Tales of Regime Change： Afghanistan — Graveyard of Empires
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Summary
This is what happens when the Fourth Turning meets 5th Generation Warfare. A commentator, international social media sensation and former Navy intelligence veteran, and former military intelligence veteran Jack Posobiec, joins host Jack to discuss the latest breaking news story about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York City, and the latest on the death of Osama bin Laden.
Transcript
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I want to take a second to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief.
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You can stop the endless scrolling, trying to find out what's going on in your world.
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We will have this delivered directly to you totally for free.
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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth-generation warfare.
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A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
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This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
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Christmas 1979. Soviet armor pours across the Afghan border towards Kabul as helicopters secure the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush mountains.
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In Moscow, the Politburo has decided to save Afghanistan's communist government from collapse.
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We have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago.
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You have declared a jihad against the United States. Can you tell us why?
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The U.S. government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal through its support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those killed in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.
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He is representative of networks of people who absolutely have made their cause
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to defeat the freedoms that we understand, and we will not allow him to do so.
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On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps
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and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
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These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan
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and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.
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It is a milestone a mere number cannot explain.
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According to an independent Associated Press count,
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1,000 American troops have now been killed in Afghanistan.
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Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world
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that the United States has conducted an operation
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that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.
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President Biden announced the end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the same spot
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in the White House Treaty Room as President George W. Bush announced its beginning 20 years ago.
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Chaos following the horrific attack outside the Kabul airport. This is now
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the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in more than a decade.
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The Taliban held a parade at Bagram Air Base, showing off the weapons and military equipment Joe and Kamala left behind.
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The U.S. armored vehicles just outside of Kandahar Wednesday, and right on top of there, that is the black and white flag of the Taliban.
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Now, it's not clear how much U.S. hardware is now in the hands of the Taliban.
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Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's special edition of Human Events Daily.
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We've got a special Christmas series for you yet again this year, introducing Tales of Regime
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Change. Tales of Regime Change is a journey through the modern American habit of wandering
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into far off lands with big plans, big budgets, and even bigger blind spots. Now, if you followed
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U.S. foreign policy for more than five minutes, you probably notice a pattern. It always starts
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with a briefing, you know, crisp suits in the intelligence community, whispering about windows
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of opportunity, humanitarian obligations, or the chance to shape the region. The language is
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polished, the PowerPoints are convincing, and the mission, we're told, is noble, spreading stability,
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democracy, liberal order, all the things that make Washington policymakers feel like they're
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the protagonists of history. But behind the curtain, there's another engine running. The
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quiet belief that American involvement can always bend the arc of the world towards some vision of
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globalist liberal hegemony. Not domination. No, no, no. They'd never call it that. They'd call it
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maintaining influence, supporting partners, managing outcomes, a soft empire wrapped in
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the language of progress. And every single time the same thing happens, the law of unintended
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consequences strolls in like it owns the place. Because when you try to rearrange nations from
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7,000 miles away. When you treat societies, tribes, history, faith traditions like pieces
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on a whiteboard, you end up creating forces you never anticipated and problems that you can't
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bomb, bribe, or brief your way out of. Which brings us to episode one, Afghanistan, the graveyard
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of empires. For generations, Afghanistan has devoured the ambitions of great powers,
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the way the desert sands swallow footprints. The British marched in with confidence of empire.
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The Soviets rolled in with tanks and ideology. And the Americans, well, we arrived with a cocktail
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of counterterrorism, nation building, and the belief that we could turn the Hindu Kush into
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a Jeffersonian democracy project by sheer will and a few trillion dollars. The intelligence briefing
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said the Taliban would crumble. The analysts predicted we could reshape a tribal warrior
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society into a centralized government. The architects of liberal order imagined Kabul
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as the next success story in the grand narrative of progress. But Afghanistan had its own narrative.
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Goes back to Alexander the Great, ancient, rugged, unyielding. And in the end, we learn once again
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what so many who came before us learn the hard way. You can enter Afghanistan on your own terms,
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So we're going to take the next couple of days in this series,
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Tales of Regime Change, over this Christmas time.
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And what we're going to do is peel back the curtain.
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We'll sift through the documents, the declassified cables,
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Because if there's one thing we've seen again and again,
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It tells itself stories about why those wars must be fought.
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And those stories, more often than not, shape our mistakes as much as they justify them.
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And folks, while you listen to this episode, I want you to remember
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that I'm not just talking about something that I've read about in books or seen in movies or
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watched on TV. I spent a year at Guantanamo Bay in the interrogation cell. I've met these people.
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Members of the Taliban, members of Al-Qaeda.
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This is an ideology that I am intimately familiar with.
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And I understand this problem set as well as anyone can understand something.
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to drive north through the sullen mountains is to journey backwards in time to an isolated nation
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which has consistently ignored the approach of a 20th century world
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all right folks we're back human events special tales of regime change
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graveyard of empires afghanistan i'm very excited so joining me in this quest as he did last year
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and the year prior is joshua lisek the co-author of unhumans secret society of communist revolutions
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and how to crush them joshua how are you my friend i'm well good to be here thank you
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merry christmas merry christmas to you as well so you know it's amazing we're starting here
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with Afghanistan and to tell the story of the regime changes in Afghanistan, you know, you
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really have to kind of start at a certain point, you know, which regime change do you want to go
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with? Do we talk about the British invasion in the 1920s? Do we go back all the way to Alexander,
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the great and the Macedonian empire and the Hellenic world, the empire of Alexander from
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which derives the city of of uh so alexander's name uh in uh in the local in pashtun would be
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um uh it's something along the lines of alexandar which me which is where we derive the name of the
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city kandahar is actually based on alexander the great and it's one of the largest cities
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in afghanistan to this day so the the country of afghanistan is indelibly marked by regime changes
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that go back thousands upon thousands of years, all the way back to, you know, hundreds of years
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before Christ when Alexander was there. But I think for modern times, where I'd like to start
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is the 1970s. So and that kind of gets us to the present situation. But I want people to very
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clearly understand that Afghanistan goes way, way back and people have been trying to tame the Hindu
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cush, if you will, for thousands of years. And all of them have been have ridden to ruin. And
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the United States, of course, is no different. And so what do you have in the 1970s? Well,
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first you have a king. The king is deposed. He is deposed by a strong nationalist leader,
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military leader, who then begins nationalizing industry, who begins kicking foreigners out of
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the country. But then, oh yes, then something happens that's so similar to all of us that in
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fact, it even features in on humans from last year, because some of these Marxist revolutions,
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which took place within the context of the cold war were actually, uh, were actually regime
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changes. So Joshua, what did we write about the Marxist revolution of Afghanistan, which no one
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talks about, by the way, all the way back when we wrote on humans last year.
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Yes, that's correct. What the Soviet Union attempted to do in the local communists,
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Marxist-Leninists of Afghanistan, bears an eerie resemblance to pretty much everything that
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happened everywhere else. We identified sort of the three acts of a communist uprising,
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a far left-wing revolution, whether they call themselves communists or socialists, or dare we
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say, Democrats, but we're going to pick up and do a little bit of story time with Joshua Lysak
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featuring the Unhumans book, the chapter Red Hot Cold War. If you have your copy, you may turn to
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page 179. This is what you do at Christmastime as you read stories. Let's pick it up. It all started
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back in 1973 with a coup that kicked out the Afghan king and ended the monarchy. Muhammad
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Daoud Khan, a man of ambition and vision, toppled his cousin, King Zahir Shah, while he was abroad.
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Overnight, Afghanistan transitioned from a monarchy to a quasi-democratic republic with
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Daoud at the helm. His initial moves were bold and modern, pushing for women's rights and societal
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reforms such as, surprise, surprise, land redistribution. But these seemingly anti-Islamic
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ambitions edged the nation closer to Soviet influence. Radical shifts to modernize Afghanistan
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rubbed traditionalists the wrong way, and by 1978, simmering tensions exploded in the Sour
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Revolution. A Marxist-Leninist faction, the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,
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PDPA, ousted and assassinated Daun in yet another coup. And so the Democratic Republic
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of Afghanistan was born, with the Soviet Union acting as midwife and a KGB attending. Oh, but
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it continues. It continues. We're not done yet. To maintain the early grip on power, the Afghan
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communists imprisoned, tortured, and executed all who opposed. This is what they do. These brutally
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unsurprising tactics sparked a wildfire of resistance across the mountains and valleys of
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Afghanistan. Enter the Mujahideen, a motley crew of fighters bound by their shared disdain
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for the PDPA's atheistic and foreign-backed regime. While some were native Afghans and other
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Arab volunteers, these simple men united under a common banner of defending their faith and homeland
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against what they saw as an existential threat. As internal strife escalated, the Soviet Union,
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Watching its new ally falter to next-generation warfare, as the U.S. recently had in Vietnam,
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December 1979 marked the beginning of a new chapter as Soviet tanks rolled across the
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It was a full-scale invasion aimed at a profit of the faltering communist regime.
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and again we're not done yet with this regime change business listen to this how can we not
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be done it's not done yet in the u.s charismatic congressman charlie wilson charlie wilson's war
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now begins pozo here we go well before before we get to charlie wilson's war let's let's let's
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pause because and i do want to go back so in the sour revolution when they came to the nationalist
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leader now you mentioned that that they assassinated him were not you know not surprising
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but joshua and i don't know if we wrote it in the book but you know perhaps in the new updated
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version of unhumans imagine not owning a copy couldn't be me that uh what did they do with his
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family what do they always do with his family they killed them all they killed every single one
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big shock big shock right there they killed him his entire family his wife his children every
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single one of them wow i can't imagine not communists doing the same thing they do every
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single time not marxists engaging in insane bloodletting and insane violence every time
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their revolution expands to another country not not atheists trying to impose their insane
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beliefs on a radical religious by the way a radical religious tribal people and so of course
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this does not work well and so this is what what we what we see responded in when the tribes begin
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to um you know begin to rise up and they begin to actually fight back against uh against the
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soviets and so fight back against the new coup the new revolution the new government so that's when
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the Marxists say, okay, we need more than just the KGB, they put out the call to Moscow,
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and they say, we need help, or we're not going to win this thing.
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Yes, that's right. And that's when, shortly thereafter, there were 115,000 Soviet troops
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sent into Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone under Charlie Wilson,
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Congressman Charlie Wilson, who some of you have seen the film Charlie Wilson's War,
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which depicts the internalism in the united states this fomenting of a righteous war
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referring to the mujahideen as the good guys the good guys my goodness now one of the organizations
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that opposed the soviet union and all these troops and tanks and resources was a little
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group called the taliban my goodness what people generally seem to go ahead oh no i was gonna say
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what's amazing to me is one of the pictures that you get out of this is of course there's a photo
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where the mujahideen is meeting with president ronald reagan in the white house in the white
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house in the united states and he's saying oh this you know this is going to be great we'll work with
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them. It's, you know, it's amazing. And, you know, my gosh, it's it, when you look at it
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in a post nine 11 capacity, we're scratching your head saying, how could this possibly have
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happened? And what we're explaining and what I hope that we can try to do through this entire
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series is explain how these things keep happening. I remember, uh, uh, of course there's, um,
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the great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Gust Avrakatos in, in the scene, in the movie. And
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he's in the CIA officer. And he goes, you know, what is it? He goes, remember, he smashes the
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window and he's like, you're in the business of changing the world. You don't think it's odd.
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You're in the only business we're doing. Nothing is considered radical, you know? And he's just,
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he's just saying over and over about how it's, you know, you have to have the political will,
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You have to have the political will. And, you know, it's over and over and over about how this
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is a great idea. And actually, we know what it turned into. It turned into the rise of the
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Pakistani ISI and from which Pakistani intelligence, which basically runs Pakistan
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today to a great extent with the U.S. deep state, we saw the rise of the low group and the seedbed
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of what would one day become al-Qaeda, the Taliban's rise, then 9-11, and then eventually
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the longest war in America's history. And yet, for some reason, we don't talk about it in those
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terms. So all of it, every single last domino, it's like domino theory actually happens,
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but it happens with us and not the other way around. And it all begins with this coup in 1978,
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an invasion in 1979, and this Cold War strategy. And we'll see this throughout this episode and
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every episode we do that never pauses to ask the most important question. What happens next?
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What happens next? Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lysak, by the way, make sure you get your copy of Unhumans
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as well as the new audio book, which features myself as the narrator. Go and get that wherever
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you can download your audio books. It's got a couple of new chapters in there. So make sure
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you get those as well. Be right back, Tales of Regime Change, Afghanistan, Great Yard of Empires.
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The Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan began in the early 1990s when the group began
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resting control away from the Mujahideen warlords who controlled the countryside and were engaged
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in brutal civil conflict. All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back. Tales of regime change,
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and we're talking about Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire. So now we're in the 1990s. The Soviet
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Union has collapsed. They've expended themselves. America's patting themselves on the back. Great
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job. We did a great regime change. Look at us. And Afghanistan, no longer a battlefield, total
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vacuum. Soviets are out. America packs up their covert ops, walks away. CIA walks away. But
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You don't have a country. You have this shattered mosaic of warlords, factions, armies.
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The victory over the Red Army did not bring peace at all.
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What it brought was a quagmire, a civil war.
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And who rises to the top of this? The Taliban.
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And believe it or not, early on, the Taliban was backed by the U.S. government as well because they thought the Taliban would be a stabilizing force because they could win the civil war and then stabilize Afghanistan.
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And the Taliban, of course, was working with a group called al-Qaeda.
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Now, al-Qaeda and the Taliban rose separately out of the Afghanistan civil war, and there's two different tracks that people have to understand.
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So the Taliban were Pashtuns. Pashtuns are the locals of Afghanistan and really live on both
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sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Whereas Al-Qaeda, they are not local. They are Arabs.
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So Arabs and Pashtuns are two different races. This is something, of course, that the planners
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in Washington didn't really care about, didn't think it was a big deal, didn't think like it
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mattered. And of course, as we know, the leader of the Al Qaeda was one of those wealthy scions
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of the Gulf nations who used his family's wealth to grow Al Qaeda. And that, of course, was Osama
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bin Laden. And Osama bin Laden, as we mentioned, was working with the Mujahideen, was working with
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U.S. backing, was working with the CIA, was working with others. By the way, Al Qaeda, at this point
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in the 1990s, was conducting attacks all throughout Africa, conducted attacks even in Southeast Asia,
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but at the same time was also aiding the United States and various operations in where? Yugoslavia.
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So this is a very strange situation where you've got al-Qaeda and NATO on the same side of these
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different regime change wars when all of that breaks apart. And we'll have to, of course,
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cover Yugoslavia in another segment of Tales of Regime Change. So stay tuned, kids. It'll come
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up again. So by 1994, Taliban takes Kandahar, then they take Kabul in 1996. And believe it or not,
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one of the things the Taliban is known for is public executions of pedophile warlords,
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public executions of pedophile warlords, because they were conducting a practice known as Bacha
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Bazi. And Bacha Bazi is when the warlords would take the prepubescent boys of the villages and
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of the areas they controlled and rape them in their tents and in their palaces, and then send
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them back to the families and would, you know, keep a coterie of these boys around. They would
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say girls are for procreation, boys are for fun. And so those were the warlords that the U.S. was
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backing. The Taliban then became the ones who were executing those warlords. This will come up later.
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Then the coal bombing happens in 2000 from Al-Qaeda.
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And the response to 9-11, we all know, Operation Enduring Freedom.
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So Joshua, at any point, did any of these U.S. planners sit back and think,
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gosh, perhaps we played a role in starting all of this?
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Some of you all know, and you do as well, Jack,
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that Data Republican and I are working on a book on basically the 300-plus-year conflict
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between what we'll call nationalism and supranationalism.
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Supranationalism is this idea that your own concept of a nation is beyond the borders of one country.
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You might have all heard the term globalism, globalization.
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This is slightly different in that you sort of see yourself as a citizen of the world versus a person from a people with traditions, heritage, and more.
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This might be the difference between what we like to call heritage Americans versus NPR Americans, sort of people who listen to and consume mainstream media that is as much focused on what's happening on the other side of the planet.
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And how that affects you today, where you have ideological allies, if you're a liberal, in New Zealand or Canada.
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And you see yourself as the kin of those individuals if you're an NPR American.
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So that is the data that we're looking at with the book coming out in 2026.
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What we trace is this growth of this ideology that we are a global village.
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if they're not going to play nice and act nice, we can just make them. It's a sort of foreign
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policy based on blank slate theory. And generally what we see from these people who are as naive
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as they are powerful, the supranationalists in the West and elsewhere, oh, we can just get rid
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of a regime if they're a closed society, to use the phrase popularized by George Soros, who is a,
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So let's say a star character in my and data Republicans book.
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And so perpetual intervention, whether it's Afghanistan or it's Syria or it's Libya or
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There's this idea that humankind is perfectible.
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It is a misapplication of enlightenment values, where if you simply create the right structure
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with the right incentives, you'll get the right results.
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And so because there's a morality involved here,
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He called the Mujahideen, quote, the good guys.
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That good and evil, and we're on the side of good,
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when it's applied to these different scenarios,
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third world interventions bring third world consequences.
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And it's as if there's a blindness to these consequences.
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So you hear the words, directly or indirectly, should just appear amongst the supranationalists,
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who again, are those individuals who for decades, if not centuries, sort of see themselves as citizens of the world.
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Which is why when Donald J. Trump, our president, speaks ill of Haiti or Somalia, for example, they get all offended.
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The ideology is so funny when you actually break it down.
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All right, folks, we'll be right back in our next segment on this.
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We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in
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New York City. One report said a plane may have hit one of the two towers. The United States
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military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations
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of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back. This is
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tales of regime change graveyard of empires afghanistan and so folks we get we've come to
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the part of the story where we begin the forever war america's longest war 2002 to 2021 think of
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that 19 years of warfare really 20 years if you consider uh the original october 2001 beginning
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of Operation Enduring Freedom. So Taliban falls in 2001. And then what America attempts to do
00:28:09.880
is dismantle their regime, but then lay a liberal Jeffersonian regime based on American ideals on
00:28:21.340
top of it. And they just believe that democracy would pop up and flourish in, and I'm just going
00:28:27.820
to say it. Uh, they believe that centralized elections, government, civil institutions,
00:28:33.020
individual rights, professionalized security forces, and a free market economy, uh, complete
00:28:37.860
with women's rights, gay rights. I'm sure today are up to the, you know, parts of the administration
00:28:44.800
we're trying to push, uh, transgender rights at one point that they could impose this on a low
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00:28:51.420
IQ, tribal, hyper-religious culture that's existed for thousands of years and still practices
00:29:00.380
cousin marriage, that they could just use the force of will of Washington, D.C. So you've got
00:29:07.420
George Bush, you know, kind of on the, you know, the military front, the, you know, we're going to
00:29:14.380
fight and we're going to win. But then you've also on the other side got George Soros, who's pushing
00:29:18.980
liberal democracy and liberal hegemony. And in a way, and people might not think of this,
00:29:24.620
but George Bush and George Soros were almost aligned on this because they both were and are
00:29:31.260
globalists. Joshua Lysak, why is it that the nation building project in Afghanistan was such
00:29:41.420
a failure? One of the reasons it's such a failure is that the supranationalist
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00:29:47.660
neoliberal ideology doesn't really work outside of the Western world. For example,
00:29:56.360
what are American values versus what are Pashtun values? What are the values of these pedophile
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00:30:03.920
warlords and why are we aligning themselves with them? We all know individuals who were
00:30:10.460
serving on the ground and even in combat during the global war on terror and the horror stories
00:30:16.620
that they brought back that sadly drove many of our best men and women to claim their own lives
00:30:24.540
was the inability to stop the pedophilia that they witnessed over there, that they had to
00:30:32.780
back off. It's just a cultural custom. Don't judge. That is the trouble with supranationalist
00:30:40.360
neoliberalism is because they're simply incompatible. And yet there's a naivety that
00:30:46.900
persists. What shocks so many people who look into this is you realize that George W. Bush,
00:30:52.780
and George H. W. Bush before him, and George Soros, the two Georges, were by and large
00:30:58.680
ideologically aligned. Listen to this from December 3rd, 2001. The United States and its
00:31:07.740
allies are winning the war on Afghanistan, wrote George Soros. Now listen to this. As yet,
00:31:16.840
there's a little clear thinking about what that means in practice and how we can ensure,
00:31:21.200
here we go, a broader victory by helping to build a genuinely free, open, and prosperous society
00:31:29.860
in Afghanistan. Free, open, and prosperous. So the idea is, as a sort of citizen of the world,
00:31:39.920
where all nations are part of my purview, neoliberal, meaning we can bring secular
00:31:46.920
enlightenment values to everyone. And he goes on to talk about the basic necessities. He starts
00:31:53.740
to sound like a public school teacher about health care rights and education, technology,
00:32:00.140
hospitals, the sort of staples of Western society. He starts talking about roads,
00:32:05.540
for instance, here. And then he says the best organization, this is where he does go at odds
00:32:11.000
with George Bush. He says that the best organization to rebuild Afghanistan, to make it a prosperous
00:32:15.780
and free society, is not the United States. It's the United Nations, which has a record of
00:32:23.200
demonstrated incompetence everywhere there is a nation building or a regime change effort.
00:32:32.280
One of the patterns that we witness with regime change across place, place, time, and race
00:32:39.720
is a three-act structure. We saw this with communist revolution, but the three-act structure,
00:32:45.180
the rule of three, seems to be persistent across our physical reality and our human reality.
00:32:53.200
And here it is again, and we'll see this also in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, where Act
00:32:59.360
One is this sort of demonization and preparation, where you have to build the moral case with
00:33:07.640
your own people that we need to go over there, right?
00:33:11.880
We fight them over there, so we won't fight them over here.
00:33:16.700
We ended up importing them, sending them over here, right?
00:33:19.440
which Data Republican acknowledges is the George Sorosian solution to nation building after the
00:33:27.060
global war on terror. You know, we can't really, we have trouble democratizing their spaces,
00:33:33.380
so we just bring the populations here instead. And then we can learn how to train them to be
00:33:39.120
good little neoliberal supranationalists and explore a prosperous, free, and open society,
00:33:45.540
open means you're open to influences, you're a cosmopolitan. But the trouble is, there's very
00:33:52.860
little cultural similarity between your New York Times subscriber and a pedophile warlord. Those
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are two different tribes, different realities even, and they simply do not mix. How do we treat
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00:34:08.760
these uncontacted tribes in the Amazon? How does the government of Brazil treat them?
00:34:14.000
What about Sentinel Island? Everyone knows about the Sentinel Island, right? As in that there are laws against going there. Why is it that we have those laws, those policies, and yet we pick a nation like Afghanistan or Iraq, and we need to charge headlong in there, but first demonize the leader, say we have to go there, or there's the good guy, we got to stop the bad guys, right?
00:34:39.620
That's stage one where you make the moral case for it.
00:34:43.360
And then you have act two or stage two, which is where you execute the change and often
00:34:50.680
That's where there's intervention, there's overthrow, there's direct invasion, there's
00:34:54.800
airstrikes, there's proxy support for, in this case, the Jahedin and then the Taliban.
00:35:01.760
And finally, after there's been chaos and bloodshed and destruction, you come in to
00:35:07.160
That's the aftermath, the consolidation. You try to install your people. And this is where George Soros advises a neoliberal supranationalist order.
00:35:20.140
And what's amazing is that, you know, when you look at it from a military perspective, it's the U.S. military was always able to win in, you know,
00:35:35.160
one city or one battle or whatever it might be. But the problem was it was the George Soros angle
00:35:40.920
that kept failing because they would keep trying to build this central liberal, um, government,
00:35:47.520
neoliberal government, which would constantly keep collapsing because again, we're propping up the
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00:35:52.560
pedophile warlords. We're saying it's just their culture. We're working with people who the local
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00:35:57.100
populace hates because they can see that we're the ones who are propping them up. And they look
00:36:03.160
at us as the invader because we broke every single rule of fourth generation warfare.
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You run in with tanks and bombs and then say, you should love us because we've killed your
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children and blown up your cities. You should fly the American flag. We've liberated you. Don't you
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see? And we've never once considered how it might look to the local populace. Then, oh, by the way,
00:36:27.620
yes, we're going to we're going to prop up all these ideals that run completely counter
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to islam which run completely counter to your cultural mores which run completely counter
00:36:37.520
to everything that you believe and that because afghanistan wasn't a blank slate there are no
00:36:42.020
blank slates in the world blank slate doesn't exist the blank slate does not exist it never has
00:36:46.500
and these blank slaters need to go and then they would say oh well and and we're just going to show
00:36:51.100
how good we are so we're going to open our doors we're going to open our doors so and people miss
00:36:55.480
this i want to get in because i know we only have a minute left in this segment but i want to get
00:36:58.280
this in, that people forget that although Bush did the surge in Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan
00:37:03.520
was 2009. That was Barack Obama. So Barack Obama is the one who expands the war in Afghanistan,
00:37:12.620
keeps it going throughout his administration, even though he campaigned on ending it,
00:37:16.600
and continues, of course, the drone war, which, you know, it crosses into Pakistan.
00:37:20.780
And it's all in furtherance of this insane neoliberal project. That's what Obama did.
00:37:27.400
So Obama is the one who continues the surge in Afghanistan.
00:37:31.940
Trump tries throughout his first term to get them out.
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And of course, we are going to get to that in the next segment, 2021.
00:37:46.020
What happened if the 20 years of American involvement of a forever war in a country
00:38:06.240
President Biden announced the end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the same spot
00:38:11.820
in the White House Treaty Room as President George W. Bush announced its beginning 20 years ago.
00:38:20.880
well folks we're now in the spring of 2021 the accelerated drawdown u.s bases empty overnight
00:38:32.360
contractors vanish air support disappears the fragile afghan state which washington and the
00:38:37.440
united states spent two decades propping up suddenly had to stand on its own guess what
00:38:43.360
it folded faster than saigon every capital fell afghan soldiers abandoned their weapons vehicles
00:38:50.480
even entire bases. They switched sides, negotiated surrenders, or simply walked home.
00:38:55.960
The Taliban advanced faster than anyone thought possible. They entered Kabul on August 15th,
00:39:03.300
2021 without resistance. This was not a conquest. This is key. It was the unmasking of a political
00:39:11.820
illusion that Washington had been pushing for 20 years. The ministries, the armies,
00:39:18.820
the police, the courts, it was all fake. As the kids say, it was all fake and gay because it
1.00
00:39:25.760
collapsed in days. And we saw the images, the helicopters evacuating the U.S. embassy,
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Afghans clinging to aircraft, crowds flooding the airport. The very scenes that America swore
00:39:36.600
would never happen again, happened again. And the media and no one, no one in Washington sat down
00:39:43.320
and actually asked themselves, they want to point the blame. Oh, it's Trump's fault. Oh,
00:39:46.880
it's this fault, it's that fault, it's the military's fault, it's the Afghan's fault,
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00:39:49.960
it's Ashraf Ghani's fault, or perhaps could it have been the fault of telling ourselves
00:39:59.200
the wrong story? Were perhaps we telling ourselves a story that American values and
00:40:07.860
liberal democracy can flood around the world and that this will work every place that it's tried?
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were we telling ourselves a story that we wanted to believe and most importantly were the afghans
00:40:23.760
listening to that story or were they perhaps telling themselves their own story joshua lisek
00:40:32.060
you are the master of using story and explaining how story and the stories that we tell ourselves
00:40:39.020
activate our minds, activate our beliefs, activate, and they drive our social policy.
00:40:45.300
Do you agree with me that this was, in addition to being a clash of civilization, a clash of
00:40:51.000
cultures, it was, in fact, a clash of stories? To quote Mike Cernovich, all media is narrative.
00:41:01.140
To quote Joshua Lysak, all history is ghostwritten. It was ghostwritten by the victors,
00:41:07.560
specifically the victors who can't afford to hire the people to write the history.
00:41:12.740
And one of the issues with neglect for the facts is we forget how these things go every single time.
00:41:23.340
I'm reminded of our sort of founding mythos that you had George Washington,
00:41:29.780
you had the Continental Congress in our own country.
00:41:35.560
we had Christian faith, we had Greek and Roman and Northern European and the early books of the
00:41:44.320
Bible, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and so on, that all came together to provide the foundational ideas
00:41:49.900
for this wonderful American experiment. But when you look at the actual military conflict
00:41:56.620
between the Minutemen and the militia under Washington and his officers versus the Grand
00:42:02.200
British Empire, the irony, the absolute irony, is you see something closer, rather than the sort of
00:42:10.780
wonderful, let's say, organized warfare and on the battlefield, what you more so see is something
00:42:19.120
akin to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, or perhaps Russian soldiers in the winter being attacked by
00:42:28.000
every single empire that's ever attacked them from German to French. One of the most interesting
00:42:33.820
stories from the American Revolutionary period is General John Burgoyne and his pursuit of George
00:42:39.840
Washington's army for a number of months during the Louis upstate New York, Pennsylvania sort of
00:42:46.720
a region where Burgoyne against Washington won battle after battle after battle. But it was the
00:42:56.540
heat and the humidity of summer swamps that did his army in. It was the geography that outlasted
00:43:05.820
the British Empire there. And eventually, by the time Bergoin caught up with Washington,
00:43:12.140
they were done. They surrendered. They quit. So Joshua, are you saying that perhaps
00:43:17.940
the terrain has a vote? That perhaps the people have a vote? The culture has a vote?
00:43:26.080
that the law of unintended consequences always wins in the final round. And look, I'll just say
00:43:35.180
again, folks, I served at Guantanamo Bay. I spent a year down there. I worked in the interrogation
00:43:41.280
cell. And I saw these guys up close and personal. I am not speaking from something that I've read.
00:43:50.300
I'm not speaking just from something that I've seen on the movies or something. I'm speaking
00:43:55.720
as a guy who actually met Taliban members and Al-Qaeda members and all the rest,
00:44:02.240
this is what they believe. And I know what they believe because I heard them say it from their
00:44:07.420
own mouths. Sometimes they're translators, sometimes even in perfect English. They fully
00:44:13.120
are committed to radical Islam. They are fully committed to believing that Islam should take
1.00
00:44:19.480
over the world and that they should rightfully be the rulers of all nations, that they want to
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00:44:26.580
spread their caliphate throughout all borders, throughout all of Christendom, throughout all
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of China, throughout all of North America. And they want all of us to be subjugated. This is
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simply what they believe is what they told themselves. And guess what? That was the story
00:44:43.660
that beat America in Afghanistan for 20 years. Because while we imposed our story of, oh,
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you can be liberated, they said, we don't want to be liberated. We want to be proud Muslims
00:44:58.700
who believe in our God. And that fervent belief carried them through 20 years of this fight.
00:45:07.080
and also the terrain that they have on their side, the advantage, the cultural advantage.
00:45:13.520
That is why when you go to Afghanistan today, you will see the Taliban still in charge.
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00:45:20.240
We had the hubris. We believe that we can control outcomes from thousands of miles away.
00:45:25.180
We believe that our values were universal, that everyone would just believe what we believe,
00:45:30.800
and that our good intentions would override all of these local realities.
00:45:36.420
It's not true. You know, folks, the graveyard of empires doesn't beat outsiders. It outlasts them.
00:45:46.800
And it outlasts them every time. Josh Rolisek, let me get a final minute wrap up from you.
00:45:54.860
On the topic of American storytelling, one of the most, another interesting story that maps
00:46:00.740
onto this, and this is why the neoliberal experiment fails every single time. The British
00:46:05.260
empire applied that same mindset to the American colonies. Of course, we've retold ourselves this
00:46:10.480
glorious new story, but the British empire and the southern colonies, they backed what we might call
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00:46:17.460
the rednecks who were loyalists living in the backwoods of the southern colonies rather than
0.82
00:46:23.260
ally with the local southern aristocracy. And what ended up happening by them equipping the
0.89
00:46:30.640
backwoods Scots-Irish who despised the uptight, hoity-toity southern colonists. They engaged in
0.52
00:46:38.760
total warfare, murdering entire families, including the women and the children, the Scots-Irish
00:46:45.300
loyalists did, who were given power, who were given resources. And it absolutely horrified
00:46:50.820
the British that they had created this massive bloodshed. And that, of course, created propaganda,
0.94
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which then turned the entirety against the british experiment ironically the united states
00:47:02.440
and it with its geography and its unique cultural situation was the graveyard of the british fire
00:47:07.640
this is why it's so important that we learn our own politically incorrect history and we separate
00:47:13.880
which is ghost written by the victors versus that which actually happened that's far darker than
00:47:20.340
most of us are prepared to read folks this has been episode one tales of regime change
00:47:29.820
graveyard of empires afghanistan i'm jack sobek and next time we'll follow the pattern to a new
00:47:37.320
front another intervention another mission another set of promises and another chapter
00:47:47.360
Ladies and gentlemen, as always, have my permission to reassure you.