James Glancy is a Royal Marine, filmmaker, Brexiter and former British soldier who served in the Royal Marines in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. In this episode, we discuss the impact of the British invasion of Afghanistan, the loss of British soldiers and equipment, and the rise of militant Islamism.
00:01:12.940Royal Marine, filmmaker, Brexit party, MEP, lots of different things.
00:01:17.300But the one thing we really wanted to talk to you about is you mentioned in your movie, actually, Afghanistan, that you sign up for the Royal Marines and a week later 9-11 happens.
00:01:29.040And you end up going over to Afghanistan, which at the time you thought was just a war and a good thing to do.
00:01:35.220And now you feel like not only did we lose that war, we're actually importing some of the people who beat us into this country.
00:01:44.460I mean, if you think of our reason for going there, it was because of 9-11 and you had the Islamic movements around al-Qaeda hosted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
00:02:01.020We went there to remove those people and to try and kill that ideology.
00:02:08.020And that felt like the right mission, the right thing to do, because clearly militant Islamism or Islamo-fascism, as it's also known, is an ideology which is fundamentally incompatible with the West of our way of life.
00:02:30.900Not only did we lose that conflict in Afghanistan, but we left a huge amount of weapons and capability in the country.
00:02:40.780And the Taliban, who we went to fight, are more powerful than they were in 2001.
00:02:46.920They didn't even control the whole country in September 2001.
00:02:52.960They controlled the southern part of the country.
00:02:55.500The north was helped by the Northern Alliance.
00:02:57.800Now the Northern Alliance doesn't exist.
00:02:59.720They controlled the entire country and they'd be completely rearmed.
00:03:03.580And all those extremists, okay, maybe not under the brand of al-Qaeda, but they still exist and they were able to operate freely in that country.
00:03:13.060Not only that, we have imported tens of thousands of people with the same ideology as al-Qaeda or the Taliban, extremists, Islamists, into Britain.
00:03:27.620And they live here amongst us on welfare in British taxpayer-paid housing, subsidised by us in our country.
00:03:38.920I think it's 2020, the Home Office figures for the number of people on the terrorist watch list.
00:03:46.840So Islamists on the terrorist watch list numbered just over 37,000.
00:03:51.180That was the last time they reported the figure.
00:04:01.540Now it's around 72,000 and in decline.
00:04:04.200So essentially what we're saying is we have a force of around 40,000 Islamists who hate this country, who have been monitored by MI5 and security services.
00:04:17.700Because in this country, that number is more than half in the British Army.
00:04:25.340So to answer the question, do I think it was the right thing to invade Afghanistan?
00:04:48.640You're someone who was on the sharp end of that on the one hand, but you've also been to Afghanistan and I'm sure traveled more widely in the Middle East.
00:05:02.280I think when I say militant Islamism, I mean the...
00:05:05.560If you think of the full implementation of Sharia law, which is what the Taliban claim to be doing, which is the brutal suppression of women's rights.
00:05:20.200The adherence to strict Islamic codes, including punishments, extreme punishments for anything from adultery, which will result in stoning, the cutting off of limbs for theft, the strict adherence to child education only really based on the Quran.
00:05:41.140So no freedom of thought or freedom to access information outside of Islamic teachings.
00:05:48.940And I already mentioned the suppression of women, but we're talking about an extremely religious society.
00:06:58.120Because there's people going to be listening who is a prick up.
00:07:00.860They're going to go, what is a Five Pillars organization?
00:07:03.760So for them and for me, can you explain what it is?
00:07:06.880The Five Pillars is an Islamic network in Britain that represents, I would say, the more extreme forms of Islam and essentially like a pressure group and a media organization.
00:07:18.220And I don't know too many details about it.
00:07:20.460But all I know is that they very much support the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Taliban run Afghanistan.
00:07:29.020And just to continue this militant Islamism conversation, why is militant Islamism, in your opinion, a threat to us and a problem for us?
00:07:42.720Well, I mean, Islam in itself, there are different forms.
00:07:51.520It's like Christianity or any religion.
00:07:54.480And the most extreme form of it is completely incompatible with a liberal democracy.
00:08:00.580You know, it doesn't believe in free and fair elections.
00:08:08.640It's attitude to things that have become agreed upon within the West.
00:08:13.580The attitude to whether it's homosexuality towards women working to freedom of expression, freedom of speech.
00:08:22.720It's completely diametrically opposed to that.
00:08:25.420And in the same way as we wouldn't allow, we don't allow fascism to flourish because we believe it to be an extremist ideology, the extreme forms of Islam, militant Islam, or islo-fascism, as it's also known as, is completely incompatible with a fair, free, liberal democracy.
00:08:47.240And yet, it's flourishing, and it's gained strength as a result of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:09:00.340And I think the really important thing to remember is that Bin Laden, this was Bin Laden's design.
00:09:08.440He ensnared, trapped America to doing this.
00:09:12.340He knew that by cause, through the 9-11 attacks, he knew if he could commit an atrocity that forced America to react in such an extreme way, he could draw America into the Middle East, into Asia, and that would turbocharge the fanatical elements of Islam.
00:09:40.320So, looking back now, do you think the invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake?
00:09:47.220The way we went about it, well, you know, the first phase, there would have been troops on the ground in 2001.
00:09:55.660So that would have been, so September the 11th happened.
00:09:59.080November, December, it's widely reported that US and British troops went on the ground, I think starting in Bagram, working with the Northern Alliance.
00:10:09.060And that method of working with Afghans that wanted to get rid of the Taliban was successful.
00:10:16.120So, getting rid of Al-Qaeda, their bases, forcing them to flee out of the Tora Bora caves, wherever they went, they killed large numbers of them.
00:10:27.440Then 2003 happened, which was the invasion of Iraq.
00:10:31.140And then we started to re-concentrate on Afghanistan, only about 2006, 2007 when I went.
00:10:37.360Now, to me, it's not about, we, of course, should have hit those training bases and cleared them out.
00:10:45.420But what we went into, which was a new phase of nation building, trying to make Afghanistan a liberal democracy, a country which is, society is hundreds of years behind Western or even other Middle Eastern societies.
00:11:01.700We should try to impose our own values.
00:11:06.660But if you take a bigger step back, you essentially had these neoconservative views.
00:11:11.960And Tony Blair was very much part of this, was of liberal intervention, that we should be intervening in any state that we think is oppressive or doesn't align with our values.
00:11:20.540And we should try and impose our way of life on these people.
00:11:24.400Because what it shows is a complete disconnect from reality, from those people who think you can suddenly swoop into a country which has never had any form of democracy and just implement it.
00:11:38.840And, you know, this is one of the big problems of the British mindset is we might have lost the empire, but we still want to tell people what to do.
00:11:50.920Whether you're left-wing or right-wing, we still want to impose our values and our thinking onto everybody.
00:11:57.100We even see this in the Foreign Office today through what was DFID, but SCDO now, our foreign aid programs will be telling African nations.
00:12:08.540And I was recently briefed about a program where, you know, we're telling them about LBGTQIA rights.
00:12:15.340We're telling them about all sorts of liberal issues that matter to us, whereas these people are more worried about feeding themselves or about their security, say, in Iran.
00:12:25.440But we're still pushing our values onto these people through development programs.
00:12:31.300And I think that mindset that we must be telling other societies what to do and how to be is all pervasive in the British and now the American mindset.
00:12:42.500And we've got a massive inability to think we've got huge numbers of problems in our society.
00:12:47.300We should probably just withdraw from the world a bit and sort our own country out before we continue to tell people what to do.
00:12:53.800It's also quite antagonistic as well, because what you're essentially doing is going over there and lecturing people about the things they're doing badly.
00:13:01.640And they're quite, I'm sure they think to themselves, who are you to be doing that?
00:13:07.720Yeah, I mean, look, I would have been part of the problem.
00:13:22.440I want to go and fight these bad people.
00:13:27.020There's something I want to come back to is how you can have a perfectly decent conversation with an Islamist or a member of the Taliban, because I have done that.
00:13:33.800But, you know, I believe these people are evil and we wanted to, you know, we wanted to show them or get rid of them.
00:14:17.880They were very good at going around the desert, but they were very inappropriate to when the conflict changed and they started using IEDs, improvised explosive devices, because they would destroy these vehicles.
00:14:28.940But in the early phase, we were able to manoeuvre around the desert in southern Afghanistan and get in fights with the Taliban.
00:14:36.080And it was really enjoyable as a commander to sort of have this sort of freedom and manoeuvre to fight.
00:14:41.840But I remember working with the Green Berets on one particular operation and they had a target.
00:14:48.400They wanted us as manoeuvre and fire support.
00:14:54.240And they went in to try and get this target.
00:14:57.860And there's a little bit of a firefight.
00:14:59.800And then we got started getting mortared from the other side of the Helmand River from a place called Kaliagaz, which was a sort of Taliban badland.
00:15:06.360And then they thought one of the mortars was to the south of us in a different village.
00:15:13.100And the American Green Beret, he had communications, which I think was either B-52 or maybe a B-1 bomber and a number of platforms.
00:15:26.160They would have this stack of close air support.
00:15:29.840And they think they identified one sole mortar that was every sort of two minutes dropping a mortar.
00:15:37.700And it was quite close, but it wasn't effective.
00:15:39.460And the guy called the fire control officer or the TAC-P, which is the guy that talks to the aircraft, called in a £2,000 bomb bracketed by two £500 bombs on this compound.
00:16:08.380And the Americans sort of whipping and everyone's going, yeah, come on, brilliant.
00:16:14.420And then about two minutes later, as the dust was settling on this village, I just saw what looked like a family, a woman carrying things in their arms and just leaving really slowly.
00:16:26.880And I just thought, it was the first time I thought we just used completely, or they just used completely unnecessary force to deal with one person mortaring us.
00:16:37.460And I just thought, we might not be the good guys.
00:16:41.760And secondly, if somebody did that to my family, where I grew up in Oxford, not too far away from here, I would vow to kill them for the rest of my life, all of them.
00:16:53.260I would fight them for the rest of my life.
00:16:54.480And that was the moment I thought, we're not going to win this.
00:17:30.280And knowing, because it's going to be a long time to change this country, to get it standing on its own two feet, it was going to take decades.
00:17:42.860But the people giving these pledges, politicians that are elected in five-year cycles, are saying, yeah, we're going to stay with you.
00:17:49.020You know, you can't give that commitment in a democracy.
00:17:51.960Military offices that are on tours of six, 12 months are giving this pledge, we're going to stay here, don't worry, you're partners.
00:17:57.320They don't have the authority to say that.
00:18:00.280And anyone that looks at the history of liberal democracies engaging in overseas conflict, let's look at Vietnam, you know that eventually the election is going to get fed up of this.
00:18:09.780It's costly, and lives and money, and you know that we will withdraw, and the Taliban knew this as well.
00:18:18.340When I say betrayed, I suppose in hindsight, it's obvious that we were going to leave Afghanistan.
00:18:24.440It was the way in which we did it, in which we pulled the rug under the feet of young people.
00:18:33.520So if you think, a lot of the Afghan population is below 30, unlike our aging population, it's a very young population.
00:18:40.360So a large majority of them would have been born since 2001.
00:18:43.380They were born into the hope that we gave them through the huge amount of economic aid, the security and structure that they could live in a different way in the cities like Kabul, Jalalabad, Mazar-Sharif.
00:18:55.580Those places, they could go to university, women would go to school, university, you know, you'd have beauty salons and shops where women can shop for a variety of things.
00:19:05.500And it was an amazing place to visit when I went back in 2020, before the withdrawal.
00:19:14.320And by announcing that we're going to leave, or the Americans announcing in May 2020 that we're going to leave by 9-11, or September 11th, so quickly, it just shattered the country.
00:19:28.220And it meant all those people that had come to expect us to stay for a bit longer were forced to very quickly evacuate and embolden the Taliban, embolden the extremists.
00:19:40.140And that's what preceded or caused the complete collapse of the country and the Taliban to take over.
00:19:49.120And so, of course, we were forced to try and help the people, the good people that we had built up, that we'd given hope to.
00:19:56.340And I stepped in, as many veterans and people did in Britain and America, try and get these people who shared our values, shared our vision, try and get them to safety.
00:20:07.480Because they would be the first people to be taken into the torture chambers of the Taliban, tortured and then executed.
00:20:16.260So we sold them this vision, and then we just turned our back on them.
00:20:22.200And I fear the same could happen in Ukraine.
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00:22:01.560So on Afghanistan for the moment, in your documentary, one of the things that happened is you weren't really filming anything about the withdrawal because you didn't know it was going to happen.
00:22:09.880You were there filming the documentary and then the withdrawal started to happen.
00:22:14.360And one of the things that became immediately clear is everybody knew before the withdrawal happened that the Afghani security forces, the police, they had no chance against the Taliban, right?
00:22:32.800They weren't necessarily as just capable of defeating the Taliban on their own.
00:22:38.380They all kept saying, we need your support, we need, right?
00:22:42.380So do you think that when the Americans, President Biden, made the decision to pull out, he would have been advised that this was the likely outcome?
00:22:54.740Why, I would, I think it's very important that we start having conversations with people in the decision-making process in America.
00:23:03.420I don't think really we really know the decision-making cycle of what they knew and what they didn't.
00:23:08.380I think the fair assumption was that if we give the Afghan military and government no support, they will survive for about six to nine months or to the following year or limited support.
00:23:22.540That was, I think that was the CIA interpretation of it.
00:23:26.200Nobody thought they would fail immediately and it would collapse immediately.
00:23:50.120I guess what I'm saying, James, sorry, you're absolutely right to point out that there would have been the opportunity to get more people to safety.
00:23:55.960What I mean is from the bigger picture perspective, from guys like you going over there to deal with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, 20 years on, if we pull out, you'd want all of that blood and treasure and everything to have actually been worth it.
00:24:14.240And for that to be the case, you would have had to leave the country in a sustainable, better place.
00:24:23.000Well, you have to leave a small number of troops, special forces, advisors, intelligence, people there as a deterrent, keep Bagram Air Base, and you still have to supply a large amount of cash to the Afghan government in order to keep certain areas of Afghanistan free from the Taliban.
00:24:46.340That was always going to be Taliban territory.
00:24:48.200I think the strategy could have been to essentially balkanize or split up the country.
00:24:56.000Not a popular view, but we could have kept some areas free.
00:25:00.420What that would have prevented would have been mass population movements, mass numbers of refugees going into Iran, going into Pakistan, making their way to Europe.
00:25:11.020It would mean that there were safe places for women, for ethnic minorities, because Afghanistan is a melting pot of cultures and ethnic groups.
00:25:24.280Support the Afghan government, however bad and corrupt it is, to secure parts of Afghanistan where people want to have this way of life because they didn't want to have this way of life.
00:25:36.340And the government in all parts of Afghanistan, specifically in places like Kandahar, Helmand.
00:25:43.020That's what the strategy should have been, is how do we prevent complete crisis?
00:26:53.960But the reality is, the Taliban are an ethnic group in southern Afghanistan.
00:27:00.760They are the Pashtuns, and that extends across into Pakistan as well.
00:27:06.260And a lot of people believe in that ideology, so you can't exterminate a people.
00:27:12.840And that, the misconception is that we didn't go to fight the Taliban, we went to remove them from government.
00:27:19.560And what we should have done was work out a sort of way to include them in the future of Afghanistan.
00:27:25.040The Pashtun people, the hardline Pashtuns who are, who believe in Sharia, there would have been a federal way to have worked.
00:27:32.660But we did, but I think it was Donald Rumsfeld, was it Donald Rumsfeld, who is dead now, but he did not want to include the Taliban in any form of Afghan government.
00:27:47.900In the same way they did this debarthication in Iraq, we won't include any of them.
00:27:53.160And that ended up in the creation of ISIS.
00:27:56.520If you don't accommodate some of your own enemies in the future of the country, when they have a big stake, there's huge numbers of them,
00:28:04.360then you essentially, we allowed the Taliban to recreate itself as a resistance force to our occupation.
00:28:12.960James, do you think as well, because I think there's one part of the puzzle that people never discuss is the rampant corruption within the Afghanistan government.
00:28:23.700And you look, and your movie actually shows this really tragically, like these guys who were protecting the walls of the Kabul.
00:28:35.540And you look at their equipment, their equipment was terrible.
00:28:39.480And trillions upon trillions of dollars was pumped into this country.
00:28:43.460How much of this was the people at the top just creaming off the money?
00:28:48.600Well, I mean, again, it's one of those things that has been swept under the carpet.
00:28:55.180It's that huge amount, huge amounts of money is in Dubai and officials have, you know, I know one family, Afghan family,
00:29:03.760who have an apartment or apartments in the Burj Khalifa.
00:29:08.940That's not cheap real estate in Dubai.
00:29:12.440And now the Taliban have stealing loads of money.
00:29:15.740I mean, they've got apartments in Dubai and in Qatar and they're sending, some of them are sending their daughters, would you believe, to be educated there.
00:29:24.100But so, of course, corruption was huge and a massive problem.
00:29:28.900And I think it's something we struggled to get a grip of.
00:29:31.440How much of a problem, it was systemic.
00:29:35.280I think that was one of the, that's one of the greatest issues you're dealing with when you're trying to nation build.
00:29:40.000But I think that was the main problem.
00:29:43.240Why the mission creep, the mission creep from removing Al-Qaeda or removing or ensuring that Afghanistan was a place that terrorism couldn't flourish.
00:29:53.240Essentially, that was the main mission.
00:29:55.920And then it became, well, to do that, we need to rebuild a new country.
00:29:59.880That being the concept, so we now need to fight Taliban because they're going to stop a new nation flourishing.
00:30:06.140Yeah, so the corruption thing has been a huge issue and it resulted, what I physically saw was soldiers in the South not being paid, ghost armies.
00:30:20.260So commanders or regional governors would say, I have 5,000 troops here, so I'm drawing the salaries of 5,000 people.
00:30:28.080And yet, when we travelled around Kandahar, we never saw a body of men larger than maybe 90 to 150 troops.
00:30:41.540There should have been a core of Afghan National Army troops in Kandahar.
00:30:47.980There should have been 7,000, but the governor said, well, there's probably about 1,000 Afghan troops covering a huge area, an area, I mean, probably almost the size of Wales between Kandahar and Helmand, just 1,000 troops.
00:31:05.800So, you know, the deceit and lies of the Afghan partners or the Afghan government was systemic.
00:31:13.120And I don't think, I would like to know, did America, did the CIA know when they say we've built the Afghan National Army up to 350,000, did they know it was probably only really nominate, really, they really had the capability of about maybe 75,000 troops?
00:31:31.200And of those who were actually any good and wanted to fight, maybe that was 25,000, because some really did want to fight and a lot of others didn't.
00:31:44.660We don't know the answer to that because there's no inquiry in Britain, and I'm not sure there's going to be an inquiry in the USA about this.
00:31:50.640Because, to me, corruption is like a cancer.
00:31:54.080Once it is allowed to spread, it corrupts everything and it destroys the society.
00:31:58.560So, I guess my question to you is, with this rampant level of corruption, wasn't this project doomed to failure?
00:32:06.640But at the same time, it's a medieval society.
00:32:08.960And I don't mean that to denigrate Afghanistan, but parts of it are the way it lives and operates are hundreds and hundreds of years separated from the way we think.
00:32:19.160So, we're there trying to teach them things and to operate in a way which is completely alien to them.
00:32:25.940When you say medieval society, what do you mean?
00:32:28.560Okay, so you think a typical remote village in Helmand province, or Kandahar, prior to 2007 or 2008, wouldn't have had electricity.
00:32:42.600Or if they did have electricity, it would be because they were stealing it from a power station from the Helmand Valley or the Helmand River,
00:32:53.000where there was power coming down from Kajakitan.
00:32:55.720So, a lot of them would live mainly by subsistence, what they could grow or have a small amount of money from crops that they could sell or opium in order to buy food.