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Dec. 29, 2025 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
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Tales of Regime Change: Afghanistan — Graveyard of Empires

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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth-generation warfare.
A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posovic.
Christ is King.
Christmas 1979.
Soviet armor pours across the Afghan border towards Kabul as helicopters secure the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush Mountains.
In Moscow, the Politburo has decided to save Afghanistan's communist government from collapse.
We have a breaking news story to tell you about.
Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City.
It happened just a few moments ago.
You declared a jihad against the United States.
Can you tell us why?
The U.S. government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal through its support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
And we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
He is representative of networks of people who absolutely have made their cause to defeat the freedoms that we understand.
And we will not allow them to do so.
On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.
It is a milestone a mere number cannot explain.
According to an Independent Associated Press count, 1,000 American troops have now been killed in Afghanistan.
Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.
President Biden announced the end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the same spot in the White House treaty room as President George W. Bush announced its beginning 20 years ago.
It's time to end America's longest war.
Chaos following the horrific attack outside the Kabul airport.
This is now the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in more than a decade.
The Taliban held a parade at Bagram Air Base, showing off the weapons and military equipment Joe and Kamala left behind.
U.S. armored vehicles just outside of Kandahar Wednesday, and right on top of there, that is the black and white flag of the Taliban.
Now, it's not clear how much U.S. hardware is now in the hands of the Taliban.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's special edition of Human Events Daily.
We've got a special Christmas series for you yet again this year, introducing Tales of Regime Change.
Tales of Regime Change is a journey through the modern American habit of wandering into far-off lands with big plans, big budgets, and even bigger blind spots.
Now, if you've followed U.S. foreign policy for more than five minutes, you probably notice a pattern.
It always starts with a briefing, you know, crisp suits in the intelligence community, whispering about windows of opportunity, humanitarian obligations, or the chance to shape the region.
The language is polished.
PowerPoints are convincing and the mission we're told is noble, spreading stability, democracy, liberal order, all the things that make Washington policymakers feel like they're the protagonists of history.
But behind the curtain, there's another engine running.
The quiet belief that American involvement can always bend the arc of the world towards some vision of globalist liberal hegemony.
Not domination.
No, no, no, they'd never call it that.
They'd call it maintaining influence, supporting partners, managing outcomes.
A soft empire wrapped in the language of progress.
And every single time the same thing happens, the law of unintended consequences strolls in like it owns the place.
Because when you try to rearrange nations from 7,000 miles away, when you treat societies, tribes, history, faith traditions like pieces on a whiteboard, you end up creating forces you never anticipated and problems that you can't bomb, bribe, or brief your way out of.
Which brings us to episode one, Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.
For generations, Afghanistan has devoured the ambitions of great powers the way the desert sands swallow footprints.
The British marched in with confidence of empire.
The Soviets rolled in with tanks and ideology.
And the Americans, well, we arrived with a cocktail of counterterrorism, nation building, and the belief that we could turn the Hindu Kush into a Jeffersonian democracy project by sheer will and a few trillion dollars.
The intelligence briefing said the Taliban would crumble.
The analysts predicted we could reshape a tribal warrior society into a centralized government.
The architects of liberal order imagined Kabul as the next success story in the grand narrative of progress.
But Afghanistan had its own narrative.
It goes back to Alexander the Great, ancient, rugged, unyielding.
And in the end, we learned once again what so many who came before us learned the hard way.
You can enter Afghanistan on your own terms, but you do not leave on them.
And that's what we're going to do, folks.
We're going to look at this.
So we're going to take the next couple of days in this series, Tales of Regime Change over this Christmastime.
And what we're going to do is peel back the curtain.
We'll sift through the documents, the declassified cables, the speeches, the promises, and the fallout.
Because if there's one thing we've seen again and again, it's that America doesn't just fight wars.
It tells itself stories about why those wars must be fought.
And those stories, more often than not, shape our mistakes as much as they justify them.
And folks, while you listen to this episode, I want you to remember that I'm not just talking about something that I've read about in books or seen in movies or watched on TV.
I spent a year at Guantanamo Bay in the interrogation cell.
I've met these people.
I've seen them up close and personal.
Members of the Taliban, members of al-Qaeda.
This is an ideology that I am intimately familiar with.
And I understand this problem set as well as anyone can understand.
Why?
Because I was a gift.
My soul.
To drive north through the Sullen Mountains is to journey backwards in time to an isolated nation which has consistently ignored the approach of a 20th century world.
All right, folks, we're back.
Human events special.
Tales of regime change.
Graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.
I'm very excited.
So joining me in this quest, as he did last year and the year prior, is Joshua Lysak, the co-author of Unhumans, Secret History of Communist Revolutions and How to Crush Them.
Joshua, how are you, my friend?
I'm well.
Good to be here with you, Bozo.
Thank you.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you as well.
So, you know, it's amazing.
We're starting here with Afghanistan.
And to tell the story of the regime changes in Afghanistan, you know, you really have to kind of start at a certain point.
You know, which regime change do you want to go with?
Do we talk about the British invasion in the 1920s?
Do we go back all the way to Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire and the Hellenic world, the empire of Alexander, from which derives the city of So Alexander's name in the local in Pashtun would be it's something along the lines of Alexandar, which is where we derive the name of the city, Khandahar, is actually based on Alexander the Great.
And it's one of the largest cities in Afghanistan to this day.
So the country of Afghanistan is indelibly marked by regime changes that go back thousands upon thousands of years, all the way back to hundreds of years before Christ when Alexander was there.
But I think from modern times, where I'd like to start is the 1970s.
So, and that kind of gets us to the present situation.
But I want people to very clearly understand that Afghanistan goes way, way back.
And people have been trying to tame the Hindu Kush, if you will, for thousands of years.
And all of them have ridden to ruin.
And the United States, of course, is no different.
And so what do you have in the 1970s?
Well, first you have a king.
The king is deposed.
He is deposed by a strong nationalist leader, military leader, who then begins nationalizing industry, who begins kicking foreigners out of the country.
But then, oh yes, then something happens that's so similar to all of us that in fact, it even features in on humans from last year, because some of these Marxist revolutions, which took place within the context of the Cold War, were actually regime changes.
So Joshua, what did we write about the Marxist revolution of Afghanistan, which no one talks about, by the way, all the way back when we wrote Unhumans last year?
Yes, that's correct.
What the Soviet Union attempted to do in the local communists, Marxist-Leninists of Afghanistan bears an eerie resemblance to pretty much everything that happened everywhere else.
We identified sort of the three acts of a communist uprising, a far left-wing revolution, whether they call themselves communists or socialists, or dare we say, Democrats.
But we're going to pick up and do a little bit of story time with Joshua Lysak featuring the Unhumans book, the chapter Red Hot Cold War.
If you have your copy, you may turn to page 179.
This is what you do at Christmas time as you read stories.
Let's pick it up.
It all started back in 1973 with a coup that kicked out the Afghan king and ended the monarchy.
Muhammad Daoud Khan, a man of ambition and vision, toppled his cousin, King Zahir Shah, while he was abroad.
Overnight, Afghanistan transitioned from a monarchy to a quasi-democratic republic with Dawood at the helm.
His initial moves were bold and modern, pushing for women's rights and societal reforms such as surprise, surprise, land redistribution.
But these seemingly anti-Islamic ambitions edge the nation closer to Soviet influence.
Radical shifts to modernize Afghanistan rubbed traditionalists the wrong way.
And by 1978, simmering tensions exploded in the Saur Revolution.
A Marxist-Leninist faction, the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, PDPA, ousted and assassinated Daun Ed in yet another coup.
And so the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was born, with the Soviet Union acting as midwife and the KGB attending.
Oh, but it continues.
It continues.
We're not done yet.
To maintain the early grip on power, the Afghan communists imprisoned, tortured, and executed all who opposed.
This is what they do.
These brutally unsurprising tactics sparked a wildfire of resistance across the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.
Enter the Mujahideen, a motley crew of fighters bound by their shared disdain for the PDPA's atheistic and foreign-backed regime.
While some were native Afghans and other Arab volunteers, these simple men united under a common banner of defending their faith and homeland against what they saw as an existential threat.
As internal strife escalated, the Soviet Union, watching its new ally falter to next generation warfare, as the U.S. recently had in Vietnam, decided to step in.
December 1979 marked the beginning of a new chapter as Soviet tanks rolled across the borders into Afghanistan.
This wasn't near intervention.
It was a full-scale invasion aimed rather at propping up the faltering communist regime.
And again, we're not done yet with this regime change business.
Listen to this.
How can we not be done?
It's not done yet.
In the U.S., charismatic Congressman Charlie Wilson.
Charlie Wilson's war now begins, Pozo.
Here we go.
Well, hold on, look, before we get to Charlie Wilson's war, let's pause because, and I do want to go back.
So in the Sauer Revolution, when they came to the nationalist leader, now you mentioned that they assassinated him.
We're not, you know, not surprising.
But Joshua, and I don't know if we wrote it in the book, but perhaps in the new updated version of Unhumans, Imagine Not Owning a Copy Couldn't Be Me, that what did they do with his family?
What are they always doing with his family?
They killed them all.
They killed him.
Every single single one.
Big shock, big shock right there.
They killed him, his entire family, his wife, his children, every single one of them.
Wow.
I can't imagine not communists doing the same thing they do every single time, not Marxists engaging in insane bloodletting and insane violence every time their revolution expands to another country.
Not atheists trying to impose their insane beliefs on a radical religious, by the way, a radical religious tribal people.
And so, of course, this does not work well.
And so this is what we see responded in when the tribes begin to begin to rise up and they begin to actually fight back against the Soviets.
And so fight back against the new coup, the new revolution, the new government.
So that's when the Marxists say, okay, we need more than just the KGB.
They put out the call to Moscow and they say, we need help, but we're not going to win this thing.
Yes, that's right.
And that's when, shortly thereafter, there were 115,000 Soviet troops sent into Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone under Charlie Wilson, Congressman Charlie Wilson, who some of you have seen the film Charlie Wilson's War, which depicts the internal, as in the United States, this fomenting of a righteous war, referring to the Mujahideen as the good guys.
The good guys.
My goodness.
Now, one of the organizations that opposed the Soviet Union and all these troops and tanks and resources was a little group called the Taliban.
My goodness.
What is it?
Go ahead, Jack.
Oh, no, I was going to say, what's amazing to me is one of the pictures that you get out of this is, of course, there's a photo where the Mujahideen is meeting with President Ronald Reagan in the White House, in the White House, in the United States.
And he's saying, oh, this is going to be great.
We'll work with them.
It's, you know, it's amazing.
And, you know, my gosh, it's when you look at it in a post-9-11 capacity, we're scratching our head saying, how could this possibly have happened?
And what we're explaining and what I hope that we can try to do through this entire series is explain how these things keep happening.
I remember, of course, there's the great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Gustavatos in the movie.
And he's the CIA officer.
And he goes, you know, what is it?
He goes, remember, he smashes the window and he's like, you're in the business of changing the world.
You don't think it's odd.
You're in the only business we're doing.
Nothing is considered radical.
You know, and he's just, he's just saying over and over about how it's, you know, you have to have the political will.
You have to have the political will.
And, you know, it's over and over and over about how this is a great idea.
And actually, we know what it turned into.
It turned into the rise of the Pakistani ISI, and from which Pakistani intelligence, which basically runs Pakistan today to a great extent with the U.S. deep state, we saw the rise of a little group and the seedbed of what would one day become al-Qaeda, the Taliban's rise, then 9-11, and then eventually the longest war in America's history.
And yet for some reason, we don't talk about it in those terms.
So all of it, every single last domino.
It's like domino theory actually happens, but it happens with us and not the other way around.
And it all begins with this coup in 1978, an invasion in 1979, and this Cold War strategy.
And we'll see this throughout this episode and every episode we do, that never pauses to ask the most important question.
What happens next?
What happens next?
Jack Fasovic, Joshua Lysik, by the way, make sure you get your copy of Unhumans as well as the new audio book, which features myself as the narrator.
Go and get that wherever you can download your audio books.
It's got a couple of new chapters in there.
So make sure you get those as well.
Be right back, Tales of Regime Change, Afghanistan.
The Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan began in the early 1990s, when the group began resting control away from the Mujahideen warlords, who controlled the countryside and were engaged in brutal civil conflict.
All right, Jack Pasobic, we are back.
Tales of regime change, and we're talking about Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire.
So now we're in the 1990s.
The Soviet Union has collapsed.
They've expended themselves.
America's patting themselves on the back.
Great job.
We did a great regime change.
Look at us.
And Afghanistan, no longer a battlefield, total vacuum.
Soviets are out.
America packs up their covert ops, walks away.
CIA walks away, but you don't have a country.
You have this shattered mosaic of warlords, factions, armies.
The victory over the Red Army did not bring peace at all.
What it brought was a quagmire, a civil war.
And who rises to the top of this?
The Taliban.
They called themselves the students.
And they were backed by Gulf donors.
They were backed by Pakistan's ISI.
And believe it or not, early on, the Taliban was backed by the U.S. government as well, because they thought the Taliban would be a stabilizing force because they could win the civil war and then stabilize Afghanistan.
And the Taliban, of course, was working with a group called Al-Qaeda.
Now, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban rose separately out of the Afghanistan civil war.
And there's two different tracks here that people have to understand.
So the Taliban were Pashtuns.
Pashtuns are the locals of Afghanistan and really live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Whereas Al-Qaeda, they are not local.
They are Arabs.
So Arabs and Pashtuns are two different races.
This is something, of course, that the planners in Washington didn't really care about.
Didn't think it was a big deal.
Didn't think like it mattered.
And of course, as we know, the leader of the al-Qaeda was one of those wealthy scions of the Gulf nations who used his family's wealth to grow al-Qaeda.
And that, of course, was Osama bin Laden.
And Osama bin Laden, as we've mentioned, was working with the Mujahideen, was working with U.S. backing, was working with the CIA, was working with others.
By the way, Al-Qaeda at this point in the 1990s was conducting attacks all throughout Africa, conducted attacks even in Southeast Asia, but at the same time was also aiding the United States and various operations in where?
Yugoslavia.
So this is a very strange situation where you've got Al-Qaeda and NATO on the same side of these different regime change wars when all of that breaks apart.
And we'll have to, of course, cover Yugoslavia in another segment of Tales of Regime Change.
So stay tuned, kids.
It'll come up again.
So by 1994, Taliban takes Kandahar.
Then they take Kabul in 1996.
And believe it or not, one of the things the Taliban is known for is public executions of pedophile warlords, public executions of pedophile warlords, because they were conducting a practice known as Bacha Bazi.
And Bachabazi is when the warlords would take the prepubescent boys of the villages and of the areas they controlled and rape them in their tents and in their palaces and then send them back to the families and would keep a coterie of these boys around.
They would say, girls are for procreation, boys are for fun.
And so those were the warlords that the U.S. was backing.
The Taliban then became the ones who were executing those warlords.
This will come up later.
Then the coal bombing happens in 2000 from Al-Qaeda.
And of course, 2001, we get 9-11.
And the response to 9-11, we all know, Operation Enduring Freedom.
So Joshua, at any point, did any of these U.S. planners sit back and think, gosh, perhaps we played a role in starting all of this?
Some of you all know, and you do, let's call it Jack, that Data Republican and I working on a book on the basically the 300 plus year conflict between what we'll call nationalism and supra nationalism.
Supernationalism is this idea that your own concept of a nation is beyond the borders of one country.
You might have all heard the term globalism, globalization.
This is slightly different in that you sort of see yourself as a citizen of the world versus a person from a people with traditions, heritage, and more.
This might be the difference between what we like to call heritage Americans versus NPR Americans, sort of people who listen to and consume mainstream media that is as much focused on what's happening on the other side of the planet and how that affects you today, where you have ideological allies if you're liberal in New Zealand or Canada, and you see yourself as the kin of those individuals if you're an NPR American.
So that is the Data Republic and I, with the book coming out in 2026, what we trace is this growth of this ideology that we are a global village.
We all need to get along.
People are interchangeable.
If they're not going to play nice and act nice, we can just make them.
It's a sort of foreign policy based on blank slate theory.
And generally what we see from these people who are as naive as they are powerful, the supranationalists in the West and elsewhere, oh, we can just get rid of a regime if they're a closed society, to use the phrase popularized by George Soros, who is a, let's say, a star character in my India Republicans book.
And so perpetual intervention, whether it's Afghanistan or it's Syria or it's Libya or it's Iraq, potentially Iran, right?
Pick your country.
There's this idea that humankind is perfectible.
It is a misapplication of enlightenment values, where if you simply create the right structure with the right incentives, you'll get the right results.
And so because there's a morality involved here, where there's, what did Charlie Wilson say?
He called them Jahuddin, quote, the good guys.
That good and evil, and we're on the side of good.
That filter, that mindset looks, and when it's applied to these different scenarios, you end up having a situation where third world interventions bring third world consequences.
And it's as if there's a blindness to these consequences.
Well, we should just not let that happen.
So you hear the words, or directly or indirectly, should just appear amongst the supranationalists, who again are those individuals who for decades, if not centuries, sort of see themselves as citizens of the world.
And so the whole world is in their purview, which is why when Donald J. Trump, our president, speaks ill of Haiti or Somalia, for example, they get all offended.
How dare they speak about Somalia?
They're just like us.
Their culture is famous.
The ideology is so funny when you actually break it down.
All right, folks, we'll be right back in our next segment on this.
Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires.
We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City.
One report said a plane may have hit one of the two towers.
The United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
All right, Jack Pasevik, we are back.
This is tales of regime change, graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.
And so folks, we get, we've come to the part of the story where we begin the forever war.
America's longest war, 2002 to 2021.
Think of that, 19 years of warfare, really 20 years if you consider the original October 2001 beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom.
So the Taliban falls in 2001.
And then what America attempts to do is dismantle their regime, but then lay a liberal Jeffersonian regime based on American ideals on top of it.
And they just believe that democracy would pop up and flourish in, and I'm just going to say it.
They believe that centralized elections, government, civil institutions, individual rights, professionalized security forces, and a free market economy complete with women's rights, gay rights.
I'm sure today, up to the, you know, parts of the administration were trying to push transgender rights at one point, that they could impose this on a low IQ, tribal, hyper-religious culture that's existed for thousands of years and still practices cousin marriage, that they could just use the force of will of Washington, D.C.
So you've got George Bush, you know, kind of on the, you know, the military front, the, you know, we're going to fight and we're going to win.
But then you've also on the other side got George Soros, who's pushing liberal democracy and liberal hegemony.
And in a way, and people might not think of this, but George Bush and George Soros were almost aligned on this because they both were and are globalists.
Joshua Lysak, why is it that the nation building project in Afghanistan was such a failure?
One of the reasons it's such a failure is that the supranationalist neoliberal ideology doesn't really work outside of the Western world.
For example, what are American values versus what are our passion values?
What are the values of these pedophile warlords?
And why are we aligning themselves with them?
We all know individuals who were serving on the ground and even in combat during the global war on terror.
And the horror stories that they brought back that sadly drove many of our best men and women to claim their own lives was the inability to stop the pedophilia that they witnessed over there, that they had to back off.
It's just a cultural custom.
Don't judge.
That is the trouble with supranationalist neoliberalism is because they're simply incompatible.
And yet there's a naivete that persists.
What shocks so many people who look into this is you realize that George W. Bush, Bush and George H.W. Bush before him, and George Soros, the two Georges, were, by and large, ideologically aligned.
Listen to this from December 3rd, 2001.
The United States and its allies are winning the war on Afghanistan, wrote George Soros.
And listen to this.
As yet, there's little clear thinking about what that means in practice and how we can ensure, here we go, a broader victory by helping to build a genuinely free, open, and prosperous society in Afghanistan.
free, open, and prosperous.
So the idea is as a sort of citizen of the world, where all nations are part of my purview, neoliberal, meaning we can bring secular enlightenment values to everyone.
And he goes on to talk about the basic necessities.
He starts to sound like a public school teacher about healthcare rights and education, technology, hospitals, the sort of staples of Western society.
He starts talking about roads, for instance, here.
And then he says the best organization, this is where he does go at odds with George Bush.
He says that the best organization to rebuild Afghanistan, to make it a prosperous and free society, is not the United States.
It's the United Nations, which has a record of demonstrated incompetence everywhere there is a nation building or a regime change effort.
One of the patterns that we witness with regime change across base, place, time, and race is a three-act structure.
We saw this with Communist Revolution, but the three-act structure, the rule of three, seems to be persistent across our physical reality and our human reality.
And here it is again.
And we'll see this also in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, where Act 1 is this sort of demonization and preparation.
We have to build the moral case with your own people that we need to go over there, right?
We fight them over there so we won't fight them over here.
Yeah, how did that turn out?
We ended up importing them, sending them over here, right?
Which Deity Republican acknowledges is the George Sorosian solution to nation building after the global war on terror.
You know, we can't really, we have trouble democratizing their spaces, so we just bring the populations here instead.
And then we can learn how to train them to be good little neoliberal supranationalists and explore a prosperous, free, and open society, right?
Open means you're open to influences.
You're a cosmopolitan.
But the trouble is, there's very little cultural similarity between your New York Times subscriber and a pedophile warlord.
Those are two different tribes, different realities, even.
And they simply do not mix.
How do we treat these uncontacted tribes in the Amazon?
How does the government of Brazil treat them?
What about Sentinel Island?
Everyone knows about the Sentinel Island, right?
As in that there are laws against going there.
Why is it that we have those laws, those policies, and yet we pick a nation like Afghanistan or Iraq, and we need to charge headlong in there?
But first, demonize the leaders, say we have to go there.
There's the good guys.
We got to stop the bad guys, right?
That's stage one where you make the moral case for it.
And then you have Act Two or Stage Two, which is where you execute the change and often execute your enemies.
That's where there's intervention, there's overthrow, there's direct invasion, there's airstrikes, there's proxy support for, in this case, the Jahuddin and then the Taliban.
And finally, after there's been chaos and bloodshed and destruction, you come in to do Act III.
That's the aftermath, the consolidation.
You try to install your people.
And this is where George Soros advises a neoliberal supranationalist order.
And he very much opposes.
What's amazing?
Go ahead.
No, I was going to add to that.
What's amazing is that, you know, when you look at it from a military perspective, it's the U.S. military was always able to win in, you know, one city or one battle or whatever it might be.
But the problem was it was the George Soros angle that kept failing because they would keep trying to build this central liberal government, neoliberal government, which would constantly keep collapsing because, again, we're propping up the pedophile warlords.
We're saying it's just their culture.
We're working with people who the local populace hates because they can see that we're the ones who are propping them up.
And they look at us as the invader because we broke every single rule of fourth generation warfare.
You run in with tanks and bombs and then say, you should love us because we've killed your children and blown up your cities.
You should fly the American flag.
We've liberated you, don't you see?
And we've never once considered how it might look to the local populace.
Then, oh, by the way, yes, we're going to, we're going to prop up all these ideals that run completely counter to Islam, which run completely counter to your cultural mores, which run completely counter to everything that you believe.
And that, because Afghanistan wasn't a blank slate.
There are no blank slates in the world.
Blank slate doesn't exist.
The blank slate does not exist.
It never has.
And these blank slaters need to go.
And then they would say, oh, well, and we're just going to show how good we are.
So we're going to open our doors.
We're going to open our doors.
So, and people miss this.
I want to get in because I know we only have a minute left in this segment, but I want to get this in that people forget that although Bush did the surge in Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan was 2009.
That was Barack Obama.
So Barack Obama is the one who expands the war in Afghanistan, keeps it going throughout his administration, even though he campaigned on ending it, and continues, of course, the drone war, which we know it crosses into Pakistan.
And it's all in furtherance of this insane neoliberal project.
That's what Obama did.
So Obama is the one who continues the surge in Afghanistan.
Trump tries throughout his first term to get them out.
Doesn't happen.
Then Biden comes in.
And of course, we are going to get to that in the next segment, 2021.
What happened after 20 years of American involvement of a forever war in a country?
OIQ and cousin marriage still exists.
in the U. S. War in Afghanistan from the same spot in the White House Treaty Room as President George W. Bush announced its beginning 20 years ago.
It's time to end America's longest war.
Well, folks, we're now in the spring of 2021.
The accelerated drawdown, U.S. bases empty overnight, contractors vanish, air support disappears.
The fragile Afghan state, which Washington and the United States spent two decades propping up, suddenly had to stand on its own.
Guess what?
It folded faster than Saigon.
Every capital fell.
Afghan soldiers abandoned their weapons, vehicles, even entire bases.
They switched sides, negotiated surrenders, or simply walked home.
The Taliban advanced faster than anyone thought possible.
They entered Kabul on August 15th, 2021 without resistance.
This was not a conquest.
This is key.
It was the unmasking of a political illusion that Washington had been pushing for 20 years.
The ministries, the armies, the police, the courts, it was all fake.
As the kids say, it was all fake and gay because it collapsed in days.
And we saw the images.
The helicopters evacuating the U.S. embassy, Afghans clinging to aircraft, crowds flooding the airport, the very scenes that America swore would never happen again happened again.
And the media, and no one, no one in Washington sat down and actually asked themselves.
They want to point the blame.
Oh, it's Trump's fault.
Oh, it's this fault.
It's that fault.
It's the military's fault.
It's the Afghans' fault.
It's Shrif Ghani's fault.
Or, or perhaps, could it have been the fault of telling ourselves the wrong story?
Were perhaps we telling ourselves a story that American values and liberal democracy can flood around the world and that this will work every place that it's tried.
Were we telling ourselves a story that we wanted to believe?
And most importantly, were the Afghans listening to that story, or were they perhaps telling themselves their own story?
Joshua Lysak, you are the master of using story and explaining how story and the stories that we tell ourselves activate our minds, activate our beliefs, activate, and they drive our social policy.
Do you agree with me that this was, in addition to being clash of civilization, clash of cultures, it was in fact a clash of stories?
To quote Mike Cernovich, all media is narrative.
To quote Joshua Lysak, all history is ghostwritten.
And it was ghostwritten by the victors, specifically the victors who can't afford to hire the ghost to write the history.
And one of the issues with neglect for the facts is we forget how these things go every single time.
I'm reminded of our sort of founding mythos that you had George Washington, you had the Continental Congress in our own country.
We had this grand vision.
We had these glorious values.
We had Christian faith.
We had Greek and Roman and Northern European and the early books of the Bible, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and so on, that all came together to provide the foundational ideas for this wonderful American experiment.
But when you look at the actual military conflict between the minutes men and the militia under Washington and his officers versus the grand British Empire, the irony, the absolute irony is you see something closer rather than the sort of wonderful, let's say, organized warfare and on the battlefield,
what you more so see is something akin to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, or perhaps Russian soldiers in the winter being attacked by every single empire that's ever attacked them, from German to French.
One of the most interesting stories from the American Revolutionary period is General John Burgoyne and his pursuit of George Washington's army for a number of months during the Louis upstate New York, Pennsylvania sort of region, where Burgoyne against Washington won battle after battle after battle.
But it was the heat and the humidity of summer swamps that did his army in.
It was the geography that outlasted the British Empire there.
Well, that eventually, by the time Burgoyne caught up with Washington, they were done.
They surrendered.
They quit.
So Joshua, are you saying that perhaps the terrain has a vote?
That perhaps the people have a vote, the culture has a vote, that the law of unintended consequences always wins in the final round.
And look, I'll just say again, folks, I served at Guantanamo Bay.
I spent a year down there.
I worked in the interrogation cell and I saw these guys up.
close and personal.
I am not speaking from something that I've read.
I'm not speaking just from something that I've seen on the movies or something.
I'm speaking as a guy who actually met Taliban members and al-Qaeda members and all the rest.
This is what they believe.
And I know what they believe because I heard them say it from their own mouths, sometimes through translators, sometimes even in perfect English.
They fully are committed to radical Islam.
They are fully committed to believing that Islam should take over the world and that they should rightfully be the rulers of all nations, that they want to spread their caliphate throughout all borders, throughout all of Christendom, throughout all of China, throughout all of North America.
And they want all of us to be subjugated.
This is simply what they believe.
This is what they told themselves.
And guess what?
That was the story that beat America in Afghanistan for 20 years, because while we imposed our story of, oh, you can be liberated, they said, we don't want to be liberated.
We want to be proud Muslims who believe in our God.
And that fervent belief carried them through 20 years of this fight.
And also the terrain that they have on their side, the advantage, the cultural advantage, that is why when you go to Afghanistan today, you will see the Taliban still in charge.
We had the hubris.
We believe that we can control outcomes from thousands of miles away.
We believe that our values were universal, that everyone would just believe what we believe and that our good intentions would override all of these local realities.
It's not true.
You know, folks, the graveyard of empires doesn't beat outsiders.
It outlasts them.
And it outlasts them every time.
Joshua Elisek, let me get a final minute wrap up from you.
On the topic of American storytelling, one of the most, another interesting story that maps onto this, and which is why the neoliberal experiment fails every single time, the British Empire applied that same mindset to the American colonies.
Of course, we've retold ourselves this glorious new story, but the British Empire and the Southern colonies, they backed what we might call the rednecks who were loyalists living in the backwoods of the southern colonies rather than ally with the local southern aristocracy.
And what ended up happening by them equipping the backwoods Scots-Irish who despise the uptight hoity-toity southern colonists, they engaged in total warfare, murdering entire families, including the women and the children.
The Scots-Irish loyalists did, who were given power, who were given resources.
And it absolutely horrified the British that they had created this massive bloodshed.
And that, of course, created propaganda, which then turned the entirety against the British experiment.
Ironically, the United States and it with its geography and its unique cultural situation was the graveyard of the British Empire.
This is why it's so important that we learn our own politically incorrect history and we separate which is ghostwritten by the victors versus that which actually happened that's far darker than most of us are prepared to read.
Folks, this has been episode one, Tales of Regime Change, Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.
I'm Jack Prosobek, and next time we'll follow the pattern to a new front.
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