Sam Harris speaks with Peter Bergen about the US exit from Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, and his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” They discuss the Neo-isolationist consensus on the Right and Left, the legitimacy of our initial involvement in Afghanistan, our ethical obligations to our Afghan allies, Biden’s disastrous messaging, the weakness of the Afghan army, the advantages of the Taliban, the implications for global jihadism, the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, how Osama bin Laden came to lead al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s sincere religious convictions, our failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, the distraction of the war in Iraq, the myth that the CIA funded al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s wives, his years of hiding in Pakistan, his death at the hands of US Special Forces, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Well, we're about a week into the tragedy and fiasco of Afghanistan, which is in part the topic of today's podcast.
As you'll hear, I'm not entirely sure what I think about our withdrawal.
That is, I'm not sure what I think about whether or not it should have happened.
I can honestly inhabit both sides of that debate.
But how we withdrew?
The lack of preparation.
The lack of foresight.
The lack of consultation with our allies, like the British.
Our failure to extract the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped us.
The interpreters and their families, whose lives are now in utter jeopardy because of our bungling.
Our failure to ensure the safe passage of our own citizens.
All of this is such a shocking betrayal of our obligations and of our own interests that it just beggars belief.
It's almost impossible to imagine a greater indication of American decline and a greater gift to our enemies, to the jihadists globally, who must feel absolutely triumphant at this moment.
And to China and Russia, who must now know to a moral certainty that they can always call our bluff, because we simply are no longer a competent superpower.
We have been visibly spooked by our own shadow here.
So, if China invades Taiwan this year, or next, or the year after, I think it's safe to say that our frantic Withdrawal from Afghanistan will surely be one of the reasons why they felt they could.
Again, I'm not taking a position on the question of whether we should have left Afghanistan now, or last year, or ten years ago.
I can see both sides of that debate.
But the way we left is absolutely astonishing.
And it will harm us as a nation.
Guaranteed.
Who will trust our assurance of protection now?
Whether it's an ally like Taiwan or any faction within a country that we're trying to support in some future humanitarian crisis.
And if you don't think that matters, if you don't think we need our friends to trust us and our enemies to fear us, I don't know what planet you think you're living on.
Perhaps you think we can just retreat from geopolitics altogether and simply ignore the rest of the world.
We should just repair our bridges and get the lead out of our water pipes.
Right?
Of course we should do those things immediately.
But a world without America as a functioning superpower is a very scary world, and not just for Americans.
A world where our NATO allies can't trust us to honor our obligations is a world where the risk of major wars has increased, not decreased.
So, what has happened in this last week, it's like the wheels have completely come off.
As a country, we have to get a handle on this.
And again, I think this has to be recognized and responded to, whatever you think about the wisdom of getting out of Afghanistan.
Anyway, those of you who might want to support our friends in Afghanistan who desperately need refugee status, I would recommend a donation to the International Rescue Committee.
I had David Miliband on the podcast previously, I think about a year ago, who runs it, and the Waking Up Foundation will be donating $100,000 to the IRC this week.
Which, of course, is made possible by those of you who subscribe, either to the Making Sense Podcast or to the Waking Up app, or both.
So, thank you for that.
And if any of you get inspired to ride along with us in this donation this week to the IRC, I would certainly welcome it.
And the website for the International Rescue Committee is rescue.org.
And now for today's podcast, where we get into many of the details here.
Today I'm speaking with Peter Bergen.
Peter is the author of several books, most recently The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, which we discuss in the second half of the podcast.
He is a vice president at New America.
And a professor at Arizona State University and also a national security analyst for CNN.
Peter has testified before Congress and held positions at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and has been covering jihadist terrorism and al-Qaeda in particular since the 90s.
So in this podcast we discuss the U.S.
exit from Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban.
And then we get into his new book.
We cover the neo-isolationist consensus that seems to be forming on the far right and far left, politically.
The legitimacy of our initial involvement in Afghanistan.
Whatever you think of the ultimate outcome.
We discuss our ethical obligations to our Afghan allies.
Biden's disastrous messaging.
The weakness of the Afghan army and what happened there.
The advantages that the Taliban had.
The implications for global jihadism.
The relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
How Osama bin Laden came to lead al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden's religious convictions.
Our failure to capture him at Tora Bora.
The distraction of the war in Iraq.
The myth that the CIA funded al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden's relationship with his wives.
His years of hiding in Pakistan.
His death at the hands of U.S.
Special Forces.
And other topics.
Anyway, the conversation is all too timely, unfortunately, and whether or not Afghanistan stays in our news cycle, I think the reality of what's happening there is going to have implications for a long time to come.
And this conversation is certainly a good starting point for thinking about why that's the case.
And now I bring you Peter Bergen.
I am here with Peter Bergen.
Peter, thanks for joining me.
Sam, thank you for having me on.
So, you've written a wonderful book, which we will get into, The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden.
It's actually a great audiobook, too.
That's how I consumed most of it this week.
Oh, that's good to hear.
Yeah, you didn't read it, but you... I didn't.
You know, actually, strangely, reading these books, I don't know if you've done your own books, but it's a very exhausting process, which is kind of counterintuitive.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a total ordeal for me to read books.
I mean, it's genuinely harrowing.
I've actually had to rewrite sentences on the fly because I literally could not get through them even after 20 takes.
They were not written to be read by me.
It was just an insane Cirque du Soleil routine that I could not perform.
So, yeah, so we'll get to the book, which is all too germane to the current topic that's absorbing everyone's interests now and concern, which is the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
But I guess before we jump in, maybe summarize your background.
How is it that you come to know about these issues and what have you focused on these many years?
Well, you know, I was living in Manhattan in the early 90s before I moved to DC.
And in late February 1993, a group of men drove a van into the World Trade Center parking garage and blew it up, intending to bring down both towers.
And these men had one thing in common.
They'd all supported the Afghan war effort against the Soviets or actually even fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets.
And so I went to my bosses at CNN and said, this seems interesting.
There seems to be some sort of phenomenon here.
I traveled to Afghanistan first time I ever went there.
It was in the middle of a very brutal civil war, much more intense than what we see now.
with Peter Arnett, who was then almost certainly the world's most famous correspondent, because it was relatively shortly after the end of the Gulf War.
And we and another colleague sort of spent many weeks in Afghanistan trying to document this.
And it was a very Tricky situation because it was, A, a very nasty civil war, and B, no communications to speak of.
We took a satellite phone in that was the size of 200 pounds.
That was the state-of-the-art satellite phone.
And today, of course, you can just use a cell phone.
So it was kind of a hard place to function.
But after that, I heard about bin Laden in 1996.
And again, went to my bosses at CNN.
They, of course, had no idea who he was.
And I said to them, you know, perhaps he was responsible for this, you know, for this phenomenon.
And he really wasn't involved in the trade center bombing in 93, except in the most peripheral of ways.
But of course, he was responsible for this both organization and movement that kind of was an outgrowth of the 93 trade center bombing.
Yeah, yeah.
So, we'll go back into the history a bit and track through your book, but what are your thoughts now upon seeing over the last week what has happened in Afghanistan?
Well, unfortunately, it was both predicted and predictable, you know, not only by myself, but by others, because you didn't need to be sort of Clausewitz to recognize that If we absented ourselves entirely, we the United States, well then all our NATO allies would leave.
There were, by the way, 2,500 American troops, but there were 7,000 NATO allied troops and 16,000 contractors, all of which have left or are in the process of leaving.
And this caused a complete collapse of morale amongst the Afghan military and Afghan government.
And there's a kind of line of argument that the Afghan army was weak and certainly there is some truth to it, it's an incompetently led organization.
But 66,000 Afghan soldiers and Afghan policemen died fighting the Taliban, which is about 30 times larger than the number of American fatalities.
So, you know, it's not that there wasn't a will to fight, it's just the will to fight evaporated when there was no longer MEDEVAC, close air support, American advisors, etc.
Yeah, I want to get into the seeming conundrum of what happened with the Afghan army.
But before we do, what I'm troubled by in the last few days in witnessing the reaction to this, there seems to be a consensus forming domestically in America, maybe it's worldwide, but there's a kind of neo-isolationist consensus on the far left and the far right.
And maybe far is in scare quotes, I don't know how far in either direction you have to go before you run into this.
It seems that both sides of the political spectrum have large cohorts that agree that not only did we have to leave Afghanistan, but we had no business being there in the first place, right?
And the whole project was illegitimate.
And You know, on the right, I think you tend to hear people denigrating the Afghans and thinking that they just, you know, they're not ready for democracy.
They want the Taliban.
They're barbarians.
This was a fool's errand to try to bring them into the 21st century.
And, you know, above all, at this moment, let's keep their damn refugees out of our country, right?
So there's that attitude on the far right.
On the left, people tend to denigrate America and Western civilization.
And so the idea that we could pretend to want to spread our values to the rest of the world, when we're the greatest criminals and terrorists in history.
I mean, it's surreal.
On the left, you have people who list their preferred pronouns in their Twitter bios.
And who would want to see their neighbors and coworkers destroyed for telling off-color jokes, but who will simultaneously claim that we shouldn't judge the treatment of women under the Taliban.
Right?
I mean, who are we to pretend to care about these women, and who are we to even judge this ancient culture for its own, you know, norms?
But both sides seem to agree that we have no business being the world's cop, and that nation-building never works.
And then you have these catchphrases that do immense work here, where Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires, right?
So, of course, this was ill-conceived.
And we were committed to a forever war here.
And on both sides, people seem to imagine that The reason why we were in there was to enrich ourselves in some way.
We were stealing natural resources.
And I'm sure both sides in the end will find some way to put the Jews at the back of all of this.
I mean, it's just, we're living in a information space that is contaminated by conspiracy theory and a complete loss of trust in the media, in institutions, in The possibility of benign American power.
And so I just, you know, before we get into the details of the rest, I'm just wondering how you see this consensus that we, you know, we had to rip the Band-Aid off and we're better for it.
We'll just get the hell out.
This was going to fail.
I mean, in some ways Biden has almost echoed this.
Like it was always going to be this bad.
There was no way to exit.
There was going to be any better.
Just rip the Band-Aid off, right?
Yeah, of course, I have a whole host of reactions to that.
I mean, yeah, we've heard from the White House, in a sense, through White House reporters, that, you know, the fact that it all collapsed so quickly is evidence of Biden's brilliant, brilliant decision, which kind of a sort of strange way of defending a not very smart decision.
So, you know, I mean, there are many things to be said.
For a start, there are 1.3 million active duty Americans, 2 million when you throw in the reserves.
And, you know, 2,500 is not a large, I'm not a mathematician, but it's a really, really small percentage of the force that we have.
And that was what sufficient to kind of prevent the collapse that followed.
And, you know, I think that This was just completely unnecessary.
You know, there's kind of two arguments sort of that have been heard.
One is that, you know, this was a great idea, but the execution was terrible.
Well, no one's denying the execution was a total fiasco.
But I'm also, I'm unconvinced it was the right policy decision.
There's a great Washington DC tendency, which we're seeing right now, which is when you make a policy fiasco, you blame it on the intelligence.
You say the intelligence didn't really tell us that this would collapse so quickly or whatever.
I think this was very fast-moving, and it was predictable that if we just pull the plug, or rip the bandage off, as you put it, that there was going to be real problems, and here they are.
And, you know, there's kind of back to the future element to this because we're approaching the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
The Taliban are in control of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda, according to the United Nations, in a report released in June, is closely aligned with the Taliban.
Al Qaeda is present in 19 of the 34 Afghan provinces, again according to the UN, and the resistance to the Taliban is being led by Ahmad Shah Massoud's son in the Panjshir Valley, which is exactly what was, you know, two days before 9-11, Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda.
You know, we'll see how this, you know, what does it mean for American national security is kind of another question.
I mean, we're much more well defended than we were in the past than say on 9-11, but there are going to be plenty of people sort of excited about this who either will try to go and get training in Afghanistan or simply radicalize at home in front of their computer and do something in the name of the Taliban or Al Qaeda as we saw during the ISIS caliphate.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, just to focus on the legitimacy of this, of the initial project for another moment, it seems to me one can, one really has to make distinctions, fairly granular distinctions across every point in this timeline.
So, for instance, one could certainly admit that going into Afghanistan was perfectly legitimate.
We went in for the right reasons, we had to go in But then also concede that the project failed there for a variety of reasons that we need to understand and that weren't foreordained, right?
Or you could further argue that despite how difficult our 20 years there were, the project itself was still salvageable, right?
That, you know, the serious combat for our troops had ended somewhere around 2014, And that our continued presence there would have been far preferable to what has now happened.
I mean, we've been in South Korea for 70 years or so, and, you know, we've been in Western Europe longer than that, and no one's talking about a forever war with respect to those places.
So it's clear that we can maintain troops in places for a sane purpose, you know, whether it's humanitarian or geopolitical or both.
Without feeling that we have become the world's masochists or an evil empire.
So, wherever you fall in your optimism or pessimism with respect to the possibilities in Afghanistan, it's still possible to argue that maintaining our presence there, as mediocre as the results seemed, is far better than what has just happened and what is likely to be coming.
I mean, I'm in violent agreement with that.
You know, the enemy of the perfect isn't sort of the reasonably okay.
And what we had before was sort of reasonably okay.
And this is obviously a catastrophic debacle that has sort of taken place.
And so, you know, the 2500 troops or the 3500 troops and part of this also was just about I think our messaging, and we've been saying since that we're planning to leave Afghanistan since December 1st, 2009, when President Obama went to West Point to announce a surge.
And at the same time, a surge of troops at the same time announced their withdrawal date.
And of course, Trump, you know, repeatedly said we're leaving and Biden has completed the withdrawal.
Of course, he can change his mind.
I mean, President Obama changed his mind in Iraq after the rise of ISIS and sent in, you know, thousands of troops in the end.
to train the Iraqi counterterrorism service, which turned out to be a very effective special forces unit, which pretty much destroyed much of Al-Qaeda in Iraq with American air support.
So this is not over.
Biden can change his mind.
I mean, right now we're in the phase of trying to get Americans out and our allies, but Yeah.
Even if you disagree with the position I just sketched out, which the truth is I'm not even sure what my view is here.
I could easily be persuaded that we should have gotten out more or less now, right?
But what seems patently obvious and is What has been denied by every one of Biden's public utterances I've heard thus far is that we could have and should have massively prepared to extract not only our, you know, the 10 or 15,000 American citizens who are rumored to still be there,
But all of our allies, all of the people who put their lives on the line to collaborate with us, you know, who are translators and people who are now very much at risk of being killed by the Taliban.
I mean, we had an ethical obligation.
We have an ethical obligation.
To get them out, and the idea that we couldn't have done it in a truly orderly way with sufficient force on the ground, that just seems insane.
I don't know how, in his messaging about this, I don't know why Biden would even be tempted to try to put a brave face on how this has unraveled here and claim that there was no better way to do this.
We can't even guarantee the safe passage of our own citizens to the airport.
I mean, I completely agree with that.
I don't think there's a single person listening to this who doesn't think that this has been, you know, extremely poorly handled.
The harder question where people do disagree is, like, was it the right thing to do?
Let's do the thought experiment where this was perfectly planned and a year went into the planning and everybody needed to get out, got out, Yeah, I think you would have still ended up with the Taliban in control.
And you know, some people may be fine with that.
And some people may not be.
I mean, I fall into the category of, I spent a fair amount of time in Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
And I have a healthy skepticism for their claims of amnesty for people that were fighting them.
I have a healthy skepticism for their claims about girls being educated or women having jobs.
I mean, the crucial modifier in their statements, Sam, is whenever they say something like, yeah, well, of course we'll have education for women.
And then they add, in the context of Sharia law, which is a pretty large caveat, because their interpretation of Sharia law differs pretty markedly from most Muslims.
And the same thing they've actually said about the independent media.
Yeah, we're going to have an independent media, but they're going to have to kind of do it in the context of Sharia law.
So these are huge caveats, and these are coming from the sort of Doha Taliban or political Taliban, the people in the field, you know, they're going to sort of make their own judgments about who they want to kill or, you know, attack, because the Taliban itself is not a monolithic entity.
So, you know, it's a question for you, which is, if you were to score this as sort of an American failure, is this Hurricane Katrina, you know, for Bush, is this You know, the Iraq War decision is this, you know, it's hard for me to think of an analog of something that was so poorly handled and so unnecessarily screwed up.
Even with the Iraq War decision, it didn't really become clear until several months in what a fiasco it was and, you know, all the false pretenses that it was kind of predicated upon.
Here, the disaster is immediately obvious from day one.
And I doubt the pictures are going to get better over time.
Yeah.
I mean, there's something especially grotesque about this because the images, you know, and I'm sure we're going to see worse in coming weeks, but I mean, the images we have are, you know, every bit as bad as the fall of Saigon and Biden is becoming a gaffe machine with respect to this topic.
I mean, the images have been supplied, you know, precisely in the form he said they would never He said we will not see fall of Saigon like images, and what we have seen is worse, but certainly reminiscent of those older images.
I mean, there's just a pervasive sense that there are no grown-ups left to help run the world.
I mean, if Biden's presidency meant anything as a real turning of the page from Trump's, It was in a renewed commitment to competence, right?
And, I mean, this is so uncompetent.
I don't think we should be under any illusions that it would be better if Trump were in charge.
I mean, if Trump were president, I'm sure he would have done something just like this.
I mean, he's the one who committed us to getting out in May.
You know, he signed this, I believe it's referred to as the Capitulation Agreement with the Taliban.
So, he started us on this path.
But, you know, if he were president, you could just imagine what his messaging would be.
He would say things like, I mean, he's totally capable of saying things like, I love the Taliban.
They only say nice things about me.
It could just be a complete repudiation of any sort of moral integrity we once had.
But effectively, that's happening anyway in how little thought we've given to the Yeah, the idea that a generation of women and girls is now going to be pitched back into the dark ages is something that no one should be comfortable with.
And it's certainly an argument.
It's all one needs for an argument to have continued our presence there for another generation.
At whatever sacrifice, it seemed at this point a truly minimal sacrifice, just to ensure that women and girls are not pointlessly miserated for the rest of their lives under the Taliban.
And I like the verb immiserated, because also that's going to be true for much of the rest of the population.
I mean, immiseration that I witnessed when I was in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was, you know, the country had already gone through the Soviet occupation and a civil war.
What remained of the economy completely disappeared under the Taliban.
I spoke to doctors in Kabul who were earning $6 a month.
So what is the Taliban project?
The Taliban project is to make society pure.
And then when society is pure, utopia will be achieved.
Unfortunately, that doesn't plan for things like, you know, keeping the electricity on or the water.
The Taliban is not really interested in sort of conventional governance.
They are interested in judicial decision making, and they're interested in kind of, you know, kind of how to, you know, set up an educational system that conforms with their views.
But as for anything else, they don't have, you know, maybe the new Taliban will have more competent people.
But they certainly didn't when they were in power.
And it's really not their priority.
I mean, I haven't seen a Taliban plan for, you know, kind of what their economic plan is, or like, it's almost, it's almost an oxymoron.
So, you know, unfortunately, we can expect them to, as we've already seen, you know, attack or try and attack anybody that they consider to be an enemy, which is anybody who collaborated with the United States or our NATO allies.
And the number is, you know, it's hard to put a number on how many people worked with different, we had 49 countries in there at one point, who are going back to this thread of legitimacy, actually, Sam.
I mean, this is probably one of the more legitimate wars in history, because not only did the Congress vote overwhelmingly, with only one descending vote, which was Barbara Lee of California.
Then NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time and only time in its history, the collective right to self-defense.
And rather crucially, the United Nations passed a resolution a few days after 9-11 saying that the United States could respond by any means necessary, which is UN speak for you know, basically you can go to war in a legitimate sense.
So, yeah, I can't think of a war, certainly the United States has conducted, where there was that level of international and unanimity on the legitimacy of the war.
You know, I'm surprised by the figure that you gave earlier of the troop levels of our allies that were still there.
That opens the question, why is it all on us?
Or maybe I'm just, I have a myopic view of our own national disgrace here, but, and I think the UK is, people in the UK are expressing the same opinion of themselves.
But why, you know, why was our pulling out synonymous with the unraveling of everything?
That is a very good question.
But I mean, the 7,000 American allied troops, the NATO troops that were there, You know, a lot of them were doing advise and assist missions.
It was non-combat roles, you know, like in, in Germany and, and, you know.
The German political dispensation wouldn't allow Germans to be involved in combat.
And so they were, you know, mostly in supporting roles of one kind or another, which is important.
We're gathering intelligence, but you know, we provide the security umbrella under which all this took place.
And that's in terms of, you know, our satellite imagery and our drones and You know, the levels of intelligence we have and, you know, the, and the fact that we have special operations, you know, forces that can go out on counterterrorism missions.
I think, you know, that when that was pulled out, I mean, a leading indicator, I don't know if you remember this, Sam, but The Australians said they were going to close their embassy.
It feels like it was several weeks ago that they said that.
I mean, they saw the writing on the wall and the Australians actually fought rather bravely, you know, in Afghanistan.
So it just, it just created this sort of crisis of confidence and war, you know, I'm, War is always about a contest of wills and if, you know, if the will starts kind of receding, it's a very quick, you know, it's the Hemingway line about how did you go bankrupt?
Well, first gradually and then suddenly this is what happened.
Well, so on the point of bankruptcy, what do we make of the collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan police and armed forces?
It seems like the writing has been on the wall there for a very long time in terms of our knowing about the corruption of the government.
Actually, I was unaware of how deep this ran, but this week someone surfaced a documentary that was from 2012.
Perhaps you saw it.
The journalist Ben Anderson for Vice, along with Eddie Moretti, produced this A documentary titled, This Is What Winning Looks Like, I think came out in 2012.
And he was just, Ben Anderson was embedded with US forces who were taking a purely supportive role for Afghan forces at that point, just letting them execute all their missions.
And the lack of real trust and real morale between the Americans and the Afghans was pretty startling.
And they're just these ghastly episodes where they'd find You know, an Afghan police commander who's, you know, raping boys and they wanted, you know, the Americans want to do something about this and what they come up against is that this is basically a social norm that, you know, it's just, it's ubiquitous.
I think One of the Afghans said, you know, good luck finding a police commander who's not raping boys.
I mean, it's just, this is what we do.
They were raped as boys and now they're entitled to rape boys.
And so there was just, there was such a disjunction between any kind of idealism for what could be built through this partnership and What was the actual truth on the ground?
And there were so many signs that this would unravel.
We're putting people in totally untenable situations when we're going into a village, along with Afghan forces, and demanding that people support the government.
And it was perfectly obvious that the villagers, they had to hedge their bets.
I mean, because they know the Taliban could be in there in the next week making the opposite demands.
And they just, they have to more or less agree to be loyal to whoever is standing in front of them holding a gun.
So, I don't know.
Did you ever see that film?
I didn't, but you know, I mean, I experienced it myself.
I was in Helmand with the Marines in 2009.
There was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel He was asked by a farmer, you know, how long do you plan to be around?
And the Marine Lieutenant Colonel wasn't going to lie to him.
He said, I can only promise you I'll be here for nine months.
And the farmer, you know, clearly what the farmer meant was, you know, exactly what you've pointed out, which is like, I, you know, People switched, surrendered to the Taliban, not because they suddenly became enthusiasts for the Taliban's view of utopia, but because they want to keep their heads on their bodies.
And, you know, the war in Afghanistan began in 1978.
It began even before the Soviets invaded.
So it's been going on for 43 years and Afghans want to survive.
They've had multiple switches.
In 92, the communists were defeated and Kabul fell to the warlords.
In 96, Kabul fell to the Taliban.
In 2001, Kabul fell to the Americans, and now it's fallen back to the Taliban.
I think there's a, it's not that Afghans are sort of inherently conniving.
They just, you know, they've had a long experience of needing to survive in a war that's gone on for almost half a century.
And so what you describe in that documentary is, you know, is exactly right, which is going back to the question of corruption and the police and the army.
I went out on patrol with Afghan police in the sort of 2003-2004 time period, and they were smoking the best quality grass you can get in the world.
And that was about all they were doing.
So, you know, the police were very poorly paid, no real morale.
The army is slightly better, but you know, when President Biden talks about the 300,000 man army, That, that figure is probably half that because so many people deserted, so many ghost soldiers.
So, you know, it, that was, it hasn't really been, that wasn't really much of a success.
The Afghan special forces are quite robust and, and they were, they've been fighting well and the Afghan Air Force has some competence, but, but clearly the Afghan army, you know, if you haven't been fed or paid for many, many months, It's not like you're going to have a tremendous loyalty to the central government.
Yeah, and there's also just this truly asymmetrical advantage with respect to morale and commitment when you picture the psychology on the Taliban side.
I mean, you have one side that is literally fighting for paradise or their conception of paradise, and the other is fighting for money, some pragmatic sense of the game theory of the moment.
And, you know, it's just all of that is, however you can stitch it together, is far more fragile unless there are people, a sufficient number of people on the government and army side who are, I mean, this speaks a sufficient number of people on the government and army side who are, I mean, this speaks to some possibility that there's more sympathy with the Taliban worldview than we
I mean, it's just, it's, I.
I could imagine if most Afghans are as horrified by the Taliban as I am, Then the explanation that they haven't been paid doesn't cut it, right?
I mean, this is a life-and-death struggle against a totalitarian theocracy.
You'd expect the two sides would really fight it out, but I have to expect that while they may not be totally sympathetic with the conception of Sharia that the Taliban is going to demand of them, It's not as obscenely divergent from what most people think should be normative as it would be in our context.
I would sort of caveat that pretty heavily in the following sense.
So, you know, the Taliban is an overwhelmingly Pashtun movement.
The Pashtuns are, you know, 40% roughly of the population.
They are almost entirely from the south and the east.
And so the norms that they have are the norms of rural Pashtuns.
These are not the norms of Tajiks, Hazaras, or Uzbeks, or people who live in the cities.
You know, they're not like... Right.
Yeah, it's obviously, you know, I'm not saying that people in Kabul are like, you know, sort of taking tons of drugs and going to discos and like, you know, there's obviously gender segregation, but it's a very different, you know, a much lower order.
So I agree with you in the sense that... Just to ask you, like, if you I don't know a ton about him, but someone like Ahmad Shah Massoud, who you mentioned earlier, I can't imagine he was as liberal a figure as we would want him to be in opposition to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
That is true.
Look, I mean, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who I met in 93 and was kind of an astonishing human being, probably the most impressive person I've ever met.
He, um, was an Islamist.
Right.
But he was also an Islamist with a kind of orientation to the West.
I mean, he's, I think you went to a French lycee in Kabul.
He, you know, he was perfectly happy dealing with Westerners.
And so it's, it is a matter of degree as you point out.
Yeah.
But the other thing also just to sort of related point on the Taliban and the Taliban also pays people and they're sitting on a multi-billion dollar poppy opium enterprise.
And so I think for a lot of the foot soldiers of the Taliban, Yeah, they may not completely subscribe to Taliban ideology.
They may not really care about it completely.
They are getting paid pretty steadily.
And just like ISIS was able to pay people, there's kind of a distinction between a terrorist group and insurgent group.
You know, obviously there are kind of military differences, but terrorist groups tend to be volunteers and often from the upper middle class or middle class.
An insurgent group usually has people on the payroll, you know, when you have 30,000 men in the field or 60,000 or 75,000 as in the case now of the Taliban.
You know, that's a pretty big payroll to meet.
And so the Taliban was paying people.
There are limited jobs for young men in Afghanistan.
And so I don't, you know, there is some ideological component to this, but there's also, for some people, this is just a job.
It's a job where you're actually getting paid.
JS Yeah, yeah.
And again, you're backing what appears to be what clearly is the stronger horse, right?
It's purely pragmatic at that point as well.
So, how do you view this?
Now, let's think about the implications of this for jihadism globally.
Do we think that a resurgent Taliban, you know, something like their version of a caliphate in Afghanistan will have a similar galvanizing effect that the Islamic State had worldwide?
And is this just the pendulum swing back into global jihadism claiming more and more of our bandwidth geopolitically and journalistically?
I think the short answer is yes.
I mean, why would it be any different?
I mean, here Here, the Taliban, in their own minds, defeated first the Soviets, because a lot of them came out of the anti-Soviet jihad, and now the Americans.
And that's a pretty big deal.
And, you know, they're going to declare not a caliphate, but an emirate.
The distinctions between the two are less important than the similarities.
And the commander of the faithful is how the Taliban refers to their leader, which is a claim that Not only do I lead the Taliban, but I'm in charge of all Muslims everywhere, which was the same claim that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made when he declared ISIS.
So one of the big differences, I think, is that ISIS was like pathologically sectarian.
The Taliban certainly have engaged in anti-Shia, anti-Hasara massacres.
They may not be the defining core of their movement, which for ISIS, clearly that was the case.
But I think you're going to see foreign fighters pouring in from South Asia and parts of Europe to join this incredibly successful enterprise.
And you'll see a few Americans who may try and travel there.
You'll certainly see people radicalizing in front of their computers because they believe that This great jihadist victory has happened, and they self-identify, and we saw that with ISIS.
The problem, of course, in the United States was people kind of self-radicalizing because of the ISIS geographical caliphate, and it was very exciting.
Once that caliphate geographically disappeared, the number of people who got excited about it was much, much smaller because no one wants to join the losing side.
So right now, the Taliban are the winning side.
Al Qaeda is, you know, kind of on the front lines with them, and not only Al Qaeda, but other jihadi groups.
So, yeah, I think we've seen this movie before.
We kind of know how it begins, and we also know how it ends.
It doesn't end usually very well for the groups concerned, because ultimately a coalition of nations and other groups kind of It's kind of like Napoleon in 1813, which is like, if you make a world of enemies, it's going to lead to your own defeat.
And these groups tend to do that.
They tend to kind of create a lot of antibodies, whether it's domestically or internationally.
Well, so now we're kind of backing into the contents of your book.
We know through your reporting that there's been a very cozy relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda all the while.
There was really, you know, while there was some discomfort at various stages of Osama bin Laden's reign where he was, you know, seeking publicity in ways that Mullah Omar and others found inconvenient, There was never really a significant breach between them, and they've been mutually supportive until the present.
But I'm wondering, what do we know about the fact that there was not only not real collaboration, but actually overt hostility between the Taliban and ISIS, or the Islamic State?
Yeah, I mean, they've certainly been fighting each other.
Is that ideological, or is it just not wanting to share the power?
As far as I can tell, it's mostly Taliban groups that have slapped on the ISIS kind of patch, and that makes them bigger and badder.
I don't think it's like the narcissism of minor differences, which is Freud's brilliant observation about most human activity.
You do think it is, or you don't think it is?
No, I think it's, I think, I don't, I don't, I don't think there's some big ideological split.
Certainly ISIS is more likely to attack Shia, whether in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
But I think it's more just that certain Taliban groups wanted to be the biggest, baddest person on the block and slapped on the ISIS patch.
And it was more about, you know, local grievances, local personalities.
I don't think there was, the Taliban of course had engaged in negotiations with the United States, which ISIS clearly hasn't done.
But I see it as more, you know, the narcissism of minor differences rather than some big ideological split.
Right.
Obviously ISIS and Al Qaeda have split in a kind of perhaps a little more ideological manner because Al Qaeda has tended to want to avoid attacking Shia, except Al Qaeda in Iraq, which of course was the sort of the progenitor of ISIS.
Right, right.
OK, so let's get into the history here and the fascinating case study of Osama bin Laden.
We actually know a lot about him now, as you report, given how many documents were liberated from him.
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