What Happened in Afghanistan?

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0:00:07.3 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:08.0 Aaron Ross Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:11.0 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Sahar Khan, a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Defense and Foreign Policy Department. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Sahar.

0:00:17.4 Sahar Kahn: Thank you for having me.

0:00:19.2 Trevor Burrus: Now, the war in Afghanistan is purportedly over. We can talk about whether or not it actually is, but it’s purportedly over and for 20 years, we’ve been involved in that country, and everyone pretty much knows that 9/11 was sort of the galvanizing force there, but to set the stage for what more recently has happened, what did we believe about Afghanistan when we went into Afghanistan originally? And what were our purported goals, at least for going into the country?

0:00:54.2 Sahar Kahn: So I think they’re basically three myths that are around Afghanistan or what we thought what would happen. The first myth was that we will be able to get control of the country quite easily and maintain control of the country. Now, this is partly a myth because we were able to get control of the country and topple the Taliban and dismantle Al-​Qaeda quite quickly. We went in November 2001 and basically within a few weeks it was over. The Taliban were toppled and all the other key players were scurrying around. So that’s partly true, but the myth was that we could maintain control over Afghanistan, that it would somehow become this US ally, US partner, almost like a colony. I think a lot of people hesitate using that word, but I think that was the idea. And because the US operation in Afghanistan went so well, the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq, because why not? So that launched us into another war, which of course has been a complete disaster and killed millions of people and displaced even more. So that’s the first myth around Afghanistan.

0:02:08.3 Sahar Kahn: The second myth was, that we could create a democracy in Afghanistan, and I think for all of us who pay attention to these things, especially for those scholars who study democratic processes, I think it’s fair to say that democratic processes are more grassroots level, they’re more of a bottom-​up approach rather than a top-​down approach. It helps when there are some friendly policies at the top who are more democratically friendly, but for the most part, democracy, freedom, equality, these happen or start at least at the grassroots level. And I think the US just thought that if the Taliban are gone somehow they could help, they could install a government there that would be US friendly, which they did, but that also it would be a democracy, and it would be a democracy in the way that would be friendly towards the US. Of course, this was based on no empirical facts and no past history of democracy either, but that was the idea and the vision that the Bush administration had and that other future administrations carried on. So that’s the second myth.

0:03:18.5 Sahar Kahn: The third myth really was that the US could somehow exit smoothly, and I think this is the one that really has people confused, because we’ve known that we’re leaving Afghanistan for a long time. We’ve been debating it, we’ve been talking about it, even the Obama administration said we’ve achieved our core goals. The Obama administration tried to leave, then came back and then narrowly defined the roles and the goals that the US would have. So we’ve been leaving or attempting to leave, so you would think that if each administration has focused on leaving Afghanistan, that there would be some kind of coherent exit strategy. Like, let’s do a couple of things, number one, let’s make sure that Special Immigrant Visa, which was a special visa that was established by the US for Iraqi and Afghani translators and their families to come and immigrate to the United States, that perhaps we should ensure that the SIV process is smooth, perhaps we should ensure that even if the Taliban or another save reactors come into power, humanitarian aid would still go in because regardless of who’s in power in Afghanistan, it’s a poor country and Afghani people need a lot of international aid to function. Another option could have been that perhaps we should ensure that we have a deal with the Taliban before we exit that international airports remain functioning, the Kabul airport remains functioning.

0:04:42.7 Sahar Kahn: So I feel like there are these few things that could have done to make the withdrawal a little smoother. Another option, I think would have been to tell your Afghan counterparts that you’re leaving. The way that the US left the Bagram Air Base was in the middle of the night, and the Afghan commander who took control of the air base didn’t even know that the US had left. And supposedly this Afghan commander is an ally. There’s so many smaller hiccups that happened that led to the bigger hiccup. I don’t think anyone could say that the withdrawal would have been smooth, but the fact that it was done so poorly, I think is an indication of just how little planning went into the withdrawal, and this is something we wanted to do. So imagine when we don’t wanna do stuff and how that happens. So I think those are the three myths surrounding our role in Afghanistan.

0:05:36.6 Aaron Ross Powell: We invaded Iraq because we were told they had weapons of mass destruction, and we needed to prevent them from using those in ways that would harm us or our interests, and that turned out not to be the case. A lot of our listeners, at least some of them probably weren’t even alive when we invaded Afghanistan. That’s how long the war went on, and the reason that we were given was because 9/11, that was… We needed to go in. Can you talk a bit about what that argument looked like at the time for why we needed to launch a full-​scale invasion of this country? Yes, the Taliban was ruling them and the Taliban wasn’t great, but there are lots of countries with not great governments that we’re not invading. And so what the argument was, and whether that argument in that time, in the days and weeks and months after 9/11, whether there was anything to it?

0:06:44.9 Sahar Kahn: Right. That’s a really interesting question, because 9/11 was a tragedy, and I think that the United States is one of those countries who rarely has experienced any terrorist attack on its homeland, so when it happens, it’s a really, really big deal. Before 9/11, the attack on the homeland was Pearl Harbor, which was like 1942, and it was part of World War II and it was a whole different framework of events. So I think 9/11 was something that really shook Americans, and of course the American government, as it should, because that’s what it was meant to do. But I think the policies that resulted afterwards have actually ended up killing a lot more people and have violated a lot more rights, and frankly, I think have made the United States more insecure than secure.

0:07:36.2 Sahar Kahn: Now, just speaking about the war in Iraq. First of all, the United States has no issue being friends and allies with unsavory state governments. Saudi Arabia, Israel are just two examples of this, and you could argue the benefits of these bilateral relationships, but at the same time, they’re not known for various things like civil liberties, etcetera. So yeah, the United States had had a relationship with Saddam Hussein and of course Saddam Hussein was not a good leader. He was known for committing massive amounts of atrocities against his people, but the war that the Bush administration launched was an illegal war, and not only was it illegal, but it was based on lies. You have Collin Powell go to the UN and blatantly lie saying that we have intelligence that Iraq has a program of weapons of mass destruction, and then we later found out that he was lying, and it wasn’t just him, it was Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a host of people in the administration who lied and what happened to them? Absolutely nothing.

0:08:52.8 Sahar Kahn: And I think the greater issue with the war in Iraq, well, first is why did we go in? I think we went in because the Bush administration basically got cocky. They went to Afghanistan, they realized that we’re able to topple the Taliban, that was easy. Al-​Qaeda fled, that was easy. You know what? It’s time to topple Iraq too, because they have these weapons and we need to get them, and anybody who harms Americans, they’re gonna get them. We’re gonna get them. And when you have that kind of mentality, and then when you have a military to match that mentality in terms of arsenal, the United States military is one of the best militaries, one of the best equipped militaries in the world. So when you have that kind of cowboy mentality along with the guns, then yeah, you wanna go shooting when you realize that you’re good at it. And the United States is good at killing for better or for worse. So I think that’s what happened with Iraq. But Iraq is not Afghanistan. They’re completely different countries with completely different political landscapes.

0:09:51.0 Sahar Kahn: Afghanistan had already been involved in a civil war of its own since the Cold War ended, since the Soviet left. Iraq was a proper functioning country. They differ on population, they differ on actual political landscape, they differ on the militant groups that operated there. It’s a whole different country, and Iraq is bigger as well. And so the United States, I think the Bush administration went in because they got cocky. The second aspect of the Iraq war, which I think is the most troubling, is that the Bush administration got away with it. This war in Iraq is about 15 or more years old, it started in 2003. None of the US officials who lied, not only to the American public, but to the world, and have killed thousands of Iraqis because of their lies, none of them have been held accountable. None. And forget the International Criminal Court, you could argue that that International Criminal Court doesn’t have any teeth, or the US is not even a member of the ICC, so the ICC can’t go after the US. But what about the United States? There have been no hearings held on the Hill about this, that we are seeing now about the Afghan withdrawal.

0:11:07.6 Sahar Kahn: We’re seeing a couple of hearings. Last week, the House and Senate held hearings, and the House one was actually a part one, so I imagine that we’re gonna see more of that. There is the sense of we need to hold US officials and generals accountable for what happened in Afghanistan, how could this happen, etcetera. But none of that has been done for Iraq and it should be done for Iraq because look at all the damage that we did there. So yeah, I think the Iraq war was… To say that it’s unfortunate, I feel like it doesn’t even capture the tragedy of Iraq. Iraq really is more of a victim of the global war on terror and perhaps more than the US is, because 9/11 happened but it didn’t destroy the United States. The US economy still grew. Americans, for the most part, still feel safe, most people in the world still wanna come to the United States because it still remains a place where you can live freely and safely and thrive. So that didn’t really change. So even though 9/11 happened to the United States, it’s not really a victim, it’s not the victim that it says that it is, and who really are the victims are Afghans and Iraqis, and then from there, Libyans and Yemen and etcetera.

0:12:21.9 Trevor Burrus: Let’s talk a little bit about the Taliban because most Americans know that word, that organization, but maybe don’t have a good analogy for what kind of organization it is. Is it like a political party? Is it like the Republicans in the United States? So if we invade Afghanistan, and then the Taliban gets up and goes somewhere and hides, as far as I understand, probably in Pakistan and some other places. Is it organized to the point that you can just email everyone in the Taliban and say, “Okay, everyone in the Taliban, we’re all gonna go now and run away.” Is it that kind of membership organization? Or is it more like the Republican Party of Ohio? So if someone was to invade Ohio and the Republican Party of Ohio said, “Alright, we’re all gonna move to Michigan now until they leave Ohio and then we’ll come back.” Is it more like that? Or is it somewhere in between?

0:13:18.2 Sahar Kahn: [chuckle] You know, it’s funny you mentioned Ohio ’cause I went to undergrad in Ohio, so I feel like if there was ever a time that Ohioans went to Michigan willingly, something’s really going on. So, okay, first of all, the Taliban is not like the Republican Party. It makes me chuckle for you to say that, but they’re not. I think they want to be like a political party. I think that in the future, we’re going to see… Right now we’re seeing an evolution. So the way that Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt have evolved, I do think that that’s what the Taliban want, and I think that’s the trajectory we’re seeing. But just to go backwards a little bit, who are the Taliban? The Taliban basically are a collection of factions, they’re not really a centralized group. They have Twitter and a spokesperson now, so maybe they have a newsletter, but I’m not signed on to it, so I’m not sure. [chuckle] But everybody has internet. But it’s not necessarily an organization that you become a member of and pay dues to. It came up basically during the Cold War, when the United States and Pakistan helped create the Mujahideen, which were the anti-​communist forces to fight the Soviet Union.

0:14:28.6 Sahar Kahn: When the Mujahideen was created, and the Cold War ended, and the US basically left Afghanistan, you had the Mujahideen left in Afghanistan, and they were essentially unemployed. Some of them formed other groups, some of them just left the profession of militancy, and some became the Taliban. And the Taliban essentially gathered power locally, and especially in the south of the country, and then in 1990s… In 1996, they toppled Kabul and they formed a government, and they said that they are the official government of Afghanistan. And their whole goal is to make Afghanistan into an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. So the Taliban are, unlike Al-​Qaeda and unlike the Islamic State that came up in 2014, they don’t have international goals. Their goal is very much focused within the borders of Afghanistan, they’re concerned with how Afghanistan is being governed, and they want it to be governed under their interpretation of Islamic law, which is actually quite strict, and it’s almost very literal in terms of property rights and family rights, etcetera.

0:15:38.2 Sahar Kahn: So the Taliban is… Some countries view it as a terrorist organization, and some countries do not. For example, for the United States, the US has never labeled the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization. Politicians might refer to their activities as terrorist activities or as terrorist acts of violence, but one of the reasons why the US has never labeled the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization is because when you get labeled as an FTO, you cannot have any kind of relationship with them, you cannot negotiate with them. And so when the US war in Afghanistan started, part of the US goal was also that at some point, they might need to negotiate with the Taliban. And this is something actually Pakistan pushed the US on, that, “Don’t necessarily declare them a terrorist group because you might run into some trouble.” It’s rare to have positive developments in the US-​Pakistan relationship, and Pakistan often does not get credit for some of the things that it ends up doing, but that was one of the things that Pakistan pushed the US on.

0:16:43.8 Sahar Kahn: But yeah, so the Taliban itself right now, since they got toppled in 2001, they’ve been evolving. In 2009, the Obama administration built a political office for them in Doha, Qatar and one of the goals was that they would be able to come to a neutral place, not Pakistan, not Afghanistan, not some place that the US is really friendly with, that there is neutral ground for all stakeholders involved, so they could go to Doha and they could potentially talk to the US, and potentially in the future, talk to the Afghan government. Since that office was formed, the Taliban has really taken its role to become a legitimate actor in Afghanistan really seriously. And they want international recognition. So when they came into power in 1996, only three countries recognized them: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates. Nobody else did. And the Taliban basically learned its lesson because what it doesn’t want is a repeat of 2001. It doesn’t want any foreign troops, especially the US to come in and topple them again.

0:17:46.4 Sahar Kahn: So, since their office in Doha, they have literally been trying to have bilateral relations with Central Asian countries, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, especially the ones that they have borders with. They’ve been reaching out to China, to Russia. Of course, they have a relationship with Pakistan, which has weakened over time, but for the most part, it’s a good relationship as far as foreign relationships go, but the Taliban are really trying. So now their goal is that they want international recognition. India still views the Taliban as a terrorist group, and so do several European countries. For the most part, it’s still up for debate whether or not they are a terrorist group. As of today, no country has officially recognized them, but they did form an interim government in Afghanistan. But they have been very clear, they said that Afghanistan is not gonna be a democracy, they’re not gonna have elections, and they’ll have some sort of council members who are in charge of the government, but that’s it. So that’s who the Taliban are. They’re a bunch of factions together who are trying to figure out how to govern Afghanistan. They do use tactics that are labeled as terrorism, they’re not very friendly towards women and minorities, but for the most part, they view themselves as a legitimate actor in Afghan politics.

0:19:10.0 Aaron Ross Powell: When you were talking about Iraq, you said that Iraq was a… I think the term you used was, “a functioning country” before we invaded it. And that makes me think of there’s… When we look at US Mid East policy, and a lot of the objections that I have seen to say us leaving Afghanistan or objections to the objections about invading Iraq back when we were having those arguments, one of the common refrains is that these governments like, yes, Iraq was functioning as a country in the sense that it had a more or less stable government that was doing things, but it was wildly oppressive and awful for the people who lived under it. The Taliban might not have been as bad as the Islamic State, but was terrible. You can see similar arguments about, say, Syria right now. And so when we go in, bad things happened in Iraq, but we got rid of Saddam Hussein’s government. Bad things happened in Afghanistan, but we had 20 years of not Taliban rule when, say, women could get an education, attend universities, there were significantly more freedom and individual rights than there were before invasion, or there are now with the Taliban taking over again.

0:20:47.5 Aaron Ross Powell: And that if we have the opportunity to do that, we should be doing that and we shouldn’t just be saying like, Look, these are stable governments because they’re god-​awful governments. Does that play any role in how we should think about these issues?

0:21:03.8 Sahar Kahn: So I think what you’ve sort of explained or described really is the logic behind interventions, the US interventions or humanitarian interventions, and ideally it sounds great when you have a government that’s repressive and oppressive, and Iraq was also doing a bunch of shady things, they didn’t necessarily have a weapons of mass destruction program, but they were trading in illicit nuclear material and doing all sorts of things they should not be doing, and that’s all a fair point. But the question really should be, is it the US’s responsibility to invade these countries?

0:21:39.5 Sahar Kahn: And then second, does the US have a right? Every country that’s recognized by the UN, according to international law, has sovereignty within its borders. You cannot just invade a country. You can physically, which is what the US has done several times in various countries, but it creates problems, and the main problems it creates is the problem of legitimacy. Yeah, Saddam is gone. Saddam Hussein is gone. And that’s a relief. Sure, but what’s left? Who replaced Saddam Hussein? What we ended up with is a weak, a weak Iraqi government, which was headed by Nouri al-​Maliki, and then later on, the current government of Iraq right now, and we were also left with the birth of the Islamic state, Daesh, which I would argue is probably even more powerful, more dangerous than Al-​Qaeda.

0:22:34.2 Sahar Kahn: Had the US not invaded Iraq, Daesh would not exist. And all of its affiliates like Islamic State Khorasan, which is operating in Afghanistan, would not exist. Perhaps something else would have existed, I don’t know, but just from what happened on the ground, it’s clear that the US invasion of Iraq made Iraq a lot more unstable. And even if you… And I do wanna preface this by saying I’m not an Iraq expert. I’m not a US Middle East policy expert. So just as an observer of US policy in Afghanistan and South Asia, I feel like I can speak a little bit about what the US has been doing in the Middle East.

0:23:08.2 Sahar Kahn: But if you look at what happened with Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was no cakewalk either. He was a terrible, terrible man who oppressed and killed thousands of his people. But one of the things he always said was that if I’m gone, Libya is going to become completely decentralized and it will become like a no man’s land, which will not have any functionality. Now, it’s very rare to agree with Muammar Gaddafi really on anything, but the man had a point. You can’t get rid of a dictator if you don’t have any plans of how to replace the dictator.

0:23:44.3 Sahar Kahn: And if you are looking for a replacement, that replacement, you better be sure that replacement is gonna work. The US is excellent at toppling dictators, wonderful at doing coups, no doubt we are an expert on that. What we are absolutely terrible in is replacing the dictators with legitimate political leaders. We always have a vision of these political leaders, that they’re going to be US allies, that they’re going to protect liberty and bring justice, and those are all great. They’d literally never have happened on the ground, and I think that’s the main problem with interventionist arguments.

0:24:22.4 Sahar Kahn: Yes, you should… When Human rights are violated, you should criticize them and the United States, especially as a leader in the international community on all sorts of fronts, the US emerges as unipolar power right after the Cold War. So yes, the US should be vocal about injustices, but that does not mean that the US should go in and topple countries, especially when they don’t have any plan of how to replace the ones that they toppled. And that’s my main concern with interventionist arguments.

0:24:53.2 Sahar Kahn: And another thing is that the United States has, along with Britain and France, has been an architect of the sort of liberal international order that we have. So when you created this international order, why not use it? Why are you so bent on using your military all the time? These forces of diplomacy, they should mean something, but they’ll only mean something if they’re used properly and effectively. And the US almost, almost always goes in with a gun rather than wanting to talk and having a dialogue or hearing the other side. And I think that’s been another problem that we’ve seen with the global war on terror as well, and if we just look at the sheer numbers of the number of people who have been killed and the instability that has been caused, I would argue that this war on terror, though ideologically it sounds great, has made the world a lot more unstable and has made us unsafe.

0:25:54.7 Trevor Burrus: Over the course of the Afghanistan War, of course, at the beginning it was get rid of the Taliban, get rid of Al-​Qaeda and then… Well, this is part of my question. The way I remember it, but I’m not an expert, is that there was the counter-​insurgency until about 2010, and then we’ve kind of just been staying there, but not sure of what to do with the country until August, I guess Biden announced that we’d be pulling out. And first of all, is that kind of an accurate story and what details am I missing? And was the main reason that we were just sort of hanging out there was just this sort of fear of what would happen next, like in terms of… You mentioned Daesh, ISIS, that that’s what would happen in Afghanistan, so we just sort of were sitting around with 7500 troops saying, “We’ll just stay here until… What? Something good happens,” I guess. Is that the general story we’re seeing and eventually they just decided, we’re done?

0:26:52.6 Sahar Kahn: Yeah, that is kind of the general story, which makes it really sad. But I think for those service members, US service members and NATO allies, etcetera, who served in a Afghanistan, I think a lot of them felt that they were doing something good, they were going in and they were on the ground level, they were really helping Afghans. There were countless stories of US service members building roads and digging wells and literally constructing buildings and bridges, trying to create an infrastructure where ordinary Afghans could live.

0:27:26.0 Sahar Kahn: So I don’t want to discount any of the good things that the US ended up doing. But I think the problem became… Or the problem really was that nobody really knew, even the higher-​ups, they couldn’t really articulate what you’re doing in Afghanistan. And you need to have an elevator speech. And you need to believe it. So I remember when I was writing my dissertation, my advisor would always say to me, “What’s your dissertation on?” And I would have this 10-​minute speech prepared. He’s like, “No, tell me in like 30 seconds. Like your elevator speech, you need to know what you’re doing, what is the core mission of this dissertation?” And I think for Afghanistan that was lacking, whoever you asked, there was a different core mission, and that mission was, we’ll make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for Al-​Qaeda.

0:28:13.1 Sahar Kahn: Okay, sure. We kind of already did that. They’re not really… They’re operating in a Afghanistan but not the same way they were before. Then the mission was, well, create democracy, create democratic institutions. Well, if Afghans want democracy, they’ll have to create it themselves. The US could potentially help and aid, but you can’t just create a court system and say, Okay, now have court cases. It doesn’t really work that way. So I think the problem really became that nobody knew what the mission was, and then the longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave because so many Americans have died in Afghanistan, 2000, 2300 or more and then thousands more Afghans have died, and a lot of these US service members became friends with their translators, they almost viewed them as families as well. So there was sort of a ground level, I think interaction that’s really important. But I think the problem really was that nobody really knew what to do with Afghanistan anymore. What’s the goal?

0:29:17.6 Sahar Kahn: And I think the other issue was that there was this idea that you can destroy. That the US can destroy the Taliban. The problem is you can’t because the Taliban is part of Afghani society. Now, you could argue why they’re part of Afghani society, how did they evolve to be this way, what happened. And those are all good discussions and arguments to have, but you cannot annihilate a group. Also, annihilating a group like that would be completely genocide as far as I know, as definitions go, and I don’t think the US went in wanting to commit genocide or anything like that.

0:29:54.6 Sahar Kahn: So I think the issue really became that nobody, none of the administrations from Bush onward could articulate what they were doing in Afghanistan. And so that’s why I think the withdrawal should have gone smoother, it probably should have been better planned, absolutely, but I think President Biden was really right in saying that we don’t know what we’re doing there, we don’t have any reason to be there, we have to leave. And I think that decision was probably really painful for him too. He had a son who served and who died because of complications from serving. So these are not easy decisions to make, but I think what needs to happen is we need to figure out what really went wrong in our mission strategy in Afghanistan.

0:30:36.8 Sahar Kahn: What did the US really want? And even though we’ve withdrawn now, we still don’t really know what we want, and I think that that’s a main problem, and because of that, we wasted… We spent like a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and killed thousands of people and arguing still killing people. The Pentagon on Friday made an announcement that they killed… That a drone strike killed 10 people, seven of them children. So the killing is not done, there are no boots on the ground, but there are drones in the air, so to me, that’s still war. And frankly, I think the problem is nobody knows what we’re doing in Afghanistan. To this day, nobody knows.

0:31:15.9 Aaron Ross Powell: A counter to that argument though that I have seen, especially during and immediately after the withdrawal is, look, we accomplished early on those early on goals of taking out the Taliban and destabilizing Al-​Qaeda, and we created this situation where maybe the new government wasn’t working out as well as we hoped or wasn’t as stable as we hoped, but people in Afghanistan have more freedoms than they did before, and in the last several years, the number of American service member deaths was relatively low. We had stabilized the country with our presence. And so yeah, maybe we didn’t have an immediate like, by this time next year, there will be a stable and lasting democracy in Afghanistan, but things were a lot better, it wasn’t costing us a lot to continue being there, maybe they just needed more time and we should have just kept sticking around until… Well the costs were low until things got better, or even if they didn’t, I guess indefinitely, because it made life a lot better for most of the people who were there.

0:32:35.7 Sahar Kahn: Yeah, that’s an argument I’ve heard as well, and you know, to some extent it is convincing, we could have just stayed. Maybe if we stayed things would be better, but here’s the thing, we are a foreign occupying force. We do not belong in Afghanistan the way that we were staying in Afghanistan. And another goal of the US had been to strengthen Afghan National Security Forces, and the US spent a lot of time and money training these Forces, but one of the problems with training the Forces were that a lot of Afghan National Security Forces did not feel safe, they felt that because there is no interaction or link or negotiation or agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, that they’re the ones who are targeted. So yeah, US service members were not being killed, but the Taliban were targeting Afghan National Security Forces and killing them by thousands. Every year, the Taliban launches a spring offensive in April, in which they say, they announce it, “We’re starting our offensive and we’re going after the Afghan National Security Forces.” And Afghan National…

0:33:38.4 Trevor Burrus: And this is sort of like… Because they’re like traitors kind of?

0:33:41.4 Sahar Kahn: Yeah, they view them as… Absolutely, they view them as traitors. They view them as, “You are helping the United States remain in Afghanistan. You are exploiting Afghanistan and you are basically part of a puppet regime that has been constructed by the US.” Now, how is that helpful? Sure, the US service members weren’t being killed, but we were still spending millions of dollars in Afghanistan, and if you look at it now, we don’t really have anything to show for it. The Afghan National Security Forces basically collapsed within a week, and the thing that really angered me in the US media, when they were talking about Afghan National Security Forces was painting them as being kind of lazy or incompetent, or not brave, and that is not the case at all. These are men and in some cases, women who risked their lives and their family’s life because they believed in the vision that the US had created about Afghanistan, which was that Afghanistan can become a democracy and that the United States is going to help Afghanistan become a democracy, but that in of itself is almost impossible.

0:34:49.2 Sahar Kahn: The US cannot create a democracy in Afghanistan. And I think what the US will hopefully realize is that it completely overinflated and overestimated its own abilities in Afghanistan, especially when it comes to institution building. So the issue I think really becomes that we didn’t really… The US to this day still didn’t really know what they were doing in Afghanistan, there were narrow goals and every administration made every goal more narrow. And that was good, but for the most part, the military mission should have been over a long time ago.

0:35:25.0 Sahar Kahn: And there are also other ways that the US can help Afghanistan. There’s humanitarian aid, there is medical training, there is language training. There are all sorts of non-​military ways that the US can help Afghanistan become better integrated into the international community and potentially even hold the Taliban or whoever is in power more accountable to some of the atrocities that are being done there. But having US troops on the ground was not helping the causes at all, and it certainly wasn’t helping the Taliban, if nothing else, they became stronger, and their argument of the US is an occupying force that wants Afghanistan’s resources… The Afghanistan has a great deal of semi-​precious metals and other natural resources. And so their argument was that this is what they want, they want to make the Afghanistan part of their territory.

0:36:20.3 Sahar Kahn: So I think now with the US gone, hopefully there’ll be other ways that the US can help and aid Afghan people, but I think troops on the ground was not the way to do it, and we could have stayed for as long as we wanted, but I think… The minute we would have left, either we withdrew today or we withdrew 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I think we would be having the same discussion.

0:36:40.8 Trevor Burrus: And when it comes to the Taliban and the way Americans, I think a lot of Americans think about so-​called let’s just say extremist Muslim groups around the world, whether it’s Hezbollah or ISIS or the Taliban. I think many Americans think that they’re all friends, like some super villain league that gets together and has meetings and talks about how they’re gonna go after America, like going after Batman and the Justice League and all that stuff, and the Taliban and ISIS are best friends along with Hezbollah and Iran and Al-​Qaeda. What’s the reality there?

0:37:25.0 Sahar Kahn: So that’s a great question. So no, I don’t think they get together once a month and hold weekly meetings of how to topple America. So there’s a spectrum, and actually one of our Cato colleagues, Mr. Veico describes it really well. So there’s a spectrum of basically extremist Islamic thought or extremist groups, and Al-​Qaeda and ISIS are basically one end of the spectrum, and they’re really bad, especially ISIS is really bad, in terms of its goals, in terms of its ideology, in terms of its suppression and oppression and using Islam, I think, as a political tool for its political gains, I think they’re the worst. The Taliban are kind of in the middle. They’re not great, but they’re not that bad either, which is terrible to say because they are actually quite bad. So again, I just wanna stress this is a spectrum. And they don’t always all get along. So the Taliban actually…

0:38:23.0 Sahar Kahn: So they were friendly with Al-​Qaeda and they had an alliance, but after 9/11 and after the US war in Afghanistan began, the Taliban and Al-​Qaeda alliance has really weakened. The Taliban is very unhappy with Al-​Qaeda because they feel like they’re the ones who put the Taliban in this position, they are the reasons why the Taliban got toppled ’cause they were doing just fine before the US war in Afghanistan, nobody recognized them but nobody was toppling them either, so it was fine. And so they’re really not happy with Al-​Qaeda operating in Afghanistan. So there’s been some sort of schism there. They still have an alliance, but it’s weak.

0:38:57.6 Sahar Kahn: The Taliban does not get along with the Islamic State, and they do not get along with the Islamic State, Khorasan, which is the affiliate of Islamic State that’s operating in Afghanistan, and the reason is that they each view each other as traitors. So Islamic State basically, their goal is to create a large caliphate where all of these western borders that are recognized, that they won’t exist, that they’ll be done with and this will be a big caliphate that’s ruled under their interpretation of Islamic law. This is the vision they have.

0:39:30.8 Sahar Kahn: The Taliban just want to rule Afghanistan according to Islamic law, they don’t have any international reach or anything like that. Territorially, they’re focused on Afghanistan itself. So Islamic State, Khorasan, which is the affiliate operating in Afghanistan, they view the Taliban as a traitor ’cause they’re basically saying, “Okay, so you want to stay within your border, these borders that are western constructs, that have been created by infidels, you wanna stay in these borders and to some extent, you want international recognition. And really the only thing you should be striving for is recognition from God and worshipping God.

0:40:18.8 Sahar Kahn: In the political system they envision, the people are not sovereign. In a democracy, people are sovereign. In their vision, God is sovereign and that’s it. They’re simply trying to function, but we shouldn’t be listening to the people, we should be listening to God and you can do that through the Quran and the Hadith, etcetera. So that’s sort of their argument. So Islamic State and Taliban are enemies, and I think what we’re going to see, and what we did see recently in August, that horrendous suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed over a hundred people. That was done by Islamic State, Khorasan.

0:40:52.1 Sahar Kahn: So I do think that we’re gonna see more attacks like that where ISK is basically attacking the Taliban now and attacking Taliban security forces now. I think we’re gonna see more of that, which indicates that they are not on the same page, and the Taliban basically want ISK out. And in fact, in 2015, when ISK was really powerful, the US and the Taliban actually together launched a counterinsurgency campaign to get rid of the group, and the group weakened significantly ’til it rose again, it elected a new leader who’s really focused on urban warfare, and since 2019, the group has revived itself. But the fact that it was gone, it was done because of the partnership that the Taliban had with the Afghan National Security forces and with the US. So they collectively got together to counter this group.

0:41:45.9 Sahar Kahn: So yeah, so all militants are not friends. All militants, they might have similar ideologies, but they disagree on their ideologies, and also most of these groups are also not monolithic either. We talk about the Taliban as it’s this one cohesive group with a monthly membership fee, but it’s not that. It’s actually a collection of factions, and even within the Taliban, you see a lot of differences and a lot of debate of how to rule and what to do, etcetera.

0:42:14.1 Sahar Kahn: I do think though we are witnessing an evolution of the Taliban, and my sense is that they want to become something like Hezbollah and the Muslim brotherhood, they want some sort of international recognition. They don’t really care if some groups in some countries called them terrorists, they’re fine with that label, but they want more recognition as a legitimate player in Afghan politics, or really the only player in Afghan politics.

0:42:41.8 Aaron Ross Powell: Obviously, the people most affected by the US invasion and then the US presence, and then the US withdrawal are the Afghan people themselves. What have they thought throughout this whole process? Were they in favor of the invasion? Did they were, to the extent that we have say, public polling data, did they appreciate the US presence? And then, do we know, did the people of Afghanistan want the US to leave, maybe not in the way we did, but were they ready for us to get out?

0:43:21.7 Sahar Kahn: Yeah, that’s a great question. First of all, it’s really hard to get polling information like that in Afghanistan. My sense is just from all the news articles and the people who have been interviewed, and there’s of course internet there, so a lot of Afghan activists have been using Twitter and Facebook, etcetera to explain their logic, explain how they feel. I think my sense from them is that, first of all, they’re all really wary.

0:43:49.7 Sahar Kahn: First, the Soviets came in and created havoc, then the Taliban came and then the US came, so they had been in a state of war for 40 years, which is a really long time, and it’s something that’s extremely devastating. So they’re war-​weary and they’re tired. The second thing is, I think that a lot of them did believe that the US made them a lot of promises that they would help Afghan society, that they would help the country of Afghanistan and/​or that they would be able to immigrate to the United States or European countries. I think a lot of Afghans feel that those promises were not delivered, and so they’re disappointed with that.

0:44:28.8 Sahar Kahn: But I think the third thing that really resonates and that I’ve noticed the most is that Afghans feel like the world is turning their back on them, and that they’re being killed by the thousands, by the hundreds, and nobody really cares about the Afghan people. The international community only really cares about the Taliban and what they’re doing, and the bad things they’re doing, like opium production and illicit selling of antiques and all of that stuff, they care about that kind of thing, but they don’t really care about women’s rights, they don’t really care about what’s happening, like medical facilities and how equipped their hospitals are. Are Afghans getting vaccinated? Are vaccines available?

0:45:17.1 Sahar Kahn: So I think Afghans feel really neglected by the world, and a lot of this, I think does fall on the shoulders of the United States, because the US had made all these promises to the Afghans. One example that I had mentioned earlier was the Special Immigrant Visa. If you have… Like, seriously, if you have a US Marine vouching for you and your whole family, and you still can’t enter the United States, something is wrong, something is wrong, and this is bureaucratic incompetence on the side of the United States.

0:45:53.6 Sahar Kahn: To say that the US botched up the withdrawal is like, is it enough to say that? They really messed it up, and these are people’s lives. The images we saw of people getting on a plane, that 17-​year-​old soccer player that the Wall Street Journal wrote about, and he basically fell off a plane, nobody does that unless they’re absolutely desperate. So I think the Afghan people are really desperate and they’re dying and they don’t want to die, so I think it is on the shoulders of the international community to take some kind of responsibility, especially the United States as well.

0:46:29.0 Sahar Kahn: And you know the Afghans, it’s hard to say, they’re very proud people from what I’ve read and the few that I’ve met; they’re very, very proud of their cultural heritage, and it’s a country that actually has a very rich cultural heritage, they’re very proud of that. They’re very proud of their resilience, that foreign forces have come in and unable to topple them or get rid of them, or conquer them, or what have you. So they’re very proud of that, and they’re very proud of who they are, of their cuisine, of their languages, of how they have practiced religions, of their ethnicities. So they’re very proud people, and I think what we’re seeing now is basically a lot of them are desperate and if nothing else, the United States owes them a lot, owes the Afghani people a lot more than what we have given.

0:47:17.3 Sahar Kahn: And one core argument, Aaron, you were talking about going into Afghanistan. One of the arguments of going into Afghanistan was, Oh, we have to help Afghani women. We gotta make sure they’re not suppressed anymore. And in 20 years, within these 20 years, very rarely did any US strategy talk about women’s rights or minority rights, and then the US left and suddenly now it’s like, “Oh, we’re so concerned about Afghan women.” Now, this is not to say that Afghani women did not make achievements during this time, of course they did.

0:47:46.0 Sahar Kahn: But to say that this was one of the goals of the US, I think is also… It’s deflecting. I don’t think it was one of the goals of the US to liberate Afghan women. I think it sounded good to the American public, but I don’t think that this is what US officials really wanted. So I think there’s a lot of corruption involved, there are a lot of lies, there’s a lot of inflation of information out there, and it’s hard to tell what Afghans really think, but my sense is that they’re feeling neglected by the international community, and they feel that the US owes them a lot more than they’ve been given.

0:48:23.1 Trevor Burrus: Now, going forward, if we have in some sense a nicer Taliban than we did 20 years ago, or at least one that wants to join the world community and get recognition, do we expect them to be as harsh as they were when it comes to let’s say, punishing all the Afghani who helped out American service troops, punishing people who have slightly different religious beliefs, blowing up statues? Do we expect this to all happen again? I guess I’m asking you though, make a prediction on is it gonna be as bad as it was, and is there anything we can do except for what we should be doing is getting everyone out of there who wants to come here, but I don’t see that happening, so how bad is it gonna get?

0:49:11.1 Sahar Kahn: Yeah. Well, as they say, as a US foreign policy expert, I’m great at making predictions. No, I’m just kidding. I’m terrible at making predictions, and nobody should ever predict anything when it comes to foreign policy. But yeah, so far, the Taliban have said that they are not going to seek revenge, that they’re not going to target those people who worked with the US or allied forces or who are part of the Afghan National Security Forces. They did say that they will do a curriculum review, but that women and girls can go to school and they will be allowed to continue graduate studies as well, and the classes will be segregated, but women can work and they will be allowed to do so.

0:49:54.9 Sahar Kahn: They have somewhat become a little looser in their interpretation of various things, but it’s hard to say how they’ll be because their core ideology has not changed, they do have a very sort of puritanical interpretation of Islam. And I don’t think that’s gonna change. Now, what will be interesting to see is, if all the things they’ve said will it actually happen or not, and this will be determined by the kind of international recognition they get. Now, what they really want is for other countries to recognize them as a legitimate government of Afghanistan, that hasn’t happened yet.

0:50:43.4 Sahar Kahn: You could say that once that happens, they’ll be like, “Okay, great, now we can do whatever the hell we want because we have governments recognizing us.” Or, because they’ve been recognized, it might force them to then adhere to certain international standards and norms and laws the other sovereign countries do. Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country, and it is a member of the UN and all of that, and so is Pakistan and South Sudan and all of that. It’s hard to tell what’s gonna happen. Right now, things on the ground are so unpredictable that I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how the Taliban evolve itself.

0:51:26.4 Sahar Kahn: The spokesperson they have though is very much… He’s good at what he does, he’s trying to represent the Taliban and he’s trying to explain to the world what their ideology is and how they’ve changed and how they wanna function. He’s trying to make the message clear, and it’s up to the world whether to buy it or not. So it’s very hard to predict, but what I do think is gonna happen is that we’re gonna see a lot more attacks between the Taliban and Islamic State Khorasan, absolutely. And I think we should be prepared to hear more bad news coming from Afghanistan when it comes to civilian deaths.

0:52:10.1 Sahar Kahn: So yeah, we’ve been really focused on what the US has thought about the withdrawal and the implications for US foreign policy and US thinking, and that’s all great, and of course that’s extremely important. I think it’s time for the US to be held accountable for its actions in Afghanistan, and this is one of the first wars where we have so much information, actually open source information that people can use to ask questions from generals and policymakers, and I think that that’s way overdue. We didn’t have that for the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or for the Iraq War.

0:52:43.5 Sahar Kahn: So for Afghanistan, I think it’s important that the House and Senate are taking this seriously and holding hearings. But I think the one thing that we should also focus on is the regional fallout from Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a landlocked country, and we had all these images of Afghans fleeing and yeah, many of them wanted to flee to the US and Europe, but thousands really ended up in neighboring countries like Pakistan, which hosts about three million Afghan refugees, and also Iran, which hosts about 800,000 Afghan refugees and neighboring countries like Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

0:53:20.5 Sahar Kahn: Now all of these countries have said, “We can’t take anymore Afghan refugees. We ourselves are poor. We ourselves are dealing with our own internal dynamic and turmoil, and so we can’t have more refugees.” So I think what we’re gonna see and what we should be prepared for is a refugee crisis that’s similar to the Syrian refugee crisis, which was massive. And I think this is what we’re gonna see in the region too, and this is already a region, South Asia basically already has ongoing refugee crises, in Myanmar, in Bangladesh, in India, so it’s just gonna add pressure on these poor countries that are struggling with not just conventional security concerns, but environmental and climate change concerns as well.

0:54:04.3 Sahar Kahn: The second regional fallout I think we’re gonna see is an increase in opium trade. The Taliban has made a ton of money, has really made most of their money by selling drugs, growing drugs and selling them. They grow opium, and this is something… Poppy production was something that the US tried to actually end and they were not very successful at it, and basically the region that the Taliban grew most of the poppy in the US was rarely able to get control over it. So we’re probably gonna see an increase in drug trafficking, because that’s lucrative for the Taliban.

0:54:45.5 Sahar Kahn: We’re probably also gonna see an increase in black market sales of antiques or I think it’s called illicit antiquing basically. We saw this in Iraq, and we saw this in Lebanon as well, where various artifacts would end up in private art collections or in museums, and you wonder, Well, how did you get that? Was it a sale on Amazon or eBay? It got to you somehow. So I think we’re gonna see a lot of that because Afghanistan has a really rich cultural heritage especially of pre-​Islamic artifacts, but the Taliban aren’t interested in that. And they need to make money, obviously to survive, and so I think we’re gonna see a spike in this kind of illicit trading.

0:55:35.4 Sahar Kahn: And the third thing I think that we should really be concerned about is the instability that’s gonna be caused in Afghanistan because of a lack of humanitarian aid. Right now the IMF and the World Bank basically have said, “No, we’re not giving aid.” And the reason, of course, is because they’re not recognizing the Taliban, which I’m not saying that you should, but I think that should be a separate issue. I think the key is, if you really want to help Afghans, then the avenues of humanitarian aid have to be opened, there has to be some way to coordinate with the Taliban and international organizations to get medical supplies, vaccines, and medicines to the Afghan people, because they’re the ones who are suffering the most.

0:56:15.7 Sahar Kahn: So these are some of the larger things to think about when we think about Afghanistan, but of course at a domestic level, I think it’s time to ask our policymakers some really serious questions about what went wrong with the withdrawal, why was it so terrible and why was it so botched up? And then internationally, I think we need to think about just the implications of having a US foreign policy that’s using our military, that goes in with a gun rather than with diplomacy. And I think Afghanistan is a prime example of that. So I hope we learned our lesson, I’m not holding our breath, I’m not holding my breath, but I’m an optimistic person so I’m just going to hope that we get more answers and that hopefully it makes our policymakers rethink our military interventions.

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0:57:17.3 Aaron Ross Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.