Hosted by John Raine and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson is an American war correspondent, biographer, and staff writer at The New Yorker. He has covered conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia, and reported frequently from Latin America and the Caribbean.
He is the author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997); while researching the book in Bolivia, he located Guevara's hidden burial site, leading to the exhumation of the remains and their return to Cuba. His other books include The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, and The Fall of Baghdad, plus two co-authored with his brother Scott Anderson. His most recent is To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, which gathers his Afghanistan reporting from the late 1980s through the Taliban's 2021 return.
He has profiled Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Gabriel García Márquez, and received a Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2013 for reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean, along with an Overseas Press Club honor. He has also written on Saddam Hussein and Spain's King Juan Carlos I, and consulted on Steven Soderbergh's 2008 film Che.
Episode Summary
August marked five years since the US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan after a twenty year stint in the country. But was this ever a winnable war in the first place? Author and war correspondent for The New Yorker war Jon Lee Anderson joins former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove and guest co-host John Raine this week to explain that even a few years into the war there were signs of a Taliban resurgence that foreshadowed things to come. Anderson discusses why it was a strategic failure to not support former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai in nation building, and how that blunder facilitated both the return of opium production and the Taliban comeback. He also talks about what happened to the Northern Alliance, the complexities of Afghan allegiance and loyalties, lessons in counterinsurgency, the importance of winning the hearts and minds of a people, and what diplomatic relations with Afghanistan could look like even under continued Taliban rule.
In this episode:
(00:00) Ceding an Aura of Invincibility
(03:15) Was Afghanistan Ever a Winnable War?
(07:26) Karzai and State Building
(11:12) Opium Production and Taliban
(18:43) Shadow Taliban Government
(27:09) What Happened to the Northern Alliance?
(33:39) Navigating US-Afghani Cultural Differences
(39:14) Afghanistan’s Geography
(42:45) Lessons in Counterinsurgency
(48:26) Legacy of Afghanistan War
(50:09) Persistence of Taliban Government
(51:58) Diplomatic Relations with Taliban
(55:28) One Decision: The West Must Engage Afghanistan
(56:41) Takeaways and Wrap Up
Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and guest co-host John Raine (International Institute for Strategic Studies)
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
[00:00] ANDERSON: Disappointed more than anything else in what the West, with all of its virtues, did not achieve. Not following the rules of war 101 — 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 vouchsafe your prestige. The aura of invincibility that you have acquired over decades as a superpower, you don't just give it away.
INTRODUCTION AND GUEST INTRODUCTION
[00:26] RAINE: Hello and welcome to One Decision — conversations about intelligence, statecraft, 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 Raine, formerly of the UK's diplomatic service.
[00:45] DEARLOVE: And I'm Sir Richard Dearlove, former Chief of MI6. And it's good to be with you, John, again to discuss another anniversary or important topic.
[00:58] RAINE: Great to see you too, 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 transporter 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 fully to conquer, and to control? And why has it been also so hard for Afghan governments 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 Jon Lee Anderson, a war correspondent for the New Yorker. Jon has covered Afghanistan since the Soviet retreat of the late 1980s. He's drunk tea with legendary Mujahideen 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 forlorn. Jon's latest book, To Lose a War, collects years of dispatches from the country. Jon, welcome to One Decision.
Jon, 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?
DID YOU EVER THINK THE WEST COULD WIN?
[03:58] ANDERSON: 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 kind of grand historical epic. This was this incredible, horrific event in the United States, the 9/11 attacks. They were coming to Afghanistan to punish and bring to book 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 and the 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.
Initially it was about rolling back the physical positions of the Taliban and their allies. And then 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, MI6 or 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 Tora Bora was the last stand. And of course that ended inconclusively.
HOW THE TALIBAN MELTED AWAY — AND RETURNED
[06:20] ANDERSON: And arguably with a loss for the West, because Bin Laden wasn't brought to book. And so 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. I followed up the assassination of Massoud 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. There were a lot of pragmatic alliances going on. I felt that, and for the first time I noticed 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 the thought was there. And then the drumbeats 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, the gray war, the one over there. The Taliban were gone. It was just a matter of catching Bin Laden. And when I returned in 2005, the Taliban were ascendant again in the provinces. It wasn't until 2010 or 2011, 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 the Taliban would inevitably come back to power and said so.
[08:02] RAINE: Yeah. And Jon, 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 Bonn Conference and the optimism there was around restructuring the state of Afghanistan — do you think we should have included the Taliban?
KARZAI, KHALILZAD, AND THE LOST OPPORTUNITY
[08:37] ANDERSON: I'm not sure. I don't know. I think that if I would were to assign criticism to what 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 — and who was desperate to be given the freedom to show that he was the true sovereign power of the country. He desperately needed that and was never given it. Certainly not by the Americans, whom I saw in close proximity with him. And this was something I came away with from 2005, just as the Taliban were beginning to reassert themselves. I spent some time around Karzai and around Khalilzad, who was the American viceroy, Afghan-born viceroy of Afghanistan, later of Iraq. And I felt that Karzai was not being given enough leeway.
I attended many of these Diwans, 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 were 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 that in some cases the Taliban were coming back. And 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.
[10:45] ANDERSON: 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. And as Karzai himself began to try to reach out to the Taliban, realizing that he hadn't obtained deals that would stick in various places and with certain warlords that the Americans had essentially bought or put in their pocket — I feel that there was a chance to have become much more assertive early on, 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, Jirga-based government to its own devices, and then to have left. I think that by 2005 I began to see that there were chinks in the armor, and we never really regained the initiative after a certain point.
[12:05] RAINE: Yeah. That's —
[12:07] DEARLOVE: Fascinating. Because my direct association with Afghanistan, with Karzai, goes back to pre- and post-9/11, that early period. And what I would say — and I'd be very interested in your comments — is that 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. And obviously, when Bin Laden did a run-up from Sudan to Afghanistan, that aspect of ungoverned space became very much our predominant concern. 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 podcasts and I really have never gotten my head around why that change of attitude took place. Can you explain that?
THE DRUG TRADE — WHEN CIA SAID BACK OFF
[13:46] ANDERSON: I wish I knew exactly that there was a moment in the room, you know, the Bonn 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 a kind of stumbling forward. And of course we do have a system — speaking of the United States — in which there are presidential changes every few years and so on. But my understanding, since you mentioned drugs — and you know, correct me if you have a different view, but my understanding is that despite their appalling behavior, the Taliban nonetheless at a certain point decided to rein in the opium production in Afghanistan. And in the same year that they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, 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 or 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 had been on every side for the previous 30 years, but nonetheless 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 and 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 it — the drugs were coming back. It was clear that it was happening under our aegis. There was that interagency dispute which has occurred in so many places over the years between CIA national security and the DEA anti-drugs people, and the CIA won. They basically said, back off. And the drug lords — i.e. our allies, warlords who were also dealing drugs — went for it and were allowed to go for it.
[16:21] DEARLOVE: We specifically disagreed with CIA on that issue. 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 stop. We had local militias who were eradicating the poppy fields.
THE NARCO MANSIONS OF KABUL
[16:41] ANDERSON: By 2005, and I do remember that breach, somehow it became known without being very literal. By 2005 there was that new neighborhood next to Sharinaw in Kabul — which you'll remember, it was the only residential neighborhood as such in Kabul — 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 palaces. 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. And they were, just as you'd expect, very ostentatious, with flying entrances and balconies everywhere and chromed glass. And by 2007 the Americans had decided, which you'll remember, that they needed to rein this in. And so I found myself involved — through a person I knew, a former DEA agent — drawn into the first anti-narcotics mission, which the Americans had, of course, having privatized everything, handed over at great expense to DynCorp, which is, you know, an extension of the Pentagon, for $10 billion. And I joined the first narcotics eradication mission in Uruzgan, as you know, right next to the Taliban heartland. Long story short, it was a complete disaster. We were ambushed repeatedly. The special forces were brought in to sort of save us. Several people died. The mission was called off. The point of this whole little anecdote is that it was clear that our own allies ambushed us.
[18:41] ANDERSON: We visited the governor of the province who was supposedly pro-government, and it was within minutes of leaving his office that we were first ambushed. And 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 private, you know, counterinsurgency effort. It was billed as an anti-Taliban thing. It wasn't. It was 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 derrieres about it.
In the course of this — in fact I think it was the night before the mission — the head of the mission, a 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 in the north from several years previously, not well. And I said, well, I know him but not well. And he 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 was rather typical, I found, 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.
WHAT THE US OFFICERS DIDN'T KNOW
[20:28] RAINE: Jon, you had exposure to the US military in quite an 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 talking 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 and the situation, and then seeing the way it was being dealt with by officials and military and contractors. Because I have to say, some of the bits of your book that really brought it to life for me were those conversations that you had with fellow Americans — that mix of determination to do the right thing, but a kind of cultural bewilderment at what was going on. You must have felt —
[21:23] ANDERSON: Yes. I did, because I had a similar experience in Iraq, actually. Although I didn't know the country as well as I did Afghanistan, 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 under allied cover. But I developed a sense of how Afghans — or at least, broad brushstrokes — how they were, with their codes, their sense of honor, all that stuff. How they behave in war. And when I returned initially, I felt that I wanted to replicate that sort of feeling, that sense of freedom. From the very beginning, even behind anti-Taliban lines, I had 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 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, 2006, 2007, it had become so dangerous to be a Westerner — you'd be kidnapped and held or worse, 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.
[23:26] ANDERSON: So in one experience I had in 2010 in Maiwand — of course, the iconic battlefield for the British from the 19th century, and as it turned out exactly the same place I had been in late 1980, early 1989, with a Mujahideen commander since killed — there was this battlefield space. The Americans had just taken over from the Canadians. They would do a year and then the Americans came. And I stayed at a fortress where there was an American commander, well-meaning — he wanted to do the right thing. Privately, he wondered how much he was going to 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 among the Afghans and were to be given compensation. There were about ten men in the room, and it included the local Afghan army commander, the intelligence chief, the local Afghan-American Allied intelligence man, and the American commander who spoke — held forth. It was a bit G.I. Joe, you know. He was a bit like American values, this is what freedom — all this stuff. And you'd see these old men with beards just kind of nodding and being inscrutable.
[25:37] ANDERSON: 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 — reasserted themselves everywhere. And I was wondering, is there a shadow Taliban government here? In the case of 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 further away? And the answers were rather pat. There was some apology, but nothing too profuse. And then the intelligence man had this big wad of money that he was using to hand out to these men.
In the course of these several hours, I kept watching the intelligence man. They were called NDS — National Directorate of Security, I think it was. And I thought, if there's a shadow Taliban guy in the room, 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, not well at all. I said, well, what do you mean? He says, well, you know, we've 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? A year. He said, did they give you a dossier? Did they brief you? 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 fortress, a couple of guys showed up in a pickup truck one evening. They were special forces, or maybe CIA. They wore beards like the Taliban, they were dressed like the Taliban, but they were clearly American. And they went into an adjacent space.
[27:56] ANDERSON: 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 the 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 — the good G.I. Joes, the clean-cut ones 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. It was the very thing that caused the breach with Karzai and 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 nobody owned up to, that was doing all kinds of things. And there was a two-facedness to the war in that sense. Added to which you had NATO allies — volunteer armies — and then you had contractors, never fully on the books, and then you had the paramilitaries. Complicated.
[29:33] RAINE: Too many people, too many agendas. You do bring that up very clearly in the book. Richard, I think you had a question back.
THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE — WHO BETRAYED MASSOUD?
[29:40] DEARLOVE: Yeah, my question is really pretty straightforward. I think the answer is 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 create a reasonably efficient military force, but they would have their own clout and influence within Afghan society. And I do understand the tribal compositions and the differences between what mainly constituted the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. But the Northern Alliance, having been invested with this hope — and that of course goes back to Massoud and before — just seemed to evaporate and disappear. Did you think that they would ever achieve anything and be a reliable partner?
[30:42] ANDERSON: It was the ever-shrinking territory in the run-up to 9/11, wasn't it? I mean they went from controlling the gates of Kabul, essentially at Charikar, just across the Shomali Plains at the foothills of the Hindu Kush, to being practically in the Wakhan Corridor there next to Tajikistan by the time 9/11 happened.
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 Massoud had been assassinated. And it became clearer and clearer to me that within the Northern Alliance there were traitors. There were people working for the other side. My conclusion in the end was that Abdul Rasul Sayaf — who essentially held the doorway to the Hindu Kush, to the Northern Alliance territory — was that man. Who was he? You'll know of him well. Along with Haqqani back in the day, these were the most virulently anti-Western, xenophobic jihadist leaders of the anti-Soviet war. And Sayaf had been a mentor for Bin Laden, openly, along with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. A jihadi group in the Philippines had even named themselves after him. Strangely, when the Taliban took Kabul, Sayaf — after that horrible civil war in Kabul in which everyone was killing everybody — somehow moved into Massoud's space and was an ally of his, despite the fact that he was much more Islamist and had come out of this hard-line part of the insurgency. When they escaped to the north when the Taliban took Kabul, Sayaf went with them.
[33:02] ANDERSON: And he then controlled essentially the front door. When in 2001 these al-Qaeda terrorists planning to kill Massoud arrived in Kabul, posing as journalists, wanting to make their way into Northern Alliance territory, it was Sayaf who let them in. And I had several encounters with him which became increasingly acrimonious. He was suspicious of me and hostile eventually. He denied having anything to do with Massoud'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 him to let them through.
A friend from Bosnia can only have been a jihadi anyway. So I never believed Sayaf. And his behavior became more hostile towards me. Did al-Qaeda get to Sayaf 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, Massoud? I would think so. But lo and behold, Sayaf remained in place after 9/11. Where did I go to find Sayaf? In Paghman, the old royal hill retreat just outside of Kabul. He was not friendly, his men were not friendly, and people were killed along the access road between there and Kabul. But he's even now in the mix in Afghanistan. He's always managed to be part of the Greater Alliance.
SAYAF AND THE CHANGING ALLEGIANCES
[35:01] ANDERSON: The Western intelligence agencies and security forces made certain calculations when it came to Sayaf — that they decided he was better to have on side, whatever he may have done, than not. I even had approaches from people in Britain about Sayaf, and they basically expressed a similar view towards him at one point. So there was a kind of toxic mix. I even had questions about some other people, including Fahim and Bismillah Khan — these are other Massoud allies who then became ascendant, in some cases extremely rich, like Marshal Fahim, after 9/11, under our custodial jurisdiction — but whom I think we either knew or suspected things about and 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 Massoud, which took place two days before 9/11, was all clearly part of a plan. They probably didn't know when they would kill Massoud. And the people that were going to kill Massoud probably didn't know exactly when 9/11 would happen. But it was all part of a plan to wipe them out. And 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.
[36:51] RAINE: Jon, could I just pick up on that? Because it raises this very interesting area of culturally rooted concepts around loyalty and allegiance. And you touched on this a number of times — Americans very ready in some cases to foreground American values, and then other concepts that we might readily understand, loyalty being one, don't translate. So is there a genuine cultural difference there? Do you have anecdotes and experiences that illustrate that there were just two totally different, not just vocabularies, but codes in play here? And that for us to expect — as you've illustrated in your discussion around Sayaf and others — loyalty, that you will be on our side, badged as one of us — was somehow 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 —
ON LOYALTY AND TREACHERY — WHAT MACHIAVELLI UNDERSTOOD
[37:55] ANDERSON: That's more or less true. Yeah. And I know this sounds very — it could easily sound like a criticism of the nature of the Afghan. And I wouldn't want to fall into easy stereotypes. But a few years ago I was asked — you know, the copyright of these books comes around and I was asked to write an introduction to Machiavelli's The Prince, which I'd read as a teenager, so I read it again.
And there was one city-state warlord that Machiavelli was particularly praising — a guy who betrayed everyone and became ascendant. And I realized 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. 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 pay due homage to these people.
And this is the kind of thing I felt I saw a lot of times in Afghanistan. In the battle for Kunduz, 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 — and there's shooting back and forth, there are skirmishes around, and there are American B-52 bombers circling and dropping big bombs in the distance. And in the middle of all of that, one day, about 300 Taliban, black-clad, come barreling across to this side. And 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.
[40:17] ANDERSON: But 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. We developed a kind of wariness around the people we were in battles with, as observers. The same night that happened, a Swedish colleague was murdered. And 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 where the real enemy lay in some cases. Certain of our commanders, certain of our intelligence people came to know this and decided to just go with it. In other cases they tried to circumvent them, knowing that they couldn't trust this or that ally.
[41:42] RAINE: Jon, that really resonates. I'm sure it does with Richard. I was serving in Pakistan between 2006 and 2009, where 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.
[42:04] DEARLOVE: Yeah, I think you put your finger on one of the central issues. You never were quite sure who you were dealing with and what their allegiances were — maybe what their allegiances were going to be. It was a drifting, variable situation. And this is why I was so shocked when I had retired 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. The other thing which I always found striking about Afghanistan — and this is a statement of the terrible obvious — was the geography. When you fly over the place you realize —
THE GEOGRAPHY PROBLEM
[43:08] DEARLOVE: the degree of isolation of every valley, pretty much. I mean, okay, there are main roads, but 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 sheer difficulty of getting there. I mean, this may sound completely stupid, but that's one of my enduring memories of the place. And I saw quite a lot of it from the air. I just thought, God, it's impossible. You'll never achieve anything here. Jon, you must have felt that even more strongly given the amount of time you've been there.
[43:52] ANDERSON: Yes, absolutely. What you just said is exactly right. It's in fact the first place I've ever been where, given a different capacity, I would have become a mammoth road builder — because I hate roads and especially highways. 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 it was always eight, ten, 12, 15 hours, and you'll find some irascible old man 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 the Tajik part, who was just a little tyrant. And those women there had to wear burkas. And to get to the capital would have required three days. In fact, when we went from Kunduz, it took us five days to get to Kabul. When we went from Kabul to Jalalabad — which, as you know, is very iconic in British history — it took 17 hours. Because the road in 50 years, 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. So roads were essential.
But I had a fascinating encounter in another part 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 were financing at vast expense.
[45:47] ANDERSON: 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 the war is lost. This wasn't even a Taliban. This was somebody of very fluid allegiances — he 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 not to attack the road. And if they couldn't pave it, they could never really control the pass.
And so there you were. It looks like the moon or Mars or a mashup of both when you fly over Afghanistan. It's extraordinary. Very difficult.
LESSONS IN COUNTERINSURGENCY
[46:40] RAINE: Just to pick up on that and Richard's point about the geography and governability — or ungovernability — of Afghanistan. If you were lecturing on counterinsurgency 101 at the US Military Academy or anywhere, what are the lessons that you would draw out? What are the dos and don'ts to make these really forbidding environments at least neutral?
[47:10] ANDERSON: Well, first of all — and I think it goes beyond Afghanistan because one has seen this in a number of places in different ways — is know what your mission is. Ring-fence it against mission creep, despite the fact that you may have a rotating door politically at the top. If it's a police action, make it a police action. And for every bullet you expend, expend two more on buying the goodwill of the people. There was not enough done of that. I felt there was a huge lag between the bombing that got rid of the Taliban, such as it was — not that many civilians were killed — and the lack of a Western presence in the beginning.
Believe it or not, and this may sound naive, the first thing I felt that the West should do was build playgrounds everywhere. Why? Because the Taliban had banned children's play, and there was nothing soft in people's 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 infinitesimal expense — yes, it's a little bit soft, maybe — but it can go a long way towards showing people that you care about their spirit. 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. And this was key. You don't go around kicking in doors 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.
ON CULTURE AND DIGNITY
[49:09] ANDERSON: And too often — and I speak most critically of the Americans, because they're 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: the gooks became Hajjis. It was this objectification of the locals who were seen as dirty rabble and very often treated as such. And 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 a combat forward outpost near the tribal territories of Afghanistan, right on the border. I talked with a very young American captain in his twenties, a good kid. He was well-educated, from the Northeast somewhere. He had about 25 soldiers under his command and was incredibly frustrated. We had a great conversation one day and I said, is it true that you don't need to know any words of Dari, the one language, or Pashto, the other? And he said, well, no. About six months ago they asked us — I think 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 our soldiers and the locals. And who do you depend on in those circumstances? A thin tranche of middle-class, educated people who serve you as interpreters, 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.
[51:32] ANDERSON: I think we need to be more culturally aware, and we need to be very conscious of the effect of our combative presence and put money immediately into hearts and minds, but not necessarily nation-building. I mentioned the playgrounds. It's just one thing. In a country without a swing set — in another country it might be food. What would it be in Sudan today?
You also have to arguably kill your actual enemy, and not confuse the camp followers with that enemy. The fact that we did not run Bin Laden and his core to ground early was a fatal mistake. And if diplomacy had gotten in the way because we were dealing with two Pakistans — one Pakistan was jihadist and supporting the jihadis, and the other 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 DID THE WEST ACTUALLY ACHIEVE?
[52:52] RAINE: What do you think we did achieve, Jon? Was there a legacy? I was talking to a senior British Army officer, now retired, about this. He said, yeah, but there's also a credit column in this balance sheet. What would you add in yours?
[53:12] ANDERSON: 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. 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, right? Or you leave enough there, having invested so many lives and so much revenue and prestige over a period of time — you make sure that you've left enough people in place to vouchsafe your prestige. The aura of invincibility that you have acquired over decades as a superpower, you don't just give it away.
And so having said that, the presence of the West in Afghanistan, especially in the capital, which has grown hugely — the country itself, the average age is 18 and a half, it's doubled its population in the time we were there — so the average 30-year-old in metropolitan areas knows us and was aware of us and what we were doing and the ideas that we were bringing and the engagement we gave them with the outside world. We gave them different hopes and aspirations to the ones they could only have had beforehand.
[54:42] RAINE: And will that, Jon — will that influence the course of politics in Afghanistan? Will that eventually marginalize or dilute the Taliban? Or are they gone for good?
[54:57] ANDERSON: 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 millions, of young women persisting in going to these secret schools, getting an education. Clearly that's also the case for the boys — we don't know them as well, but clearly that's the case. So there's a kind of shadow 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 are at least two factions. The one in Kandahar, Akhundzada — the Supreme Leader — very, I would say, obscurantist, the one who's decreeing again and again the repression of women in society generally. And then the Haqqani network — curiously, 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 fracas 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 we're seeing what there is for the time being.
SHOULD THE WEST ENGAGE THE TALIBAN?
[56:38] DEARLOVE: This ongoing argument now about policy with regard to Afghanistan — do we isolate them? Do we, in particular on the issue of the suppression of women's education and treatment of women generally? 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 Haqqani and the others, which is quite a split if one tries to analyze the difference between the two. Would you favor less isolation of the regime?
[57:31] ANDERSON: 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, say, the Haqqani leadership. Clearly not in the other. And they have a canny recognition of the altered demographics of their country after 30 years of war. Having come back to the capital, they let their fighters have smartphones. The graven image no longer is such an issue. That shows a certain evolution. And the messaging coming out of Haqqani in particular — who controls the intelligence and security services — 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 earths of Afghanistan, a sense of unease that China may be beating him to the mining sector or something along those lines, is the most likely impetus for engagement by the United States. I would hope that it would be more holistic, and people would remember that when we all turned our backs on Afghanistan in the '90s, look what happened. Afghanistan is a place where wars germinate. They always have. And it's wise to be aware of and engage with Afghanistan. The people that are still alive whom we know best — people like Karzai or others — are also saying this. So it doesn't mean we have to necessarily remove sanctions; I'm not saying that or give them money. There has to be some quid pro quo here.
[59:52] ANDERSON: But there should at least be an intelligent conversation taking place, as there should be with any country. I would hope that we could find someone to talk with — and not necessarily through Donald Trump, as in North Korea — in any country where the potential for real conflict down the road lies without that attempted engagement. I think so.
ONE DECISION TO WATCH
[01:00:22] RAINE: Jon, 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 — what is the one decision that you're going to be watching on Afghanistan? And that decision could be taken in DC, in Islamabad, in Kabul, or anywhere. What's your one decision?
[01:00:51] ANDERSON: It has to be one decision, okay. Because I could say, well, I would wait, and would wait for a long, long time, for Pakistan to stop using strategic depth — i.e. state terrorism — as its foreign policy with its neighbors. But since we're talking about the bigger picture, my one decision would be what I just was trying to sum up, which is that I think the West, through a group of its most intelligent and patient people, should begin to engage Afghanistan in a discussion which could lead eventually to a more moderate society and a re-engagement of that country with the rest of the world.
[01:01:41] RAINE: Jon Lee Anderson, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure having you as a guest. Thank you.
[01:01:46] ANDERSON: Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
POST-INTERVIEW DISCUSSION
[01:01:49] RAINE: 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? I wonder what did you take away from that?
[01:02:11] DEARLOVE: Well, I guess his emphasis on the sheer complexity of what you're dealing with in 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 allegiances, and their expectation that they have durability just doesn't hold.
It just took me back to a conversation at the beginning of the sort of crisis in Afghanistan. We had a meeting with the Prime Minister — I think with Tony Blair — and some military, and we were talking about taking one of the northern towns in Afghanistan. And the military was saying, we'll take 100,000 soldiers. I said, for goodness' sake, that's complete rubbish. It'll take six briefcases of cash. I was absolutely staggered. 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. You're standing on this continuously shifting tribal ground. And I thought he brought that up brilliantly.
The other thing I think which was important that he said towards the end was how 30 years of warfare had altered the country's demographics and the country's attitudes. And that actually the Western occupation, although it appeared to have evaporated quickly, hadn't evaporated at all. It's left significant seeds implanted, particularly in the more urban populations around Kabul, which are having an impact and will have a result.
[01:04:24] DEARLOVE: And then the other thing of course is he did emphasize this division between a more moderate Taliban — which we know exists — and 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 coming 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.
[01:05:12] RAINE: Yeah. I think that would be an interesting conversation — if not an episode — because Afghanistan is such a huge part of Pakistan's history, not just their strategic thinking, as Jon noted, but also Pashtun identity and overlap.
[01:05:32] DEARLOVE: The Pashtun identity and Pashtunistan is a really important part which we didn't really get into. I think one should think about talking about Afghanistan in two or three parts. And this was a great introduction.
[01:05:49] RAINE: Yeah, it was a truly comprehensive overview. And I thought a lot of his comments were quite heartfelt — not just about Afghanistan, but also what he'd seen of US military miscalculations. One slightly irreverent thought it sparked in me was how everyone in Afghanistan navigates by the bones of their predecessors, as it were. You were talking about geography, Richard. I can remember immediately after 9/11, when the first deployments were made and everyone was trying to find maps of Afghanistan — the only ones available were in Russian, because the Russians were the last people in there.
But the texture that I thought Jon brought out was how there are always a multiplicity of agendas running. 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, let alone outsiders, is to somehow reach enough accommodations between all these agendas to move forward on the crying development needs. He described Afghanistan in his book as pre-industrial. It still is.
[01:07:16] DEARLOVE: That point you made at the end too about Afghan rare earths is interesting, because the Pentagon 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 only dream of. That isn't just a shimmer. It is quite a serious proposition, and maybe it's something we'll see reappear in the future.
[01:08:03] RAINE: 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 than 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 a comment too. You can email us at hello@onedecision.com, and check out onedecision.com for commentaries, explainers, and earlier episodes that you might have missed. I'm John Raine. Thank you for listening.
