disappointed more than anything else in what the West with all of its virtues did not achieve.
You know, not following the rules of war when a one you don't tell your enemy when you're
going to leave the country. You know, you make sure that you've left enough people in place
to vouch save your prestige. The aura of invincibility that you have acquired over decades
as a superpower. You don't just give it away.
Hello and welcome to one decision. Conversations about intelligence, state craft and the forces
that drive world politics. Conversations too with people who are in the room and on the ground.
I'm your co-host, John Reign, formerly the UK's diplomatic service.
And I'm Sir Richard De Laugh, former chief of MI6 and it's good to be with you.
John again to discuss another anniversary or important topic.
Great to see you to Richard, yes, on this perhaps rather somber anniversary.
We have a very thought-provoking episode for you today and it is on Afghanistan.
But to keep up with all our content, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'd be
really grateful if you could also like this episode or drop us a comment on YouTube. That'll
help others find the show. Right, let's get to today's subject, Afghanistan. It's five years
this week since the last American C-17, transported plane left Afghanistan and with its departure
ended a 20-year military deployment, occupation and nation-building exercise
led by the US and its allies in Afghanistan. It also turned out to be America's longest war
and a war that ended in apparent defeat with the chaotic evacuation from Kabul.
What went wrong for the US and its allies in Afghanistan? Why have foreign powers repeatedly
found this country, the so-called graveyard of empires, so difficult for you to conquer
and to control? And why has it been also so hard for Afghan government to govern and control
their own country? Today we're going to explore what the West did and did not accomplish
in Afghanistan and how the Taliban managed to retake power. Our guest is John Lee Anderson.
A war correspondent for the New Yorker John has covered Afghanistan since the Soviet retreat
of the late 1980s. He's drunk tea with legendary Majahadin commanders. He has interviewed
Afghan and US politicians. He's interviewed ordinary Afghans. He's interviewed US officers
and contractors and through all those lenses he has watched Kabul evolve. Fast into a cosmopolitan hub
and more recently into something very much more full-on. John's latest book to lose a war
collects years of dispatches from the country. John, welcome to one decision. John, let me start
by asking you a question based on the title of your book to lose a war. Given how difficult it is
to govern Afghanistan, let alone to occupy it and run it as a foreign force. Did you ever think
this was a winnable war? Or did you think that it was just a question of how the West lost it?
Well, it's a very good question. It's the first time anybody has asked me that. I think
it never occurred to me that the West would lose the war. First of all, when I went to Afghanistan
in the wake of 9/11, having been there 12 years before during the Soviet withdrawal, a couple of times
with the Mujahideen. I found it a most compelling country. I'd always wanted to return, so I returned.
I believe that I was in the vortex of a grand, an epic of history. This was this incredible event,
horrific event in the United States in 9/11 attacks. They were coming to Afghanistan to punish
and bring to Brooke a terrorist group that had uniquely embedded itself in this place that
had been neglected under the custody of the Taliban and that it would be a matter of time before
this police action, as I saw it, albeit an epic one would wrap up. I think the shock,
the kind of history-turning aspect of 9/11 and its wake may have clouded the perceptions of
a lot of people from every perspective in terms of what would come next. I'm not sure
that I thought about it either. Initially, it was about rolling back the positions, the physical
positions of the Taliban and their allies. When that was done, I remember coming down through the
north and I watched as waves of Taliban would switch sides on the battlefield. By the time I got
to Kabul, I was fairly cynical about what was going on but still didn't have full knowledge of
let's say what the CIA or my six or, you know, our side knew and was doing behind the scenes.
And then when I reached Kabul, I realized that the Taliban had merely melted away. They hadn't
actually fought. There wasn't a last stand, so to speak. I think the media believed that
Todoboda was the last stand and of course that ended inconclusively and arguably with a loss for
the West because bin Laden wasn't brought to boat. After that, I think I settled into and I spent
most of the spring of 2002 and part of the summer in Afghanistan. I spent most of that time
trying to figure out what had happened. You know, I followed up this assassination of
Masood and found a bit like watching the Taliban switch sides on the battleground that I couldn't
really tell who was friend and who was foe. That there was a lot of pragmatic alliances going on.
I felt that and for the first time I remembered the American Special Forces operating in the East,
some of what they were doing felt like they were going off the reservation a little bit. But sort of
the thought was there and then the drum beats for Iraq started and like so many others, I found myself
going to Iraq and not returning to Afghanistan for three years. It was on my mind all the time,
but it had become the subsidiary. It had become the kind of the gray war. The one over there,
the Taliban were gone. It was just a matter of catching bin Laden. When I returned in 2005,
the Taliban were ascended again in the provinces. So it wasn't until 2010 or 11 around the time
bin Laden was killed and I began to have embedded experiences with the Americans and some of their
allies that I believed that the Taliban would inevitably come back to power and said so.
Yeah. And John, when I mean, that's quite early to have realized that the Taliban were not gone,
that they were still there. I think it took a lot of people longer than that to appreciate that.
Do you think that there were opportunities once the West got into nation building and state building
to accommodate that view? So I'm thinking of the bond conference and the optimism that was
around restructuring the state of Afghanistan. Do you think we should have included the Taliban?
I'm not sure. I don't know. I think that, I mean, if I would were to assign criticism
to the West began to do in Afghanistan mid-2000s, it was not to have invested
the president of choice. That is to say, Karzai, who was, let's face it, a puppet, but nonetheless,
a well-meaning and rather enlightened one, man. And who was desperate for
to be allowed to be given the freedom to show that he was the true sovereign power of the country.
He desperately needed that and never was given it, certainly not by the Americans,
whom I saw in close proximity with him. And this was something I came away with from in 2005,
just as the Taliban were beginning to reassert themselves very closely. I spent some time around
Karzai and around Khalilzad, who was, as you know, the sort of American advice for Afghan-born
and advice for Afghanistan later in Iraq. And I felt that he was not being given enough leeway.
I attended many of these de ones, these great gatherings that he would have as a kind of
traditional leader. And I watched as different delegations came to him from the provinces.
And we're, you know, bestowing upon him all of the decorum and respect that they would
a traditional leader. And asking for certain favors later we saw, very clearly, that this had
a great deal to do with how things were in their provinces and how well they could govern.
And the subtext, of course, was, you know, in some cases the Taliban were coming back.
I watched as Karzai made promises, very specific promises about how he would follow up.
And then it never happened. And I went to the Americans to ask about this. And they essentially
made light of it. And as you can see, this is just
one thread, of course, of many that you could choose in terms of the counterinsurgency project
in Afghanistan. But that became a toxic marriage over time, because I himself began to try to reach
out to the Taliban, realizing that he, you know, that he hadn't obtained deals that would stick
in various places, and with certain warlords that the Americans had essentially bought, or, you
know, put in their pocket. It was, I feel that there was a chance to have become much more assertive early
on, you know, in retrospect, with Al Qaeda, with Pakistan, which, of course, was harboring most of
those people, and to have essentially left the country, having invested Karzai, and the best
that could be made of a moderate, civic, you know, grand alliance, a geolga-based government,
to its own devices, and then to have left. And I think that by 2005, I began to see that
that there were chinks in the armor, and we never really kind of regained the initiative after
a certain point. That's fascinating, because my, you know, direct association with Afghanistan,
with Karzai, goes back to, you know, pre and post 9/11, that early period. And what I would say,
and I'd be very interested in your comments, in that period, we weren't so much thinking about
Afghanistan as a country. We were thinking about the danger of ungoverned space. Let's put it like
that. We had a massive drugs problem with the exportation of heroin onto the European market,
particularly to the UK. Obviously, you know, when Bin Laden did a runner from Sudan
to Afghanistan, that sort of aspect of ungoverned space became very much offered on and concerned.
And I think that in that period, the initial view was very much the one you express about Karzai,
being given space, being left to run it, and us being a significant but light-footed presence,
maybe taking anti-drug initiatives, and maybe chasing Bin Laden around or Bin Laden's associates.
And we very much approached the whole problem with that in mind. It was only later on
that this nation-building project suddenly took over. I've said this before in podcast,
and I really have never got my head around why that change of attitude took place. Can you explain that?
I wish I knew exactly that there was a moment in the room. You know, the one-seat conference that's
a bit of an extreme example. You know, that moment, I don't know of that moment. I think it was more
kind of stumbling forward. And of course, we do have it, speaking of the United States,
we do have a system in which there are presidential changes every few years and so on. But my understanding,
well, since you mentioned drugs, and you know, correct me if you have a different view or understanding,
but my understanding is that despite their appalling behavior, you know, the Taliban nonetheless,
at a certain point, decided to reign in the opium production in Afghanistan. And in the same year
that they blew up the booties of Bamyan, they were awarded some kind of commendation by the UN
for having virtually eradicated opium in the country. Now, fast forward to the months and the year,
so following 9/11, what I soon began to understand in Afghanistan was that by coming in through
the North as they did, the Americans and their allies, especially the CIA, began bringing on
side certain warlords that were, in some cases, Dostum, he'd been on every side for the previous 30
years, but nonetheless, you know, was ready to go for us in 2001. As were others, maybe less well-known,
smaller warlords, clan commanders, regional fellows, and some of them, if not all, especially those
along that Tajik Uzbek border were of course involved in the opium stroke heroin trade and continued
to be, as we went forward, by the spring of 2002, and I can't tell you exactly how I know this,
but I deduced that, you know, the drugs were coming back. The, it was clear that it was happening
on under our ages that there was that interagency dispute, which has occurred in so many places
over the years between sort of CIA national security and DEA anti-drugs, and CIA won, and they
basically said back off, and the drug lords, IER allies, warlords who were also dealing drugs,
went for it, and were allowed to go for it. We specifically disagreed with CIA on that issue,
and we, I wouldn't say we had a falling out with them, but we were really fed up to the back teeth
with them, because they were giving a green light to production, which we were trying to,
we had local militias who were eradicating the poppy fields. By 2005, and I do remember that
breach, somehow it became known without being sort of very literal. By 2005, there was that
new neighborhood next to Shady now in Kabul, which you'll remember, it was the only residential
neighborhood such as one existed in Kabul. It was the NARCO mansions. They started popping up.
When I returned there in 2005, Kabul was bustling again, but there was this whole area with
several dozen, maybe 50 or so, of these ridiculous poppy mansions. That's what everybody called them,
and I would say why do you call them that, and it's because everybody knew that these were being
paid for with NARCO money mostly. They were, just as you'd expect, very ostentatious with flying
entrances and balconies everywhere in chromated glass. By 2007, the Americans had decided,
which you'll remember, that they needed to rein this in. I found myself involved
by sort of a person I knew former DEA. I was drawn into a anti-narcotics mission, which the Americans
had, of course, have been privatized, everything. They had handed this over at great expense to
Dancor, which is an extension of the Pentagon. And I joined the first narcotics eradication
mission in Otuzgan, as you know, right next to where Taliban sort of hardland. Long story short,
it was a complete disaster. We were ambushed repeatedly. Several people died. The mission was
called off. It was clear that our own allies ambushed us. It became clear to everyone, all the
Americans involved, most of whom were now private contractors, but with some kind of fluid
relationship with the nearby special forces, which were doing their own thing, that this was all
part of a kind of private, you know, government, stroke, counterinsurgency effort. And it was
built as a Taliban, anti-Taliban thing. It wasn't never clear to me that this was a Taliban thing.
This was an Afghan thing. And it had been happening under the Americans' noses. And now they
decided to go to one province and sort of kick dairy areas about it. In the course of this,
in fact, I think it was the night before the mission, the head of the mission, former senior DEA
official asked me privately, how well I knew the vice minister of interior of Afghanistan,
who was also their ally in this new war on drugs. And I knew him from the war against the Taliban
and the North from several years previously, not well. And I said, well, I know him, but not well.
He said, I said, why do you ask? He said, because there's a lot of rumors that he's involved in
the drug trade too. Now, he was the vice minister for counter narcotics, and they did not know.
And they're asking me, a journalist, if I know the truth about the man. And that
that was rather typical, I found out, of the superficial degree with which a lot of American
officials, at least, engaged in Afghanistan. And I started to get worried from that point on.
That was 2007. John, you had exposure to the US military in quite a unusual way. You were embedded
with them. One of their forward combat units. But also, you know, you were talking to all ranks
of US servicemen and contractors as well as talk to their Afghan opposite numbers. Give us some
feel for what it was like knowing, seeing and understanding in the way you did the country in
the situation, and then seeing the way it was being dealt with by officials in military and
contractors. Because I have to say, some of the bits of your book that really brought it to life
for me, with those conversations that you had with fellow Americans, that mix of determination
to do the right thing, but kind of just a cultural complement at what was going on. You must have
felt very frustrated. Yes. I had a similar experience in Iraq actually, although I didn't know the
country as well as I did Afghanistan, but I did know Iraq before the American invasion in 2003.
I tried to get to know Saddam's Iraq with great difficulty, but I had a sense of it.
And I had freedom to roam as I did in Afghanistan. My experiences in Afghanistan from the end of the
80s were at war. I was with the Mujahideen, that is to say,
those fighting against the Soviets and their allies.
But I developed a kind of sense of how Afghans,
you know, broad brushstrokes, you know,
how they were, their codes, their sense of honor,
that all that stuff, how they behave in war.
When I returned initially, I felt that,
you know, I wanted to replicate that sort of feeling,
that sense of freedom from the very beginning,
even behind anti-Telibon lines,
I had repeated experiences, repeated encounters with people
with very hostile attitudes towards the West,
America specifically, but the West generally.
There wasn't such a difference between what,
notionally, the Taliban perception
or al-Qaeda perception of us was.
And in some cases, fighters in the field,
I had altercations, in some cases, sometimes dangerous,
in the North and in the South, all over the place.
And I always felt that the Taliban
were just right there in the shadows.
It was some time before the insurgency of the Taliban,
resumed to such an intensity that I felt
I had to embed with the American forces.
By 2005, '67, you know, it had become so dangerous
to be a Westerner, you'd be kidnapped and held,
or very easily anywhere from the outskirts of Kabul onwards,
that you had to take great care.
So therefore, the country began closing down.
And I felt forced into these embeds,
where the only way I could return to areas I once knew
was now embedded with American forces.
So in one embed, in one experience I had in 2010,
and may want, of course, iconic battlefield for the British
from the 19th century.
And as it turned out, exactly the same place I had been
in early '89, with the Ahmadiyya Heading Commander,
since killed, there was this battlefield space.
The Americans had just taken over from the Canadians.
You know, they had each, it was like a year,
they would do a year, and then the Americans came.
I stated a fortress where there was an American commander,
well-meaning, you know, he wanted to do the right thing.
Privately, he wondered how much he was gonna be able to achieve,
but the key moment for me in this rather strange, surreal,
disassociated few days I spent with him and his men
was a meeting with the elders of the area.
Who had come to the fortress to talk about abuses
or accidents, which had caused death amongst the Afghans.
And the, you know, they were to be given compensation.
Those about 10 men in the room.
And it included the local Afghan army commander,
the intelligence chief, the local Afghan,
that is to say, the American Allied Afghan
command intelligence man, and the American commander,
who held forth, it was a bit GI Joe.
You know, he was a bit like American values,
this is what freedom, all this stuff.
And you see these old men with the beard,
it's just kind of nodding and being inscrutable.
And I kept looking around by now, everybody in Afghanistan
talked about the shadow government.
The shadow government was the Taliban who had,
it was known, not seen, but known,
had sort of reasserted themselves everywhere.
And I was wondering, is there a shadow Taliban government here?
And in the case of some of these,
some of these men, they were impassive.
One man talked about his own son being killed
by an American helicopter.
And he asked the commander,
why did you fire into my compound and kill my son
when the person you were looking for was, you know, further away?
And the answers were rather pat.
There was some apology, but nothing to refuse.
And then the intelligence man had this big watch of money
that he was using to then hand out to these men.
In the course of this several hours,
I kept watching the intelligence man,
they were called NDS, National Directorate of Security,
I think it was.
And I thought, you know, if there's a shadow,
Taliban government, it's him.
I just had this feeling.
I didn't know, but I had this feeling.
When it was all over later, I talked with the colonel,
the American colonel.
I said, so how well do you know that guy?
He says, oh, not well at all.
I said, well, what do you mean?
He says, well, you know, it only been here a couple of months.
And I said, but surely the Canadians who were here,
did the Canadians work with him?
He says, yeah, yeah.
And how long were they here?
They were here a year.
He said, did they give you a dossier?
You know, they bring nothing.
I said, so what do you know about him?
He says, beyond his name, zip.
And I thought, okay, here we go.
Meanwhile, on that same, in that same fortress,
a couple of guys showed up in a pickup truck one after one
evening.
They were special forces or maybe CIA.
They were beards like the Taliban.
They were dressed like the Taliban.
They were clearly American.
And they went into an adjacent sort of space.
And they came and went from there.
And I asked about them.
I said, what do they do?
And of course, what they were doing was sort of real war.
That is to say, they would go out at night and kick down doors
and kill people with their little paramilitary mob.
And they were doing this all over the country.
That sort of behavior began to undermine what the NATO forces
and allies were trying to do.
You know, the good GI Joe's, the Johnny Clean jeans that were
meeting with the local mayor and all that stuff.
There was barely any deniability because in some cases,
they shared the same fortress.
And when I tried to inquire what those guys were doing,
I didn't get an answer.
But as time went on, that became really toxic.
And it was the very thing that caused the breach with Karzai.
And I think began to empower the Taliban throughout many,
many parts of the country.
Because you did have a paramilitary army that was deniable,
that was off the charts that was not nobody owned up to,
that was doing all kinds of stuff.
There was two facetness to the war in that sense.
As well as the attic wrinkles, sorry,
the added wrinkle of the fact that you had NATO allies,
people coming from volunteer armies of, you know,
and then you had contractors, you know,
that were never on the books fully.
And then you had the paramilitaries.
And you know, complicated.
Too many people, too many agendas.
You do bring that very clearly in the book.
Richard, you had a question there.
- Yeah, my question, I think is really pretty straightforward.
I think the answer's probably quite complicated.
What happened to the Northern Alliance?
Because in the initial stages,
we invested a lot in the possibility
that they would not just only create a reasonably
efficient military force,
but, you know, they would have their own cloud
and influence within Afghan society.
And okay, I do understand the tribal compositions
and the differences between what mainly constituted
the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.
But the normal Alliance having been invested with this hope,
and that, of course, goes back to Macedon and before,
just seemed to evaporate and disappear.
Did you think that they would ever achieve anything
and be a reliable partner?
- It was the average shrinking territory
in the run up to 9/11, wasn't it?
I mean, yeah.
They went from controlling the gates of Kabul,
essentially, a tariqar just across the Shomali plains
at the foothills of the Hindu Kush,
to being practically in the Wahan corridor
there next to Tajikistan, by the time not 11 happened.
I don't know how to answer that question fully,
but what I can venture a kind of an answer,
as I said in the spring of 2002,
I spent a lot of time in Kabul and around the country,
trying to figure out what had happened,
how Masood had been assassinated.
And it became clear and clear to me
that within the Northern Alliance there were traders,
there were people working for the other side.
My conclusion in the end was that Abdul Rasul Sayyaf,
who essentially held the doorway to the Hindu Kush,
to the Northern Alliance territory, was that man.
Who was he?
You know him of him and of him well.
Along with Hakani back in the day,
these were the most virulently anti-Western,
xenophobic, jihadists, leaders of the anti-Mujedinal,
anti-Soviet war.
And Sayyaf had been a mentor for Bin Laden openly,
along with Gulbuddin Ekmatiar,
who had been such a powerful force
that a group, a jihadi head-chopping group in the Philippines,
had even named themselves after him.
When the Taliban took Kabul,
I strangely to me, Sayyaf, after that horrible civil war
in Kabul in which everyone was killing everybody,
Sayyaf somehow moved into Mesut space and was an ally of his,
despite the fact that he was much more Islamist and,
Of course, it had come out of this hard line, part of the insurgency, which was always
xenophobic and virulently anti-western. When they escaped to the north, when the Taliban
took Kabul, Sayyaf went with them, and he then controlled essentially the front door.
When in 2001, these al-Qaeda terrorists planning to kill Masood arrived in Kabul and posing as
journalists, wanted to make their way into Northern Alliance territory, it was Sayyaf who let them in.
And I had several encounters with him, which became increasingly acrimony as he was suspicious of me,
and hostile eventually. He denied having anything to do with Masood's death, but when I questioned
him on why he had allowed these men through, he said, a friend from Bosnia had called him and told
them to let them through. I've heard a different version of that. A friend from Bosnia can only
have been a jihadi anyway. So I never believed Sayyaf and his behavior became more hostile towards me.
From that point on, I mean, did al-Qaeda get to say off and say, look, we're going to do this,
we're also going to do 9/11. Now's the chance for the great jihad you've been fighting for your whole
life. Would that have been enough for him to sell out his putative ally at the time Masood?
I would think so, yeah. But lo and behold, Sayyaf remained in place after 9/11. Where did I go to
find Sayyaf? In Pagman, the old royal hill retreat just outside of Kabul. He was not friendly,
his men were not friendly, and people were killed along that the access road between there and Kabul.
But even now he's in the mix in Afghanistan. He's always managed to be
part of the greater alliance. My point here being that the Western intelligence agencies and
security forces made certain calculations when it came to Sayyaf. They decided he was better to
have on side, whatever he may have done than not. But I had approaches from people in Britain
about Sayyaf, and they basically expressed a similar view towards him at one point.
There was a kind of toxic mix. I even had questions about some other people, including Fahim and
Bismillahhan. These are other Masood allies who then became ascendant. In some cases,
it's extremely rich, like Marshall Fahim, after 9/11 under our custodial jurisdiction. But
whom I think we either knew or suspected things about but looked the other way for the sake of the
fact that they were on side and supposedly helping hold things together. That doesn't help explain
why the Northern Alliance fell back as it did in the run-up to 9/11. But the murder of Masood,
which took place two days before 9/11, was all clearly part of a plan. They probably didn't know
when they would kill Masood. The people that were going to kill Masood probably didn't know exactly
when 9/11 would happen. But it was all part of a plan to wipe them out. Again, I think a lot of it
has to do with what I saw later, which was these changing alliances, in some cases,
through kinship or clan. You couldn't entirely trust your allies.
Yeah, Joghry, just pick up on that. It raises this very interesting area of different concepts,
culturally rooted around loyalty and allegiance. You touched on this a number of times with
Americans very ready, in some cases, to foreground American values. Then other concepts that
we might readily understand, loyalty being one, don't translate. Is there a genuine cultural
difference? Do you have anecdotes and experiences that illustrate that maybe there were just two
totally different not just vocabaries but codes in play here? And that for us to expect, as you
illustrated in your discussion around Sajef and others, loyalty that you will be on our side,
you know, batched as one of us, was somehow that was never really on offer. You got like a
percentage share in somebody, but you rented them by the hour as the saying was you could never
actually win them over. That's more or less true. Yeah, and I know that this sounds very, you know,
it can easily sound like a criticism of the nature of the Afghan. And I wouldn't want to fall
into kind of easy stereotypes. But a few years ago, I was asked to, you know, the copyright of these
books, you know, they they become away. And I was asked to write an introduction to Machiavelli's
The Prince, which I'd read as a teenager. And so I read it again. And there was one city state
warlord that Machiavelli was particularly praising of. And it was a guy who betrayed everyone
and became ascended. And I realized that eventually that much of what I felt I saw in Afghanistan
was very similar to that kind of middle ages warfare in which it's not about right or wrong.
It's about winning. It's about becoming powerful. You do what you have to do. If you have to slaughter
a bunch of people that thought that you were their protector, well, so be it. But if you're powerful,
you're the boss, you're the man. And Machiavelli would sort of pay due homage to these people.
And this is the kind of thing I felt I saw a lot of times in in Afghanistan in the battle for
Kundus, one of the northern cities. It was sort of the last stand of the Taliban in the North.
Imagine this on the battlefield. There were northern alliance fighters here. And in the far
distance, you could even see them roaring around on Jeeps and so on the Taliban in this shooting back
and forth. There's skirmishes around. And there are American B 52 bombers circling and dropping
big bombs in the distance. And in in the middle of all of that one day, about 300 Taliban black
clad come barreling across to this side. Like others who were there, I was stunned by this. And I
was saying, what's going on? We followed up. It turned out the head of that force was a cousin
or an old friend of the commander on this side. And they had cut a deal. What was the extent of
that deal? We didn't know. But later those people, those men, they didn't talk. They all had brand
new equipment as well. And many were Uzbeks. And the supposition on our part was that they were an
al-Qaeda affiliated group from Uzbekistan. And they ended up in the tribal territories of Pakistan
and remained in the mix. So we heard later, there were many such moments. And we developed a kind
of weariness around the people we as observers and battles with. It was clear that the battle lines
had shifted. The Taliban technically had been beaten. They had melted away, but some had joined
this side and who knew, who knew where the real enemy lay, lay within in some cases. And so
again, I think that certain of our commanders, of our intelligence people came to know this and
decided to just go with it. In other cases, they tried to circumvent them. They tried to go
around them and knowing that they couldn't trust this or that, I lie. John, that really resonates.
I'm sure it does with Richard. I was serving in Pakistan in between 2006 and 2009. This was scaled
up to the state level, but Richard, I'm sure you had lots of reflections on this. The difficulty
of really being able to bank on an allegiance. Yeah, I think you put your finger on one of the
central issues and you never were quite sure who you were dealing with and what their
allegiances were. Maybe what their allegiances were going to be. I mean, you know, it was a drifting
variable situation. And, you know, this is why I was so shocked when, you know, I had retired by
then and there was this massive change in government policy, which all of us had opposed
up until the beginning of 2005, which was not to, as it were, put ourselves at the mercy
of this extraordinarily fluid system. And I think many of us understood the outcomes and the other
thing which I always found striking about Afghanistan. And I mean, this is a statement of the
terrible obvious. It was the geography when you fly over the place. You realize, you know,
the degree of isolation of every blinking valley pretty much. I mean, okay, there are main roads.
But, you know, there's no geographic cohesion because if you control this valley over here,
no one's going to come into it probably because of the shared difficulty of getting there. I mean,
this may sound completely stupid, but that's one of my enduring memories of the place.
You know, I saw quite a lot of it from from the air.
I just thought, God, it's impossible, you'll never achieve anything here.
I mean, John, you must have felt that even more strongly, given the amount of time you've been there.
You know, yes, absolutely. What you just said is exactly.
In fact, it's the first place I've ever been where I've given a different capacity.
I would have become a mammoth road builder because I hate road roads, and especially highways, right?
But I felt this is a country that needs lots of roads because, as you say, you go up a valley,
and it could be in the Northern Alliance territory, and there, you know, 108 hours from anywhere,
or 10 hours, and it was always 8, 10, 12, 15 hours.
You'll find some erasible old goat in a robe who's imposing his will on everyone.
And I found it many times in Northern Alliance, they were just as bad as the Taliban.
There was one old guy in Faizabad, the old capital in Tajik, in the Tajik part,
who was just a little tyrant. Those women who were there had to wear burkas.
It was all very, and I thought, boy, but to get to the capital would have required three days.
In fact, when we went from Kundus, it took us five days to get to Kabul.
So it's like a 19th century story. When we went from Kabul to Jalalabad, which you'll know is,
again, iconic in British history, it took, was it 17 hours?
Because the road in 50 years had, once upon a time, there was a paved road there, it was gone.
And it was murderous. We had to have three different tribal militias to get us through that space,
or else we would be attacked. That was in 2001.
Roads were essential, but I had a fascinating encounter again, and another part of
near the Pakistan border with an American colonel meeting with a guy, supposedly an ally,
but who he suspected was having his men attack, a road building project, the Americans,
at vast expense, were financing. And the subtext of the meeting was, if we hire you,
will you stop attacking the people? And this was now 2010, 2011, at which point,
you know, the war is lost at that point. This wasn't even a Taliban.
This was somebody of very fluid allegiances who would go with whoever, but ultimately,
what he wanted was power and money for himself and his clan, who were in that valley,
and he knew the Americans depended on his goodwill for him not to attack it. If they couldn't
pave it, they could never really control the past. And so there you were. As you absolutely,
it looks like the moon or Mars or a mashup of both when you fly over, I've got to say, it's extraordinary.
Just to pick up on that and Richard's point about the geography, earlier point I was making about,
just the sheer governability or ungovernability of Afghanistan, if you were lecturing on
counterinsurgency 101, the US military academy or anywhere, I mean, what are the lessons that you
would draw out? What are the do's and the don'ts to make these really forbidding environments
at least neutral? Well, I mean, first of all, and I think it goes beyond Afghanistan,
because one has seen this in a number of places and different ways is,
know what your mission is. You know, ring fence it against mission creep, despite the fact that you
may have a rotating door politically at the top that, you know, if it's a police action, make it a
police action, dress it up a little bit for every bullet you expend, expend two more on buying
the goodwill of the people. There was not enough done of that. I felt that there was a huge lag
between the bombing that got rid of the Taliban, you know, as such as it was, not that many people
were killed, so there's, and the lack of a Western presence in the beginning, believe it or not,
and this may sound stupid. The first thing I felt that the West should do was build playgrounds
everywhere. Why? Because the Taliban had banned child's play. There was nothing soft in their lives.
For children, there was nothing playful. It was all hard. It's rocks. It's tough. And if we had
done that for the people of Afghanistan, at almost an infinitesimal expense, you know, it's a little
bit cease to be DeMille maybe, but it can go a long way towards showing people that you care about
their spirit or something. And in a country like Afghanistan, I think that shows. For the rest of it,
they're okay. They want their children to be safe. They want their dignity preserved, as you know,
and this was key. You don't go around kicking outdoors and humiliating fathers in front of their
families. They will then hunt you down for the rest of their life. It goes way beyond logic
or self-preservation. It's about pride. In a prideful culture, you have to work differently.
Too often, and I speak most critically of the Americans, because they're my fellow, my compatriots,
and they were the preponderant force there. They didn't do enough of that, and they never have.
There was this kind of, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, very similar behavior to what we saw.
Admittedly, it was not total war as in Afghanistan. But the Gooks became Haji's. You know what I
mean? It was this kind of objectification of the locals who were seen as dirty rabble,
and very often treated as such. The Afghans, they're sort of all-knowing.
They know how they're being treated. They didn't appreciate the Soviets either. The Soviets
killed far more people than we did in Afghanistan, and they leveled the country outside of Kabul. I saw it.
And that got their blood up, and it never subsided after that for a lot of Afghans.
By 2011, I was in this combat-forward outpost, near the travel churches of Afghanistan,
right on the border in Afghanistan. I talked with this very young American captain in his 20s,
a good kid. He'd been as well-educated from the Northeast somewhere. He had about 25 soldiers
under his hour, and he was incredibly frustrated. We had a great conversation with Dan. I said,
"Is it true?" I think he'd even been to West Point, called the Los Angeles. And I said,
"Is it true that you don't need to know any words of Dady, the one language, or Pashtun,
the other Pashto?" And he said, "Well, no. No. About six months ago, they asked us, it was the
officer class, to try to learn 60 words before coming." That's ten years into the war. So,
there was a complete disassociation between the, you know, our warriors, our soldiers, and the
locals. And who do you depend on in those circumstances? Well, a kind of, you know, a thin
tranche of middle-class, educated people who serve you as interpreters, as intermediaries,
as warlords, as whatever it is, and in whom you put all your trust, but you're never really talking
to the people in the bush. And that is a huge mistake. I think we need to be more culturally aware,
and I think we need to be very conscious of the effect of our combatant presence and put money
immediately, immediately into, into hearts and minds, but not necessarily in nation-building.
I mentioned the playgrounds. It's just one thing. In a country without a swing set, you could,
in another country, it might be food. What would it be in Sudan today? You also have to arguably
kill your enemy, your actual enemy, and not confuse your, maybe the, you know, the camp followers,
with that enemy. The fact that we did not run to bin Laden and his corps to ground early
was a fatal mistake. And if diplomacy had gotten in the way, because we were dealing with two
Pakistan's, and one Pakistan was jihadist, and supporting the, you know, the jihadis, and the other
was, were the foreign ministry types that we dealt with, and even a portion of the military,
that was a problem we needed to deal with early on, and we didn't. What do you think we did achieve,
John? Was there, was there a legacy? I was talking to a senior British Army officer,
and I retired about this. He said, yeah, but, you know, there's, there's also a credit column
in this balance sheet. But what would you have had in yours? Sure, look, I'm not a catastrophist,
by any means. I think somewhat of a realist, I'm disappointed more than anything else in what the
West, with all of its virtues, did not achieve, especially the way it ended, you know, not following
the rules of war 101, you don't tell your enemy when you're going to leave the country, they just
wait you out, or leave enough, they're having invested so many lives, and so much, so much revenues,
or, and prestige over a period of time, you know, you make sure that you've left enough people in
place to vouch, save your, your prestige, the aura of invincibility that you have acquired over
decades, or as a superpower, you don't just give it away. And so, having said that,
the presence of the West in Afghanistan, especially in, in the capital, of course, which has,
you know, grown hugely, the country itself is now the average age is 18 and a half,
it's doubled its population and the time we were there. So the average 30-year-old in metropolitan
areas knows us, and we're aware of us, and what we were doing, and the ideas that we were bringing,
and the engagement will be done.
we gave them with the outside world.
We gave them different hopes and aspirations
to the ones that they only could have had beforehand.
- And will that, John?
Will that influence the course of politics in Afghanistan?
Will that eventually marginalize, dilute the Taliban
or are they there for good now?
- I don't think it's an either or exactly.
I think we're already seeing to your first question, yes.
We see this in the insistence of, at least hundreds of thousands,
maybe it's millions of young women persisting
in going to these secret schools and getting an education.
Clearly that's also the case for the boys
and we don't know them as well.
We don't know them, but clearly that's the case.
So there's a kind of shadow of Afghanistan.
We're not fully seeing, but it's there.
And it's determined to learn and be part of the world.
And then you have a sense that the Taliban
is not monolithic, we're aware that there's at least two factions.
The one in Kandahar, Akwan Sada, the Supreme Leader of Re,
I would say a scurrentist, the one who's decreeing again
and again the repression of women in society generally.
And then the Hakani network, curiously,
it's the evolution of the al-Qaeda linked jihadis
who are mostly in control of Kabul
and who seem to be looking the other way
at the secret schools of girls
and who have let it be known that they would seek
a more moderate form of Islamic society
than the one coming out of the Supreme Leader's decrees.
Will this eventually lead to some kind of fraca
between them maybe?
It usually does in Afghanistan.
For the moment, however, they've said they're not willing
to go to civil war.
They're still trying to consolidate power.
So I think we're seeing what there is for the time being.
This ongoing argument now about policy with regard
to Afghanistan, do we isolate them?
Do we, in particular, over the issue
of the suppression of women's education,
the treatment of women generally?
Or there seems to be a growing dialogue
that actually it might be better to engage
and to have not necessarily full diplomatic relations,
but some sort of dialogue which might take the relationship
and indeed eventually the country forward.
And you've expressed that division
between the Kandahar, Mujahideen and Haqqani,
which is quite a split if one tries
to sort of analyze the difference between the two.
Do you favor less isolation of the regime?
I do not because I have any illusions
about Haqqani or his people particularly.
But I've come to understand that people do evolve
and it's possible that some in that leadership have evolved.
And it's a Haqqani leadership clearly not in the other.
And that they have a cany recognition
of the altered demographics of their country
after 30 years of war.
Having come back to the Capitol,
they let their fighters have smartphones.
The graven image no longer is such an issue.
That shows a certain evolution and sort of messaging
that's coming out of Haqqani in particular
is that we need to engage, we want to engage.
So I think what happens here is that eventually,
now that we have such a transactional president in the United States,
assuming he can be diverted from his other enterprises,
perhaps an interest in the rare earth of Afghanistan,
a sense of unease that China may be beating him to it,
to the mining sector or something along those lines,
is the most likely, probably, in the sounds of it cynical,
but the most likely impetus for engagement by the United States.
I would hope that it would be more holistic
and people would remember that, by the way,
when we all turned our backs on Afghanistan in the 90s,
look what happened.
Afghanistan is a place where wars germinate.
This happens there.
They always have.
And it's wise to be aware of and engage with Afghanistan.
And the people that are still alive whom we know the best,
people like Karzai or others, are also saying this.
It doesn't mean that we have to necessarily remove sanction.
I'm not saying that or give them money.
There has to be some quid pro quo here.
But there should at least be an intelligent conversation
taking place as there should be with any country.
God forbid, I would hope that we could find someone like that
to talk with, and not necessarily through Donald Trump
in North Korea, in any country
where the potential for real conflict down the road
lies without that attempted engagement, right?
I think so.
- John, thank you so much for your reflections,
your experience, your wisdom today.
I'm going to ask you now the final question,
which we ask all our guests.
And it does pick up on Richard's last question,
which is what is the one decision
that you're going to be watching on Afghanistan?
And that decision could be taken in DC,
in Islamabad or in Kabul or anywhere.
What's your one decision?
- I will be watching for one decision, okay.
'Cause I could say, well, I would await,
but I think for a long, long time
for Pakistan to stop using strategic depth,
IE state terrorism as its foreign policy with its neighbors.
But since we're talking about the bigger picture,
my one decision would be,
I think what I just was trying to sum up,
which is that I think that the West
in its, through a group of its most intelligent
and patient people begin to engage Afghanistan
in the discussion, which could lead eventually
to a more moderate society
and a re-engagement of that country
with the rest of the world.
- John Leanderson, thank you very much.
It's been a pleasure having you as a guest.
Thank you.
- Thank you so much, enjoyed it.
- Richard, I did find that a very thoughtful conversation,
somebody who's been watching Afghanistan for so long
and from so many different angles.
I tried very hard to stay optimistic
about Afghanistan, but it isn't easy, is it?
- No, I wonder what did you take away from that?
- Well, I guess his emphasis on the sheer complexity
of what you're dealing with Afghanistan,
the point I made about geography
is almost expressed politically as well.
And I think the thing I felt was extremely striking
in his analysis was that, you know, basically,
you buy and organize your competencies with their expectation
that they have durability.
And it just took me back to a conversation
at the beginning of the sort of crisis in Afghanistan.
And we had a meeting, I was a prime minister,
I think, with Tony Brown some military,
and we were talking about, you know,
taking one of the northern towns in Afghanistan
and that a military was saying, "Over and take 100,000 soldiers."
I said, for goodness sake, that's complete rubbish.
It'll take six briefcases of cash.
It looked absolutely staggered.
And I said, you don't take things militarily
in Afghanistan.
You organize relationships and alliances.
And the question then is, how long do they last?
And, you know, what, you know,
you're standing on this continuously shifting tribal ground.
And I thought he brought that up brilliantly.
- Yeah.
- The other thing I think, which was important
that he said towards the end,
was how war 30 years of warfare
had altered the country's demographics
and altered the country's attitudes.
And that actually, the Western occupation,
although it appeared to have evaporated quickly,
hadn't evaporated at all, you know,
it's left significant seeds implanted,
particularly in, let's say,
the more urban populations around Kabul,
which are having an impact and will have a result.
And then the other thing, of course,
is he did emphasize this division
between a more moderate Taliban,
which we know exists in the hardliners in Kandahar.
And the fact that out of this would probably come some crisis
eventually and the point he made about these things
in Afghanistan usually do come to a crisis,
I think is quite right.
So I don't think you could have heard
a more sophisticated analysis of the country.
The one thing we didn't really get into discussion about,
but maybe at a later date we can
is what actually happened in the relationship
between the Pakistani military and the Taliban
and why they're now essentially fighting each other
over the southern border.
- Yeah, I think that would be an interesting conversation
if not an episode, because Afghanistan
is such a huge part of Pakistan.
not just their strategic thinking as John noted, but also pushdune-pachdune identity overlap.
I was going to say that pushdune is Stan and the pushdune identity, I think it's a really
important part, which we didn't really get into, but I think you can only, you know, maybe
one should think about talking about Afghanistan in two or three parts, and this was a great
introduction. It was, I'm truly comprehensive overview. I thought a lot of his comments were
quite heartfelt, not just about Afghanistan, but also what he'd seen of US military
miscalculations. Something that I mean, one slightly irreverent thought it sparked in me was how
everyone Afghanistan navigates by the bones of their prejudices as it were. You were talking
about geography, which I can remember immediately after, I'm usually after 9/11, and the first
deployments were made, and everyone was trying to find maps of Afghanistan. The only ones
available were in Russian, because the ones that, you know, the Russians were the last people in
there. The second thought, the texture that I thought John brought out was how there are always,
there are multiplicity of agendas running. Does every warlord, as he put it, every guy who controls
an inaccessible valley has got an agenda of some sort, and the trick, which is a hugely difficult
one for Afghans alone for outsiders is to somehow reach enough accommodations between all these
agendas to move forward on the crying development needs. He described Afghanistan as
being free industrial in levels of poverty and deprivation, and, you know, it still is.
That point you made at the end, too, about Afghan rare earth is interesting, because Appendican
did have a paper which I was sent to read. This is after I retired, about the possibility of
the West pumping lots of money into mining rare earths in Afghanistan, and that it could transform
certain areas of the country and give them economic prospects, which they could any dream of.
So that isn't, you know, sort of shimmer, right? It is quite a serious proposition,
and maybe it's something we'll see reappear in the future.
Well, let's hope so for Afghanistan, it's almost impossible taking the historical perspective,
which is perhaps slightly longer for British officials and soldiers, anybody else to be optimistic,
but we should try to be so under difficult circumstances.
Well, I think that's all for this episode. Please do join us every Thursday for new episodes.
Subscribe to One Decision on YouTube, so you never miss out on a conversation, and leave us
comment, too. You can email us at
[email protected], and check out OneDecision.com for commentaries,
explainers, and early episodes that you might have missed. I'm John Ray. Thank you for listening.
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