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

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Robert Crews is a historian at Stanford, specializing in Afghanistan, Russia, Islam, Central Asia, and South Asia. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - MUD\WTR: https://mudwtr.com/lex and use code LEX to get 5% off - Ten Thousand: https://www.tenthousand.cc/ and use code LEX to get 15% off - Four Sigmatic: https://foursigmatic.com/lex and use code LexPod to get up to 60% off - Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Robert's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobertCrews22 Robert's Stanford page: https://profiles.stanford.edu/robert-crews Afghan Modern (book): https://amzn.to/3nYL5rX PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:42) - U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (21:30) - September 11 (39:05) - Bin Laden (1:14:35) - Withdrawal of U.S. troops (2:06:47) - War (2:18:01) - Leadership (2:34:11) - Afghan people (2:43:40) - Rumi

The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz, a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is mud water, a delicious coffee alternative. Second is 10,000. Clothes I like wearing for lifting cardio and grappling.

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equipment. Sale ends on December 5th. Go to lexfreedman.com slash on it that's lexfreedman.com slash on it. This is the lex Freedman podcast and here is my conversation with Robert Cruz. Was it a mistake for the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago? Yes. As simple as yes, why was it a mistake? I'm a historian, so I say this with some humility about what we can now, I'd still like

to know much more about what was going on in the White House in the hours, days, weeks, after 9-11, but I think the George W. Bush administration acted in the state of panic, and I think they wanted to show toughness, they wanted to show some kind of resolve. This was a horrific act that played out on everyone's television screens. And I think it was really fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy within the White House, than the obeloths. And I think they felt like they had to do something and something dramatic.

I think they didn't really think through, who they were fighting, who the enemy was, what this geography had to do with 9-11. I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us, not sad, was clairvoyant or good-seen in the future, but I think many of us were, if from that morning skeptical about the connections that people were drawing between Afghanistan as a state, as a place, and the actions of Al Qaeda in

Washington and New York and in Pennsylvania. So as you watch the events of 9-11, the things that our leaders were saying in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed. Maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline of what was being said. One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan. And also what were your feelings in the minutes, weeks after 9-11? I was in DC. I was on the way to American University, hearing on a PR, what had happened.

And I thought of the American University logo, which is red, white, and blue. It's an eagle. And I thought, you know, washing is under attack. And symbols of American power are under attack. And so, yeah, I was quite concerned. And at the time lived just a few miles from the capital. And so, I felt that it was real.

So I appreciate the, yeah, the sense of anxiety and fear and panic. And for two, three years later, in DC, we were constantly getting reports, you know, mostly rumors and confirmed about all kinds of attacks with all the cities. So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault. But in watching television, including Russian television that day, because I just installed a satellite thing. I was trying to watch World News and get different points of view. That was quite useful to have an alternative set of eyes in Russian.

Yeah. In Russian. Yeah. Okay. So, you Russians is good enough to understand Russian television the news Yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming that were not shown on American television I don't know how they had it but they had they were not filtering anything In the way that the major networks and cable televisions were doing here. So it was

a very unvarnished view of the violence of of the moment, you know, New York City of people diving from the towers are being just you know It was really they didn't hold back on that which was quite you know, New York City, of people diving from the towers, or being, you know, it was really, they didn't hold back on that, which was quite, you know, fascinating. Much of the world saw much more than actually the American public saw. But to your question, you know, amid that feeling of imminent doom,

I watch commentators start to talk about Al Qaeda, and then talk about Afghanistan, and when the experts was, was a barin who's it in my U who's it you know kind of long very learned it. Afghanistan hand and he's brought on Peter Jennings and ABC News to kind of lay this out for everyone and I thought you know he had to find job but I think it it was formative and submitting the view that somehow Al Qaeda was synonymous with this space Afghanistan. I think again I was no Al Qaeda expert then and I'm not now but I think my immediate thought went to war and because

my background had been with at that point mostly Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war who my encounter to Newspakistan, 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 up, of course, the defense of the most people who have nothing to do with these politics. So we should give them a little bit of context that you could speak to. So assume nobody's an expert at anything.

Yeah, so let's just say you and I are not experts experts anything right what as a historian were you studying at the time and thinking about see Is it is it the full global history of Afghanistan? Is it the region? Were you thinking about the Moodje had Dean and Al Qaeda and Taliban? We think about the Soviet Union, the proxy war through Afghanistan, where you think it about Iraq and oil. What's the full space of things in your heart and your mind at the time? I mean, just the moment, of course, it was, you know, there's the sense of, you know, the suffering and the tragedy of the moment of, you know, the deaths. And that was, I think

I was preoccupied by the violence of the moment. But as the competition turned to Afghanistan, I as a kind of theater to somehow respond to this moment. I think, immediately, what came to mind was that little I knew about Al-Qaeda at the time, so that the geography was, was inaccurate, that this was a global network, a global threat, that this was a kind of, you know, That this was a global network a global threat that this was a kind of you know I'm even with it went beyond borders, and I think that it felt really on that Afghanistan was going to be used as a scapegoat and essentially at the time, you know I was teaching at American University my courses You know touch on a range of subjects, but I was trying to complete a book on Islam and the Russian Empire actually

But in doing that research, which took me across Russia and to the Central Asia, purely the accident, I had developed an interesting Afghanistan because, again, I see a series of coincidences, I found myself in Tushcan, the capital was like, without housing. Doing an American friend who was like the king of the market in Tushcan, he knew everyone, you run into some Afghan merchants there. They found out I didn't have a place to live. I didn't know where Afghanistan was. Honestly, this was 1997.

At a big idea it was next door. Well, you lived in his back in Afghanistan? Yeah, in Tashkan, doing decision research. Yeah. Because it was, you know, hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia. Yeah. So just for accident, I met with these young Afghans who took me in as roommates.

And then I think that the sense of that community shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is. It was my first exposure to them. They were part of a trading diaspora. They brought, they had brought matches from Riga, Latvia. They had somehow brought blower and some agricultural products from Egypt. brought blower and some agricultural products from Egypt. And they were sitting in closed containers and Tashkanate waiting for these Buckeye Staini State to permit them to trade.

So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day. They'll get dressed up, they put on suits and ties like you're wearing, they polish their shoes, and they would sit around offices, drink tea, stashos, then they'd feasted lunch, and then at night we would go out. So part of my research, because I also had a bottle of like my research, I was going to the sit archives in Tashcan, and because of the state of Uzbekistan, you know, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do, so I took a while to get in, so I had down

time in Tashcan, just like these guys. So I got to know them pretty well and it was really just a An accidental kind of thing but grew quite close to them and I developed an appreciation of Which now I think again thinking of the seeds of all this these people had already lived Young guys, you know in the 20s that already lived in 67 countries They all spoke half doesn't languages one of my best friends there had been a kickboxer and breakdance who trained in Tehran his father was a theater person and I've kind of done He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan during the Civil War going to his back aton escaping death there

And these were very you know real stories. Can you also just briefly mention? Yeah. Geographically speaking. Yes. Afghanistan is back, it's the jikestan you mentioned Iran. Right. What are the neighbors of all of this? What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?

I was always terrible at geography and spatial information. So can you lay it out? Yeah, sure, sure. So, Tashkan, you know, is the capital of Uzbekistan. It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century. The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty in 1865. It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917. It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan,

which becomes independent, finally, in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapses. So these are all like these republics are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia. That's right. 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, you know, the great machine that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions to stretch across Asia. From Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends, hailed from Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s when leftists tried to seize power there

in 1978. So union then extended from Uzbekistan, crossing the border with this forces in 1979 to try to shore up this leftist government that it sees power in 1978. And so for Central Asians in the wider region, their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan in a variety of ways,

but it became much more connected in 1980s when Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years. And here I refer you listeners and viewers to Rainbow 3 as the guide to the historically accurate. The story of the Bible, the Bible of African history in Rainbow 3, yeah. As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war. But for us, Afghans, there are people who fought

against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation, the guys I knew their mission was to survive. And so they fled in waves, by the millions to Pakistan, to Iran, some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in 1990s, and some were displaced across the planet. So California or Sydney today has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s in the East Bay Can I ask a cool question that's a little bit of attention. Yep What is the correct or the respectful way to pronounce Afghanistan Afghanistan I

Ran Iran to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran. So as a Russian speaker of Afghanistan, the on versus the end, is it different country by country? As an English speaker in America, is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan or is it the opposite? Respectful to say it that way. What are your thoughts on that? That's a fascinating question. I defer to the people from those countries to of course sort out those politics. I think, you know, I think one of the fascinating things about this, the region broadly, is that it is a place of so many cultures and it's really quite cosmopolitan. So I think people are mostly quite forgiving about how you say, Afghanistan, Afghanistan,

Afghanistan, not like Paris. The French are not forgiving. Exactly. I think people are very forgiving. And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive, suggesting Iran rather than Iran, Iraq. I, Iraq, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I 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 sort of implied statement about your beliefs as fascinating.

Yeah. I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran, I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional in the case of a Democrat or is it just a, you know, and it's a, what I read again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people know have been very cool about that. What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's fair to say,

I don't mean to speak for, mainstream people, but I can just share with our non-Afghan friends. The term afghani is a term of offense because that's the name of the currency. And so lots of people ask why having, again, it's more like the Americans because we've been so deeply involved in that country, obviously for the last 20 years. So afghans ask why after 20 years, are you still calling us the wrong name?

What is the right name? Just somebody, they prefer Afghans. Afghans. Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency. And so I just dodged a book, because I was gonna say it again. That's cool, and I know. Yeah, I hear you, that's really great to know.

Yeah, and it's, again, I think, but I would emphasize that people are quite open and it's a whole region of incredible diversity and respect for linguistic pluralism actually. So I think that, but I also appreciate that in this context, when there's a lot of pain in the Afghan diaspora community in particular, 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. Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation is because yes, it is true that there are certain things when mispronounce kind of reveal that you don't care enough to pronounce correctly. So you don't care enough to pronounce correctly. So you don't know enough to pronounce correctly. And you dismiss the culture and the people, which I think as per your writing is something that if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan just because I'm used to

I say Iraq Iran, but I say Afghanistan. Yeah, it's great. It is as you do in your writing, again, it's then suffers from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world. But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the whole region that gives us context for the events of 9-11. Right. Right. So yeah, if we go back to that day in the weeks, you know, that followed, you know, my mind went to the community I knew in touch can. Which was interesting. It was, I mean, they were, so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US about

9-11, right? Everyone to know what was the relationship between the surface violence and that related tradition with its, you know, one billion plus followers across the globe, right? That became the issue of course for, or reckon security institutions for, you know, local, state and police institutions, right? I mean, it became the, I think it was the question that most Americans had on their mind. So, again, I didn't imagine myself as someone who had all the answers of course, but given

my background and coming at this from Russian history coming at this from studying Empire and trying to think about the region broadly You know, I was very alarmed at the way the the conversation went can I ask you a question? What was your feeling on that morning of 9-11? Who did this is not is that a natural feeling? There's a it's coupled with fear of what's next, especially when you're in DC. But also, who is this? Is this an accident? Is this a deliberate terrorist attack? Is this domestic? What were your thoughts of the options and the internal ranking given here by the parties? Man I suppose I was taken by the narrative

that this was international. I mean, I'd also lived in New York during one of the first bombings in 94 of the World Trade Center. So it was clear to me that a radical community had really fixed in New York as part of their imagination of, and I immediately thought it was a kind of blow to American power. And I was drawn by the symbolism of, if you think of it as an act, it was an act of speech,

if you will, a way of speaking to, from a position of role to weakness, speaking to an imperial power. And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that with horrific real world consequences for all those innocent victims for the fire and for the police and just the horror of the moment. So I did see it as transcending the United States, but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily to do fundamentally about Afghanistan and the history of the region that I've 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 a party every night. We had discussions about alcohol. I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its drinking. It's drinking. You know, it's something to look forward to. So I didn't want to travel to that part of the world. When was the last time you were in that part of the world? Early 2000s.

Well, they meant 2000s, 2010s. So by the way, we're drinking vodka. What's the purpose of what kind of choice? Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice. And it informs, you know, and it's, but the fascinating thing, you know, and it's a student is what you're observing as an on-muscle, you know, I'm an on-russian,

I'm this is all, you know, culturally new to me. And I'm, you know, a student, while that, right? It's a guy that's a student doing my work there. So you're like the Jane good all vodka and Russia That's right. It's just observing. It's right. Yeah, yeah, and then you get the you get the summer gone the grass vodka you get you know I have I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier. Yeah, I'm not proud of You know, but you have to know that people and some of them for yeah Yeah, yeah, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, how Muslims understand the tradition in different contexts. So many Uzbeks will say,

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

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

I really want to read it. Is a Moscow and the mosque or something like that. By the way, just another tangent and a tangent. So I bought all your books. I love them very much. Thank you. One of the reasons I bought them and read many parts is because they're easy to buy

Unlike articles every single website has a pay-wall. Yeah, yeah, so it's it's very here. I'm sorry very frustrating to read brilliance colors So she's yourself. No, no I wish there's one fee I could pay everywhere. I don't care what that fee is Right, because it allows me to read some of your brilliant writing. No, no, I think you're here. I think moving toward more open source for many stuff, I think is what a lot of journals are thinking about now, and I think it's definitely for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship. That's definitely an important thing that we should all think about.

I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers to do that. So I appreciate this is what I'm doing here. Yeah, yeah, publishers to do that, so I appreciate that. This is what I'm doing here. Yeah, yeah, good, yeah, no, I appreciate it. 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 if eight in that country isn't going to fix, isn't going to fix the toxic malstrom of politics that produced 9-11.

Again, just thinking of some of the personalities just thinking about going back to the touch-and-storage all, and with, I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things and then asking questions about it and trying to understand, do their eyes, what the tradition means to them. Then we had a very narrow conversation about what Islam is that you know generated immediately exploded in yeah on the day of 9-11, right? and then of course I think the Antipathy toward Islam and Muslims You know was informed by

By racism informed by xenophobia. So it became a perfect storm. I think of demonization informed by xenophobia. 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, because I'm going back to, I mean, there are other friends and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tashkent from the moment. I mean, just that thought about my friends who had been, who had suffered a great deal in their short lives, who've been cast aside from country to country, but had found a place in Tashkamp with some relatively. And they wanted to go out every night. And they explained one friend,

we talked about it with the alcohol on it, and he didn't get crazy, but he was like, you can drink, but just don't get drunk. That's permissible within a slum, right? And he was, I think, Posh Tune. 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. 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, and so many different ways. So 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? And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments for violence, right? Mixed up with a natural human feelings of hate. Yeah, and hurt that much. And pain. mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate and

hurt that much in pain. So I mean, I have to, I've been, I remember I sat with other PhD historians in different fields. We oddly enough had lunch that day and it kind of deserted Washington. Some places open we went. And we just thought, you know,

this is gonna kind of open up like a great mall of destruction. And, you know, the American state is going to destroy and it's going to destroy in this geography. And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons. And then I think if one, you know, I'd been doing some research on, I've kind of stand in, I was kind of shifting to the south, and I'd been looking at the top on, from afar, for some years, and I think it's clear now that in retrospect, there were opportunities for alternative policies at that moment.

So what should the conversation have been like? What should we have done differently? Because, you know, from a perspective of the time, the United States was invaded by a foreign force. What is the proper response or what is the proper conversation about the proper response at the time you think? I know my colleague gets asked for a kindly surprise, would tell me this is above my pay grade. And she makes a point in her classes to talk about how difficult decision making is under such intense pressure.

And I appreciate that. I am an historian who sits safely in my office. I don't like battlefields. I don't like taking risks. So I can see all those limits. I'm not a mental expert. I've been accused of being a spy. We're probably gone because of the way I look and because of my nationality and so on, but not a spy. So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise of all those communities. But I think they acted out of ignorance. They

acted, I think because I mean, you think of the, in a way, there was a compensatory aspect of this decision-making. I mean, the Bush administration failed. This is an extraordinary failure, right? So if we start way, if we can break down the issue. A failure of intelligence. I mean, if you follow the story of Richard Clark, who's Richard Clark? He was a national security expert who was tasked with following Al Qaeda who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration that he passed on

to the George W. Bush administration. And if you look at the work of Connelly Sirice, she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaid walled, foreign affairs article that you can read, announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy outlook. And it was all about great powers. It's about the rise of China. It's about Russia. I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover of those who missed having Russia as the bookie man who spoke, you know, the clip administration 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 their national sovereignty as a way of containing Russia initially but also Iran, which sits to the south and west and then peripherally looking on the road to China to the east So the the bear is what like Russia or Is it kind of like some weird combination of Russia, Iran and China? The bear is Russia and Russia is this I'm trying to characterize the imagination of some of these mash-coated figures. This is an image formed in the Cold War. I mean, it has deeper seeds in European and Western intellectual thought that go back

at least to the 1850s in the reign of Zardinicals I. When we first get this language about, the Western Empire is this kind of evil polity. Obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism, but the Clinton folks kept that alive. They wanted to make sure that American power would be unmatched and they being creatures with Cold War themselves, they looked to Russia as a recession power. Well before Putin was even thought of. Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep profound historical piece in Rambo. This probably, this conflict has to do with another celestial movie of Rocky IV, which

is also historically accurate and based on, is basically a documentary. So there is something about American power, even at the level of kind of least the rice, these respected deep kind of leaders and thinkers about history in the future, where they like to have competition with other superpowers. And almost conjure up superpowers, even when those countries don't maybe at the time at least deserve the label of super power. That's right, great point. They're all at all excellent points. So, yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many, many exports, I mean, my mentor at Princeton,

Stephen Cokkin, was then writing great things about how, if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP, its capacity to actually add globally, it's all quite limited. But Kandia Rice and the people around her came into power with Georgia of the Bush, thinking that the form policy challenges of her era would be those of the past, right?

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. The FBI had been following these people around for many months. And so, you know, by the time Georgia, be Bush comes to power, lots of al-Qaeda activists are, well, not lots, but, you know, perhaps a dozen or so, you know, by the time George W. Bush comes to power, lots of al-Qaeda activists are not lots, but, you know, perhaps a dozen or so, are already, you know, training in the United States, right?

And what we knew immediately from the biographies of some of the characters of the attackers of 9-11, it was a hot pot of people from across the planet, but mostly they were Saudi, right? And that was known very early on, or presumed very early on. So again, if we go back to your big question about the geography, why Afghanistan? It didn't add up, right? It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target. It was a place to have explosions to seemingly recapture American supremacy. And also, I think, you know, there was in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge, and this

was the place to have some casualties, have some explosions. And then I think, you know, restore the legitimacy of the Bush administration by showing that we are in charge, we will pay. And I think it was a very old-fashioned punitive dimension, which rests upon the presumption that if we intimidate these people, they'll know not to try this again, right? All these I would suggest are all misreadings of an organization that was always global. It had no real center. I mean, called itself the center. It's one way to translate al-Qaeda. But that center was really in the imagination.

Ben Laden bounced around from country to country. And crucially, I think, I mentioned that I don't claim to know anything new about, but his 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 was Saudi, right? I mean, this was a Saudi operation with different things. Again, just on the basis of nationalities, Saudis, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy. And the Egyptian guy had been studying in Germany. He was an urban planner, right? So if one thinks of the imagination of this, I mean, in fact, if you look at the kind

of typology of the figures who have led this radical movement, I mean, you think of the global jihadists. They are mostly not religious scholars, right? But Lodin was not a religious scholar. His training was an engineer, you know, someographers claim that he was a playboy for much of his youth. But really, these ideas, and I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers. I mean, this is a an imagination fueled by training and engineering. I mean, a lot of the sociology, if you do a kind of prosprosyography of a lot of these leading jihadists,

their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship, but actually in engineering and kind of practical sciences and professions, medical doctors are among their ranks. And so there's long been attention between Islamic scholars who do it their whole lives to study of texts and commentary and interpretation. And then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals, new Muslim authorities who actually have secular university educations often in the natural sciences

or engineering in technical fields, who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will, to what Muslims call it, their 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. Were the relation to Afghanistan, who has been Laden?

Bin Laden was a visitor. If you look at his whole life course, part of it is in Enigma still. He is from a Saudi elite family, but a family that has a Yemeni Arabian Sea genealogy. The family has no relationship to Afghanistan past or present, except in the late 1980s, when he went thousands of other young Saudis, first to Pakistan, two places like Bashar on the border, where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity. And for the most part, the Arabs who went, opened up hospitals, some opened up schools,

they've been law and family, had long been based on engineering construction. So it's thought that he used some of those skills and resources and connections to build things. You know, we have images of him firing a gun for show, right? It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun in what we would call combat. Again, I could be corrected by this

and I think they're competing accounts of who he was. So he's kind of a, I mean, many of these figures that who sit at the pinnacle of this world are, you know, fictive heroes that people, you know, map their aspirations onto, right? And so people like Mula Omar, who was then out of the Taliban, was really seen in public. The current head of the Taliban is almost never seen in public. I mean, there's kind of studied air of mystery that they've cultivated to make themselves available for all kinds of fantasies, right? Do you think he believed, so his

religious beliefs? Do you think he believed some of the more extreme things that enable him to commit terrorist acts? Maybe put another way, what makes a man want to become a terrorist? And what aspect of Ben Laden made him want to be a terrorist? Great. I mean, let me out for some observations. I think there are others who know more about Ben Laden and have bummer expertise in Al Qaeda. So I'm coming this in a Jason way kind of from Al Qaeda stand and from my soul-quad training. So this is my two cents. So you know, bear with me. I don't have the authoritative account which even 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't a huge part of your focus of study, just means that Ben Laden is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan except that America made him a key part of the history of Afghanistan. I would endorse that. Definitely. You put it in a very pity way. Yeah. So he was an engineer.

He said to be a playboy who spent a lot of cash from his family, you know, like many young Saudis and from some other countries, he was inspired by this idea that those jihad in Afghanistan, 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 Afghans civilians during that conflict. It's very, you know, plausible and very, you know, completely understandable that many young people would see that cause as, you know, the righteous, pious fighters for jihad, who call themselves Mujadin, are aid against this evil empire,

of a godless Soviet empire that, I don't seem confused about what the Soviets wanted. Now we know much more about what the criminal wanted, what Russia wanted, and how the Soviet elite thought about it because we have many more of their records. But from the outside, for Jimmy Carter, and if it really, it looked like the Soviets were making a move on on South Asia because

they wanted to get to the warm water ports, you know, which Russian always wants to believe, right? And it was kind of a move to take over our oil and, you know, to assert world domination, right? So there are lots of ways in which this looked like good perceivable in Congress that looked like kind of Vietnam again. But this time, this is our chance to get them. And there are lots of great quotes, I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes that American policymakers made about wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam. So the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into this project to back the Mujadine, who Reagan called freedom fighters.

So Belon was part of that universe. He's part of that. He's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujadine who out of size did 95% of the fighting the other ones who died, the other ones who defeated the Red Army. The Arabs who were there did a lot of fighting, but a lot of it was for, you know, their purposes. It was to get experience. It was to kind of create their reputations like Bin Laden began to force for himself, of being spokesperson for a global project because about 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 that Gorbachev is going to power 85. He's like, let's get out of here. This is training the Soviet budget. It's an embarrassment. We didn't think about this properly. Let's focus on restoring the party and strengthening the Soviet Union. Let's get out of this costly war. It's a waste.

It's not worth it. We're even losing anything by getting out of Afghanistan. So their retreat was quite effective and successful from the Soviet point of view. It's not what we're seeing now. What year was the retreat? I mean, it began, so Mikhail Gorbachev, Kandit Pachandhi V, he was a generation younger than the other guys. He was a critical system. He didn't want to abolish it. He wanted to reform it. He was a true believer in Soviet socialism and the party is a monopolist. But he's critical of the old guard and recognized that the party had a change and the whole system had a change to continue to compete.

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

degree getting money from Saudi and he said let's draw a stone them into the government and basically have a kind of unity government that makes some space the opposition. And for the most part with US backing, with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing and with Saudi backing, the opposition said no, we're not going to reconcile, we're going to push you off the cliff. And so that story goes on from at least 1987, the last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989. But the Naji below government holds on for three more years. It is the, I mean, there's still getting some health and Soviet Union, its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly. And it stops at 92 that, that, that they lose.

And then Mujaddin, Mujaddin come to power. They immediately, you know, they're deeply fractured. And it's sort of been a lot in this watching all of this on roll. That's right. And he's, he's part of the mix, but he's also mobile. So he got, he, at one point, you know, goes, you know, isn't Sudan. You know, he's, he's moving from place to place. His people are all over the world. In fact, they I mean, if you think of the once the Mujahideen take power,

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

But then many of those fighters went home, they went back to Syria, they went back to Egypt. Some wanted to go back to the Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis were very careful. I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan as a kind of safety valve. In fact, they had fundraisers on television, they charter jets, they filled them with people to fly to Pakistan, get out and push out and say, you know, go fight. And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy, very cleverly, I think, created a kind of escape valve for would-be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right?

Just send them abroad. You wanna fight jihad, go do that somewhere else. Don't bother the kingdom. But all this became dice here in the early 90s when some of these guys came back home, and some of the scholars around them said, you know, let's, we defeat the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost. And 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.

So already watching the Soviet retreat across the bridge back into Uzbekistan. If you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving, a lot of people interpreted this as like, you know, we are going to change the world and now we're turning to the Americans. And our local national governments are backed by the Americans. So let's start with those places. And then let's go strike, let's go strike, you know, the belly of the beast, which is America, which is New York. And going back to Ben Lawn, your question about, you know, what motivates him, what motivated him, you know, again, he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar. 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 are wearing worn on a level. They're shocked. They see his appearance. They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf of Arabic books. He's got the clash of cough. He's got what looks like a religious scholar's library behind him, right?

But if you look at his words, I mean, one fascinating thing about just our politics and just one thing that kind of sums up, I mean, the fact that on 9-11, we had to have a few people, a few experts, people like Burnett Rubin, who was Afghanistan expert. So that was one way in which I think, you know, I'm not faulting him personally, but he's just one way in which that relationship appeared to be, you know, formed, right, of linking Afghanistan to that moment.

If one looks actually, you know, what Bin Laden was saying and doing, people like Richard Clark were studying this. There were Arab leaders. The Arab press was watching this because he gave some of his first interviews to a few Arab news super outlets. But speaking of our American, kind of, you know, monolingualism, a lot of what you're saying wasn't known. And so I think for several years, people weren't reading what Bin Laden said. I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic, but there was great anxiety around translating his works.

So, you know, we have my comp, we have all this stuff. You can buy the collector works of Lin, install, and Mao, whatever you want, and whatever language you want. But Ben Laden was taboo for American publishing. So it was only, uh, Verso in the UK, that published a famous volume called Messages to the World, which was the first convenient, a bit of Ben Laden's writings. So he has a minecon. He has a tight, does he have a thing, what he's like, it's a kind of collected works. It's a collected works. Okay.

He had like a, like a works. It's a collected works. Okay. He had like a blog. Yeah. Yeah. It's a collection of articles versus. Yeah. These are interviews. These are his misves, his decorations, his, his decrees. Right. 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 going about. I put it that way. And I don't see that in a conspiratorial sense. I just think that it was, you know, it was a taboo. I think people, you know, there was a kind of consensus that, you know, trust us, we know, we know how to fight al Qaeda. And you don't need to know what they're about because they're crazy. They're they're fanatics. They're fundamentalists. They hate us. Remember that language.

Yeah. Us versus them. But if you read Bin Laden, that's when it gets messy. That's where the Bin Laden's documentation is not fundamentally about Islam. And if you were sitting here with an Islamic scholar, he would say, you know, it's Islamic scholar they would tend to go through and dissect and negate 99% of the arguments that Ben Laden claimed was in Islam, right? But what strikes me as an historian who's again leading this, adjacently, if we've been lawdened, I mean, the arguments that he make are, first 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 of what's the nature of the enemy? It's a it's a

it's an amalgam and he like a good politician, which is what I would call him. He is a depth at speaking in different ways to different audiences. So if you look at the context of what he speaks, if you look at messages to the world, if you look at his writings, and you can zoom it out now, and we now have Compendia of the writings of Al Qaeda more broadly. You can purchase these, you know, they're basically primary source collections. We know how that for the Taliban. I mean, what's fascinating about, I think if you 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, and especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions. They used to blow up VCR, videotapes. They used to string audio and videoc cassettes from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right? We're killing this nefarious, infantile technology that is doing the work of Satan. And yet today, in the last, I mean, one of the keys to the top-notch success is that they got really good at using media, I mean, brilliant at using the spoken word music actually. And Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard. And these guys have studied how to create drama, how to speak to modern users. I mean, he's

not like, stayed at this. I mean, the role of media, new media. I mean, I follow and I am followed by senior top on 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. They follow, they follow, they follow you on Twitter. I don't know why. This is no joke.

This is no joke. So it's, they are part of our modern world and it's how they talk and it's how they recruit. And this is part of the, this is why they are, So Ben Laden, if you've been Laden, he speaks multiple languages, I would say. It's environmentalism. The West is bad because we destroyed the planet. The West is bad because we abuse women. So in class, especially female students, are very surprised to learn.

And actually, saying 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, over and over again. And he is, you know, aspirationally in genocidal. But let's try to understand what he's about. So we walk through the text, read them, and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about

you know, quotations and the carons drawn together in some irrational fashion. He knows, um, I mean, at the core, I'd say, he's the problem of human suffering. And he has a geography of that that is mostly Muslim, but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir. All right. So if you have a student in your class, who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir, he or she will say, that's not entirely inaccurate. The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir, you know, Pakistan is not too, you know, Palestine is an issue, right? So you have an American university setting people across the spectrum who get that, you know, past Indians have had a raw deal. And so it's a victimhood is central,

and it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary, but as number of scholars have written, and I'm, you know, I definitely think this is a framework for this useful. I mean, in this kind of vocabulary, in this framing, in this narrative, today, in today's world, if you think of today's world being post-Cold War, 91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars, and seeing

the visuals of that, I think that the American public has been shielded from some of this, but if you look at the carnage of the Iraqi army that George H. W. Bush produced, right? Or you think of, you know, the images of the suffering of Iraqi children under George W. Bush's sanctions, US British strikes, then you have Madeline Albright answer a question on 60 minutes saying, do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids is worth it? Is that, is that justified to contain Salam Hussein? And she says on camera, yes, it's worth it to me. If you put that all together, I mean, American kids and of course, the American public,

they're not always aware of those facts of global history. But these guys are, and they very capably use these images, use these tropes, and use facts. I mean, some of these things are not deniable. I mean, these estimates about the number of Iraqi civilian children dead. You know, that came from, I think, the Lancet and came from those are estimates. But looking at this one point of view of Amman, of, you know, Jaffa, of Nairobi, you can just think around the planet. And if you see yourself as the victim of this great imperial power, you are making them feel how you feel.

Because they won't listen to your arguments recently because they won't recognize Palestinian suffering, Bosnian suffering, right? Chechen suffering. You go across the planet, right? Because they won't recognize our suffering. We're gonna speak to you in the only language that you understand, and that's violence. And look at the violence of the post, not to anyone, world, in which American

air power really becomes a global kind of fact in the lives of some people. And then the big mistake after 9-11 among many, I mean, fundamentally was taking the one tear to some, you know, 30 or 40 countries, right? So that you have a more and more of the globe feel like they're under attack, right? And the logic is that essentially it's not, it's not, it's re-bidlawed and it's not, we're going to convert you and turn you into Muslims and that's why we're doing this. That appears, that claim does appear at times, But it's, if you look at any given bit lot in text, I mean, there are 40 claims in each text. I mean, it's kind of, it's

dizzying. But he's a modern politician. He knows the language of, of social quality. You know, that there's a class to mention to it. There is an environmental dimension to it. There's a gender dimension to it. And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in. And when he wants to speak that language, he knew that, you know, he's not a scholar. So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on. So some of his declarations of jihad had his signature kind of sprinkled in with like a dozen other signatures from people who are somewhat known or at least, yeah, with titles, right? So as a kind of intellectual exercise, it's fascinating to see that he is throwing everything

into wall in one level. That's one way to see that 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 is what, you know, I think for a broader public, it's hard to get, you're like, well, Bin Laden suffer. He wasn't poor. But yeah, I mean, Lenin, Pol Pot, I mean, they're speaking to the empathetic to the suffering, the landscape, the full landscape of someone. It's interesting to think about suffering. America, the American public, American politicians and leaders, when they see what is good and evil,

they are often not empathetic to the suffering of others. And what you're saying has been lawdened, perhaps accurately could speak to the ignorance of America, maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people. That's right. And I mean, if you look at the speeches and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s, he spoke quite accurately to the quite accurately to the injustice and maybe the suffering of the German people. I mean, charismatic politicians are good at telling accurate stories. It's not all fabricated, but they emphasize certain aspects. And then the problem part is the actions you should take based on that. So the narratives and the stories may be grounded in historical accuracy, the actions then cross the line. Yeah.

The ethical line. I find that too. I mean, again, if you pick up just one of these texts, I mean, it's a cladiscope. So the Hitler analogy is interesting, because it's, you know, Hitler spoke to, he could speak to things like inflation, right, which really existed. Um, but he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans, right? He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma, um, disabled people, homosexuals,

and so on, right? I mean, that's also, they're in Ben Laden too. I mean, Daddy of, you know, an anti-Semitism, the concept flagging of Zionist and Crusaders. 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, catchmarries have suffered, Chechens have suffered, and so on. Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.

I mean, it never really, I think the, I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right, about ideology. I mean, I think the blood on his hands always limited his appeal among Muslims and others. But Ben Laden did have, I mean, he had a, there's a great book by a great scholar at UC San

Ago, Jeremy Prestole, who read a great book about global icons in which he has been London. He has Bob Marley. He has Tupac. You know, he asked why, you know, he's in research in East Africa. Why did he see young kids wearing bin Laden shirts? They're also wearing like two-pock shirts. They're wearing bin-bottom Mali shirts and based its way of of looking at um a kind of partial embrace of some aspects of the rebelliousness of some of these figures, some of the time by some people,

under certain conditions. Well, the terrifying thing to me is, yeah, there is a longing in the human heart to belong to a group and a charismatic leader is somehow, especially when you're young, just the catalyst for all of that. And I tend to think that perhaps it's actually hard to be Hitler. So a leader so charismatic that he can rally a nation to war. And Ben Laden, perhaps, were lucky, was not sufficiently charismatic. I feel like if his writing was better, if his speeches were better, if his ideas were stronger, It's like more viral and then there would be more people kind of young people uniting around him. So in some sense it's almost like axons of

history of just how much charisma, how much charisma particular evil person has. Oh yeah. Of course I'm like Ben Laden. I get spare evil evil works. I think you think been lot is evil. Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean he was a mass murder I'm just saying that his ideas were They're more complex than then we have tended to acknowledge they had They have a wider potential resonance than we would acknowledge. I mean, and also, I guess one fun and a point is that thinking about the complexity of

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

I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership, and this is being reported, if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris of the Bata Clan murders, I think, the court allowed some discussion of the backgrounds of the accused and they come from different backgrounds, but if there's any common bond, it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime. Femously, in the seven-seven bombings in London, the metropolitan police, UK authorities looked at all those guys, and what people want is this idea that like,

they must be very pious. They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff. They must be fanatical true believers. But what they found with those guys was that somewhere, normally Muslim, some went to mosque, some didn't. Some were single, young guys with like, chronal backgrounds. Some, you know, we're like, sorry, they were, were kind of misfits who never succeeded anything. But others had at least one thing had a wife and family who he would have in orphaned. So there's no, I mean, for policing, I mean, if you're looking at, to that lens, there

is no kind of typology that will predict who will become violent. And that's why I think we have to move beyond thinking about religious argumentationarily or by itself. And think about things like geopolitics, think about how people respond to inequality, the existential threat of climate crisis, of all hostomatters, and think about, this is a mode of political contestation.

I mean, it's a violent one. It's one I condemn. It is evil, right? But these are people that are trying to be political, they're trying to change things in some way. It's not narrowly about like, I don't know, impose sherry law on you. You know, you must wear a veil, you must eat this kind of food. It's not that prokyl. But what one, another quick thought about your interesting claim about charisma in this, I think that the one self limiting feature of this subculture is that definitely, I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen and that the kind of invisibility is a productive force of power, a colleague of mine who knows ancient history far better than I, you know, said, oh, this is, you know, when she looked at it, it

Maloma initially, we've come up in London, I mean, this kind of studied posture of staying in the shadows. Yeah, it's also a source of authority potentially, because it it invites the idea, and it's partly dictatorships, too, as well. I mean, it invites the idea, and it's partly dictatorships, too, as well. I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working, and maybe it's the basis for a lot of Q and on or other conspiracy data, someone's working behind the scenes, and things are gonna go the right way. You can't see it, but that's almost preferable

because you can kind of feel it. And so not having someone out front can maybe be more effective than having someone out in front constantly than the whole 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 He's not a mislead, he's not a Hitler macho. I'm standing, I'm thumping my chest.

He's not doing the theatrical chin, you know. The theater people tell us to so aggressive, you know. Oh, a chin? What, moving your chin up? Oh, I saw a great BBC theater person. It was kind of a, it was a makeover show about how to become a theater. A theater? Oh, no better oh no just a powerful Yeah, leader a thirdarian figure no just how to how to like get ahead in life and then okay cool and just like about acting

How you can act differently, right? So it was it was a BBC thing and this woman claimed that Yeah, seeking your chin out like a wrestler does right, right? Is the most like, male to male. I love this kind of, most aggressive analysis that people have about power. But watch the chin. Watch the chin. It's the same as analyzing, like, enressling styles that win or fighting or so on. There's so many ways that the chin, I mean, the, the chin is a, could be

interesting verbal gesture. And I, yeah, I've watched enough mislead footage for my classes to try to pick the right moment and the chin is mislead is all about the chin. And I have watched human beings and human nature enough to know that there's more to a man, a powerful man than a chin. Yeah, no, no, I'm saying it's an active aggression. I'm not saying it's one of the many two in the toolkit. Yeah, sure. So it's not all about the chain, but it's a, but that's

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

how his face was almost, I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy. He saw spoken, his voice was low. He attempted to be poetic. I'd say it wasn't a warrior kind of image that he tried to project of like a tough guy. It was I'm, I'm demure, I'm humble. I'm offering this message.

And the appeal that he was going for was to see, to project himself as a scholar, his knowledge and humility, the whole package, carried with it an authenticity and a valor that would animate, inspire people to commit active violence, right? And the different kind of logic of like, go and kill, right? So he put, he presented himself in contrast to the imperialist kind of, macho, power, bombastic power, whatever. Yeah, yeah.

So that's just yet another way of, and you have to have facial hair or hair of different kinds of recognize. We had a very recognizable look to, or at least later in life. Yeah, no, he, he tried to look apart. Yeah. But I'm saying more fortunate

that whatever calculation they use making, he was not more effective. Yeah. I mean, the world is full of terrorist organizations and we're fortunate to the degree any one of them does not have an incredibly charismatic leader that attains the kind of power that's very difficult to manage at the geopolitical level. Yeah, and we credit the publics, you know, who don't bind to that, right?

You see through this, we credit the critics, you know, barely on, pretty much not 11 itself. One of the problems was that US government officials kept kind of leaning on Muslims to to condemn this as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility or culpability. And in fact, dozens of scholars and organizations, hundreds condemn this, but their condemnation is never quite made it out. But it created a tension where, if you wore a veil, you must have been one of them,

and you must be on team Bin Laden. And so a lot of the, I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination and profiling came out of that urge to see a oneness, which you know, been not projected, right? He wanted to say, we are one community, you know, if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right? But I think that the diversity of Muslim communities

became important because outside of small pockets, I mean, they didn't accept his leadership, right? People wore t-shirts in some countries, I mean, non-Muslims wore t-shirts because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans. So in Latin America, people were like, yeah, that was sad, but finally, I mean, there was a kind of shot in Florida in that moment.

International. It's like Che Guevara or somebody like that. Che, yeah. It's crazy, like, character in a Pissolz book, yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's just a symbol. It's not exactly what he believed

or the cruelty of actions he took. It's more like he stood for an idea of revolution versus authority. That's right. And that's the great way to understand bin Ladenism and the whole phenomenon, but I think looking at the big picture, it's also you wonder, without ever end, right? I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk of being a kind of hyper power like the US, where you, and assisting on a kind of unipolar world in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created, and almost, here's this full target, wherever the US wanted to exert itself militarily.

Before I 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 with draw of US troops from Afghanistan. What are your thoughts on how that was executed? How could it have been done better? Yeah, an important question. I mean, I perhaps all of this was saying, you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.

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

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

So they're all driving this van and these exits and they keep not taking the exits and then running out of gas. I do this all the time thinking, where am I going to pull off? I'll go to the list empty. How could it have been done better and what exactly how much suffering have all the decisions along the way caused one of the long-term consequences? What are the biggest things that concern you about the decisions we've made in both invading Afghanistan and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have? made in both invading Afghanistan and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have. I mean, if we start at the end, as you propose, you know, the herb scenes of the airport, you know, that was just one dimension. I think in the weeks to come, I mean, we're going to see Afghanistan implode.

There are lots of signs that mountain nutrition, hunger, starvation are going to claim tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter. And I think there is really nothing, there's no framework in place to force all that. What is the government, what is currently the system there? What's the role of the Taliban? So there could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of the starve either just almost the famine or starve to death. 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. Right, right. The Taliban sit in control. That's unique when they were in power in 1990s from 1996, 2001,

they controlled some 85 to 90% of the country. Now they own it all, but they have no budget. The Afghan banking system is frozen. So the financial system is a mess. And it's frozen by the US because the US is trying to use that lever to exert pressure on the Taliban. And so the ethical quantities are, of course, Legion, right? Do you release that money to allow the Taliban to shore up their rule, right? The Biden administration has said no. But the banks aren't working. If you're in California, you want to send $100 to your cousin,

so she can buy bread, you can't do that now. It's almost impossible. There are some informal networks that are moving some stuff, but there are bread lines. The top-line government is incapable, fundamentally, of ruling. I mean, they can discipline people on the street, they can force people into the mosque,

they can shoot people, they can beat protesters, they can put out a newspaper, they can have, they're great great diplomacy, it turns out, they can't rule this country. So, essentially, the hospitals and the kind of healthcare infrastructure is being managed by NGOs that are international. But maybe people had to leave and the Taliban have impeded some of that work. They've told adult women, essentially, to stay home.

So a big part of the workforce isn't there. So the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt. Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors, it's kind of a transit trade economy. It exports fruits. Pakistan has been closing the border because they're anxious about refugees. They want to exert pressure on the national community to recognize the Taliban because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power because I see that in Pakistan's national interest, especially the lens that's rivalry with India. So the Pakistan, the Pakistani security institutions are playing a double game, especially the

Afghan people are being held hostage. And so the Taliban are also saying, you know, if you don't recognize us, you're going to let tens of millions of Afghan starve. So to which degree is Taliban, like who are the Taliban? What do they stand for? What do they want? Obviously year by year this changes. So what is the nature of this organization? Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful government,

sort of holder of power, or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so? The briefest answer would be that they are a clerical slash military organization. They have... This is kind of an imperfect metaphor, but years ago, German scholar, he's the term caravan, to describe them. And that has some attractive elements, because different people have joined the Taliban for different purposes at different times. But today, and people tell us, you know, it's scholars who know more about the human

eyes, 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 colors that I listen to. 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 that money comes from and so on.

But I would say now that we have a clearer picture of what has happened, I'd say they are a standingly, well-organized clerical military organization that has a very cohesive and enduring ideology, which is quite idyllic and cratic if we zoom out and continue the conversation we're having about Islam and how we think about radicalism and who's drawn to what. People throw different terms around to describe the Taliban,

some use a term that links it to, the kind of school thought born in the 90s century in India, the Doobhondi school. 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, well what does that mean? I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different,

potentially kinds of intellectual orientations, right? I mean, attaching them to school doesn't quite capture. I mean, it's complicated. I mean, actually MIT is interesting because I would say MIT's different as Stanford, for example. Yeah. I think MIT has a more kind of narrow, yeah, um, bad analogy in my part, maybe.

Well, no, it's interesting because I would argue that there's some aspect of a brand like Taliban, Yeah, MIT, yeah, no relation that has a kind of interact like the the brand results in the behavior of the like enforces a kind of behavior on the people Feed the brand and like there's a loop. loop, I think Stanford's a good example, something that's more distributed. There's sufficient amount of diversity in like all kinds of like centers and all that kind of stuff that the brand doesn't become one thing.

And MIT is so engineering. It's so- Yeah, I think- Okay, it's a scratch in MIT. The scratch thing for two, because I think Stanford's more like MIT than you might imagine. But isn't Taliban, isn't it pretty? I don't think there's a diversity.

So yeah, sorry, so just a reference. So people say, oh, the day of bonding school, I'm like, what is that? I mean, the Taliban are they're an ethnic movement. They represent a vision of poshtun power, right? Pashtun are people who are quite internally diverse, who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are Pashtun to live all over the planet, right?

There's a community in Moscow, California everywhere, right? Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are post-tunes that live all over the planet, there's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere, right? So it's a global diaspora of sorts. Post-tunes have a kind of genealogical imagination so that lots of post-tunes can tell you the names of their grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. And that's kind of a, there's a sense of pride in that.

Posture language is a kind of core element of that identity, but it's not universal. So for example, you can meet people who say, I am postune, but I don't know, posto. So as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous. It also means different things, different people at different times. So saying the Taliban or our postune requires lots of qualifiers because lots of postions will say, no, no, I have nothing to the Taliban are our pastime requires lots of qualifiers because lots of passions will say no No, I I have nothing to the Taliban. I hate those people, you know, so The Taliban tried to mobilize other postions with limited success

But their core membership is almost exclusively Pushed in and they say no, no, we represent Afghans. We represent Pius Muslims. And so in recent two, three years, they've gone further to say, no, we have other ethnic groups, we have Uzbek, we have Tajiks, we have Hazaras. And in the north of Afghanistan, in recent years, they did do a bit better at drawing in people who were very disfected because of the government. And they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat. But if you want to say, like, 15, and who they've appointed, what language they've used, how they've presented themselves,

it's clear that, you know, they are poshtoon, they are male, and they are extremely ideologically cohesive and disciplined, I'd say. Right? So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, cohesive and displent, I'd say. So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah, some of that stuff was the way to fight a war. They are fundamentally, you know, a guerilla movement. They see themselves as kind of pious robin hoods. 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. And so, I mean, they're, they're bag, if you like, they're thing. They're, they're central theme. Their brand is about public morality. And so their origin story, going much back to 1994, is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals who were trying to rape people. And so there's a branching kind of like, emphasis on sexuality and on public morality,

and really being the core of like, we're gonna restore order and public morality, and how that translates into governance is something they've never sorted out. I mean, how do you run a banking system? If your intellectual priorities are really about the length really about, you know, the length of a beard. And then, and then their path of power, and it kind of abstracts sense.

I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by, if you like, propagating the prompts of martyrdom. And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way that to make sound ridiculous, make sound like it's um You know a moral judgment. It's simply I think a fact. It's a fact of their appeal that they promised young men who have known Nothing else, but studying in certain schools if at all But they've known fighting and they've known they known victimization

And this isn't it. I'm not asking for like sympathy for them, but I think the reality is that a lot of the we know about the kind of foot soldiers is that they They lost families and bombings in airstrikes in night raids You know, I mean orphans have always been a stream Living in in all male society Not knowing girls not knowing, hearing things from outside about places like Kabul. And so there's always been this kind of urban rural dimension, it's not just that, but I think there's a whole imagination that being Taliban captures. And the whole

marginal thing is really, it's, you know, I think to any religious person, I mean, it's not a bizarre idea. I mean, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, someone get it from their own religious backgrounds, but I think it's an alien idea, but I think it's essential to kind of stretch out my intentions of saying that's attractive.

And now one of the dilemmas going forward is that they've got a pivot from Mardem and some have been told foreign journalists. I mean, it's good that we're in charge now. We're going to build a proper state, but it's kind of boring. I wanna keep fighting. I wanna maybe I'll do that in Pakistan. Yeah, I mean, that's nice. Yeah.

If they are expressing their thoughts, some are not even honest, sufficiently with themselves to express that kind of thought. If you're a fighter, you see that with a bunch of fighters or professional athletes, once they retire, they don't know. It's very is boring. And so like the if the spirit of the Taliban,

even the the best version of the Taliban is to fight, is to be martyrs, is to is to and the paint the world is good and evil in'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 in a couple and other major cities. You have some of them are young, they're in other places, but also the very important obstacle for them is that African society has changed. I mean, it's not what, even for the older guys, it's not what they knew in 1990s.

Some have always had some ambivalence about the capital, but now it's totally different. I mean, they've been shocked to see, I think, to me, one of the most striking features of the last few weeks has been that, 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, and these foot soldiers are paralyzed. They're not sure they don't know what to do with women, period.

Yeah, yeah, and they don't know what to do with being yelled at and having someone stick their fingers in their faces. I mean, this is not what they've imagined. And so I think, and this, this juncture, there are still foreign cameras around. So they have committed acts of violence against women, against journalists. They beat people. Yeah.

They've disappeared people. Even with cameras are on, even in this test period. Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat and that's like it happened, it's gonna get much worse, I think. So the challenge now is, you know, can the top on rule? And then this is where the diplomacy is important

because the top on 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 last decade, but that's the last five years And they always have Pakistan's backing and so the Taliban are we noted there a military force very effective Grille 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 minds, you know, implies, explosive devices, machine guns. In some, you know, recent years they got sniper rifles and, you know, from the summer they got American equipment on a broad scale, right? They have airplanes. They have a lot that they will be able to use them eventually. So, but still, basically, it's a story of AK-47s, some American small arms and mines. So, it's very Ho Chi Minh, very old school grill-afiding, right? And they defeated the most powerful military alliance and rolled history probably. So, that is not yet sunk yet sunk in with that means for American and global politics. And now they're trying to rule, right? They know they need international support.

And their most consistent backer has been Pakistan who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power. 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. They want to make sure that these postions don't cause trouble for Pakistan. And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces, they like this vision of these Islamic State that the Taliban are building there because they, those are not citizen from their views of what Pakistan should be. But the Taliban have been smart enough to kind of diversify their potential

and national allies. So everyone in their blood has wanted the US to leave, right? If we go back to 2001, the real 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. And that was a real moment of repushement, I figured I'd do it that missed exits. The relationship with Iran could have been different at that moment, but the US, on Georgia W Bush, you know, devises access to the evil language,

put them together with their enemy Iraq and then with Korea, all that went south. That was the most opportunity. But in recent years the Taliban and Iran have kind of papered over the differences. They allowed the Taliban to open some offices on your own territory, likely share some resources, some intelligence, some sophisticated weaponry. And then the Taliban went to Moscow. And for the put demonstration, they've long been worried that they see the Taliban as a kind of disease that will potentially move north. In fact, it's Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan. And maybe creep into Russia's free of influence. Maybe that's why they have, you know,

much troops sitting in Tajikistan. I mean, that one, you know, forward base that Russia as well has in social Asia is in Tajikistan. And so the top one, we're always, you know, a worrying point, but also useful because they could say, well, in case the top on get out of control, we need to be here. And so the touchy-kastan said, okay, you're helping secure us.

And yes, impingest upon our sovereignty, but it's okay. So Putin said, let's give another black eye to the Americans. And let know, treat the Taliban as if they're the kind of government and waiting. Let's have them go to Moscow multiple times. This summer, you know, the last year or two, they'll be talking to the talking to China, right? So the photographs of senior Taliban 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 we got a fly flag of these all my eminent, Afghanistan, that basically said we're stating them in the waiting. And as the US back to Afghan government failed and failed and failed at, at, at ruling two, right, as they showed how corrupt they were. And as they really alienated more and more Afghans by committing facts of violence against them, by stealing from them, by, you know,

basically creating a kind of clptocracy, right? The top months said, we are pure, we're not corrupt. And look at us, we're winning on the battlefield internationally. Look, we're talking to China, we're talking to Putin, we're not corrupt, and look at us. We're winning on the battlefield, internationally. We're talking to China, we're talking to Putin, we're talking to China, we're a legitimate, powerful center of central Asia. And also hinting that we have a website, the whole digital angle is amazing because they began to, and this is important actually, they had a website which grew more and more sophisticated. Again, after having, you know, shop televisions and these kind of ceremonial killings of these infidel devices, right, they said we have a

government, we have commissions, we have a complaint line, they lifted all this telecratic language that you 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, they reproduce that in five languages on their top-on website. 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.

And look, we have an agricultural commission. We have, you know have a taxation system. And again, on the ground, they had their own law courts. And they would creep into a district, assassinate some people, the local authority figures, the men of influence, talk to local clerics, either get them on board or kill them, and say, this day is corrupt, but we're bringing you justice.

This is our calling card. We're bringing public reality and justice. And then to a broader world, they said, you know, yeah, things didn't go perfectly. A whole lot kind of thing, you know, you know, we should be kind of do it around that. We're not gonna let anyone hurt you from our territory. We just want a rule and people like us and look.

And so if you look at the neighborhood, Iran, even central Asian states, after a while, recognizing they can make some money, mean one of the one thing that expects down likes about the current arrangement, or they're not hostile to, is that they have all these contracts, they can potentially make some money from, the pipeline dream remains alive, running natural gas,

oil to, in which the Indian Ocean, to markets beyond Central Asia. It's sitting on a couple trillion dollars, probably in minimal resources that China would love to have, of course. And so people are looking at Afghanistan now, after 20 years, saying under American rule, it was a basket case, right? There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent. The world did not start counting civilian casualties in Afghanistan until 2009. Everything about that. The war went on for eight years.

The Taliban were never really defeated. They just went to Pakistan. They went to the mountains, they went to the woods. And so all of these different American operations, as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on, killed countless civilians. The US never counted for that. We never, we never counted. Trump escalated the civilian casualties, biocally in the air war.

But a lot of this was like very ugly on the ground, you know, night raid stuff where you drop into a hamlet and massacre people. And then, you know, honest about what happened, right? So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth of Taliban from below. So the food soldiers, they never ran out of food soldiers. I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters of the last 20 years, but they just sprouted up again. And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture, the male bonding of martyrology,

of martyrdom, and of revenge, and a sense of the foreign invader. And I haven't taught a ton of US military people, but through the Hoover, they put officers in our classes sometimes. And met a few wonderful army and marine officers who I really enjoyed. We came from the South like me. Always that great report to them. And they expressed a range of opinions about this. I think that I learned a lot from someone who said, yeah, I get why they hate us.

I get why they're still. I get why they're still fighting because last week we just killed 14 of their fellow villagers. So the officers, the guys on the ground fighting this war, we're not super about that. They got the human dimension of that and yet no one got off the exit. He said people kept driving. But going forward now, internationally, it's critical that they've had meetings. I mean, what the top-on-one of Dunstos August 15th is a lot of diplomacy. They've had meetings. They've had people.

They've had touch-cut com. They've had Beijing com. They've had Moscow com. I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad, from security people, from the diplomatic circles. And they're counting on things being different this time. I mean, the first time around, the only people who backed their Taliban by recognition,

given them a diplomatic recognition with the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the UAE. And because of Al Qaeda, because of Opium, because of some of the human rights stuff, the US pushed everyone to like, let's not recognize the state. Even though the US did, I mean, Colin Powell famously, in the summer of 2001, we did give a few grants in aid to the Taliban. As I kind of like massaging negotiations, they kept talking about Ben Laden,

but they also wanted in the stop, opium production. I mean, I've kind of stand throughout all this period we've talked about is the global center of opium production. I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy continued to today is devoted to the opium trade. Oh, opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin, some of the painkillers. Yep. And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to, you know, Hoboken, you know, that they are not the source of American deaths, you know?

They are part of a universal market, a global market, which, you know, I think any commissity to you is part of the story of our opium, you know, problem. So 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, there's a 2010 report by the International Council on Security and Development that showed that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province know nothing of the 9-11 attacks on U.S. in 2001. Is this at all representative of what you know? Is this possible. So basically put another way.

Yeah. It is impossible 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. All right, my gut response, not knowing the details of this actual poll is, so that's a very unhelpful way to think about how applicants relate to the world.

And I think it could be, if you get my hometown, in North Carolina, if you knock out some doors, you made me people who don't know all kinds of things. I could probably walk around the neighborhood, here in California, and there'd be all kinds of people who don't know all kinds of things. Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat. I mean, so we could,

we could make a lot of certain kinds of ignorance, I think, but I think what I would say, and then there's also, I mean, a companion point maybe that, and thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse, the return of the Taliban, there has been a big conversation about, you know, what advocates think of us really, and this famous piece in the New Yorker was about how many people liked the Taliban,

that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece. You know, we're sympathetic because they've lost family members and all the violence and the idea kind of was that, you know, we haven't thought about that at all. When, in fact, you know, of course, we have and lots of people have. But I think if you're just dropping into the conversation, if you look at like an immediate arch of coverage of, I kind of stand in the United States, I mean, the arch went from lots of coverage during, of course, 9-11, it's after math, lots of coverage during Obama's surge, and then quickly drop down the last decade, it's been almost nothing.

So if you ask the same question about Americans or other Americans, I'm not sure what they would say to you. What percentage would actually know why the US is in X, Y, or Z either, right? But the only Afghan side just returned to that for a moment. I think that, we can fetishize these provinces. They are a place where top- where top on support has been greatest. Also where there's been the most violence

where the Americans have been most committed to trying to root out the top on movement. Where? Tell them in kind of exactly in the South. What are the other parts? Yeah, in the South of the gas. Yeah, and it's mostly poshtune. Not exclusively, but mostly poshtune, mostly rural.

What is poshtune? That's the ethnic group, you know, that the top on claim to represent. So they are this group. What other groups have? Okay, sorry. So in cities, you'll find everything that is in Afghanistan. You'll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras.

These are people who, Uzbek is a Turkic language. Most Uzbeks live in Uz is now, Uzbekistan, but they form majorities in some northern parts of the city. I'm sorry of the country of Afghanistan, but I'm sorry is that, and you can find online, an ethnographic map of Afghanistan, and you'll see green where postions live,

red where Hazar is live, orange or Uzbeks live, purple where Tajik's live, didn't there a much of other smaller groups of different kinds. There are in Norstani's, there are Baluch, there are in different religious communities, there are Sunni, she, different kinds of shea. What are the key differences between them?

Is it a religious basis from the origins of where they immigrated from and how different are they? Yeah. So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous. I mean, there's a kind of mythology that some groups have been there longer. Right. So they have a greater claim to power. But historically, I mean, it's like, you know, I think groups anywhere, people have different narratives about themselves.

But many, many postions would tell you, not all, but many would say, we are the kind of state builders of Afghanistan. The dynasty that ruled much of the space, that was born in the mid-18th century, that ruled until 1973, more or less, generalizing, you know, was a postion dynasty. The Taliban have definitely said to some audiences, we are the rifle rulers because we are pushed in. The trick though is, I don't mean to be evasive, but to give asymptomatic complexity, one quick answer as well, there are majorities and minorities. I mean, one finds out a lot along with those maps. But I would say suspend any firm belief in that

because that could be entirely wrong. In fact, there's never been a modern sense of sense of self Afghanistan. So when journalists say, poshions on majority, whether the biggest group, I would say not so fast. I would say not so fast because of migration is one major issue. No major modern census. Actually, the Soviets got pretty close, but didn't quite find something comprehensive and didn't publicize it knowing that it was modern times, ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization. It's not innately so, but it's been part of the story. But then you have mixed families, right? So a lot of people you'll meet, you'll encounter in the diaspora and

around. I mean, well, I am, you know, my, one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right? Or I'm Pashtun as I mentioned before, but I don't speak Pashtun, right? Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as she, Hazara is, in fact, I'm a Sunni Hazara. Or I'm a secular Hazara, or I'm an atheist Hazara. I mean, everything's possible, right? One of my friends

If you if you were here, it's a I'm cobbly. Yeah, I'm I'm from Kabul So if you think about in Russian terms, you know, it means a lot if you're a musk which you know if you're from Peace it or yeah, muskwa. I mean, you know, yeah, well you and even here is Bostonians. Yeah, that's right Texans Californians Yeah, yeah, Coast West Coast, all that stuff. That's the best thing. Those are all part of the mix here. So you asked about Condahar and Hermann, then I would say, yeah, if you go to 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. But if you go one door over, you may meet a guy who's like Path of Sagan him to live in six countries. He may speak five languages. And these are all things I'm not saying. These are just because people have money and go fly around.

I mean, they're people who are displaced by war from late 1970s. Even already in the early 70s, people were traveling by the 10s of 2002 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 cosmopolitan cultures. In fact, I think one of the themes of the book that you may have had on red, I mean, I put you to sleep. You know, Afghan modern was about conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place,

where centuries people went on the move. And trade is there. You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization of places like Helmon and Khanhar, you fly in or you're part of the marine battalion, and you see people there and they look different and I think in our imagination, if I can generalize, they look like they've been there for millennia, the dress, the whatever, you think of technology, you think of the mud compounds and so on, you think of animal drawn transportation and that kind of stuff, right?

Or the motorbike, right? At most, is what they have. But in fact, if you follow those families, their trade is taking them to Northern India for centuries, right? The trade is connected them to Cosballton centers. You have to say they have a scholar in the family, that scholar may have studied all of the Middle East, South Asia, right?

You know, the ancestors may have been horse traders who went all the way to Moscow, right? I mean, we have the store breakers of all these people traveling across Eurasia, pursuing all kinds of livelihoods. And so Afghanistan is this paradox of visually looking remote and looking like it's kind of stuck in time, but the family trajectories and the current trajectories are accidentally caused by all of them in mobile. And so a conception of being a world center is also quite strong. So, you know, another way

to frame that question about like, do the no-button at 11 would be like, why should we know about an 11? Because we are at the center of something important, right? We are the center of Asia. We are the heart of Asia. We have a kind of historic greatness. We are, you know, a proud culture of our own achievements, right? So we're not worried about that, right? That said, I mean, sure, they're different narratives about why Americans are there, why people are being killed, you know, of course you'd find, you know, they want to convert us,

you know, they want our goal, they want our opium, they want X, Y, Z, right? There was a recent story about a Taliban official sitting in an office in Kabul and a journalist has some, can you find in this rotating globe, find your country, find where we sitting right now. And he was filmed not being able to do it. And so a lot of you, race, fiscal,fiscated Afghans that asked for it, were saying, you know, ha ha, look at this. And it 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 Afghans are standing in this too, right? But I wouldn't use those metrics to suggest that this is a place that doesn't have a sense of its place in the world and of geopolitics. I think if anything being a relatively small country in a very complicated neighborhood, I mean, everybody, every cab driver, I mean, people have them. I mean, you know, this is where America is different because I don't think America's had this sense, you know, we're talking about Moscow and stuff. I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers, I think a lot of them are going

to tell you, like, what's happening in the world and why, right? And it's just part of, it's part of their thing, right? You can find that in Ghana, you can find that Mexico City, right? You find that lots of places. So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in. And a lot of them remarkably, he had done it firsthand, which is what struck me so much. And you know, relaying my experiences from the 1990s in Tashkint, places that these guys had already lived in more countries than I've ever been.

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

I mean, one friend, most of my wealthy family, uh, in the trading diaspora. And he was imprisoned. I mean, they sent him to prison, uh, in Pakistan. And he talked about how he could start like running, uh, running in the jail, you know, taking cigarettes to people, doing the things and kind of, you know, these are not stories of like, I went to Harvard and so I'm so learning because of this. I mean, it's a whole range of experiences. The interesting thing is the survey is a survey and it doesn't reflect ignorance as you're

saying, perhaps, but it may reflect a different geopolitical view of the world than the West has. So, you know, for a lot of the world, 9-11, was one of the most important moments of recent human history. And for Afghanistan, not to know that, especially when they're part of that story, means they have a very different, like, there could be a lot of things said. One is the spread of information is different. The channels of the way information is spread and two of the things they care about, maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc of history, with the bickering of these superpowers that seem to

want to go to the moon, are not as important as the big sort of arc that's been the story of Afghanistan. That's an interesting idea, but it's still a bit if at all representative of the truth, it's heartbreaking that they're not, do not see themselves as active player in this game between the United States and Central Asia because they're such a critical player. And I feel, in obviously, in many ways, get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction with the occupation, you know, invasion of Afghanistan for many years and then this rushed with withdrawal of troops and now the economic collapse and it's sad in some ways. No, it's very, I mean, another way to put it, is this.

I mean, there's a range of knowledge and you're right, the inflation flows are peculiar to particular geographies and history and stuff. I think that, you know, plucking out a month's ample from some fairly remote area, from one like follow the agricultural products. I mean, and this is where, you know,

I think urban roll divides used to mean a lot more in the 19th century, right? So a lot of like nuts and bolts of history is about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions, but I think that if one has the privilege of traveling a bit, you see that like urban areas are fed by rural, hinterlands, and if you look, think of who actually, you see that like urban areas are fed by rural, enter and lands. And if you look, think of who actually 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. But yeah, but you're broader point about like the tragedy of this. I think I said, if I can quote a brain student mind, an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD who's now, you know, doctor, he's a great scholar. You know, we've done several events now trying to just think through what's happened and of course she's very emotionally affected by it and she continues to ask a really great question. If I can get her phrasing right, you know, if you think of the cycle of like the top on being empowered to as in one in the way in which that affected women in particular, you know, half afternoon, half of the society, right?

Then you think of this 20-period of violence and, and you know, misdexits, right? And repeat a tragedy that also created a space. I mean, it created space for a whole generation. It created a sense, a space for people mean, it created a space for a whole I say generationally, it created a sense a space for people to realize something new. I think so we have to attend to the the dynamism of the society, right? So yeah, this happened mostly in Kabul, other big cities, Missouri, Sheree, Harat, and Khanahar. But you can't limit your analysis to

that because things like radio, television, everyone got a TV channel. There's a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star that I recommend to your listeners and viewers that it's about a singing show, a singing contest show, but you see just just for so many things about like connections. I mean, it's a show by an independent, you know, television network that did drama. It did, it did kind of info commercials for like, I've met in huge American investment in it. So it wasn't politically neutral, but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff.

But at the singing show, it became, you know, incredibly popular, modeled upon the British American, you know, American idol kind of stuff, you know. And you could vote. So it had a kind of democratic practice element. But it's fascinating to see that, you know, people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this. You think of like literacy rates. Literacy rates are imperfect and people

who study medieval, modern Europe talk about how no one could read and there weren't many books, but if someone had a book, it'd be read aloud to a whole village, potentially, or gathering. So there isn't much, 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, scene television group settings, having telephone, you know, cheap telephone, which then become an access point to the world in social media, right?

So all the stuff swept across African society as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more. So African society became, you know, in important ways really connected to everything going on. And so you see that reflected politically in what people wanted. So you had some people, obviously, back to return to the Taliban, some people wanted to ask, whoa, but increasingly many more people wanted something else. the Taliban. Some people wanted the Sasque, but increasingly many more people wanted something else. And one of the great failures was to expose people to democracy, but only give them the rigged version. And so the US and state party in particular continued to double down on fake elections for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.

What kind of elections? Faked fraudulent elections for Parliament and for President. And I've got to stand again and again, from the very beginning. And there's elections, we're probably theater for the US, for remaining on the road that you're describing, right? For not deviating, for not exiting, because we were building democracy there. In reality, the US government knew it was never really building democracy there.

It was establishing control. Elections were one of means to gather control, right? But then you had on the ground, especially when young people go to university, you know, having experiences that were denied to them before, you know, they took these promises seriously. So part of the disillusionment that we see today is that, you know, they believe what the US told them that they're constructing democracy. And of course, you know, sending psychos, maybe thinking, well, you know, you're not really doing that. You're backing

fraud. They believed it when they were younger. And now they're actually smart enough to understand that it's a farce. Yeah. But and so indirectly had the consequence of actually working. Yeah. And that it taught the young, over a period of 20 years, young folks to believe the democracy is possible and then to realize what democracy is not. Exactly. It's the current system. It's beautiful to say it. But now, but now it's, you know, it's, now November.

And so this whole period, and I wouldn't say, like, I wouldn't cast the last 20 years if we're looking at all the achievements, you know, I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet, like, this is something we should pat ourselves in the back for, I think that much just happened actually against what the Americans wanted. I mean, that kind of free thinking, democracy wanting, I mean, even like, yeah, we could point you out on the religious, good might, the religious sphere. I mean, the African religious landscape became very pluralistic. Lost young people wanted a different kind of secular politics, but the old guard who wanted the status quo and wanted something that they fought for in 1980s tended to still

get American backing as the political leads. 1980s tended to still get American backing as the political elites, they still tended to monopolize political power. So all stuff was happening in different ways. I mean, the Americans established this American University of Afghanistan, which was I think one of the best things the US did there, and I regret that the US didn't fund 20 more, you know, sprinkling them across the country, making them accessible people because it was, you know, sprinkling them across the country, making them accessible people because it was, it was, you know, again, it wasn't an engine of Americanization. It was this opportunity.

So, the thirst for higher education was really extraordinary. It was never, never really met. The US then had to put money in primary education, which much of that too was fraudulent. But so, you have all this interesting dynamism. You have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space. I mean, I call it a public sphere in the classic European sense. The Afghans made of their own. And again,

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

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

But symbolic, it was very important that they rejected being mobilized politically, you know politically voting as a Hazar or voting as whatever. And of course, there were communities who wanted to vote as that ethnic community. But there are also people who said, let's put a kind of civic nationalism first, one that accommodates ethnic pluralism in a way that rejected a kind of majorityitarian politics of one ethnic group dominating the thing. So all this stuff was quite interesting. I mean, women were setting themselves across multiple spheres. Of course, it remained patriarchal.

Of course, there were struggles. Of course, there was violence. Of course, there's no utopia. But the door on all that shut on August 15, so to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer from this student, now professor, was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this, and you mentioned the tragic hour here, um, you think the 20 years, like she asked you, you know, why did you go to war in our

country? I say, what did you do to this last for 20 years when this was never about us? You never asked us if you wanted to come. You never asked us what you do to this last 20 years when this was never about us? You never asked us if you wanted to come. You never asked us what you wanted to build here. You asked us when you were coming and you asked us when you were leaving. You just did this all on your own. We tried to make the most of it. Then you pulled the rug out from under us to love with our... And returned to power, probably by diplomacy.

It wasn't at the end just a military loss. I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions. I mean, the idea you asked about alternatives, I mean, giving up bargurum. I mean, holding to the timeline, I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold to the Doha agreement that Trump had signed. I mean, every Republican president writes his own foreign policy,

right? So the Biden administration acted as if, and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied and that it was either this or 20 more years of war or some absurd kind of false alternative. And so, but I think that's important for American audiences to hear that, you know, they're like, you came to hear to experiment, you came here to punish, you came here to kind of reassert, you know, your dominance 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, and it's important for American politics since then. Like you did, you worked out your problems, you your problems on us, on our territory.

And now what do we have for it? And then the people who had a stake in that system, imperfect as it was, have been desperate to leave. And so I don't know how much people were at this, but I'm a scholar, I work in California. You know, I have friends, I edited a journal on Afghanistan, but I'm out of friends, I edited a journal on Afghanistan and, you know, but amount of politician, I'm not a soldier. But people assume that, you know, Afghans have been

desperately trying to reach me and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American to help get them out. You know, that's the kind of like, you know, the symbol of voting with your feet, you know feet is quite powerful. There's a huge swath of the side that doesn't want the system and is literally living in terror about it. Naturally, especially women of a certain age, they fight their lives rover. There is an epidemic of suicide. They feel betrayed and some people have done some good things and getting people out, you know, I mean some

You know the US military vets have been you know at the forefront of Working to get out people you know that that they they know they owe But um the US government doesn't want these people. I mean they have created all these obstacles to To allowing a safety valve for people to leave. Looking forward from a perspective of leadership, how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes? So obviously, some interests, some aspects of human nature led to this war. How do we resist that in the future? I guess beyond my moral and

intellectual capacity, I'll just say this, I mean, looking at, again, looking at it from my home ground as the university and I think of the the intellectual ways of thinking that I think students should develop for themselves as citizens, right? Maybe that's where to start as

like, historical thinking. I mean, these are all, and I try to tell people, you know, if you wanna do robotics, computer science, you'd be a doctor, whatever, you should study history. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be in a story like me, and it's, you know, my job isn't perfect, my profession is deeply flawed, right? But it's like at older, I'm like,

they're fear and fear historians actually like, you know, what I got with it stuff. So it's like, I'm not offering myself as like a model for anything, but, you know, whether you're, actually like, you know, what I got with and stuff. So it's like, I'm not offering myself as like a model for anything, but, you know, whether you're a, you know, you carry the mail or you're a brain surgeon, whatever. I mean, I think it's not, it's a way of civic engagement in a way of like, you know, ethical being in the world

that we need to, to my eyes also, because in, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a,

in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a You need to be aware of your effect on an interesting fact world. You can't say anymore that you don't know what's happening in Afghanistan or really circle the globe and point to a place. We're all connected and we're all, we have ethical obligations. That's one place. I would just say this, and this is a lot for self-critique. That is so much my teaching in the themes of my research. I've been about empire, how big states work, not only on big territories like the Russian empire and Soviet Union stuff, but the way in which power often has projected beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see. So this is where things like neoliberalism

or if you want to take capitalism or just things that, the idea of humanity or of liberalism or of humanitarianism, that is a move beyond state boundaries or all things that we think about as affecting power in some ways that often harm people, right? So I think part of, as I've seen my jobs as far as I think about,

you know, building upon the work of my people in grad school and you know, scholars 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. This should be known to us. And the scholars we can hopefully place some useful role in showing effects that aren't obvious initially.

So, empire is a framework to think about this. Obviously, for a scarlet of empire, you've seen what that looks like, and that's horrific, right? You look at things like racism as one of the ideological pillars of empire. That's horrific. It must be critiqued and must be educated against. Some of the gender exploitation of empire is also something to highlight, to rectify and so on. To be moral beings, we need to think about past inequality and the legacies of violence

and destruction that live on, living in the Americas. Look at, we're all on stone land, we're all in the sense living with the fruits of genocide and slavery and all those things, it's hard to come to terms with, right? But the last few months in Afghanistan, and thinking about empire, I think may be more humble when I read people who say to put it simply, if taking some joy in this moment, saying like, well, the Americans got kicked out of Afghanistan. If you're against empire, this is a good thing. This is a kind of victory of anti-colonial. You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan,

that America is not some kind of place that has an ideal of freedom and all the kind of things that we American tell ourselves. But it's more America has the idea of empire that there's one place that has the truth and everybody else must follow this truth. And so from a perspective of Gannison, it could be a victory against this idea of centralized truth of empire. That's another way to tell this story. And then in that sense, it's a victory. And in that sense, also, I mean, you push back against this somewhat this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires. Right. Right. And I would say this, I mean, I'm a critic of empire. I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon that stays with us. And I think, you know, we need scholars to point to the way which it still works and

still does harm. But it's part of being an empire that you can just get up and leave a place, right, that you can free make its politics on one day. And then because it fails to advance your agenda at one moment, he simply walk away. I mean, you know, we can point to other moments. I mean, 1947, on subcontinent, you know, the way that the British withdrew, played a significant role in mass violence, you know, the company partition. It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know, dictated that, right? There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know, the company partition. It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know, dictated that, right? There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know,

the knife to kill their neighbor and so on. I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment as there's now in what's happening in Afghanistan. But I think the, the capriciousness, I mean, the ability to act is if you're, your political decisions about those lives, you know, or something that can be made, you know, in secret. They can be made willingly. They really are beyond the accountability, you know, of of those who are actually going to live with consequences

of shifting the cards on a deck in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't. I would love to hear you to conversation with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson, who argues on the topic of empire, that you can also zoom out even further and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire. And he argues, I think he gets a lot of fact for this from other historians that the British Empire did more good than bad in certain moments of history. And that's an uncomfortable truth.

There's like levels, it's a cake with layers of uncomfortable truths, and it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good. Right. I would continue to disagree with them. For instance, I'm still working out where I am and in what this moment does to kind of, I think, qualify, qualify my understanding of the past into, I think in a moment of humility, you know, I do. And I'm probably, I'm probably reacting to the kind of, you know, as you put it, I mean,

that the idea that this is like a good thing that American power has been defeated here. I mean, I do think American power should contract. And I don't think, I think if I had to create a tally sheet of what the Americans did in the US, I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan, right? It could have done that without invading the country and killing people. I'm not, I'm not now becoming a politician, Tremper, I'm not, I'm not now a I'm gonna apologize to Empire. I'm not now a mini, not Ferguson, but ending Empire is, I mean, it does as soon as you make

or in some ways a continuation of empirical hubris, right? So you're not really out of empire yet. You're not really contracting Empire for those who are living it, you know? But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put this way. It's be careful what you ask for. You know, I mean, I wanted, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan, but I wanted there to be a political settlement. I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right? I wanted all kinds of things things be different, right? But why is going against the Avenida for that? You can play all those games of geopolitics without ever invading and taking ownership of the place. It feels like the war. Yeah, it feels like I mean, I'm not exactly sure what military force is necessary for,

except for targeted, intense attacks. It feels like to me, except for targeted intensive tax. It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9-11 was to show was a display of force unlike anything the world has ever seen for a very short amount of time. Targeted at sure, at terrorists, 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. There's nothing to do with military policing essential. Right. Not me. I think, yeah, if you look at it, do that lens. I mean, if any Afghanistan and then if any Iraq didn't end al-Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right? It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely. There are, if you like, you could say there were, you know, some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.

But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing. I mean, it spread. I mean, it was never an Islamic thing. It was never a Muslim thing. Some Muslims adopted it in some places. But the circus of knowledge about how to do these kinds of things only expanded with the insurgiencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq and then they kind of became connected and then they became to the president. I mean, the Islamic State is it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever that it will get recognition from all its neighbors. It will get recognition in Russia. I mean already with the evacuation airport, the United States was collaborating with the Taliban against Islamic State and openly talking about the Taliban as if they were partners in this great operation. So,

and then Al-Qaeda remains present and Afghanistan. So, trillions of dollars spent. remains present and Afghanistan. So trillions of dollars spent. Yeah. The drones up above bombing places that result in civilian death, the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers, and those stories, even at the individual level, propagate virally across the land, creating potentially more terrorists. And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars is the military industrial complex where there's just a momentum where after 9-11 the feeling like we should do something led to us doing something and then a lot of people realize that it can make money from doing more of that something and then it's just a momentum where no one person is sitting there, adding a cat in an evil way saying we're going to spend all of this money and create more suffering and create more terrorism.

But it's just something about the momentum that leads to that. To me honestly, I'm still a sucker. I believe in leadership. I believe in great charismatic leaders. And the power of that want to do evil and to do good. Yeah. And it felt like I honestly put the blame on George Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden for lack of leadership. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I Biden. Sure, for lack of leadership in this. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I agree, and yeah, there is the

Belt and Duster complex component, which is huge. And there's also, I mean, seeking a government leadership, it's also, I'd say, the imbalance of power within Washington. I mean, depending on, use this moment, well, beginning in 2001, I think to assert this authority at the expense of other institutions of national government. I mean, the State Department diplomacy has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.

And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians, which I'm not from the history of the United States, but we can go back to talk about Vietnam, we talk about lots of Cold War and post-Cold War engagements. And I think, we need a reckoning about how the United States uses military power, why we devote so much to our military budget and what could be available to us if we had a more sensible view of the value of military power of its effectiveness.

And I think we're building a hammer home that this is a defeat. I mean, I think there should be accountability. And if you, and this could be a kind of opening for a kind of bipartisan conversation because if you are a kind of American militarist, I mean, you have to look at the leadership that got you to a place where you were defeated by

men wearing sandals firing a K-47s, right? Yeah, there should be a humility with that. I mean, we should actually say that. We literally... Oh, we lost. You say lost? It wasn't just, you know, the American military lost. Yeah, and I feel I have very mixed feelings and it you know, it's, 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, they are suffering because they look at the sacrifices that they made that I didn't make. I mean, American society to make the sacrifices. I mean, men and women lost limbs, they lost eyes, they lost lives. You know, there's been this of course quiet epidemic of suicide among veterans. And I've heard some stories defected. The State Department is seeing a similar surge of suicides because they see their adult life's work collapse. They've seen their relationships.

I mean, they've seen they've seen phone calls in the little night from people who they entrusted with their lives, who they know are going to be targeted. I mean, something have already been killed. They've seen the, I mean, I think just, I'd imagine just, I logically and professionally, what they believed in and what they, what they sacrificed for has vanished. And I think that's a,. I think that's bad. Historically, thinking of some of the presence you were thinking of, if you think of, at a human level, I feel horrible for those people who may not have agreed

with everything they had done and their choices live. But I respect the fact that many good people went out of the best intentions as young people to do the right thing and make things right. And I respect that. And I've met enough to know that there were people who saw the gray and complexity. And that's all you can hope for. But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans. If we look at the other post-war moments, and this is kind of a post-war moment, where we need a conversation with American veterans about what they've gone through and what they're feeling, and they solve skin in the game because their personal connections and their histories are all suffering to be future leaders.

Yeah, veterans. Already? Yeah. People who have served are often great men and women. That's true. And, you know, throughout history, whether you sacrifice, you served in fighting World War II, in fighting Vietnam, that's going to mold you in different ways. That's going to mold how you are as a leader that leads this country forward.

And so we have to have an honest conversation about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan, the war in the Middle East, the war on terror in the history of America. If we just look at the full context at the end of this 21st century, how we're going to remember this and how that's going to result in our future interactions with small and large countries with China or some proxy world with China with Russia or some proxy world with Russia was the role of oil and natural resources and opium and all those kinds of things, what's the role of military power in the world. Now with COVID, we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too. And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive. They seem to be symptoms of something of a same kind of source problem of leadership, of bureaucracy,

of the way information, intelligence flows throughout the US government, all those kinds of things. And then hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things. Definitely. I mean, if there's one theme that jumps out to me and 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 probably our democratic traditions, if we see them being under assault from certain quarters, I think military defeat is yet another addition to all the aspects of this that you mentioned. I mean, the fact that military defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this that you mentioned, the fact of motor defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this fire, potentially if we think of its legacies and other post-war

environments when the veteran angle is one, when you have people who feel betrayed, they have been fodder for the far right and other settings. Interwar Europe is very much about mobilizing dissolution veterans in the name of right-wing fascist politics. If one thinks two of this moment of really increasing xenophobia, our immigration debate is now talking about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all in the United States after 20 years. And I think immediately their response in Europe, which I followed some extent, you know, focusing on Germany, because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans leading up those collapse. 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, I think, using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience to say, you know, in context of like recent elections that, you know, we're the party who will defend you against these Afghans are going to be coming from this. 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. I mean, obviously, Mounted Fish and Hunger will send Afghans to neighboring states. But where the European right is resurgent, this has been a gift, right, to say that the Afghans are coming, they're brown skinned, they're muslin, they're uneducated, they're

going to want your women. And they will take the odd sexual assault case or the odd, whatever, dramatic, active violence that happens numerically in any population, and they'll magnify that to say that our far right group is going to save the nation. Sorry, the main point I wanted to be in a relationship was that I think the serial, well, there are many, many carnal sends, if you like, but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits, I mean, what blocked some of these exits was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying. And so I mean that this is no secret even his fault is, but the, we've allowed, and you think of the general mistrust government mistrust of, of authority across the board,

of professors, of economists, of economists of scientists, doctors, right? Well, I actually think that's the hopeful thing to me about the internet is the internet hates in authenticity. They can smell bullshit much better, and I think that motivates young leaders to be transparent and authentic. So like 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 lies, they're not smart enough to understand the full complexities of the things we're dealing with. So we're not going to even communicate to them the full complexities. We're just going to decide and then tell them what we decided and conceive some kind of narrative that makes it easy for them to consume this decision. As opposed to that, I really believe I see there's a hunger for authenticity of when you're making decisions, when you're looking at the rest of the world

and trying to decide, untangle this complexity, the internet, the public, the world wants to see you as a leader, struggle with the tension of these ideas, to change your mind, to see, to recognize your own flaws and your own thinking from a month ago,

all that, the full complexity of it also acknowledged 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, the accountability is part of that, right? I mean, we need, you know, honesty, openness. And then, you know, acknowledgement of mistakes, I mean, humility is the key to all learning, right? But also, I mean, you think just the headline from yesterday,

the horrible drone strike, which was really the last kind of American military action on the day that the US was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul, wiped out an entire family, mostly children. You know, the US was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul, wiped out an entire family, mostly children. You know, the US acknowledged that, yes, this was not the ISIS bombing outfit that they thought it was, but yesterday they did a quick review. I'm not an expert on undressed strikes in the aftermath, but as he was looking at my

closely said, it was basically whole cloth taken from what the US government has been saying after all these strikes, you know, re-producing 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, you know, they found little ways of acknowledging things that goes planned, but we follow the policies essentially and that's it. It's not a crime. It's the way of notting saying, you know, we screwed up and it's kind of the legal ease that that suddenly makes a war crime, not a war crime, you know, and that is reflects that, are feasible to take accountability. I think people are really sick of that.

Yeah. In a way where the opposite is true, which is they get excited for people who are not, for leaders who are not that. Right. And so there's, they're not going to punish you for saying, I made a mistake. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 such subtle, but such crucial communication of mistakes made. If you make a small mistake, it is so powerful to communicate, I think we messed

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

When you do this legalese type of talk, it destroys trust. And again, I really think the lessons of recent history. Yeah Teach us what 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 humility I mean we you know, you know, we need humility, accountability, honesty. And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that. I mean, to learn from past mistakes and officer source inspiration and courage. And, you know, we can take some kind

of sustenance from that too, but also learning from learning how not to do things, right? And then, you know, analogies are never like one to one. I mean, we talk about Vietnam. I mean, I think, I mean, to be non veterans would say, yeah, this is like deja vu, you know, I mean, there's the story that the visuals of the couple airport and of the Saigon embassy, we're not the same, but close enough that people would just pose them. All else for now, but I would just ask people that, you know, over-analogizing is also, you know, a kind of Pathdown, making errors of judgment and comparison and then sameness But it's stretch. I mean, like 9-11 itself. I think the idea that

People lack the imagination within our security apparatus to think this was even possible, right? And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock on a cockpit door. You know, it would have wanted all this. And again, I'm not saying over the time or hindsight that I am omission about all this, but you know, I just been living in Germany the year before and those applaud there that the guy was hatching from Germany to blow up the mausoleum of auto-stwork in Ankara with an airplane. And so if you kind of dig,

it wasn't unimaginable that you would use an airplane as a weapon. And the bush was fishing up saying, no one had ever heard of this, who would do this? Might well, not a lot of people do this. And then, at that very moment, my wife was teaching the Joseph Convinne novel secret agent, which was about a conspiratorial organization that

wanted to bomb, actually in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing because I think they tricked this guy into doing it, but they wanted to bomb the gunnage observatory for some obscure political purpose. So that's an insistent which, you know, the novel, right, to go back to our kind of humanity's bitch, right, to go back to our kind of humanities bits, right? That, I guess my point was that, um, you know, as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination, right? And 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. And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature, I mean, just the kind of stretching that 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. You know, so much of what we talked about today, I mean, so much of, you know, our security is affected by other perception of their insecurity, right? Which unless you're a whole web of emotions. Can you tell me about the Afghan people, what they love, what they fear, what they dream of for themselves and for their nation? Is there something to say, to speak to, to the spirit of the people that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns and the hopes they have. Yeah, I think I, 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 yours a snapshot. So there is Afghan star, which really brings you to the homes of a set of people who, they want to start them. They're artists. They want to express themselves. So I want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries. There's a woman who gets into hot water for dancing. But you realize it, I mean, people, I mean, those women who get into hot water for dancing. But you realize that people, they love art, they love music, they love poetry, they love

expression, people want to care for their children, they want to save their families, they want to enjoy whatever enjoys. I think it's very humanizing portrait. There's another great documentary film called, Love Crimes of Kabul, which is a great snapshot of the post-2000 world that the Americans shaped a lot of ways. And it's about a women's prison. And it's incredibly revealing because it's about young girls and what they want. Well, not just young, but young teenage

and then some middle-aged people who are accused of moral crimes ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to, to having such relations outside of marriage. And so it shows in a way continuity with the previous telebonner's theme and that women are imprisoned for things that you wouldn't be imprisoned for elsewhere, and that Islamoklaw operates as the kind of judicial logic for these punishments.

But in letting these women kind of speak themselves, I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, I don't want to get too much away, but women make ranging choices in this film, that land them in this break-a-man. So they don't all profess innocence. Some are like, I'm guilty, but they're guilty for reasons. In one case, one woman is guilty, she's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure on her fiance to finally marry her. You know?

So you get ethnicity, you get like, you know, kind of Romeo and Juliet, things or their families don't like each other necessarily, but they find each other. You have questions of like love, money, clothing, furniture. It's beautiful. I mean, the parts with it, I mean, we're showing it in class. There was a wonderful Afghan student who was a, I think, a full bright at the Ed School. It's Jennifer and she's a genius. She's amazing.

It was awkward for her because time out, young women having sex and stuff and it wasn't the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted and obviously there's so much more of their great writers and musicians and music is a huge thing. I mean poetry, all the things are great. So she found it, I hear you. It's a taboo subject but I thought the American students seeing it really identified with these women, because they're just so real. And so, young people trying to find relationships that are universal, and circumstances that

are very difficult. Love, love is universal. Yeah, so we do have resources to humanize. I mean, some of your people will know, Called Hussein, you know, is African-American, he's done his stuff, but there are a number of novelists and short story writers who do cool things. I think that another tragic aspect of this moment is that those people have now pretty much

had to lead the country. So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you named Khadim Ali, his hasara based in Australia. It has extraordinary work in blending a tradition of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary. His work is between Australia and Afghanistan, but he also, he had to flee.

I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul, but it's an extraordinary kind of visual language that he's adapted that has been shown all of the planet now. He's got some of his work as New York alloys, is in Europe. He's been shown in Australia, but he talks about migration in a way that puts Afghans and Hazar as at the center, but is totally universal about, you know, our modern crisis of all the main people who were displaced across our planet. And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them in a way that everyone can get.

I mean, the visual imagery experts will know that it's from the Shana-mae, like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to, that Africans have been attached to, that people can quote, you know at length That has mythical figures of good and evil that kids grow up embodying They're named the names of the characters that are it's called the you know the book of kings The heroes of villains are the staple of conversation and poetry and you know Like Russians, I mean the kind of the the the resort to literary references and speak is something that, you know, Americans don't do most Western countries don't do, but the fact that everyone's got to know

this character, everyone has this reference. The word play, the linguistic finesse, in multiple languages is, you know, a major value of Afghan storytelling. As an outsider, I'm scratching it it the surface of the surface. But there's a depth to it, just like it is fascinating. The layers, yeah. The layers of Russian language that's exactly the culture. It's a, I've been struggling and this is kind of the journey embarking on, convey to

an American audience what is lost in translation between Russian and English. And it's very challenging in some of the great translators of the ESGIF Tolstoy, Russian literature struggle with this deeply. And they work. It's an art form just to convey that. And it's amazing to hear that I've got to stand with a full mix of cultures that are there

have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect. I mean, the humor thing is, that's, I'm so much of our visual imagery is about like the sad place and dour and everything. I mean, socially, again, I'm gonna engage in some stereotypes about generalization stuff, but just the,

the African friends that I've come to be close with them. I love I mean the The humor there's so much there of 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 a time I feel like there's something between iron like Ireland and Russia with the humor stuff Where it's like you've got to be on your game, you know, so it's... Yeah, it's not, I feel like, I mean, the intensity of conversation in terms of, yeah, you have to be on your game in terms of wit and so on. I mean, you have to... there's certain people I have, like, when I talk on this podcast, they're like that, certain people from the Jewish

tradition have that... Totally, like like what the way is just like yeah okay I have to oh yeah I really have to pay attention yeah yeah yeah it's a game it's like it's like it's like you know what it feels like it feels like speed chess or something like that and you really have to focus and play and at the same time there's body language and then there's a melancholy nature to at least in the Russian side yeah the whole thing is just a beautiful mess yeah I, there's a body language in the, and then there's a melancholy nature to at least in the Russian side. And the whole thing is just a beautiful mess. Yeah, I mean, there's a funny two-time video that went around that I got from some Afghan acquaintances that was,

he's an Irish comedian kind of highlighting, you know, Irish and German national stereotypes around hospitality. And this Afghan moment is that, 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 a refusal, you know, you don't, you don't take something that's offered you the first time, you don't, you know, it's the culture 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, the different, the regional cultures, that's the thing, there's whatever, but it's, I mean, the, not always, I mean, the regional cultures, whatever, but it's the kind of like generosity and the kind of, you know, that's real. I mean, that's a cool thing. That's amazing.

I mean, going up just to superficial things, but all that, the warmth of hospitality and wit and humanity. That's what we don't see if you're in the place just through war and geopolitics and the movement pieces of the map and stuff. And that's hard to see when there are gaps in language and religious tradition and all that stuff. And then being open to the fact that people do things

differently and the gender dimension there is important, right? That they're kind of, you know, arguably each culture has a kind of gender.jamifice different. And so I think it's helpful to have humility in thinking that some Afghans would do something different differently. But then you also have Afghans, you say, everyone should be educated, everyone should work,

and so on and so on. So there's no single way of. Yeah. And there is a geno dynamic in Russia too. We need to be respectful that like, and that's not always what it looks like at first. Yeah, exactly. There's layers.

Where power is, I mean, that's definitely. Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole other country where the power is. Yeah. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, who was born on the land that is now Afghanistan. Is there something in his words that speaks to you about the spirit of the Afghan people? I mean, everyone owns Rumi, I guess that's, I mean, that's going to get me in trouble with

certain Afghan fans of Rumi who want to see him as an Afghan. I would say, are they proud of Rumi? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they see him as an Afghan? Do they?, are they proud of Rome? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they see them as an Afghan? Do they? Yeah, I mean, it depends. I mean, some people will be militant and say, the Iranians can have him, he's ours.

But they're also saying, you know, he's, I mean, you can say, again, he's like a Rorschach blood. I mean, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian, he's Iranian, he's Afghan, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian, he's Iranian, he's Afghan, he's a Turk. I'm trying to think of the analogy, but he's something special to everyone. So I guess I would not walk into that conversation and claim that he's one or another, but it's a cool thing. 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, Afghans stay in and say, okay, Rumi is everyone, you know, Madonna helped make the famous in the United States, you know, for better for worse. They used to sell stuff at Starbucks, and that's all complicated, um, and embarrassing. And his, his, his translations are very much disputed where you have people be like, there's some awful Rumi translations, and there are, there are also a lot of speaking at the end, there are lots of fake roomy quotes.

Yes. You know, like, roomy said, I always be your best. Like, no, we didn't say that. I mean, that's kind of so, so, but, but then the cool thing is like, I mean, I think you can read roomy as a religious thinker. But you can also, you know, read roomy is a, you know, an Islamic sense,

but you also read them as a kind of spiritualist, right who or an ethicist or more or less and so I think that's I like the the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan Communicism and cosmolism. You know the theme I keep emphasizing of meeting actual Afghans who were actually You know fluent in Russian fluent German Turkish, they know Dari, they know Pashto, they've gone to university or sometimes they haven't. And yet, I mean, they are, I like the category of the popular intellectual, you know, the intellectual who isn't, isn't formally educated necessarily.

Although, of course, that's represented too, especially increasingly now, the generation of Goni University all over the world, you know, Stanford, MIT everywhere, African and Zawarips and other there, but just being, I don't have any kind of worldly knowledge that is not limited to a province, to a village, to a hamlet, but it sometimes is, but sometimes is not, because of, again, not because of some fatal story of curiosity, wanting to globe out of, you know, some sense of privilege, but out of necessity, out of survival, of having to adapt, and it's really extraordinary that, I mean, also, we think about like professions, like, you know, ask, ask African, you know, what does he or she do for a living?

And what have they done in the past? I mean, the answer is one gets. Sheu salesman, task optimizers, surgeons, all in one guy. Yeah. I mean, that's not just Afghans, but that's, you know, that's very common. But it's also Russia's the same. That's right. Whenever there's complex cities to the economic system and 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, but a beautiful flourishing culture and a humanity. And that creates super interesting people. Yeah. So we can often see, okay, there's Taliban, there's war, there's economic malfunction, there's harboring of terrorists,

there's opium trade, all that kind of stuff, but there's humans there with deep intellectual lies, and I love the movie Love Crimes, and the same kind of hopes, spheres and desire to love the old Romeo and Juliet story. And I think Rumi to me represents that. The wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent and just beautiful representation of humanity of love. Some of the some of the best quotes about love are from him half of them fake. Half of them real, but the best ones are real.

The best ones are real. Robert, this is an incredible conversation. Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan and making me, making us realize that there's much more to this country than what we may think. It's a beautiful country and it's full of beautiful people. You made me think about a lot of new things too, so it was definitely great for online too, so thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Cruz to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. Thank you so much. next time. you