S4 Episode 10 - "The Phantom Pain"

The crowd anticipates the first speech in 20 years from a man once considered Afghanistan's most wanted. In May 2017, after two decades on the lam, the man known as the Butcher of Kabul

returned to the city that he had once blanketed with rockets years earlier. Gobadin Hekmatyar, the cruelest commander of the Mujahideen and a favorite of the American and Pakistani intelligence services, strode back into the capital of Afghanistan with the look and the attitude of an elder statesman, ready to guide his country back to stability and prosperity.

The leader of the prominent Afghan armed group Hezbez Lami, who many regard as a warlord, is said to be behind bombings in the capital in 2012 and the following year. A few months earlier, Hekmachar had negotiated amnesty with the US-backed Kabul government, against which he had formally deployed suicide bombers. As a result, the United Nations cleared his name from a sanctions program.

The United States, after years of hunting Hekmatyar, publicly praised his rehabilitation by the UN. America was once again on good terms with one of the original Mujahideen. I call on Taliban. They should accept the desires and demands of the nation. Come stand with us. Be united to take the country out of this current unfortunate crisis.

and save the country from the bloodshed. This was not the feeling among more than a few Afghans. Quote, he just wants to have a political position for his family and for his party members in Afghanistan. said one Kabul resident, whose uncle had been killed in the war between Hekmatyar and his ex-Mujahideen allies. He is the killer of the people of Afghanistan. On the other hand, Syed Muhammad,

a cucumber salesman, summed up the feelings of many. Tired resignation. All the warlords are corrupt and have blood on their hands, he told the French wire service AFP. But we welcome Hekmatyar to Kabul. because we are tired of war and conflict. This was the reality, the creeping feeling shared by almost everyone. After 20 years of U.S. occupation, 10 years of Taliban and warlord rule, And before that, 10 years of Soviet occupation. Peace at any price.

Other Afghans are not so happy and many politicians would like Hekmatiyar behind bars and not making speeches.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 4, Episode 10, The Phantom Pain. Last time, we covered the war in Afghanistan through the Obama years. High-flying promises of a new strategy, a working strategy, crafted not by marauding cowboys from the Bush team, but the learned pragmatists of Team Obama. On the military side, Stanley McChrystal.

and David Petraeus were going to crack the code in Afghanistan, just as the latter had in Iraq. Meanwhile, the best minds in Washington would clean up the kleptocracy run by President Hamid Karzai and the country's infamous warlords. But corruption only got worse, and the violence dragged on. After six more years, the White House announced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan, and then quietly reneged on its promise.

leaving thousands of troops and tens of thousands of military contractors in country. Now, in this final episode of our season...

we'll see the long-awaited negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, as we saw last time, perished in 2011. And here we'll see Mullah Omar was quick to follow. Who will take over the Taliban? And how will they deal with Americans? How did President Donald Trump, of all people, succeed in making a peace deal in Afghanistan? Once it comes time for the United States to exit, after 20 years, how will President Joseph Biden execute the withdrawal?

In February 2018, the Taliban sent a note to America, an open letter addressed to the American people, explaining that they were willing to come to the table and negotiate an end. to the war in Afghanistan. A war which, the Taliban said, was now producing only aimless slaughter and tons and tons of heroin. Hassan Abbas, professor at the National Defense University.

calls this letter a powerful combination of a few twisted facts, a touch of sarcasm, and some straight talk. One Western official at the time remarked, I hate to say it, But they have started to hit where it hurts simply by telling the truth. President Donald Trump, too, thought the Taliban had a point. He thought the Afghan war was a loser.

Getting the troops home was looking like another deal that he could tout come re-election. And so President Trump took a personal interest in getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan. And that meant negotiations with the Taliban. And he started saying, well, it will have to be a negotiated deal. And of course, we remember he was the deal-making guy. And he said, let's talk to Taliban.

which many people before him were making that case. Richard Holbrook was making that case. Hillary Clinton, on behalf of Richard Holbrook, made that case to Obama. Somehow President Obama was not convinced or somehow it fell through the cracks. But now we had gone through a certain point. Now there was not enough public interest also in the United States. It was no more the headlines. And that is when Trump said, let's seriously talk to them.

For almost everyone outside the Taliban hierarchy, however, the question was, who was actually in charge of the movement these days? Well, sources very high up in the government close to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and CEO Abdullah and a high up source in the Afghan security institutions claim that the Taliban fugitive leader Mullah Omar is dead. In fact, they say he has been dead for the past two years. Mullah Omar, the founder and supreme leader of the Taliban, died in 2013 of tuberculosis.

in a hospital in Pakistan. The Taliban kept it a secret. In fact, the group continued to puppet Omar's corpse and release statements from him beyond the grave for years afterward. In April 2015, reports the BBC, the Taliban announced that Mullah Omar was in fact very much alive and that he remains in touch with day-to-day Afghan and world events.

When visitors from the so-called Pakistani Taliban questioned this reality, they were expelled from Afghanistan as doubting Thomases. In July of 2015, the ghost of Omar told the world that he backed peace talks with the Afghan government, saying negotiations are a, quote, legitimate way of achieving the objective of ending occupation by foreign forces. But later that year...

The Taliban made a confession. Their leader had departed this world. Afghan government and security sources say the fugitive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar is dead. The loss of such an iconic figure as Mullah Omar was devastating for the Taliban, writes Abbas. His two most influential deputies would end up competing to succeed their one-eyed leader.

Mullah Baradar, Omar's brother-in-law, had overseen the actual military component of the Taliban's insurgent campaign following 2001. Baradar's goal had been to achieve a military stalemate and then to reconcile with the weak and desperate government in Kabul. And so while his troops fought, Baradar was in secret communication with Hamid Karzais. infamous CIA asset and drug trafficker brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. And for this, in 2010, the CIA manipulated the Pakistani ISI to capture Baradar.

A joint operation in Karachi, masterminded by the Americans, kept Pakistan in the dark about who exactly they were going after. But once they seized Mullah Baradar, The ISI, quote, refused to allow CIA officials to interrogate him. And the Pakistanis, irritated at Baradar's private initiatives with Kabul, kept him in jail, then a guesthouse in 2013, surveilling him for years.

and denying him the ability to travel. Then there was the young blood Mullah Mansour, more of an administrative than a military leader, since Omar's death in 2013. He was basically, quote, a power-hungry man, known mostly for his business acumen and his network in the Gulf. The most interesting thing about him, in the words of a former US intelligence analyst, was his, quote,

famed perfume shopping trips to Dubai, where he stayed comfortably in the embraces of Russian prostitutes and royal protection." Mullah Mansour also took under his wing Sirajuddin Haqqani. the son of old U.S. friend-turned-enemy Jalaluddin Haqqani, and a commander in their eponymous Haqqani network. But in 2016, Mullah Mansour's rising star fell to Earth.

or, more accurately, a missile from a drone fell on him. It turns out Mansur was staying not in the usual border territories, but in Kedah in Pakistan. Unlike the handling of Mullah Baradar, This time, Abbas concludes, Pakistan was quietly cooperating with the U.S. to eliminate the ambitious Mullah Mansour, who many thought was becoming an obstacle to peace talks.

With Mullah Baradar under house arrest and Mullah Mansour in the next world, the stage was set for Omar's true successor to now come forward, Mullah Hibatullah. Hibatullah. A Kandahar native, like Omar himself, was a one-time deputy chief of the Taliban's Supreme Court. He was cut from the same cloth as Mullah Omar in every regard, Abbas writes, rigid in his religious approach.

calm in his demeanor and with a palpable dislike for publicity and fanfare. He has a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. End quote. Hibbutola was actually responsible for convincing Omar to double down on suicide bombings, a tactic that was foreign to the Taliban until 2003. But it would also be under Hibatullah that the Taliban would put together a team.

to negotiate directly with the Americans in Doha in 2018. There is tremendous potential between our country and Pakistan. I think Pakistan is going to help us out. to extricate ourselves we're like policemen we're not fighting a war if we wanted to fight a war in afghanistan and win it i could win that war in a week i just don't want to kill 10 million people does that make sense to you i don't want to kill 10 million people

I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth. It would be gone. It would be over in literally in 10 days. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to go that route. So we're working with Pakistan and others to extricate ourselves, nor do we want to be policemen because basically we're policemen right now.

Quote, President Donald Trump seemed not overawed by the Afghanistan challenge, writes Hassan Abbas. He was neither ideologically focused on counterterrorism like Bush, nor hesitant like Obama. He did not hold back in pushing hard on the military. There's a furious reaction today after claims that President Trump called fallen American heroes losers and suckers. A Twitter page titled Not a Loser is trending. As we saw.

with Trump's Korea policy last season. In some ways, he tested the limits of the Washington consensus, and in other ways, committed to its excesses. In Afghanistan, while Trump would set the U.S. on the road to withdrawal, he initially, quote, adopted an aggressive posture, allowing U.S. military commanders to go on the offensive. In fact, under Trump,

casualties of both enemy combatants and civilians would skyrocket. Now at 11, the mother of all bombs, the most powerful non-nuclear explosive America has ever used, dropped on ISIS. In spring of 2017, Trump made history by authorizing the military to drop the MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or alternatively, and more popularly, the Mother.

of all bombs. The target was not in fact the Taliban, but a new group, ISK, or the Islamic State of Khorasan, an offshoot of the now infamous Iraqi terror army known as ISIS. The target was naturally near the Pakistani border in the east of the country. Quote, America's biggest non-nuclear bomb, which costs $16 million and $300 million to develop.

It was used on one of the smallest militias America faces anywhere in the world, reported Robin Wright. ISK is estimated to have only about 700 fighters in Afghanistan, compared to the 8,500 US troops. and the 180,000 Afghan troops on the ground there. Still, the Pentagon said, it is expected that the weapon will have a substantial psychological effect on those who witness its use.

Both ex-President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban condemned the bombing. Quote, This is not the war on terror, but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground. for new and dangerous weapons, said Karzai. Quote, using this massive bomb cannot be justified and will leave a material and psychological impact on our people, echoed the Taliban. Well, this was a bomb containing 11,000 pounds of explosives. It's the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal.

The Trump administration unleashed a new level of violence on Afghanistan. Quote, from 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths due to U.S. and Allied forces airstrikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased. reported Brown University. The number of civilians, researchers write, killed by international airstrikes increased about 330% from 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration.

to 2019. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated that drones, thought up by Clinton, greenlit by Bush, fully embraced by Obama, and now handed over to Trump, accounted for most of the aerial strikes. Despite this, the stalemate on the ground remained. And behind the scenes of carnage, everyone was moving closer to the negotiating table.

The Taliban wants to make a deal. We'll see if they want to make a deal. It's got to be a real deal, but we'll see. But they want to make a deal. During the holiday of Eid in the summer of 2018, the Taliban won credit for respecting a ceasefire proposed by Kabul, even mingling with local security forces and civilians. The U.S. was apparently convinced Mullah Hibatullah had his finger on the pulse and could be dealt with.

And so Trump insisted his team get to work on a deal. Quote, the president was even heard shouting at his White House staff, where is my deal? End quote.

The man for this job we have met by now. Zalmay Khalilzad, Afghan-American, one-time consultant for Unical and ex-Viceroy of Afghanistan. The place for this job... was Doha in Qatar. The tiny state of Qatar is once again at the center of big hopes for peace in Afghanistan. The co-founder of the Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader, arrived in Doha on Sunday.

after being released from custody in Pakistan last year. Doha served as a kind of Switzerland for the warring Afghan parties ever since 2012, and it was there that the final negotiations under Trump would bear fruit. Quote, Zhao started shuttling between Doha, Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington in a whirlwind, writes Abbas, trying to make everyone feel that they were part of the peace effort.

But by the time negotiations were underway, there was a conspicuous absence of one party, the actual government of Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the US had decided... that before peace could be made between Kabul and the insurgency, there needed to be peace between the American occupiers and the Taliban. It made sense to the Islamic militants, as the Americans were the only thing stopping them from overwhelming

the weak and venal government in Kabul. It made sense to the Americans, since getting a deal done with the Taliban would mean an end to the insurgency and the ability to withdraw. All of this, needless to say, did not thrill... the administration of President Ashraf Ghani. At the same time, the Taliban leadership, now under Mullah Hibatullah, had to worry about selling concessions that came out of these talks.

to his underlings and the foot soldiers of the movement. The one thing the Taliban representatives knew that they had to get was a speedy and complete withdrawal of all American troops. Pakistan, of course. was happy to help. This was essentially Islamabad's final victory in a project that went all the way back to the handshake between Zbigniew Brzezinski and General Zia. We've been there for 19 years in Afghanistan.

It's ridiculous. And I think Pakistan helps us with that. I think we'll have some very good answers on Afghanistan very quickly. For Pakistan, writes Abbas, a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan meant the ouster of India. from Afghanistan, their long-desired objective and fundamental motivation in supporting the Taliban from early on. Islamabad received backdoor updates from both the American and Taliban.

If there was ever a meeting to witness, writes Abbas, it was one in Doha, in mid-March 2019. The Taliban seated at the table were not what most would expect them to be.

some were former guantanamo inmates some former prisoners in pakistani jails sitting across the table from them was the commander of the american and nato forces in afghanistan who at one point during the conversations told the Taliban that he respected them as fighters, and further surprised everyone by saying, quote, we could keep fighting, killing each other, or, together, we could kill ISIS.

Minister Fani himself also, very quickly, he started becoming authoritarian as well. And we are to be blamed also. Elections were not credible. This was all helping Taliban all along. Taliban were gaining... Not because they had some new military strategists and some new financial resources. It was because Afghanistan and Kabul was failing. The United States and the Taliban inked the deal. on February 29, 2020.

After 18 months of talks and nearly two decades of war, the US and the Afghan Taliban have just signed a long awaited deal aimed at paving the way to peace and the departure of foreign troops. At the Sheraton Hotel in Doha. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Zalmay Khalilzad shook hands with Mullah Baradar, who had by now re-emerged from Pakistani supervision as chief negotiator.

Under the deal, the US and NATO say that they'll pull out all foreign troops within 14 months if... The Taliban honors its part of the agreement, and that includes a 135-day initial period to reduce violence. And a secret provision was a prisoner swap. 1,000 Afghan security personnel... for 5,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners, some considered the most notorious, who had been rotting at the Bagram Air Base Detention Center.

Author Melchazin writes that Trump placed a deadline for withdrawal above everything else, when he could have let Khalilzad, quote, ring more out of the Taliban. This, Abbas concedes. but also suggests that more than any individual detail, the general fact of American defeat after 20 years of occupation was all but guaranteed.

NBC News now projects that Joe Biden has won the Keystone State, Pennsylvania, and its 20 electoral votes. And that means we can now project that former Vice President Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. He is president-elect Joseph Robinette Biden at 77 years old. Chuck, we'll turn to you. It's one of the great days in American history.

The American occupiers and the Taliban insurgency had made peace. Now, what of Afghanistan's actual government? Ashraf Ghani, quote, stalled things immediately. He wanted peace on his terms only. His ignorance of the Taliban's rapid ascendance would put a nail in his own coffin, Abbas writes. More so than even the Americans,

who at least had the advantage of overwhelming, if not omnipotent, military might, the Kabul government was held in utter contempt by the Taliban opposition. What's more, Ashraf Ghani was apparently so out of touch that he reportedly didn't really believe the US would actually leave when the time came. Rather than face facts and swallow an interim government with his enemies, Ghani retreated further and further.

into fantasy. I'm speaking to you today from the Roosevelt, the treaty room in the White House, the same spot where on October of 2001. President George W. Bush informed our nation that the United States military had begun strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. On April 14th, 2021, President Biden... announced that all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September of that year. War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked.

We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda is degraded in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's time to end the forever war. Thank you all for listening. May God protect our troops. May God bless all those families who lost someone in this endeavor. Joe Biden, as we saw several episodes ago.

had long urged withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now, whatever the cost, including giving up a heavy US presence across the street from China in Central Asia, Biden's administration was as desperate to get out

as Trump's had been. To its discredit, Abbas writes, the Biden administration had planned its withdrawal in the least efficient manner possible. Speaking with us... Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid describes the withdrawal as necessary policy, but one that was carried out in a disastrous manner.

Essentially, my feelings on the withdrawal were that the Americans were obligated. Obama was obligated to withdraw troops. It was a part of, you know, Trump was trying to withdraw. Obama was trying to withdraw. It became a fact of life for the Americans. The issue was, how was the withdrawal carried out? That, in my mind, was a total disaster.

It was a failure of the American military, of the American political elite, a withdrawal of that caliber with tens of thousands of troops and a whole nation's security at stake.

should have been carried out in a much more staggered, slow process. Some say Biden was left with no choice. For example, Tariq Ali, who is as critical of U.S. policy as anyone, he writes, quote, Biden was simply ratifying the peace process initiated by Trump with Pentagon backing, which saw an agreement reached in February 2020 in the presence of the U.S., Taliban, India.

China and Pakistan. The notion that Biden's hasty withdrawal has somehow strengthened the Taliban is poppycock. By mid-August. Ashraf Ghani was holed up in his office with his closest confidants. He took in reports that the Taliban were closing in on Kabul, and he cursed his long list of rivals. Imagining a conspiracy between the Taliban and Hamid Karzai, Ghani tried to make inroads with specific Taliban leaders, and he sent feelers out to the Haqqani network. Maybe they could cut a deal.

The day before the Taliban's turbaned warriors arrived at the city's gates, Ghani's phone buzzed. A call from one of the Haqqanis. Perhaps his scheme to collaborate was still possible. No dice. The word from Haqqani to Gani was, give up and get out. Within hours, Gani was on the move. One of his top advisors had already gone missing. And one can assume the memory of President Najibullah's gruesome demise at the hands of the Taliban all those years ago was as fresh in Ghani's mind as ever.

Abbas chronicles the president's final moments in his homeland. Ghani was shepherded toward two helicopters waiting. There was one last hurdle. A handful of stressed-out palace guards awaited him. A shouting match ensued, but someone in the fleeing party had thought through the final steps. The guards were paid to get out of the way. The helicopter set off for Uzbekistan.

where Ghani had a connecting flight to the United Arab Emirates. In Kabul, none of the notorious warlords of yesteryear, including Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ismail Khan,

were to be found, they too had abandoned their promises of fighting to the death, writes Abbas. People around the world are wondering why you decided to leave. Just months earlier, you gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which you said, and I'm now going to quote you, no power in the world could persuade me to get on a plane and leave this country. It is a country I love and I will die defending.

But you did get on a plane and leave the country. Why? I did get on a plane because it became impossible to defend it. From the presidential ground, all the presidential protection force... melted and put on civilian clothes. The Minister of Defence had left. I was ready to go to the Minister of Defence because he had called me that Kabul could not be defended and I said...

I'm going to come to the ministry. The ministry was empty. He was on a plane. I was the last to leave. And the reason I left was because I did not want to give the Taliban and their supporters. The pleasure of yet again humiliating an Afghan president. Taliban is in control of Afghanistan. The country's president has fled. And Western countries are scrambling to get people out. And this took the U.S.

By surprise. I did not, nor did anyone else, see a collapse of an army that size in 11 days. But that's what happened. On Monday, the final flight of American troops left Kabul, wrote The New Yorker in August. For months, refugee organizations and military officials had urged the Biden administration to begin evacuating Afghans who had backed the U.S. effort.

The White House demurred, worried that such a move would signal a lack of faith in the Afghan government. As a result, the operation, crammed into the span of a few weeks, was unnecessarily rushed and poorly planned. An estimated 200,000 Afghans who were unable to get out now face retaliation from the Taliban. End quote.

The 300,000-man-strong Afghan army crumbled, writes Tariq Ali. Thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. In contrast to the Soviet withdrawal over 30 years earlier, where a delicate but functioning government remained in place and Russian diplomats and civilians remained in-country, the U.S. withdrawal was pure chaos. The Ghani government, writes Melvin Goodman of Johns Hopkins University, didn't last for 24 hours.

Mr. President, there had not been a U.S. servicemember killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020. You set a deadline, you pulled troops out, you sent troops back in, and now 12 Marines. are dead. You said the buck stops with you. Do you bear any responsibility for the way that things have unfolded in the last two weeks? I bear responsibility for fundamentally all that's happened of late.

But here's the deal. You know, I wish you one day say these things, you know as well as I do, that the former president made a deal with the Taliban. Remember that? I'm being serious. No, I'm asking you a question. Because before... No, no, no, wait a minute. I'm asking you a question.

A year after the American withdrawal, news came out of Afghanistan regarding an old friend. We're getting more details about the U.S. mission that's killed the leader of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. NBC News reported a CIA drone strike killed Ayman al-Zwahiri, who had by now naturally replaced Osama bin Laden as the official leader of al-Qaeda.

American intelligence officials found that Zwahiri had moved from Pakistan to, quote, a Taliban-supported safe house in downtown Kabul. Alive at the time of this recording, but also under fire.

is Gulbuddin Hekhmachar. His office was attacked by suicide bombers in 2020, according to Reuters, perhaps proving that his reputation in Afghanistan has not improved. After all these years, his days running drugs with the CIA, shelling his own capital, and teaming up with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Hekmat Yar remains, playing kingmaker, declaring himself the voice of the people.

Others have opted for more comfortable environments. General and ex-vice president of Afghanistan Rashid Dostam evacuated his lavish palace in northern Afghanistan for safe haven in Uzbekistan. And from Turkey, Dostum has reportedly assembled a, quote, High Council of National Resistance, whose demand is for the Taliban to negotiate the warlord's return and include them in a government.

The Taliban, however, don't appear too nervous about the once feared Dostum. The warlord's opulent headquarters have since been raided and occupied by the Taliban. Along an endless corridor with a thick apple-green carpet, reports Al Jazeera, a young fighter sleeps slumped on a sofa, his Kalashnikov rifle resting against him as exotic fish glide above him.

in one of seven giant tanks. Zbigniew Brzezinski, arguably the prime architect of the Afghan Jihad, died in 2017. writes approvingly that, quote, The Biden administration follows Brzezinski's geostrategic blueprint, which supports Ukraine militarily, logistically, diplomatically, and politically. What's more, one of Brzezinski's sons is the current ambassador to Poland, and his daughter, Mika, much like Jenna Bush.

daughter of George W. She's a TV anchor and morning show personality at MSNBC. Don't forget the Soviets were busy training terrorists all over the place in the 80s. Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union? So yes, compared to the Soviet Union and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant. So you're suggesting that it was the Soviets who instrumentalized Islam? Yes, well, who else?

Gust Avrokodos, the foul-mouthed honcho of the CIA's jihad, who commissioned the training of jihadis in terror and assassination, officially retired from the CIA after the Soviet withdrawal. in 1989. He went on to write an intelligence newsletter for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp before returning to the CIA on contract. He died in 2005.

Michael Vickers, one-time whiz kid, who turned the jihad into a veritable Rube Goldberg machine. Vickers worked in the Obama administration as a counterterrorism advisor, where he attempted to snuff out some of his old recruits. And he's now a board member at the arms dealer BAE, alongside fellow Afghanistan veteran General John Campbell and ex-CIA director Gina Haspel. Another CIA director, Bill Casey.

who presided over the Afghan Jihad in the 80s, was tarnished, though never formally charged, in relation to another secret operation. The day before he was to testify before the Senate on the Iran-Contra scandal, Casey suffered multiple seizures and checked into the hospital. Months later, reports the New York Times, Mr. Casey died less than 24 hours after the first witness in congressional hearings on the affair.

named him as having assisted in arming the death squads in Nicaragua. Wherever Casey is now, it no doubt pains the devout Catholic to know that at his own funeral, he was verbally lashed by a bishop.

with President Reagan and former President Richard Nixon sitting in a front pew, wrote the Los Angeles Times. The bishop conducting the funeral of former CIA director William J. Casey said yesterday that Casey's belief in the moral strength of the administration's positions had blinded him to the ethical questions raised by his church about U.S. military policies.

If he was expecting a hero's return, then perhaps the former president Braheers Musharraf was disappointed. By Pakistani standards, this is a small crowd. General and ex-President Pervez Musharraf was chased out of Pakistan in 2008 and again in 2016. He was charged with high treason for suspending the Constitution and charged with the murder of his political rival

Benazir Bhutto. Though out of the country, Musharraf was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in absentia. The general was never formally convicted for Bhutto's assassination. Friendly judges in Lahore would later revoke the death sentence. After all, Musharraf was still respected within the military and the ISI, who remain, in the opinion of most, a shadow government in Pakistan.

Newsweek reported that Musharraf's speaking fees while out of the country ranged from $150,000 to $250,000 a pop. Musharraf died in February 2023. But I do have to ask you, Mr. Haqqani, because you know very well that you are under personal sanctions by the United States, which also has a multi-million dollar bounty on your head. with his fiery red beard, died secretly at some time between 2015 and 2018. He left the family business to his sons, who have become Taliban leaders in their own right.

And what if Haqqani's number one fan, Congressman Charlie Wilson? Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that up to three more combat brigades will be sent to Afghanistan. Do you think this is the right approach? I don't know anything else to do, really. We have several reasons to do that. One is to try to defeat the Taliban, if we can, and try to have a sensible civilian government for Afghanistan.

Another reason is that we need to catch Bin Laden and that's the only way to do that. I believe that he is in the tribal areas. I might have... occupied some of the same caves that he's currently occupying. Wilson had retired from politics in the 1990s, at least formally, instead becoming a lobbyist for Pakistan.

The University of Texas at Austin now features a Charles N. Wilson chair in Pakistan Studies. Wilson died of cardiac arrest in 2010. After the memorial service, reports the Dallas Morning News, Wilson's widow, Barbara, welcomed a small group of her late husband's intimates to their home on the golf course in Lufkin, Texas, next to an American Eagle sculpture in the living room.

The words of Abdurrahman Khan, emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, are emblazoned on a brass plaque. Quote, My spirit will remain in Afghanistan. even though my soul will go to God. My last words to you, my son, are never trust the Russians. Asked by an ABC News team. Whether he remembered Charlie Wilson, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fondly recalled that he was, quote, a good friend.

Since the August 2021 withdrawal, supposedly as a policy meant to oppose Taliban rule, the United States has frozen billions in the Afghan central bank's assets. Now, At least 43% of the population is living on less than one meal a day, reports NBC, and 97% of Afghans are expected to be living below the poverty line. 70% of homes are, quote,

unable to meet basic food and non-food needs, according to the magazine In These Times. Reports have emerged of Afghans selling their daughters and their kidneys in an effort to survive hunger and rising debt. Years ago, when asked what would happen if the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, Malalai Joya responded, you know, we women in Afghanistan and we in civil society.

We have three enemies, three opponents in our country. One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as government, that the U.S. supports. And the third is the U.S. occupation. Malalai said, if you in the West could get the U.S. occupation out, we'd only have two.

Tariq Ali sums up the legacy of that opponent that has been removed. Quote, that housed US soldiers and officers, while food and clothing were regularly flown in from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. A huge slum grew on the fringes of Kabul, as the poor assemble to search for pickings in dustbins." Meanwhile, Afghan land is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, reports Brown University's Costs of War project, which kills

and injures tens of thousands of Afghans, especially children. As for the status of women, writes Ali, nothing much has changed. there has been little social progress outside the NGO-infested green zone. Despite repeated requests from journalists and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex work industry.

that grew to service the occupying armies. Nor are there credible rape statistics. Although U.S. soldiers frequently used sexual violence against terror suspects, raped Afghan civilians, and green-lighted child abuse, by Allied militias. As we mentioned in our first episode this season, the American War is in many ways a sequel to the British Opium Wars of the 19th century.

Trillions have been made in profits and shared between the Afghan sectors that serviced the occupation, writes Ali. Western officers were handsomely paid off to enable the trade. One in ten young Afghans... are now opium addicts. Figures for NATO forces are unavailable. Now, despite the Taliban once again cracking down on Afghanistan's astronomical levels of heroin production,

Western experts from think tanks like Brookings are publishing articles such as How the Taliban Suppressed Opium in Afghanistan and Why There's Little to Celebrate. Seven years earlier, with a different government in power, this same expert warned of the Taliban terrorism-drugs nexus in Afghanistan. The real statistics is much higher. Usually through mainstream media, they decrease the severity and casualties, called them.

There were sometimes in the name of so-called terrorists that they are fighting or they kill, but ordinary people was the victim. Numbers on casualties, as we found in several seasons of this show. can be hard to state definitively. Roderick Braithwaite writes that quite often in wars like these, casualty figures are more or less inaccurate guesses, often put into circulation for propaganda purposes.

During the Iraq War, we saw by now lower estimates rest at around 600,000 dead. Higher ones, over 1 million. In the U.S. war in Korea, we saw estimated deaths range from 2 million. to three million people. Civilian body counts during the American occupation in Afghanistan are particularly difficult to calculate, since, as we covered, so much violence was fueled by disguising local disputes

as quote-unquote insurgent activity. What's more, as Ali writes, enemy deaths that included civilians are often not counted. The US government itself has never issued an official tally. much as in Iraq. And as we've seen, the war was hardly a purely Afghan affair, with just as much violence and carnage happening across the border in our ally, Pakistan.

Brown University, whose Costs of War project has done its best to disentangle the reports of civilians from combatants, reports that, quote, about 243,000 people have been killed. in the afghanistan pakistan war zone since 2001. the taliban and us meet face to face as afghanistan endures one of the world's worst humanitarian crises Afghan funds in the West remain frozen while repression of women and rights abuses continue. Will the talks bring Afghans some hope? In July 2021, Tariq Ali writes.

a senior Taliban delegation visited China, pledging that their country would never again be used as a launch pad for attacks on other states. The Chinese remained insistent that the situation of women must improve. But they talked trade. Have no doubt, writes Tariq Ali, Beijing will replace Washington as the capital of importance for Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban takeover of 2021, India has tried to chart a more neutral course. Pakistan essentially won in Afghanistan, and with China welcoming the Taliban to Beijing, New Delhi appears to be ready to live with the Taliban, to help rebuild Afghanistan where it can and avoid rocking the boat. Critics accuse the United States of punishing the Afghan people

in order to try and undermine the admittedly brutal Taliban government. But it may be worse than that. Malalai Joya, at least, tells us that the appearances of America cutting off the Taliban may be deceiving. while they are funding the Taliban to the tone of the 14 million a week to create a supposedly so-called all-inclusive government.

The only person who damages the ordinary people, you know, acting we are against Taliban, but in the meantime funding them. In the name of the so-called humanitarian support, of course, these money go to the Taliban. Sure enough, here's NBC News, April 2023. The head of the US government watchdog for the war in Afghanistan said Wednesday that the US may have provided billions in taxpayer dollars to the Taliban and Afghan terror groups.

since the withdrawal of American troops. But even he doesn't know the full extent of the problem. Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban. Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.

Mr. Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani, welcome to the program. Now, this is what a top Western official told me just before I got here. He said, we're in a new world. The guy that's you has a huge amount of American blood on his hands. He's got in the Taliban the tightest ties to extremist movements. He was also one of the first to put women back to work in his ministry. We have seen his ministry take promising steps to contain terrorism. To call it a paradox is an understatement.

This is not just my opinion, it's the opinion of every single envoy who works on these issues. So on the one hand, they believe you're a terrorist, I'm sorry to say, that's they who say that. On the other hand, they think they can work with you. What do you say to that? I would say that this is a judgment that they should make.

In a sane world, writes Harper's Magazine correspondent Andrew Coburn, the attacks of September 11, 2001 might have permanently ended Washington's long-standing taste for mixing Islam with politics. but old habits die hard." America's war in Iraq generated the biggest global recruitment drive of jihadism since Operation Cyclone itself. By the Obama years,

A key hotspot was next door to Iraq, in Syria, where, despite having just removed itself from the Iraqi mission, America recommitted itself to toppling an uncooperative secular strongman. But this time... in the retro cyclone style. In the spring and summer of 2015, Coburn writes, a coalition of Syrian rebel groups calling itself Jaish al-Fattah, the army of conquest,

swept through the northwestern province of Idlib, posing a serious threat to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Leading the charge was al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, known locally as Jabhat al-Nusra. The other major component of the coalition was Ahrar al-Sham, a group that had formed early in the anti-Assad uprising and looked for inspiration to none other than Abdullah Azzam. One of the original...

This potent alliance of jihadi militias had been formed under the auspices of the rebellion's major backers, writes Andrew Coburn. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar But it also enjoyed the endorsement of two other major players. At the beginning of the year, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zwahiri had ordered his followers to cooperate with other groups.

In March, according to several sources, a U.S.-Turkish-Saudi coordination room in southern Turkey had also ordered the rebel groups it was supplying to cooperate. with Jaish al-Fatih. The groups, in other words, would be embedded within the Al-Qaeda coalition. A few months before the offensive against Assad,

A member of one CIA-backed group had explained the true nature of its relationship to the al-Qaeda franchise, Coburn writes. Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United States to appear independent so that they would continue to receive American supplies. When I asked a former White House official involved in Syria policy if this was not a de facto alliance, Coburn says the official put it this way. I would not say that Al-Qaeda is our ally.

But a turnover of weapons is probably unavoidable. I'm fatalistic about that. It's going to happen. That answer doesn't sound all that different. from what CIA bagman Milt Bearden had said all the way back in the 1980s. Quote, We stand by our position that, once the stuff's delivered, we lose all control over it. In fact, practically, they supported, empowered directly and indirectly the terrorism in Afghanistan. Terrorism itself was a strategic tool in the hands of the US and NATO.

to use it against our people and waged their war, not only in Afghanistan, what they did in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Libya. And now, look what is happening in Ukraine. When you hear the news, the history of Afghanistan is repeating in India.

Caroline has this great tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail. Uroboros. I don't know what that means. A snake. It's called Uroboros. A report in the Washington Post, April 2022. When the United States wanted to purchase a fleet of helicopters for the Afghan government in the early 2010s, it chose the Mi-17, sold by a Russian state-owned arms exporter.

The decision infuriated U.S. lawmakers who felt the Pentagon should choose an American manufacturer. But the Defense Department stayed the course, saying the Russian helicopters were relatively inexpensive.

functioned well in Afghanistan's desert expanses and high altitudes, and Afghan pilots knew how to fly them. A decade later, the paper writes, Neither Congress nor the Kremlin could have anticipated that those helicopters would be used against Russian forces in Ukraine by way of arms transfers engineered by the United States. in response to Moscow's invasion and the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan. The MI-17's unusual journey went unmentioned in the announcement last week.

by President Biden touting his approval of an $800 million security package, dramatically expanding the scope of military aid that Washington is supplying to Kyiv. Forty years after the U.S. sent billions of dollars worth of weapons to Islamic warriors fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, it now sends Russian-made helicopters purchased to kill Islamic warriors fighting Americans in Afghanistan, to kill Russians in a proxy war inside of Ukraine.

That just about does it for Blowback Season 4. We'd like to thank all of our guests. Ahmed Rashid, Malalai Joya, Hassan Abbas, Seymour Hersh, Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould, and Atol Levin, and our friends at Sleazoids. And as always, we'd like to thank Matthew Giles, our fact checker, Davidson Barsky, our archival assistant, and Jesse Garacia, my assistant editor. Now, if you'd like to listen to our bonus episodes, all 10 of them,

including full-length interviews with our aforementioned guests, then make sure that you are a subscriber. All you have to do to subscribe to Blowback for $25 a year is go to www.blowback.show. You also get access to ad-free archives of all of our previous episodes, merch discounts, and first dibs on future blowback releases. Like, for example, Blowback Season 5, which comes out later this year. and covers America's deadly relationship with Cambodia. Adios. Bye.