Global terrorism gets a new lease on life in Afghanistan
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Summary
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban, is this a terror breeding ground just waiting to happen? There are few people in English-language media better versed in these topics than Peter Bergen, who is the Vice President at the New America Foundation, a National Security Analyst at CNN, and the author of a number of books, including The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.
Transcript
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Hi, I'm Anthony Fury. Welcome to the latest episode of Full Comment.
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Terrorism has thankfully dropped from the list of many people's top concerns in recent years.
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Can we now breathe a sigh of relief? Or will terror attacks ramp up again after the U.S.
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withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban? Is this a terror breeding
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ground just waiting to happen? There are few people in English language media better versed
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in these topics than Peter Bergen. He's the vice president at the think tank New America,
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a national security analyst at CNN, and the author of a number of books, including The Osama bin
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Laden I Know. Oh, how's that one for a headline? His new book just out now is the authoritative
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biography, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. That includes some important information that
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you need to know. Peter Bergen joins us now. Peter, welcome to the program.
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Yeah, great to have you on. I got to get your thoughts on, of course, what happened just a
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couple weeks ago in Afghanistan. The fall of Afghanistan, at least in the way we saw it
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happen. I know that the withdrawal of U.S. forces was planned and agreed upon, but what
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did you think when you were watching it unfold live in the way it did?
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Well, you know, I mean, unfortunately, it was a somewhat predictable disaster. I mean, as soon
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as President Biden said we were going to leave, we the United States, then 3,500 American troops
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started withdrawing. Then 7,000 Allied troops, including NATO, mostly NATO troops also left,
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and 16,000 contractors, including 6,000 American contractors, some of whom were keeping the Afghan
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air force in the air, which provides medevac and also close air support to the Afghan army.
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All that sort of got pulled at the same time, creating a crisis of confidence that was amplified
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by President Ghani fleeing the country. And lots of people lay down their arms, not because they're
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weak, but because Afghanistan has gone through multiple wars in the last 43 years, and people want to
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kind of retain their heads on their shoulders and don't want to die with a new regime that was sweeping
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into power. Will that, is it a threat to, you know, U.S. interests, Canadian interests, Western interests?
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I think it is. We saw in Canada attacks carried out by people inspired by ISIS when ISIS was at its
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height and declared its caliphate. And I think we'll see the same thing in Canada, the United States,
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and also in Europe. Canada and the United States, of course, quite, you know, we're protected by our
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distance from Afghanistan. It's hard to get there. But Europe isn't. And certainly we saw when Iraq was
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at, when ISIS was at its height, that, you know, a number of Europeans, 6,000 is the number, went to get
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training in Iraq and Syria from ISIS, and some of them came back and carried out attacks in Paris and
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Brussels and elsewhere. And we can see that again with Afghanistan fairly easily. I mean, there are
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differences between the Taliban declaring its emirate and ISIS declaring its caliphate. But the
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differences are less important than the similarities. And the jihadist movement is going to
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being given another huge breath of life by this development.
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So what do we need to know and understand in terms of the bigger context when the Taliban says,
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as some of their spokespeople have said, oh, no, we're just going to be the government now. And
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we're even going to look for standing in different international bodies. And we want to do diplomacy and
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so forth. We'll do trade. It'll be great. Oh, remember, we ran the country before, you know,
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we're just going to be a government here. I mean, in what sort of, how much of a helping of grain of
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salt should be, you know, afforded to those statements?
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I mean, I think a mountain of salt should be taken with that. Let's just look at the people
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they just appointed as the acting government. I think that acting government, by the way,
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will be the government is that the word acting in front of that is merely a sop to the international
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community. The minister of the interior is Siraj Akhani, who's the architect of the Taliban's military
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victory. And he is described by the United Nations as a leader of al-Qaeda on the leadership council.
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So, I mean, the group was supposed to separate al-Qaeda from al-Qaeda. And here they put,
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as one of the most important cabinet posts, somebody who the UN describes as a leader of al-Qaeda. So,
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I mean, I think that sort of speaks for itself. And we're going to see, I think, in coming weeks,
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you know, continued tightening of Taliban social policies. I saw just today that something like more
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than 150 independent Afghan media outlets have closed. Not all media outlets will close. The
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Taliban tolerated Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, when they were in power the last time.
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They themselves have a very robust media presence that they did not have when they were in power the
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last time. Of course, they banned television when they were in power the last time. There was no
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internet in Afghanistan. There was no phone service when they were in power the last time. They're going to
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adeptly use television and the internet for their own propaganda purposes. But in terms of their
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social project, I think it's going to be very similar to where we were before. And they don't
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really, you know, sure. I mean, it's a case of sort of projecting our own kind of mirror imaging on
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the Taliban to say, well, yeah, they want international recognition. Of course they do. But they can also
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live without it. When they were in power last time, only three countries recognized them. The UN had
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sanctions on them. The US had sanctions on them. And they survived fine. And today they are sitting
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on the poppy and opium trade, which is billions of dollars. And they're also sitting on 38 million
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Afghans who they can tax and extort at will. So I don't think money, which is not their main
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consideration anyway, is really a problem for them going forward, even if the international community
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and most countries don't recognize them. What does the Taliban want?
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They want to establish a regime and a society that rules by their understanding of Sharia.
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And their understanding of Sharia is, you know, not a mainstream view. I mean, it puts women in,
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women in the public sphere will be mostly gone, except in very specific jobs like female doctors can
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treat female patients, because of course, male doctors can't treat female patients. Women can
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teach girls in schools, but girls will no longer be able to go to school once they get to the age of
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puberty. So that's what they want. They want to, these are the values of rural Pashtuns, which is,
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you know, Pashtuns are the largest ethnic minority, but not a majority in Afghanistan. And they want to
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basically impose those rules on their theocratic order on the population. And there's plenty of
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ethnic groups in Afghanistan, Tajiks, Uzbeks, or Tsarists who don't share their views. By the way,
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it's pretty striking to me, this cabinet that was appointed by the Taliban includes, I think,
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only, it's entirely, almost entirely, 98% from the Pashtun group that the Taliban originates from.
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So there's no intent to an inclusive government, there was a lot of discussion about an inclusive
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government, they didn't include anybody from the previous government. So I think that the choice
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of who's actually going to govern kind of tells you where they're going to go.
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Now, Peter, I know you've written before in your books about what happens when various embassies
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close, Western embassies closing in those countries, or CIA offices decide, okay, it's not safe for us,
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and they pull out from there and so forth. Are we going to have the eyes and ears on the ground
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to get the appropriate intelligence and information about what's actually happening
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Well, look at this strike that was supposedly an ISIS-K target that various news organizations,
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the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN have all, I think, fairly convincingly demonstrated
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it wasn't an ISIS-K target. And that was why we still had, you know,
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the United States was still present in the country. So that target killed, it seems like,
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a contractor who was working occasionally with the United States and his family. And that was
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right now, where we still have some sort of intelligence information that isn't super dated.
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Let's look out six months from now. Yes, the United States can gather signals intelligence
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from people's phones and computers, and that's all useful. But in terms of targeting a particular
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person or persons, you still really need people on the ground to tell you that's the right person,
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or this person really is an ISIS, or they're not. And that capacity is completely gone.
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Which reminds me of when we closed, the United States closed its embassy in Afghanistan in 1989,
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when we were completely blind to the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
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As a result of that. And so, you know, pulling out of places like Afghanistan, you know, from a short
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term sort of security point of view, of course, it's easy to make that argument. But from a longer
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term point of view, it's, you don't really know what's going on. Peter, you were a part of a team
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that went to the Middle East to interview Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, to sit down with him and get his
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thoughts on who are you? What are you doing? This was, of course, in advance of 9-11. Is that sort
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of stuff going to be possible now with other figures and questions about who are these people?
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We went to Afghanistan in 1997 to interview him. But, you know, that right now, groups like al-Qaeda
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don't really need to be, I mean, they're not really looking for interviews. They don't need one because
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at the time, you know, CNN was sort of the Twitter of the time in terms of a revolutionary new
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technology to some degree. Now, you know, if you want to make a statement, you put it on Twitter, you
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don't need a, I mean, you lose something, of course, the world loses something from not having live
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journalists interviewing directly these leaders of these jihadist groups. But clearly, there's a lot of now a lot
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of danger involved in that because these groups have kidnapped any number of journalists or murdered
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Wasn't it dangerous back then for you to do what you did or was it different then?
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I don't think it was because, I mean, I sort of, they had invited us and, you know, they murdered Danny
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Pearl, the Wall Street journalist reporter, four years later. So that was really the first time these
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groups had murdered a journalist. And so the rules kind of changed in the interim. And I didn't think
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that we were in danger. We weren't in danger. They invited us, you know, it was, obviously, it was
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Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It wasn't, you know, visiting him in Sweden. But it, you know, there was
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perhaps some risk, but I don't think there were any, I don't think they had any intent of injuring us
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You know, he was very serious and kind of low-key and didn't raise his voice. He spoke in a kind of
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monotone. He was very thin, very tall, six foot four. He carried himself like a cleric. He wasn't
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a table-thumping revolutionary. He, you know, his words are full of anger against the United States,
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but he delivered it all in a very kind of poised, you know, kind of low, he didn't bang his fist on
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the table or kind of emote very much. And we were with him for just over an hour and he left and he
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went, you know, disappeared into the night. He was, they were very concerned that, I don't know,
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they had a lot of concerns about his personal security being around these three Westerners.
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You know, it's interesting. In the beginning of your book, you, of course, chart his younger years,
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his family, very wealthy from construction and various other industries they were working on.
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And Osama Bin Laden, I guess, had the ability to just access wealth, play the game and live a very,
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I mean, I guess his family were observant Muslims, but they certainly weren't extreme in the way that
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he was. And you think, oh, you know, this must be a case of the apple not falling far from the tree.
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But as you relate it, Bin Laden was actually a bit of the black sheep in terms of he was the guy
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who said, no, we got to get super extreme here. Yeah, Bin Laden, you know, he's got 54 siblings,
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none of whom went, chose his path. So that's an interesting question why he did. I don't,
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you know, I lay out in the book a kind of process of radicalization. His, his mother was an Alawite,
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is an Alawite, which is a heretical form of Sheism, if you're an Orthodox Sunni, like the Bin Laden
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family was. So she was, I know she was only married to Bin Laden's father for two years before
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they divorced. Bin Laden was the only child of that union. His father died in a plane crash when he
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was 10. That seemed to have had a big effect on him, even though he barely knew his father.
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And he turned to Islam, he memorized the Quran. By the time he's a teenager, he's a very religious
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teenager praying twice, fasting twice a week and praying an extra set of prayers at night. And,
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you know, I think that may have been one way of him trying to sort of become, you know,
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something more important than, than he was in a sense, you know, the one, he became this very
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religious person. The Soviets invade Afghanistan, he goes to support the effort there, taking money
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to the Afghan groups, fighting the Soviets. And then in 1987, he sets up his own base called Al-Qaeda
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in Arabic, in Afghanistan, from which he fights the Soviets. He, from that base, grew Al-Qaeda,
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the organization. And two years later, US troops go to Saudi Arabia to protect it from a possible
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invasion by Saddam Hussein. That turns him really, he's already anti-American, that really turns him
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against the United States. So, you know, all this was a sort of process of radicalization that took
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place over the decades. None, none of it was inevitable. There were points where Bin Laden
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could have gone, taken a different route. And, you know, people try to persuade him not to set up
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Al-Qaeda. Others, like Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was killed by Saudi officials in
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Istanbul in 2018, told him in Sudan, you know, you do an interview with me and you can,
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renouncing violence, you probably can go back to the Saudi kingdom. He was then in exile in Sudan.
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That didn't happen. And, you know, by the time he gets to Afghanistan in 1996, Bin Laden has
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dropped any pretenses that he's just a wealthy businessman in Sudan. And he starts issuing
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public statements calling for war against the United States.
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You know, it's interesting when you detail the different disagreements he had with other sort of
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terrorists in his league or involved in other groups, and they would sort of bicker over what
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actually the objectives should be. And Bin Laden was always really focused on, we got to drive the
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U.S. out, we got to attack the U.S. Whereas others are saying, well, no, we, you know, we've just got
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to overthrow this one particular regime in this one Muslim country and so forth. But he was sort of
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singularly, no, guys, we really got to focus on the U.S. angle.
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Yeah, that was Bin Laden's big sort of strategic innovation. There were lots of jihadist groups in
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Afghanistan who were interested in overthrowing their own government. Same in Al-Zawahari,
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he runs the group now, not very well. He's an Egyptian who wanted to overthrow the government of
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Egypt. Bin Laden really said, you know, let's focus on the United States. And it had the useful
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effect of uniting all these different groups from around the Muslim world that were interested in
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violent jihad around one common enemy. And Bin Laden had a theory of the case that we, you know,
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attack the United States, the United States will pull out of the Middle East, and these regimes that
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we don't like will fall. Of course, that didn't happen. The United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda,
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Bin Laden's men on 9-11. And instead of pulling out of the Middle East, got more involved in the
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Middle East than at any time in its history. So the whole thing backfired spectacularly for Bin Laden,
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but it was his big idea. And, you know, I think Bin Laden's one of the few people you can say really
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changed history. He certainly redirected the course of American foreign policy for two decades of the first
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two decades of the 21st century, which also redirected allies' foreign policy and changed
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the Middle East in all sorts of unexpected ways, but not in the ways that Bin Laden hoped it would.
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There's certainly been a lot of debate about the lead up to 9-11, what was known, what could have
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been done to prevent it. Obviously, a lot of conspiracy theories filling the void. You really
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detail the people working for the CIA, the number of years, months they spent tracking Bin Laden, what they
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did know, what they didn't know, and the warnings that they gave to their higher ops. And that made
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it up to various, you know, to the Clinton administration and to the Bush administration.
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Can you separate fact from fiction for us in terms of, you know, what exactly did they know
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about 9-11? How could they or could they not have prevented it?
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Well, the CIA did a good job of what it's supposed to do, which is provide policymakers with strategic
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warning. During the spring and summer of 2001, there was a bunch of memos went to the Bush
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administration saying that Bin Laden is planning something and it seems to be imminent. And the
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volume of these warnings was pretty large. The problem was the Bush administration just
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didn't absorb any of this and was not concerned with these issues, and was concerned with Iraq.
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This was a threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The CIA made a mistake in the sense that it didn't
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alert the FBI to two al-Qaeda members who were living in the United States who turned out to be
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two of the hijackers who crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11. And those two hijackers were known to be
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living in the United States in San Diego. And that fact was known to the CIA to about 50 or 60 officers
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who saw these cables. And so, you know, the ball was dropped and they never informed the FBI.
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So they were from a tactical point of view, the CIA made a big mistake on that front. But from an
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overall strategic point of view, they did a very good job of warning the Bush administration
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about the threat from Bin Laden. It was simply ignored.
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But the sort of generalized threat, I mean, there was no, okay, this guy,
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this specific event on this day. There was not even a hint of that sort of specifics, correct?
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No, but intelligence estimates don't usually work that way. I mean, it's very rare that you have
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like sort of specific time and place for, you know, the way that the CIA issues, they're called
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estimates, interestingly, you know, they estimate with high levels of probability or medium or low
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levels of probability. They're not, it's not a crystal ball exercise where X is going to happen
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on Y day. It's more like this is, and this actually gets to the whole question of Afghanistan
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today. You know, the CIA, the intelligence community in the United States said that government
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could fall as soon as 30 to 90 days in Afghanistan after the US withdrew. You know,
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it turned out to be 11 days. Well, you know, the difference between 30 days and 11 days is not very
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big. So I mean, the point is, is what is the, the CIA's job is to provide strategic warning to
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policymakers who then make the decision about what the policy is. And usually it's, you know,
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it's a general sense of like what, what may happen in these circumstances. It's not a prediction
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of what will happen. What was the relationship between bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Now
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they certainly communicated, they certainly shielded him, but in what way was the Taliban
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involved in Al Qaeda's machinations? Well, pre 9-11, the, you know, there were a lot, a number of
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people in the Taliban who really disliked bin Laden, hoped that he would leave. You know, they were
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particularly focused. This group was particularly in the foreign ministry of the Taliban who was interested
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in international recognition. And they, you know, they were kind of lobbying for bin Laden to leave
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or leave of his own accord or get pushed out. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban at the time,
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ultimately never made that call. Bin Laden would always sort of use religious arguments with him to
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say that it was important that he continued to live in Afghanistan and fight the quote unquote infidels.
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And then over time, you know, the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda continued. And
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the documents that I use for the book, which were found in Abbottabad show a warm and cordial
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relationship 10 years after 9-11. Bin Laden is writing letters to Mullah Omar. Other leaders of the
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Taliban are recipients of letters from Al Qaeda leaders. Al Qaeda leaders are communicating with
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the Pakistani Taliban, which is an element of the Taliban. They are communicating with the
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Haqqani network, which is a key part of the Taliban. They're funding the Haqqani network,
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interestingly. And so, and then fast forward to today, the UN says that Al Qaeda and the Taliban
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remain closely aligned. And of course, anybody listening to this can look up Siraj Haqqani,
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who's now the Minister of the Interior. And he's described as being a leader of Al Qaeda and the
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Minister of the Interior in Afghanistan is a bit like the head of Department of Homeland Security
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and the FBI rolled into one in the United States. So this is kind of arguably one of the most,
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it is one of the most important posts in the Afghan government. It's held by somebody who's described
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as a leader of Al Qaeda. So I think that all sort of speaks for itself. Yeah, it really doesn't bode
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well for any sort of future terror plots or what have you that want to sort of take root in Afghanistan,
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aimed at the West or aimed at wherever. I mean, is it just going to be a situation in Afghanistan
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where the Taliban, you know, any sort of terror group that shows up there and sort of plants roots,
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as long as they're not directly contradicting the Taliban's goals, they'll turn a blind eye to them,
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they'll shield them, they'll let them do their thing? I think so. I mean, I don't see any reason
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why that wouldn't be the case. And what are the groups that we have to worry about now? Because
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some are on the rise, some are on the decline. What are the ones you're really paying attention
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to right now? Well, there's an ISIS group in Afghanistan called ISIS Khorasan, which has
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been at war with the Taliban. They're relatively small. There's Al Qaeda, which I think is going
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to stage a renaissance, but there are other groups in Afghanistan. Some of them are not directed at the
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West. There's Lashkar Taiba, which is a group that is interested in attacking India. There's the Islamic
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movement of Uzbekistan, which is interested in overthrowing the government of Uzbekistan.
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So there are a number of groups there. And I mean, they're clearly going to enjoy, at a minimum,
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I think, tolerance by the Taliban going forward. And these groups, you know, they're never stronger
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themselves. But if they have a post-government that is favourable, they can regroup and train people.
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And, you know, we've seen this movie before. So that's what I anticipate happening in Afghanistan.
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Here in Canada, we had about 400 young people who either went abroad or attempted to go abroad
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to Iraq or Syria to heed the call from ISIS and to get involved in some way or another. And I know
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the numbers are varying in other countries and much higher in many other countries. That seems,
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thankfully, to have waned right now. But are we going to see a situation like that again, where people
00:23:08.840
view this region as a place to go that, you know, inspires the, whatever you want to call it,
00:23:14.200
the terror inclination in them? Yeah, I think the short answer is yes. Because I mean, the reason
00:23:19.000
that those 400 Canadians either travelled or attempted to travel to Iraq and Syria was because
00:23:24.920
of the excitement around the declaration of the caliphate, which is a geographical entity that,
00:23:30.440
you know, controlled 8 million subjects and territory the size of Portugal. And that was a very inspiring
00:23:36.760
thing for some, for some young people with these ideas. When that geographical caliphate disappeared
00:23:44.200
in 2017, 2018, the foreign fighter flow from Canada or America or Europe or other Muslim countries
00:23:53.560
around the Middle East just went down to zero because no one wants to join the losing team. So I think
00:23:58.520
that we're going to see something similar with Afghanistan, maybe a little bit different. And also,
00:24:03.880
we're going to see another phenomenon, which is people not travelling but radicalising it
00:24:10.920
at home in front of their computers and going out and doing things, particularly if these groups in
00:24:15.080
Afghanistan start calling for homegrown terrorist attacks in the name of the Islamic Emirate of
00:24:20.040
Afghanistan. You know, you could see, no, you don't have to go to Afghanistan to carry out a terrorist
00:24:25.880
attack, obviously, you're going to get better trained if you do. But that's pretty difficult compared to
00:24:30.760
just simply picking up some sort of weapon and pick your country and carry out an attack in the name
00:24:37.160
of the Great Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. So my concern is that we'll also see that.
00:24:41.800
Now, I know in my introduction, I said that things seem to be in a bit of a lull,
00:24:44.760
people have let their guard down, they're less concerned about it. But is that fair? And is that
00:24:48.920
accurate? I mean, I was just thinking about the various lone wolf attacks that we've had in Canada
00:24:53.320
and the United States and so forth. But I'm not entirely clear on what's going on in the Middle East
00:24:57.640
in other parts of the world. I mean, are we in a lull right now?
00:25:01.960
Well, I mean, we have been because ISIS was defeated. And I think that had a big,
00:25:05.800
you know, the geographical defeat of the caliphate led to no longer being a particularly inspirational
00:25:12.520
group. We did, we still seen attacks in the name of ISIS, we saw one in New Zealand.
00:25:17.480
Just a couple of weeks ago, we saw one in Manhattan in Halloween 2017,
00:25:23.560
even which happened after, you know, the geographical caliphate had largely disappeared.
00:25:31.960
But, you know, now we have this new caliphate or emirate. And I think it's going to have some
00:25:40.680
similar kind of inspirational effect on those people who have these ideas. So, you know,
00:25:45.960
we're in a lull now that can change over the next two years.
00:25:49.160
Now, I know here in Canada, and it happens in other countries as well, a lot of effort and energy
00:25:54.520
has put into various institutes, university projects and so forth on de-radicalization,
00:26:00.760
countering violent extremism, they call it, trying to get to these people before they get radicalized
00:26:05.880
or trying to stop them in the path and so forth. We hear a lot about, okay, these are people who are
00:26:10.120
just sort of lost, they're looking for opportunity, that there's mental illness component involved and
00:26:14.120
so forth. What's actually going on with these young people? And what if we are potentially going to
00:26:19.640
have a surge in this, and we're going to sort of go through that whole process again? I mean,
00:26:22.440
what are the things that we need to keep in mind to stop that from happening or to limit it?
00:26:26.520
Well, the most effective intervention, I think, comes from former jihadists. I mean,
00:26:31.160
there's Mubin Sheikh, who's a Canadian who's, you know, done a lot of work in this area,
00:26:36.120
and others. You know, I think the interventions that work, and of course, you don't often,
00:26:41.720
you know, interventions that work aren't, it's like the tree that doesn't fall.
00:26:46.520
You know, it's hard to measure, but I think interventions that do work can be from clerics,
00:26:56.040
who, you know, can talk on a religious basis with people who have these ideas to say that they're
00:27:00.840
not sanctioned by Islam. That's one approach. And I think an even more effective approach is
00:27:06.520
former jihadists who went down this road, who've essentially, you know, rejected this,
00:27:12.360
can also be helpful, because that's more of a peer-to-peer kind of conversation. But, you know,
00:27:19.560
sometimes these interventions don't work. There was a woman called Shannon Connolly, who's an American
00:27:23.400
citizen from Colorado. She was 19, she tried to join ISIS, the FBI talked to her four times,
00:27:30.280
and, you know, suggested if you really want to do something for Syria, don't join ISIS,
00:27:33.800
help out a Syrian charity, which was very good advice. She ignored it and tried to get on a plane
00:27:38.920
to fly to Syria and was arrested. So the interventions can sometimes not work, but they're
00:27:46.600
certainly worth doing and they don't really cost anything to do. They're just a matter of finding
00:27:51.640
the right interlocutor who can speak with some authority with whoever is radicalizing.
00:27:56.920
A lot of people, when they saw the Taliban forces return just recently in Afghanistan,
00:28:01.800
it's like, wow, what have we been doing for the past 20 years? And I know you write about the
00:28:06.040
argument for the war in Iraq and you document, well, there really was not much of a connection
00:28:10.200
between Saddam and Bin Laden. And Bin Laden actually thought of Saddam as this atheist apostate,
00:28:14.760
so they weren't crazy about each other. Peter, have we just been treading water the past 20 years?
00:28:19.400
I mean, what's going on? We saw ISIS surge, their attacks here in the West, as we've been talking
00:28:24.920
about. So they've certainly got a few notches in their scorecard there. What's, have we made progress?
00:28:32.520
Well, I mean, in Afghanistan, I think there has been some progress, which tends to be overlooked.
00:28:37.080
I mean, look, so millions of Afghan women went to work and many millions of Afghan girls were educated
00:28:44.600
and there's a very vibrant independent press, pre-Taliban takeover. There's a high degree of,
00:28:53.160
almost everybody has a smartphone, so people are much more connected to the outside world.
00:28:58.040
It's one of the youngest populations in the world. I think 70% are under the age of 25.
00:29:02.920
Uh, so, you know, they, the society has certainly changed since the Taliban were in,
00:29:07.960
were in charge, but the Taliban now can have all the weapons and, you know,
00:29:11.560
you would be taking your life in your hands to kind of resist them at this point. And the resistance
00:29:16.760
crumbled pretty quickly. Uh, now the Taliban has, you know, it's armed with U.S. Army,
00:29:23.320
armored vehicles and U.S. mine resistant vehicles. And, you know, they've got some really good
00:29:28.680
material that they've seized as a result of the collapse of the Afghan army. And, uh, so they're
00:29:34.200
in, you know, very good shape militarily. And I don't think there's much that you can do to
00:29:37.800
dislodge them anytime soon, but I think they may, they may make some mistakes, which may change the
00:29:43.160
view of president Biden or his successor, um, about what to do. They can engage in ethnic cleansing,
00:29:49.320
as they did when they were in power. They can kill an American or dual nationals. They can kill
00:29:54.360
Western allies. Uh, they can carry out a terrorist attack in the West. It's traced back to Afghanistan.
00:30:00.520
But also these things would change the political calculus here.
00:30:02.920
Uh, we see those famous juxtaposition of images from Iran pre 1979, uh, women in jeans, long flowing
00:30:10.360
hair, walking down the street, you know, people want to go to the disco or what have you have a
00:30:14.200
beer or two here and there. And then we see the photos right after, and it's, you know, in the
00:30:17.800
full burqa and all that, and those very strict rules in Afghanistan, that it's less clear to me
00:30:23.240
what the kind of direction society would take if people were sort of completely free to choose it.
00:30:29.560
You talked about it being, you know, very tribal region, the Pashtuns and so forth. I mean,
00:30:33.480
what is your sense of, of what the people of Afghanistan want?
00:30:38.120
Well, it's a multi-ethnic society. And, you know, there are people,
00:30:42.440
you know, Kabul in the 1970s had women in, you know, short skirts and, um, yeah, but that,
00:30:50.040
you know, in the, in the provinces that was not the same at all. So, you know, I think, well,
00:30:55.560
I mean, what left to their own devices, you know, people in the cities would, you know,
00:31:00.520
dress, you know, modestly, but they wouldn't be wearing a burqa or they wouldn't be wearing a
00:31:05.720
naqab. Um, and the other ethnic groups like the Hazaras, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks mostly
00:31:13.160
reject all that as well. In the south, in the Pashtun rural areas, you know, that's pretty
00:31:18.200
routine to wear a burqa. So left to their own devices, they would look a lot like they did before
00:31:23.320
the Taliban took over. Because, you know, for all its faults, the Afghan government was freely
00:31:28.600
elected by the Afghan people. Um, it wasn't a police state, people did what they wanted, essentially.
00:31:33.880
Uh, and in the, in, in rural areas, Pashtun areas that, that they, they adopted those kinds
00:31:41.960
of social kind of customs and in other areas they didn't.
00:31:44.840
Peter, one of your books looking at the war and terror from a number of years ago is called
00:31:49.000
The Longest War. It's interesting that you could call it The Longest War, even when you wrote about
00:31:53.000
it a number of years ago, because it's still ongoing right now. Is this a war
00:31:57.320
that we stand a hope of winning? Yeah, I think win is the wrong verb. I mean, I think that we,
00:32:03.640
the, the win, defeat type things we should talk, I think a more effective verb is manage.
00:32:09.160
Right. You know, it's like a kind of semi-chronic condition, which you can, which you manage,
00:32:14.440
um, and you manage it by, you know, there's a variety of tools that you can manage it with.
00:32:18.920
You know, jihadist ideas, you're not going to get rid of every jihadist in the world.
00:32:23.480
Um, you know, but you can kind of manage the issue so that it's not a threat to your national
00:32:28.440
security. And I think that we, overall, the United States and its allies have done a pretty good job
00:32:33.640
of doing that in the past 20 years. Um, but I, I fear that with the Taliban takeover, we're in for
00:32:39.720
another cycle, um, of, of violence that emanates from this country. Um, it's not existential, uh, but it
00:32:48.600
is something. Right. So it's not existential. So we don't want to, you know,
00:32:53.240
crazy overreact to it and, Oh, let's get another big prolonged ground game going or what have you,
00:32:57.480
but we also don't want to downplay it, deny it, ignore it, or what have you. What advice then
00:33:02.600
would you give to policymakers on how to respond maturely to this evolving situation?
00:33:08.360
Well, presidents as different as president Biden, president Trump, president Obama,
00:33:12.600
and president Bush have all, all embraced, you know, some kind of elements of the same plan
00:33:17.880
with just different degrees of, uh, of how they've approached it. So, you know, the drone strikes,
00:33:23.960
special operations, special forces to advise and assist local forces, cyber warfare, you know,
00:33:30.040
all these are pretty low cost in the grand scheme of things. Um, and they are, I think they're also
00:33:35.400
politically sustainable because they don't involve a lot of American boots or allied boots on the ground.
00:33:40.760
And I, unfortunately, you know, I think that president Biden made an unforced error with
00:33:43.880
his decision on Afghanistan because the 3,500 American troops and the 7,000 NATO, mostly NATO
00:33:50.520
troops that were also there and the contractors, you know, that was enough to kind of keep a fragile
00:33:55.160
status quo, um, going and, um, you know, now the Taliban has taken over. Uh, so I, you know, I mean,
00:34:05.240
I think, I think that the lesson of that is obvious, which is with a relatively small footprint
00:34:12.120
and the right kind of policies, you can have a politically sustainable way to, to counter this.
00:34:18.280
Um, but if you just kind of wash your hands of the situation, it tends to, you know,
00:34:23.400
simply because we decide we, the United States decide that we're not going to be there. It
00:34:26.600
doesn't mean that the war doesn't continue or the situation doesn't get worse. Um, and, um,
00:34:32.440
I think that's where we are today. Peter Bergen's latest book is The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,
00:34:38.840
a really informative read. I highly recommend it. Peter, thanks very much for joining us today.
00:34:46.840
Full Common is a post-media podcast. I'm Anthony Fury. This episode was produced by Andre Pru with
00:34:52.120
theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. You can subscribe to Full
00:34:56.840
Common on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can help us by
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giving us a rating or a review and by telling your friends about us. Thanks for listening.