Afghanistan After America: A Conversation With Laurel Miller and Graeme Smith

I'm Dan Kurtz-Phalen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. In terms of the sort of broader case for why we had to remain militarily engaged in Afghanistan year after year after year, the core thesis was we have to fight them over there so that we don't fight them over here in the West. Those exact words were spoken in Western parliaments. And now, five years on, you know, I think empirically, knock on wood. It's just not the case, right? If you look at the fact that for 20 years, Afghanistan was such a high priority to the United States that the U.S. expended blood and an enormous amount of treasure to be there to prop up the Afghan government, to build up the Afghan security forces, to prosecute a counterterrorism campaign, and then all at once, the U.S. can leave the country, have very little to do with the United States, and then they can leave the country. They can leave the country. little engagement with Afghanistan, have it completely drop off the policy map, and nothing happens, has to make you question the strategic choices and judgments during that long period of time. Five years ago this month, America ended its war in Afghanistan. The exit was chaotic, Taliban forces swept through the country, and the U.S.-backed government collapsed precipitously, while U.S. officials and many others scrambled to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans, who might fall victim to repression and retribution. In the years since, Afghanistan has practically vanished from American foreign policy discussion. But the situation there remains dire, and the questions for U.S. policymakers vexing. Just as important, the collective forgetting of America's longest war carries costs of its own. I wanted to speak to two foreign affairs authors who have spent many years working on and in Afghanistan. Laurel Miller, now president of the Asia Foundation, was a longtime U.S. diplomat who became a top official focused on Afghanistan from 2013 to 2017. And Graham Smith, long worked in and around Afghanistan as a United Nations official and an analyst for the International Crisis Group. We discussed the lessons and legacy of the American war there, and what the Taliban victories meant for the country since that war came to an end. Laurel, Graham, thanks so much for joining me. Dan, thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Both of you wrote incisive pieces about Afghanistan and about the United States and Afghanistan around the time of the Taliban victory and U.S. withdrawal. So given that we are now five years past those events of August 2021, I wanted to have the two of you on to discuss what's happened since and how we should think about Afghanistan's prospects going forward, and also what the policy questions American and other policymakers should be grappling with, are grappling with, given those prospects. It is quite notable just how much Afghanistan has fallen out of at least American foreign policy conversation, but also I think global policy conversation more broadly over the last few years. So there's a lot we'll want to cover. There is, again, a lot we'll get to on the policy front, but given that precipitous collapse and attention to Afghanistan itself, I want to first just understand the state of the country, starting on a very broad note. If you could inhabit your August 2021 selves, in what ways has the course of Afghanistan over these past five years, as a Taliban rule, conformed to or confounded your expectations at the time? Laurel, let's start with you on that. I think it's mostly conformed to my expectations. I certainly did not expect that the Taliban would have a new approach to how they regarded the role of women in public life, how they regarded what their policy preferences would be in terms of relations with the outside world. It's a pretty insular group. It's a pretty stubbornly consistent group in terms of their policy preferences and how they see the world. And so I thought at the time it was highly implausible that you were going to see some kind of what many would regard as a, from the outside at least, as a positive evolution of Afghan policies. I think the readiness of many countries in the region, particularly in the nearer to do business with the Taliban, to accommodate themselves to the reality of Taliban rule in Afghanistan is not particularly surprising either because those are countries, this is the Central Asian countries and China and Russia who prefer stability in Afghanistan and are less concerned with how the Taliban rule the country. Maybe the one surprising element is how fast relationships between the Taliban and Pakistan has degraded to the point of open conflict. It's not surprising in general terms that there is friction between the Taliban and Pakistan. Even in the days when Pakistan was giving safe haven to the Taliban, there wasn't a lot of love lost between the two sides there. And so the fact that there is friction as there has always been between Pakistan and Afghanistan is not surprising. It's not surprising that there is an extent of the friction to the degree of violence and military attacks between the two sides. That perhaps is surprising. Before I go to Graham, Laurel, let's just linger on the Pakistan dimension for a moment. The cause of much of this is Pakistani accusations or frustrations about the Taliban in Afghanistan giving shelter to Pakistani militants. Is that the real cause of the tension of the conflict? Or are there other causes of the tension that have accounted for just how bad things have gotten between the two countries? I think it's fair to say it's the real proximate cause of the tensions. 2025 was the most violent year in Pakistan in a decade, predominantly attributable to the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP group that has resurged in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I think what might surprise people is that there is a lot of conflict between the two groups. I think there is a lot of conflict between the two groups. People who don't follow this very closely is that the Taliban is essentially following the same policy as its predecessor, the Republic government, in giving some shelter to TTP militants as a way of creating some leverage over Pakistan. With the Afghan Taliban, there's also ideological affinity between the two groups. And TTP, just to clarify for everyone, is the Pakistani branch of the Taliban? It's the Pakistani branch of the Taliban. It's the Pakistani Taliban group. It's a separate group, but there is ideological affinity and other kinds of affinities between the two groups and some history of collaboration there. And the Afghan Taliban is adopting the same policy that Pakistan did during the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, a sort of mirror image of that policy, which is, we're not going to fight your war on our side. We're not going to fight your war on our side. We're not going to fight your war on our soil. And so Pakistan was always resistant to putting themselves in an oppositional stance with the Afghan Taliban, which was present on Pakistani soil and would have meant Pakistan fighting the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani soil. Similarly, the Afghan Taliban has no interest in fighting Pakistan's conflict with the TTP on their own soil. So these are two groups that are fighting each other. These are ways in which you see some continuity of themes from past years, even with the change of leadership and control in Afghanistan. Graham, I want to go to you on the same question. I'm particularly interested in how what appears as relative stability from the outside compared to at least what many predicted before the Taliban victory looks from inside of Afghanistan. You spend time there and spend a lot of time talking to people who are in fact in Afghanistan, including people who are in the Taliban government. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. So as you look at that course over these past five years, what has struck you? Yeah, I was back there a few times after the Taliban took over as a researcher for an NGO and also as a United Nations consultant. It's a pretty calm place at the moment. As you say, the world's deadliest conflict has come to an end. For several years, battle deaths in Afghanistan exceeded the amount in any other theater of conflict in the world. And now it's a place that you can visit and drive around. It's a lot easier if you're a man. And, you know, I think conditions for women there are not something to gloss over or hand wave away. But I think it is worth reflecting on the expectations, as you say, of what we thought was going to happen when the Taliban took over. And I have to say, you know, Laurel is right. And she was a fairly lonely, lonely voice at the time. I mean, cast your mind back, look back in the archives of August 2021 and look at what people, you know, expected to happen. There was a lot of talk about the region becoming awash in arms, becoming awash with drugs, and about a contagion of revolutionary jihadi ideas. Analysts were watching very closely developments in the Fergana Valley in Central Asia. There was concern about the stability of of Central Asian states. They were watching very closely events in Kashmir and looking at whether or not violence would resurge there. They were worried about a renewed migration crisis, the possibility that Europe could once again become flooded with millions of desperate people seeking refuge. None of those things have happened. Yes, Laurel's right to focus on Pakistan. There has been an uptick of violence in Pakistan. I will say, for people who spent the last two decades saying that the Taliban are the stooges of Pakistan, I think that's proven to be incorrect now that the two countries are just about at war with each other. But in terms of the sort of broader case for why we had to remain militarily engaged in Afghanistan. Year after year after year, the core thesis was we have to fight them over there so that we don't fight them over here in the West. And now, five years on, you know, I think empirically, you know, knock on wood, it's just not the case, right? I mean, it's not the case that jihadis have been inspired by the Taliban, an example. And, you know, we've seen a resurgence of asymmetric attacks. In war on terror battlefields all across the world, the Taliban's relationship with Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda offshoots, it does make me nervous, I will say. I mean, it's not as if the Taliban are going out and killing and capturing Al Qaeda. There are sort of cozy relationships between these international jihadis and their hosts in Afghanistan. But it is certainly a different way of mitigating terrorism than going out in helicopters. Every night and killing people. And so it does make me wonder about, you know, what was going on in Afghanistan over two decades, going out every single night and killing high value targets. Were they, in fact, that high value if we stopped killing them and nothing happened? I don't think anyone has sufficiently answered that question. Before we focus more on the terrorism issue, I do want to get to this question of calm and relative stability that you started your answer with. The two of you were, I think, among. The voices who were writing and speaking to the effect that this would not be, the consequences of U.S. withdrawal would not be as catastrophic for regional and global stability and security as many predicted. So I won't ask you what you got wrong, but when you look at the Taliban's ability to deliver that kind of calm and stability, what accounts for that and why did that confound expectations that so many had at the time, including some people that spent time on the ground there and not just in U.S. policy capacities? I always thought that one of the problems with the Taliban is they seem to me to be surprisingly popular because I spent most of my career in Afghanistan at the beginning, a few years in the south, based in Kandahar, where the Taliban were born. And I could see, you know, that the Taliban reflected the values of those people. And so I was consistently worried that. We in the West said that we had to militarily back a government in Kabul and provide the combined forces of the world's greatest military alliance and drop an unprecedented number of bombs, you know, so that we could liberate the people from an unpopular Taliban. And I just. The premise of that always worried me because I always felt concerned that maybe the Taliban were more popular. And so it's possible that part of the stability we're seeing now is that problems with Taliban governance are also in some ways problems with Afghan society. I mean, the terrible draconian thing that the Taliban have done by forbidding little girls from attending secondary and tertiary education, at least in the publicly funded non-Madrasa format, you know, that is a terrible thing. But it's also. But it's also a traditional thing in large parts of the south and east. And so why is it stable? Well, maybe because it is sort of Afghan. It may be the answer. May I have a somewhat different view on this? Less because I necessarily disagree with Graham, but because I think we just don't really know. And the degree of information we have about what any particular number or proportion of Afghans want in terms of policies for governing the country, it's very hard to agree with. That doesn't mean that the Taliban haven't enjoyed genuine popularity, but how much popularity in the context of a very repressive government, I think it's just hard to have really reliable information about that. But the reason for the relative stability in Afghanistan is because the insurgency won and the counterinsurgency collapsed. And that contestation between the insurgency and the counterinsurgency was the primary reason for. Not the only reason, but the primary reason for violence in Afghanistan. And on top of that, there is less of a domestic source of opposition, mobilized armed opposition to the Taliban now than there was when the U.S. invaded the country after 9-11. And why that is true probably has something to do with the forces that collapsed at the time. The withdrawal, but it doesn't mean that that won't regenerate at some point. It's just very hard to see with the completeness of the degree of completeness of Taliban control now. It's very hard to see where the openings for that are going to arise. It's also the fact that the Taliban are oppositional to the main source of violent threat in Afghanistan, which is ISKP, an offshoot of the Islamic State. Of course, on province. And so they are, if you will, you know, taking care of the primary security threat in Afghanistan now. I think in terms of the terrorism dimension, the key question is what was really the prospect that you were going to see an al-Qaeda resurgence from within Afghanistan after an American withdrawal? And 10 years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, that 10-year gap. Between then and the U.S. withdrawal, I mean, it was al-Qaeda was a much diminished organization. And the idea that the Taliban were going to actively, even though there were still ties between the groups in certain ways, the idea that the Taliban was going to be actively promoting or enabling a resurgence of al-Qaeda was, I think, pretty far-fetched, given that they had experienced the consequences of that. Before, it just wasn't really in their interests. I guess that's the bottom line there is they act very clearly in their own interests. That's not in their interests. Fighting ISKP is in their interests. Giving safe haven to the Pakistani Taliban is in their interests. And they conduct themselves accordingly. It's also worth noting that autocratic states appear to be stable until they're not. And so there's been an uptick of violence in Badakhshan in the north. A sort of armed resistance to the Taliban refuses to be extinguished, shall we say. So, you know, watch this space. It's an incredibly opaque regime. And, you know, much depends, I think, on the health of a few gray-bearded gentlemen down in the south in Kandahar. And, yeah, when that's the situation, you're looking at a pretty fragile situation just, you know, structurally. Laurel, let me stick with the terrorism threat. That was obviously the original reason that the U.S. was in Afghanistan. We'll also be marking in the coming weeks the 25th anniversary of 9-11. You were one of the senior most U.S. government officials working on Afghanistan in the Obama years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, when, obviously, the threat of ISIS was front of mind for people, given the attacks happening in the West and in the Middle East. What, other than Taliban self-interest, has accounted for? I don't know. The relative effectiveness of managing the terror threat, has that been about coordination often that the rest of us can't see between the U.S. and other actors and the Taliban? Is it effective management of the threat from a distance using drones and intelligence and other tools? What has accounted for those fears, those warnings being less warranted than it might have seemed in 2021? I think the main dimension of that is that the U.S. was quite successful in the counterterrorism campaign. against al-Qaeda over a long period of time, up to and well before the final withdrawal from Afghanistan. There are reports, and current U.S. officials have said that there is moderately cooperative counterterrorism engagement between the U.S. and the Taliban regime. What specific groups that relates to, I don't know, and it's not been publicly said. It's possible that's only about ISK. Whether there's any al-Qaeda element of that, I don't know, and the Taliban for sure would not say. And there's always been some degree of counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan. I think the key question there is, if you look at the fact that for 20 years, Afghanistan was such a high priority to the United States that the U.S. expended blood and an enormous amount of treasure to be there to prop up the Afghan government, to build up the Afghan security forces, to prosecute a counterterrorism campaign. And then all at once, the U.S. can leave the country, have very little engagement with Afghanistan, have it completely drop off the policy map, and nothing happens. It has to make you question the strategic choices and judgments during that long period of time. It's either because the threat was exaggerated or because the U.S. essentially succeeded on what was most important to U.S. interests. Which was the counterterrorism campaign or because the tail just started to wag the dog. And the idea that you had to continue to prop up the Afghan government indefinitely into the future just really lost its strategic rationale or it could be some combination of that. But it's pretty stunning that the situation could go from one that absorbed so much U.S. policy attention and resources. To one that absorbs almost none of it at all. Graham, are there factional debates within the Taliban about how to interact with, deal with various terrorist actors? And how do you understand the different factions and power centers within the Taliban? How do you understand their rule and who's driving decisions? You know, for many years, there was a kind of Kremlinology profession. It was a whole business to list Taliban factions and, you know, the Western world did its best to sort of pit one faction against the other. And the Taliban very stubbornly refused to to factionalize. Well, with some with some major asterisks, there was one major incident in Zabul where factions of the Taliban fought each other and hundreds were killed. But, you know, for the most part, it's been a remarkably unfractious regime. And I think part of the reason for that is that Afghanistan is a country that has been ripped apart by factional fighting for decades, you know, for decades before the West arrived in its current incarnation. And so there are a lot of really unhappy Taliban who do not like the way that the emir is running the country. They are especially upset about the ban on girls schooling because a lot flows from that. It's difficult to see how you can continue to run. You can't go to hospitals and provide health care to women if you don't train any women doctors. Now, we haven't seen the effects of that yet. Maternal mortality is actually down, apparently, because there's better access to health care when you're not bombing the country. But, you know, there are some Taliban who are state builders. They would like to run a functional system and they can't see how they can continue to do that if the emir runs everything being inspired by his dreams. And this is, you know, sometimes it's just even a bureaucratic requirement. I mean, I know a Taliban. I know a Taliban official who tried to draft an operational plan for his ministry. He sent it down to Kandahar for approval and it came back from Kandahar full of religious mumbo jumbo and absolutely no year on year planning. And it just, you know, it's so it's infuriating to a whole sort of new generation of Taliban who would just like to get on with the business of running the country. So there's kind of a technocratic versus religious zealot tension, even if it's not not full on factionalism. I think that tension plays out every single day within the Taliban. We call it factionalism simply because the Taliban themselves have such an allergy to factionalism. You know, even the most frustrated Taliban will say, no, no, we need the emir. You know, he holds us together. Unity is the absolute paramount thing at this moment. We're all, you know, recovering from generations of war, can see the evidence of generations of war, you know, in the bullet holes in the buildings all around us. And we are busy patching up those holes and fixing the roads and, you know, getting things working again. And we are not in the business of factionalizing at the moment. So I think for the moment, the main sources of tension remain, as Laurel said, you know, simmering Islamic State local affiliate in the east, simmering discontent in the north from, you know, more or less people connected to the previous government. And that's it. And it's really not a particularly violent country at the moment. I mean, just to add, you know, the Taliban clearly appreciated that one of their key comparative advantages during the war was their unity. And their lack of factionalism. And so they actively suppressed it. And as Graham said, that doesn't mean there aren't differences of view, but that's different than factionalizing. And you saw so many instances of the U.S. and the Afghan government engaging in wishful thinking about Taliban factionalism. Laurel, you mentioned at the start of the conversation that you were not surprised by the Taliban's treatment of women and girls since its return. I think it is still worth giving some thought to. I think some sense of just how draconian the restrictions have been. But also looking forward, I have to think that the fact that you had 20 years of Afghan women and girls enjoying a very different kind of life and different kinds of opportunities, obviously in a much more violent context in many cases, but still with access to education and jobs and other things. And I have to think that that makes the repression of women and girls more complicated for the Taliban this time around. I think it's a persistent change that would still present challenges, even if the kind of policy impulses to go back to something resembling the pre-2001 status quo. It is the most repressive country in the world when it comes to policies and enforcement of policies related to women and girls, depriving girls of opportunity for education, essentially erasing women from public spaces, from work opportunities. And I think it is still worth giving some thought to. The last government excluded what you might consider groups that had an affinity for the Taliban, and that contributed to its brittleness. When the long-term arrives, where this brittleness comes back to haunt the Taliban, that's very hard to say. But it's not difficult to see a scenario where that brittleness produces demand for change over time. But it's going to have to come from within Afghanistan. And I don't think it's going to be driven largely by issues related to women and girls, but that could be a contributing factor. Can I just note, though, we have to really be humble about how much we know. This is a country that has, in some ways, gone dark. The best survey that we had to measure how many girls were in formal education, and also the best survey on other parts of Afghan welfare more generally, was a survey being done by the World Bank on a regular basis, and the Taliban shut it down. So before the Taliban shut it down, a few waves of that survey showed there were actually more girls in publicly funded education in Afghanistan overall than under the previous government. Now, that was because we weren't bombing them anymore, and so little girls were able to go to school more easily in primary school. And of course, there were huge problems in the secondary and tertiary levels. So that result might have been embarrassing to the Taliban, who were busy telling their boss in Kandahar that they had taken care of this issue of girls schooling, and it was, you know, don't worry, we've banned everything. And then you start to have surveys coming out showing that, oh, in fact, you haven't banned everything. And so I think that brittleness that flexibility that might remain in the system, you know, the degree to which these so-called secret schools are maybe quite popular and quite prevalent, maybe there are more of them than you think, the degree to which so-called madrasa education actually includes English and computers and medical studies, you know, for women. You know, I'm told, for example, that if you are currently recruiting into one of the many private clinics that are popping up all over Afghanistan, that you can easily find, you know, qualified women to work in your maternal health center. Where do those qualified women come from? Well, maybe it's better if the emir doesn't know. And so, yeah, the degree to which there is a bit of flexibility underneath what appears to be a very draconian system, yeah, could be key to whether or not the Taliban survive or not, because the Afghans won't put up with, you know, iron-fisted rule forever. Yes, it's true that it's very difficult to have insight into what's going on in Afghanistan and difficult to have insight into what's going on within the Taliban. You have to remember this is a group whose, you know, previous emir, Mullah Omar, was dead for years without anyone on the outside knowing it. And that's when the U.S. was paying a lot of attention and directing a lot of intelligence assets towards Afghanistan. And we didn't know Mullah Omar was dead for two years. So humbleness is in order. On the other hand, from the day that the Taliban took over, the ratcheting up of repressive policies towards women and girls, it's only been in one direction. There's not been any ratcheting down. It's only been ratcheting up. So I don't think we can be too, you know, optimistic about the degree to which people can just stay under the radar and continue to have education. It's also only five years out. There are still women who were educated during the course of that 20 years. What does it look like five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, when half of your population has not been sufficiently educated? And also more broadly, if it turns into a hermit kingdom, if it becomes the North Korea of South Asia, how is this country going to feed itself? We're seeing the hunger estimates creeping back up again now from the IPC. And so, yeah, that's quite concerning. Graham, can you expand on the condition of the Afghan economy and the broader humanitarian situation? There's been a fair amount of reporting on declining foreign assistance, some of that from the U.S., but also from other donors. But some of this also, I imagine, owes to the quality of Taliban governance over the last five years. Yeah. So when the Taliban took over, something like 20 percent, perhaps 30 percent of the economy disappeared. A big part of that was state spending. A huge percentage of the government's budget had been provided directly by the donors. Existing sanctions on the Taliban were allowed to be effectively sanctions on Afghanistan. And the Taliban faced a whole host of issues related to being a sort of rogue regime. There was no playbook for what you do when Islamist insurgents come over the walls and take over the palace. So they had trouble keeping the planes landing at Kabul Airport. They had trouble keeping the borders open for the trucks that were doing trade across Central and South Asia. A lot of that did get solved. Airplanes did not fall out of the sky. Trade resumed. The United States was surprisingly generous and offered the most sweeping sanctions exemptions it had ever produced up until that point, until the most recent exemptions on Syria. The long and short of it is that the economy got up off of its knees just a little bit and growth returned modestly. The world is growing very, very quickly. There are 500 to 600,000 new job seekers entering the job market every single year. And millions of people streamed back over the borders from Iran and Pakistan, a lot of them returning involuntarily or quasi-voluntarily, forced back into very humble conditions in Afghanistan. And so the population has ballooned. And so even though growth has returned somewhat to the Afghan economy, per capita poverty is rising. Aid has dropped off a cliff, as no one really cares very much anymore about Afghanistan. And so what you're seeing is the UN estimates of hunger starting to climb back up, unfortunately. And I mean, a further dimension of this is the conflict with Pakistan has meant the almost closing of the border with Pakistan to trade. And that has been a crucial component of the Afghan economy. And then on the other side, the Iran war with the Afghan Taliban being close to Iran, but now the war in Iran and the ratcheting up of sanctions with Iran and closing of Iranian ports to international trade has squeezed Afghanistan on the other side. So they're in extremely dire straits. It's also one of the most prone countries in the world to natural disasters, drought, flood, earthquakes, and they've had all of that in the last couple of years, too. So it's a very, very difficult time. So it's multidimensional in terms of the severe deterioration of the economy and humanitarian situation. And has the Taliban's ban on opium, which I think went into place in 2022, and as I understand it, has been relatively well-enforced, has that contributed to the economic struggles? Is that part of this equation as well? In certain areas, it seems so. I mean, that's certainly, why did so many farmers grow poppy? Because it earned them money. Not because there was any kind of affinity for drugs production and trafficking. And so my understanding from reports I've seen is that the poppy ban has been quite effective in the areas of the Taliban heartland, in the south in particular, less so in the north. So there's still some poppy production, but certainly that has had to affect livelihoods of farmers. We'll return to my conversation with Laurel Miller and Graham Smith after a short break. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Graham, in those weeks in August of 2021, when the U.S. was in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan, so much of the attention was on this chaotic but still rather astonishing effort to get Afghans and others who had worked with either the previous government or with the U.S. itself out of the country. I think the numbers in the end were something like 120,000 who were airlifted out in those final weeks. Has the treatment of those who were not able to leave or did not choose to by the Taliban been as repressive as feared, less repressive? How has that contributed to both Taliban control, but also the stability in the country? So the United Nations and Human Rights Watch and the New York Times actually did some good investigations of the sort of unfavorable, forgivable wave of retribution that happened in the early days when allegedly hundreds of people associated with the U.S.-backed government were hunted down, some of them killed. That being said, that seems to have died down. And the Taliban said that there is an amnesty and appear to be enforcing the amnesty, trying to enforce the amnesty as best they can. They have integrated huge numbers of former officials into their own. So, you know, when you walk into a ministry building, it's very normal to see someone who worked for the U.S.-backed government sitting side by side with a Taliban, you know, even in security agencies. So one day I was staying at a hotel in Kabul and I made the mistake of leaning my mobile phone out the window to try to get a picture of the sunset. And bang, bang, bang, the Afghan intelligence was at my door wondering why I was taking pictures. I was looking at the pictures out the window. So this is a police state. They keep a close watch. But the gentleman who came to my door, one of them was an elderly gentleman who spoke some Russian and he had been trained by the Soviets in the 1980s. And the other one looked like he could be my son. I mean, he was a very young man and he spoke only Pashto. I have no idea how the two of them communicated with each other, but it was a sort of on-the-job training by one generation of the intelligence service for the next generation of the intelligence service. And I can't emphasize to you enough, these are people who were hunting and killing each other previously. I mean, the job of the more elderly gentleman was to find and kill the comrades of the younger man. And they are now working together and they seem to get along just fine. So there's a sort of person-to-person national reconciliation that's going on that is truly remarkable to witness. Laurel, you referred earlier in the conversation to the need to look backward. You referred and scrutinized U.S. policy choices during the 20 years in which U.S. forces were there. You were involved in many of those policy decisions. I imagine dissenting with some of them and perhaps not with others. Knowing what we know now, given these last five years, how would you go back and change the U.S. approach? What were the kind of key moments where, if you could go back and do it again, you would suggest that U.S. policy go in a different direction? You know, I think the most consequential period of U.S. policy. policymaking was the very early years when I was not personally engaged. The choices made to scale up the presence, first of all, to overthrow the Taliban. There is an alternative scenario that you could imagine because it's like what the U.S. had done in other circumstances responding to terrorist incidents, where the U.S. could have focused its attention exclusively on Al-Qaeda, of going into Afghanistan. To chase Al-Qaeda, kill Al-Qaeda representatives, members, and kill and capture them, and have left the Taliban in place, maybe with some punishment, but not taking over responsibility for the country by displacing the Taliban. That is a choice that was made very early on that was motivated by a perceived need to not just. go after the perpetrators of terrorism, but after state sponsors, and to send a message to all actual and would-be state sponsors of terrorism. There's a lot that flowed from that. I mean, having displaced the Taliban from rural and Afghanistan, something had to be put in its place. And the idea that you could just patch together a government and then leave immediately without then taking on the responsibility of supporting that government. And then helping that government create its own security forces where there were none in order to be the security providers of Afghanistan and the counterterrorism partner for the U.S. in Afghanistan. A lot flowed from those early decisions to really get stuck in. And a lot flowed from not clearly seeing what it meant that an insurgency was regenerating in Afghanistan. And not looking for ways early on when the insurgency was regenerating, looking for ways that were political as well as military to prevent that insurgency from really taking hold there. And is this in 2002, 2003? How early are we talking? This is in the 2002 to 2005 timeframe, I would say. Five, six timeframe. When attention was shifting to Iraq as well. Yes. I mean, that's one of. One of the theories that, you know, if attention hadn't shifted to Iraq, maybe more attention would have been paid to Afghanistan. And what was really happening there would have been seen more clearly. It's hard to say. It's possible. And it is true that the U.S. government and I was actually working in the State Department in that period of time. I mean, the just extremity of the pivot of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq shouldn't be underestimated. But does that necessarily mean. Does that necessarily mean that the U.S. would have seen things more clearly in Afghanistan? That I think is a little hard to say, but it is possible. So, you know, I think those early decisions really set a path that became very hard to diverge from in any kind of tidy way. The other dimensions are a failure to attempt a peace process at the apex of American power in Afghanistan. Instead, the U.S. didn't get serious about trying to negotiate a solution to the conflict until it was approaching the nadir of power and influence in Afghanistan. And that's just. I mean, it was always only a single-digit chance of success that you were going to negotiate a conclusion. But that single-digit chance of success became vanishingly small at the time when the U.S. got somewhat more serious about it. And then the final dimension. The final dimension is the U.S. just had an unrealistic policy towards Pakistan all the way through. Pakistan was always very, very clear about its policy preferences and its own strategic calculations. And it never agreed with the American policy in Afghanistan and the American approach to the war and the Americans in the very beginning excluding the Taliban from any part of the political dispensation in Afghanistan. And they were very explicit. And American policy, American strategy hinged on a couple of unrealizable assumptions. And assumption number one was that you could change Pakistan's calculation of its own strategic interests such that Pakistan would be aligned with the U.S. on its policy in Afghanistan and its approach to the war. And it just was never. There was never any other. There was no evidence that that was going to happen. And yet the American strategy depended on that happening, even though it was never going to happen. The second assumption, I think, was less consequential, but some people might dispute that. And that is that you could address the problem of enormous corruption within Afghanistan, which was bleeding the legitimacy of the government that the U.S. was supporting. What about the period after the killing of Osama bin Laden? In 2011, you were one of the senior most U.S. government officials working on Afghanistan and Pakistan. At that point, there was some sense that that was a moment to start to figure out how to get out, how to end the war. What went wrong through that period? How would you handle that differently if you could go back and rerun some of those policy choices? Talks with the Taliban, and this was before my time, but talks with the Taliban started in 2009. And there was a period of time from 2009 to 2011 when the U.S. was talking to the Taliban, and this was in the started by Richard Holbrook. And this was in the period when the U.S. was trying to get talks started. And I would say the U.S. just was not fully committed to that policy. That was the period of time when the U.S. was at the apex of its power, but already planning to draw down in Afghanistan. And among my team and when I was working on Afghanistan, we used to find it quite baffling. That skepticism among American policymakers about the plausibility of a successful peace process always got in the way of commitment. to trying. But somehow skepticism about the policy of successfully winning the war never seemed to fully get in the way of trying at that time. And there was a persistent theme among U.S. policymakers at the senior level and particularly among senior military officers that you needed to wait until you really turned the corner on the conflict and put the Taliban on their back feet before you really tried negotiating with them. But the problem was, you know, from that apex of American power onward, as the U.S. was drawing down gradually and as the Afghan government was struggling to really build up its capabilities and maintain its legitimacy, year on year, the Taliban were gaining ground. Year on year for the, you know, almost the last full decade. Of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. And every year that they gained more ground, their incentives to try to negotiate a conclusion would go down. It didn't mean that they weren't negotiating with the U.S. in good faith. They were testing the proposition that they could get what they want more quickly, perhaps, and more cheaply through a negotiated solution than through continuing to prosecute the war. You know, that was only testing the proposition that they could get what they wanted that way. So that was, I think, the biggest problem, which doesn't mean that the negotiations would have for sure succeeded by any stretch of the imagination. But, you know, you can say it wasn't really tried until it was too late. And then from 2011 until I was involved in direct talks with the Taliban in 2016, there was a five-year gap where there were no direct talks with the Taliban. There were indirect contacts, but no direct talks. Well, you know, 2016, we were really drawing down already. So you would have set Richard Holbrooke loose in the way he wanted to be set loose in 2009 to at least test the proposition that there was some opportunity. You know, I was involved as a younger person in the peace process in Bosnia when Richard Holbrooke was in charge of that. And I was a member of the U.S. delegation at the Dayton Peace Talks and then subsequently was involved in Kosovo and Macedonia negotiations. And I saw so visibly and evidently the difference between the kind of diplomatic muscle and political capital that the U.S. put into the peace process in the Balkans as compared to what the U.S. did in Afghanistan. And it was very, very different. It doesn't mean that there wasn't some effort on the U.S. part in Afghanistan, but it was always a kind of additional line of effort. Like, yes, State Department, you can give that a try and, you know, go ahead, give it a try. But that's a lot different than what I saw in the Balkans when this was a priority of the President of the United States, the Secretary of State with, you know, a strong interagency delegation and a focused effort with a lot of diplomatic and political support. Now, it is different in other ways, including that the U.S. was, did not have the same kind of skin in the game of the conflict in the Balkans that we had in Afghanistan. And I think it's much easier for the U.S. to try to solve someone else's conflict than one in which we are a party. So there are significant differences there that account for that. But I can say, you know, Holbrooke never had the kind of support for trying to get talks launched in Afghanistan that he had in the Balkans. And when you were in the direct talks with the Taliban in 2016, what did you, what did you take away from those? The people who I and others engaged with were businesslike and pragmatic in those engagements. I'm not painting a picture of Taliban policy more broadly, there. They were, there were always debates about how authoritative the people that we were negotiating with who were based in Qatar were as representatives of the Taliban. My view was they were exactly what they purported to be representatives who were authorized to negotiate. They were not the decision makers. They were essentially like the diplomats for the Taliban. And they were, as I said, testing the proposition that they could get what they want. And it has to be said, even after I was in the Taliban, I was not a diplomat. I was a diplomat. I was a diplomat. I was a diplomat. I was a diplomat. I was involved. And when they were negotiating and did conclude a written agreement with the U.S. later on, they never gave anything up, really. They never made any hard compromises. It was a deal that really accommodated the Taliban to a very significant extent. And anything that was difficult for them to do, they kept completely non-public and therefore non-enforceable. Graham, you were watching these debates for many stretches from within Afghanistan. How did you see the disconnect between the realities on the ground as you saw them and the realities of power and battlefield dynamics within the country and the policy decisions being made? You know, it's not just me. It's a whole generation of Americans who served in Afghanistan. And I think it's important for me to say as a Canadian, you know, your loyal NATO allies who fought and died, more Canadians died per capita in Kandahar than Americans. You know, admittedly, we were a smaller contingent, but it was difficult down there for us. And we more or less followed you into battle believing what you were saying. And I don't think we emerged from that with the same understanding of American leadership or with the same understanding of the global rules-based order. It really was striking to me to see senior diplomats from different nations gather around a table. You know, we're in Afghanistan. We're in Afghanistan. And the amount of deference given to the Americans was really intense. I mean, the Americans were leading the international community in a very sort of granular day-to-day level, just calling the shots in Kabul. And everyone would just take notes furiously whenever the Americans spoke. And by the time we got to the Doha negotiations, I was sort of had a ringside seat for the talks. There was a lot of skepticism of what the Americans were up to, a lot of suspicion of what the Americans were up to. The diplomats didn't like the fact that some shadowy Americans had set up skiffs in the hotel and were probably spying on all the delegates, including the Europeans that were there. You know, it was. This is in 2020 in the talks that ultimately led to the withdrawal agreement? You're right. Yeah, 2020, 2021. And so just watching American leadership unravel was quite something. And then, you know, the day after, you know, after the evacuation planes have lifted off the tarmac, you know, the sort of the complete absence kind of a plan or, you know, sort of like, what are the rules now? What rules apply? And I think we're still in a world where we're asking those questions. You know, it's like, well, we can't accommodate a rogue state like the Taliban who, you know, just do whatever they want on the world stage, you know. But then, you know, I'm sorry, but if you're a middle power and you're watching what the Americans have been doing recently, if you're watching what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza, you know, it's. It's hard to understand what rules ought to be functioning on the world stage. And so during the course of the Afghan war, we've been through this real journey, I think, into a different international order. Laurel, you wrote for Foreign Affairs in the months ahead of the U.S. withdrawal that there was no way to do this without a certain degree of damage and chaos. You did afterwards then write that there were some reasons to be critical of the Biden administration's handling of that process. What would you criticize about the way that was done, stipulating that there, you know, there was no kind of, you know, immaculate withdrawal, no totally clean way to do this? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely no clean way to do it, no matter who did it. And that's largely because the fact of an American withdrawal would signal to Afghans that the worst was coming and would contribute to a crisis of confidence and a collapse of. of the government sooner or later. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been differently handled in some respects and somewhat more smoothly handled. And the things I would criticize would be the continuing to negotiate with the Taliban in those final months as if there was some plausible way to put together a power-sharing understanding that would even hold on a temporary basis. I mean, even if the U.S. only thought it would hold on a temporary basis. In that last year, I would say, the U.S. negotiations with the Taliban really contributed to undermining the Afghan government. And one thing that I think Ashraf Ghani, the last president of the Republic of Afghanistan, had right in a way was that the U.S. should have been negotiating its withdrawal process with the Afghan government at least as much, if not more, than with the with the Taliban, which it was not. evidently doing. The Doha Agreement that Graham referred to, the terms of that agreement were really quite undermining of the Afghan government to include the U.S. willingness to negotiate release of hostages that were not even held by the U.S., they were held by the Afghan government. And that signaled to the Taliban as much as to anyone else that the U.S. was willing to run roughshod over the Afghan government preferences. So there could have been more preparatory process with the Afghan government anticipating the collapse and really trying to get them to appreciate better than they evidently did what a grave peril they were in. I think the Taliban was always going to be willing to negotiate the American withdrawal and to not fight the U.S. as the U.S. was planning. I think the Taliban was always going to be willing to negotiate the U.S. withdrawal and to not fight the U.S. as the U.S. was planning. You didn't need that elaborate Doha Agreement or really any formal agreement at all to get the Taliban to be accommodating to a U.S. withdrawal because that's what they wanted. The collapse of the Afghan government and everything that flowed from that was not in the least surprising if you were paying attention to what was happening in not just the years, but the months and weeks before that final collapse. But it enfolded, as if it was surprising, both to the Americans and the Afghan government. Was the speed of it surprising to you? No. I mean, was it going to be a day, a week, a month? You know, hard to say. But years before that, when I was involved in the kind of routine planning for preparation for evacuation from every embassy in the world that, you know, has to have some kind of evacuation plan, obviously, I was involved in the kind of routine planning for preparation for evacuation from every embassy in the world that, you know, has to have some kind of evacuation plan. Obviously, I was involved in the kind of routine planning for preparation for evacuation from every embassy in the world that, you know, has to have some kind of evacuation plan. But even in the 2015-2016 time frame, within the State Department, we saw that rapid collapse, downward spiral, once you started to pull out was a highly likely scenario. And by the time you're in 2021, it should have been seen as extremely likely scenario, and it should have been planned for. I always thought it was a no-brainer that the drawdown of the, the U.S. embassy to a skeleton presence at Kabul airport was going to have to be well ahead of the curve of the military withdrawal, not, you know, on or behind the curve. And it still mystifies me why ultimately that's what they did, but very late in the day. What about the argument that you hear from some in the, in these debates, both retrospectively and at the time, that you could keep 2,500 or 3,000 U.S. troops there and, and, and forestall that collapse? Implausible. I mean, there's no way on earth the Taliban would have agreed to that, ever. I mean, there were even, there was even talk about lower numbers, that you could keep, you know, 250 troops just to protect the embassy. Utterly fanciful. That is not what the Taliban was fighting for for 20 years. I think I personally was taken by surprise by the speed and totality of the Taliban takeover. I know that some Taliban negotiators in Doha themselves were very surprised. So much so that one of them called me and said, is this an American trap? You know, is this some kind of a trick? The forces in front of us are melting away. We're worried about some shenanigans. I actually thought at the time that the most likely and most terrifying possibility was of a return to multifactional civil war, which is something that Afghanistan has seen in the past. We were all sort of informally totaling up the number of fighters that were under the command of the Taliban. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's various northern factions and actually a couple of southern factions that we understood to be extremely wealthy and extremely well-armed. And we thought ready to fight to the death against the Taliban. But as it turns out, they preferred a comfortable retirement and hiding their money overseas and leaving their supporters to suffer. That was a little surprising to me, how quickly and how, um, how completely that happened. I actually have had conflicting conversations with Taliban, uh, since the takeover about what the heck were we doing in Doha? Like, why were we even negotiating? I think that some of them were there in good faith because if you are a Taliban diplomat and you want some kind of a slightly better version of the Taliban to emerge, maybe you hope that your theocratic masters are forced to make some compromises with the, shall we say, the urban elites of Afghanistan. And you, you, you, you, you, let the girls go to school and allow some diversity in the country. And so, yeah, I think some of them were genuinely thinking that there was going to be a sharing of power. I know that their vision of sharing power was quite different than the U.S.-backed government's vision. I think they were polar opposites. In fact, I remember at one point they were, the Taliban were saying we would accept 70%. I'm not sure how they envisioned carving up 70% of all the power, but they were saying we would accept 70% of all the power and our enemies could take 30%. And the U.S.-backed government had pretty much the polar opposite view that the Taliban might be allowed to have sort of a 20% or 30% share. And I don't, you know, maybe that was just idle talk in the corridors, but I think some people did seem to think that such power sharing was possible. And I think, you know, the fact that the government collapsed so precipitously really did show a sort of a positive effect. And I think, you know, I think that's, you know, I think that's a good point. I want to close with a couple of questions about policy going forward. Laurel, on the U.S. side, there was a lively debate for a period of time about recognition and the nature and level of our diplomatic engagement with the Taliban. What is the state of that policy now? And if you were back shaping U.S. policy, what would you do over the next couple of years? I think it's really implausible that the U.S. would formally recognize the Taliban, which doesn't mean that there can't be some and that there isn't, some pragmatic engagement that could ebb and flow over time, just where there happens to be a common interest in something that you can pragmatically work on together. The Taliban would prefer to have a relationship with the United States and all other governments. They want to maximize the appearance and reality of their legitimacy. And so the reluctance is all on one side, but the Taliban is not prepared to do anything in terms of policy changes to get that, even though it is their preference. And so there would be that opportunity for pragmatic engagement. But I think the space for that is very narrow for the foreseeable future. Even with other governments that are more, let's say, less concerned about Taliban domestic policies, but are concerned about security in Afghanistan, only the Russians are concerned about security in Afghanistan. So I think the U.S. is not prepared to do that. But there are others that have accepted credentials from Taliban ambassadors that have, I would say, all but recognition kind of relationship with the Taliban, including China and Pakistan and UAE and Uzbekistan. But the fact that even those governments are not willing to formally recognize the Taliban, even though they're more willing to engage with them than the U.S. government, I think that's a very, very important thing. Yes, and European countries are, shows the hurdles that are ahead for the Taliban there. You know, I think it's important what Graham said earlier, that with an authoritarian regime, a situation that has the kind of brittleness and fragility that we described in Afghanistan, things look stable and in control until they're not. And it's very difficult for us to know when and where a threat to Taliban power will emerge. That said, it's hard to see that threat to their power now. I don't think anyone's really in a position to predict when there will be any kind of revolutionary change to Taliban control in Afghanistan. If there's going to be any evolutionary change, it's only going to happen when there is generational change of personnel, at the top. And even then, we can't count on that. It's just that kind of generational change always creates an opening. So I think the most likely scenario is the status quo for a protracted period of time with a poor, hungry, weak Afghanistan, but one where you have the Taliban with a tight grip on power. You both warned that we should not expect stability even if we can't see the source of change in the near term. But Graham, if you kind of imagine a relatively optimistic evolutionary scenario to use Laura's framework there, what might that look like beyond just a kind of status quo that continues indefinitely? Well, a great deal depends on the health of the supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the emir, who has personally decided that he wants to keep the girls out of school after grade six. And he's also, I think, personally allergic to influences from the outside world. He views the West as a source of corruption, both financial and moral. And I think that if the old man were to ever pass away or be debilitated by illness, or if somehow we were just to get reports that he had been somehow incapacitated, you might see sort of generational change in the Taliban leadership. You know, it might not. It might not be a sort of overnight change, but if you move down a couple of rungs within the Taliban, there is a new generation, I think, that is more interested in state building. I wouldn't necessarily say that those people are more likely to be easier to deal with. I mean, they're more likely to put the girls in school, for sure. Are they going to be necessarily our friends? Well, we killed a lot of them. You know, some of them have scars on their bodies from fighting us. So I wouldn't necessarily. I wouldn't necessarily say it's going to be the easiest relationship. But, you know, I think there is a possibility that over time, in the same way that you saw Uzbekistan make a kind of slow opening, that I think that would be sort of the very best case scenario for for Afghanistan to see it slowly getting more functional. You know, they are actually completing, for example, a big electricity corridor that's going to connect energy rich Central Asia with the energy markets of South Asia. You know, they're trying to harmonize. Truck transport, you know, custom systems so that, you know, trade can move along not just the Chinese Belt and Road, but across the region more generally. You know, there are ways in which Afghanistan could slowly get back on its feet. But I think the the main impediment right now is that it's under a leader who sees the outside world as a threat. And when you're a small, poor, landlocked country, you depend on the outside world. You have to work with the outside world for your for your flourishing. There's a relevant data point. Here that we shouldn't lose sight of, which is in 2016, the US killed the current Emir's predecessor, Mullah Mansour, who, by many accounts, I wouldn't say he was a moderate by any stretch of the imagination, but by many accounts, he was a more transactionally minded character. And there was no evidence at that time that the Taliban would choose someone more accommodating in the wake of the war. The US killing him more willing to to reach some kind of agreement with the US or moderate Taliban policies. And indeed, my expectation when the US did that was that the Taliban would do the opposite, that they would choose the most consensus based, least divisive figure that they could find, which would mean leaning way into the conservatism of the Taliban. And that's exactly what they did. So leadership transitions can move in unexpected directions or undesirable directions. And and the more that the Taliban feel under pressure and under, I would say, threat in terms of the circumstances, the very difficult circumstances they're in, there isn't necessarily a reason to think that if and when there's when because there always is eventually a leadership transition that. They're going to move in a direction that's more amenable to opening to the outside world. And that, of course, has echoes for the flailing war effort of 2026 that we're now engaged in Iran. So I suppose that's a disquieting, but, you know, to end on Laurent Graham, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for making the time. Really appreciate the opportunity, Dan. Thank you for listening. You can find the article. That we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs interview was produced by Rachel Powell and Kanishk Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in. We'll see you next time. I'll see you next time on the Foreign Affairs Podcast. Sign up today at foreignaffairs.com/spotlight.