We Lost The War in Afghanistan. Now What?

about it was doctor Emil Simpson. Emil is a former British Army officer who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan with the Royal Gurkha Rifles. He is a scholar who wrote an extraordinary book, War from the Ground Up, twenty first Century Combat as Politics, that described new forms of war fair both from the standpoint of the soldiers on the ground and from the big picture perspective of

military strategy. He's also a scholar of international law and international relations, and currently is a barrister in London working on international and commercial matters. Emil, thank you so much for joining me, especially on short notice. Emil. Let's start with the immediate question of the evacuation, which we're all

watching in real time. How is it going, and how would you compare it to other instances of evacuation from Afghanistan, since eventually, it seems any power that decides that it wants to govern Afghanistan ends up evacuating inner hurry. Yes, well, from what I understand the evacuation, the plan is to complete it in two or three days. The Nazi evacuation of our forces, it's a question mark as to how we're going to get out inter as others who helped

us who are not part of that evacuation. And that's clearly a severe problem in terms of the kind of very near term situation. The basic problem is that because the US evacuated Background air Base sometime ago, there's only one airfield effectively in Afghanistan that we can use, and that's that's the Comble Airport, which only has one runaway and is overlooked by high ground. So it's clearly very vulnerable.

So you could have, you know, an accident. So regards to what Taliban leaderships say, a kind of unit on the ground that doesn't follow them might decide to take a pot shot at a plane that clearly would be disastrous.

That that's the kind of flash point that could happen, but short of that, it looks like we're just going to get out without further do really, as long as there's no accident, you know, for me personally, I do remember vividly the expect not just the interpreters but of cause them too, but also just the ordinary Afghan soldiers and especially you know, their officers who are basically the people I was working with on a daily basis. Who are my age. These aren't the kind of high level

officials in Kabul who are cr up. These are guys who and women too, who were very brave and very hopeful, very idealistic. They'd grown up really with this new government or at these they didn't remember the had a bands, they're too young, wanted a sort of better Afghanistan, and they really were putting their lives on the line for this project. And those are the people who have basically been abandoned, you know, unlike US, I mean, Western Force

is obviously for extremely hard too. These guys were deployed constantly on the ground. You know, they were in Hell Mount for ten years without relief. I mean maybe a week back in Kabul or whatever, but basically they were just constantly there. This was their life. This wasn't at all, This was their life, and they didn't have the option

to leave Afghanistan. I don't know whether it crossed their mind that day they might have to evacuate, but that's the position we're in now, and we absolutely have a moral obligation to evacuate these people. You know, regardless of whether we leave Ghanistan, we should be ashamed of banding these people because this isn't These aren't kind of numbers.

These are real people. And personally, I think it's not good enough just to evacuate the interpreters, because yes, we shouldn't evacuate those people, but there's a whole bunch of very brave Afghan junior officers and you know, equivalent in the government who have served us, and we should evacuated them and their families too. That that is absolutely moral responsibility.

The West bears at the moment in terms of historical comparisons, the evacuation of Kabal in eighteen forty two after the First Afghan War, when the entire British army was destroyed, so that that clearly is an instant of an evacuation

that went far worse. But you know, an example that evacuation that went better is that would be the Soviet experience, in which the Soviet main force left Afghanistan in nineteen eighty nine having trained a Naska forces of roughly the same size, about three hundred thousand, and those Afghan forces fought on for another two years until the Soviet Union itself collapsed in nineteen ninety one. And the Soviet force

also counterattacked critically. So when the Mujadin massed immediately after the Soviet withdrawal, the Soviet main force withdraw the Mujadin tried to attack Jaulalabad in a conventional kind of attack. The Afghan Soviet Army, with Soviet air support and some artillery support, counterattacks and severely defeated the Mujadin, who basically fragmented, and that brought them more time. So there are important

comparisons being made in terms of the historical analogies. Another analogy that's foremost in the minds of Americans, of course, is the American withdrawal from South Vietnam in the wake

of the fall of Saigan. As we know, in that instance, some people who had been allied with the United States and have helped the United States were able to get out, but the great majority were essentially left to their fates, some to be oppressed or even killed by the North Vietnamese, others to desperately get onto boats and hope that the rafts or barely see where the vessels they were on,

would take them somewhere. And certainly from news reports, it sounds as though there may be a significant number of people who worked with the Allies in Afghanistan who don't manage to get out. I was wondering whether when you were on the ground now a bit more than a decade ago as an officer, whether the locals who worked with you were already thinking about what would happen if the war were lost and they were left to their fates.

Was that on their minds? Was it something you discussed with them, or was it something that nobody wants to talk about because it was too terrible a prospect. It depended on where you were in the country. I think in southern Afghanistan people did not think that the army would hold out in the country side, at least not in the whole countryside. Because the Taliban is predominantly a

Christian movement from the south and east to Afghanistan. People did not think that the north to Afghanistan, or the center or the big cities would fall to the Taliban, because that's that's the Soviet analogy in nineteen eighty eight, that the Majudin took the countryside, especially in the south and east, they did not take the north, or the

center or the big cities. It is heartrap heart rendering seeing or hearing about the experience of those who worked with us who couldn't get out, And indeed it's particularly poignant when one has oneself given those assurances, not necessarily

in absolute terms, but certainly implied. You know, when you're leading to platoon of soldiers and you go to from Afghan village you're based there for six months, and the local elder or you know that their people are trying to make decisions about whether to support you or not, and you're trying to encourage them. You are implicitly giving assurances. And sure you're not giving insurances and your personally, it's not you're personally making the promise. You're a you're acting

as a representative channeling national policy. But they are nonetheless real promises, and there are real life and death. Effectually decisions and risk calculations made on the base of those assurances, and so when those people are sold out, which they absolutely have been, you know, you can say, well, that's not a national interest. That doesn't change the fact that

promises have been given. And if you're the one who actually gave the promises, as you know thousands of Western military personnel and diplomats and aid workers would have done, that's a very different moral proposition. That's very tough, and

I can imagine what you're feeling around it. What went wrong in the most recent period of time, I mean, the US, the UK, other actors spent upwards of a trillion dollars on trying to shore up, train and essentially buck up an Afghan military, and yet it seemed that once the final withdrawal was announced, the response of the Afghan military effectively was to lose more. I think that it couldn't win and give up the ghost relatively quickly.

Why what's happening here? The first thing to say, I think this is not a story that's really cut through in the last couple of days, but even in the last five years, frankly is the number of Afghan casualties. So the basic message from President Biden is the Afghans won't fight for themselves, therefore Western soldiers should not fight for them when they won't fight for themselves. Were that true, that would be a good argument. But that's not the case,

at least in a five year time frame. So although the country numbers are estimates, it's roughly a ballpark figure. So if you look at the Brookings Institution Afghan Index, which is most reliable source, they've estimated forty five thousands, so that's forty five thousand Afghan security forces. That's police an army deaths between two thousand and fourteen and two twenty,

so just over five six years. So you compare that to US forces which are just under two thousand, five hundred deaths, and then coalition deaths of another two thousand and another two roughly contractors, So about five or six thousand Western death if you liked, the Afghan forces have taken about eight times more dead and then you're going to have a factor of about three in terms of wounded from that. So the idea that the Afghan army

have not fought is it is not right. Forty five thousand of them if that estimate is right, or even close to being right have for and died doing exactly that. Were they fighting for their government? No, their government is crupt and rotten, and everyone knows that they're fighting for their families, who, unlike their leadership, don't have the option of leaving Afghanistan. They were fighting in remote provinces with their backs to the wall for the last five years,

basically getting hammered and taking a lot of Catholics. Granted they weren't fighting completely independently. They had crucially Western logistical support the Afghan army mainly because of massive corruption at the higher levels of government, and the army was unable to do logistics. You put to you put those two factors together, and you've got an army that's basically being hammered in terms of catalties and has fought bravely, but

it's morale's very low. The Taliban attack right at the very moment at which that Afghan force has to adapt to having no logistics support, so they can't get their couches out, they can't get ammunition and other supplies forward, and at the same time they see various members of their government at the cabinet level basically tweeting oh, I've resigned, I'm leaving my leaving combolts Jordan, my family in Dubai

or whatever, and finally enough morale collapses. You know, query whether a Western force would be an indifferent You know, it's entirely understandable why the Afghan regular forces, isolated and

abandoned in these provinces basically gave up. It is also clever as the final point of the Taliban to attack the southern towns first, because they basically attacks and the southern the big southern towns, and that triggered the Afghan government to deploy its reserves special forces kind of the unit they went south, and then the Taliban switched they

main effort and sat the north. In conjunction with clever political tactics from negotiating strends and stuff, and you put that together, it's not surprising that the whole thing fell apart emil. A question that's really very pressing for a lot of listeners, myself included, is do you think this withdrawal was correct? Was it the right thing to do?

Because part of what you're saying in terms of the directionality of the war suggests that there wasn't really a viable way either for the security forces to beat the Taliban or even to just hold them off indefinitely. And that starts to contribute to the idea that withdrawal was

the right thing to do. But of course the alternative picture would be one in which there were ways to withdraw eventually, but to do it in a different way that would have a chance of stopping the country from falling into the hands of the Taliban in this way. So what is your view on that was the withdrawal the right thing to do? Now well as the military side, on the political side. On the military side, the US

could in theory have stayed there indefinitely. Had a force of roughly two thousand, five hundreds by the end, spending roughly three billion dollars a month on a military budget of around just under eight hundred billion dollars a year. That's a significant but it's not a huge cost objectively, so you could just carried on. I should mention that eight US soldiers died in twenty twenty, so that's a serious number, but it's pals a comparison to the Afghan

categies at numb As I mentioned. Politically, clearly, there was an appetite for that, So how do you square that. On the one hand, you've got this fact that when the US is there as a backstop, providing sport, providing logistics, crucially, the Afghan forces can carry on. You could have maintained the stalemate indefinitely, but there's no political wealth of the indefinite presence. Answer. You have to get a peace deal, So you have to use the stalemate as leverage to

get a pace deal with the Taliban. That PCAL wasn't coming. I think a mistake was not to counterattack in the last two weeks. The Taliban attack kind of paralyzed us. They too fast. We appeared unable to move almost I mentioned, you know, in nineteen eighty nine the Soviets did counter attack at Lalabad. And when a gorilla force changes from being a gorilla force to being a conventional force, as they must do to take a country, that's their most

vable moment. That's when you can really fight them for once conventionally, and it wouldn't have been very hard to inflict serious losses on them and basically forced them into you know, at least at least give the peace deal a chance. That's how Aban I think will surprised themselves are how easily they took Kaba, And indeed, you know

you're talking about Sigon earlier. Note how in seventy two in the East to seventy two the North Vietnamese also tried to attack the Easter Offensive, and the Americans did counter attack. And I'm surprised North Etnams with their political will and bought more time, and he bought time for the peace deal. And I mean, obviously it collapsed in the end, but bought more time. So you know, a counter attack would have helped to get that peace deal.

What it happened, who knows. It's impossible to be certain about these things. But I think we should have counter attack in terms of the wider decision. You know, it's for the US president's judge, US natural interest. I'm not American. It's not made to say that the Americans should or

shouldn't bear that cost. That's President Biden. And if he thinks that that cost is too much, it I mean, I think people in the Biden administration would probably respond to that by saying that there was effectively a counter attack in the second term of the Obama administration, and that that was the effort that they hoped would be able to turn the tide, but that it failed. That then the Trump administration was just in a holding pattern,

and that Biden had already decided himself. And this is pretty clear he had already decided, now seven years ago or eight years ago, that this wasn't worth continuing. And once he had that view, the possibility of motivating a counter attack would have been pretty difficult because the Talbin would have just tried to wait it out. You know, they would have said, listen, you don't really mean it.

So if he had said, listen, we're just counterattacking in order to change the strategic calculus and make the Taliband negotiate, which was a version of what the United States had already said between twenty twelve and twenty fifteen, it just wouldn't have worked. Yeah, you put your finger on the pulse of the master. If you like, the key is surprised. You've got to make the Taliban think it's in the minds of the enemy. That's where victory lies. It's psychological state,

if you like, and surprised works in Afghanstan. The surgery was not surprised. It was telegraphed the idea was we'll search for three years and then we'll draw down. So it was all very predictable, very telegraphed, no surprise, and indeed this points to a broader failing in the West approach strategy, at least in my view, whereby we think

strategy is a kind of form of project management. It's a kind of strategy taught in business scopes where you know, if you want to build a house or something, you get your workers, your money, and your materials and you put put them in a spreadsheet, and you know, things might go wrong, like you might get some bad weather or something for a month, but and that might delay you.

But ultimately you can get from A to B through the pretty kind of techno crash approach where you just put resources on a spreadsheet and your project manage with no account of the enemy, no account of the enemy whatsoever, as if wres some kind of scientific endeavor, and that's just completely wrong. War is all about getting into the mind of the enemies, about initiative, seizing the initiative, and holding the initiative, and it's much more psychological than that.

And in Afghanistan, actually, you know, in retrospect, maybe we shouldn't urge in two thousand and nine, maybe we should actually have researched and actually put some pressure on n Fan government to do more themselves. But ultimately, if you step away from all this, it's not about these kind of set template approaches. You know, does a surge work

in the abstract? You can't tell. The question is can you use surprise to regain the initiative so doubt in the minds of your opponent, such as to get them to at least think, oh, maybe it is my interest to do a PCE deal because I don't know what the outcome is going to be. That wasn't the case here. The Taliban could totally plan around the US and Western plan and then hit the forces Afghanic horses extremely hard when we took the justic support away and basically with

we'll be back in a moment. I mean, I'm really fascinated by what you've just said, the idea that somehow the US in particular maybe Western forces more generally tended to think about Afghanistan as though it were a war without an enemy, you know, a war you're fighting in your own head, where you think that logistics are really

about what you're going to do. Seems to fit into a kind of systemic failure throughout this war, maybe deriving from the fact that in the early invasion the Taliban ran away relatively quickly and were then not treated as a serious opponent, a serious enemy who had to be surprised and engaged, but were rather thought of almost as though they were the drip drip drip of a body of water, and the question was could we hold out against that drip, drip drip, rather than could we actually

conceptualize the enemy as a set of human beings, as another who needed to be engaged, which, as you say, is crucial to warfare. Why do you think, I mean, when we turn to lessons learned here, one of the crucial ones is surely that's no way to fight a war. You know, if you're going to fight a war, you have to conceptualize the enemy. You have to put your mind inside the mind of the enemy, and you have

to do the things that will defeat the enemy. And why, why why did the United States approach war in this way? Is it something about our training? Is it's something about how we conceptualize war. Is it's something about the tremendous disparity between our resources and the resources of the enemy. What what put us in a position to make these mistakes which to me as you depict them, sound rather fundamental. Yes, well it's I mean, the term war is a good

place to start. I mean, clearly, Afghana stands war in a sense that there is at a high level of violence going on on the ground, and that the kind of combat tactics are not this similar across different kinds of wars. But really there is a fundamental difference between interstate war, which our finite in the sense that that there are two governments with whom you can negotiate a pcedal. So effectively you've got two kind of hierarchies fighting each other.

You know, you use military force against the base of the hierarchy of the army, and that sort of tingles up the nerve system of the state the other side to a government, and that government kind of gets the message and it is defeated. That's completely different when you're dealing with a network. A network is flat and loose, there's no real leadship structure. So how are you going to how are you going to win? In the kind

of political sense, you can't. Actually you're managing an ongoing security problem without trying to escalate and without getting sucked into things like nation building. Really just trying to deal with the security side of things, and war is not often that even that appropriate label. So it's much more often sometimes akin to policing operations, where you know, in a western city, no one expects the police to defeat

crime in a decisive sense. Rather you manage it. Now, clearly it's not exactly policing, but there is a spectrum of activity and treating these conflicts as war with these kind of expectations of decisive outcomes where you have surgies for like three years and somehow expect the military to deliver you a decisive outcome in three years. That's that's

not helpful. Actually, you need to have lower intensity but longer term presence with lower expectations of what you can achieve in order to manage risk over longer time frames, without these kind of fantastic expectations of decisive victories. And so there's a spectrum in terms of political outcomes. Is there even an enemy or are you dealing with a kind of kaleidoscopic bunch of factions who can change depending on how you define the enemy. I think in Afghanistan

that was an issue. You know, we started off defining an enemy narrowly as aar Qaida, and that was broadly even the position still two thousand and five, and then in two thousand and five we went into the South

and the east in bulk. There are already some forces, but really very few forces before that, especially in the South, and we started sort of treating everyone who short at us as you know, the enemy and attributing to the single corporate identity are either Taliban, and actually that wasn't

the case. There was lots of lots of different factions on the ground, and by tlicely disaggregating a network, franchise movement into its constituent parts, you can use much less force as little false as possible, so you're only using force against the really hardcore. And that's absolutely not what

we did. We use force much too broadly against far too many factions because we didn't have that political, low level political insight, which is so crucial, and thus we very quickly found ourselves swimming upstream against an ever expanding insurgency.

So a lesson here, you know, not to the tactical level, but at the kind of global level too, is always a disaggregate to try to not group everyone in the same brush, owise you end up fighting kind of everyone really, and you know, that's that goes to basically back this concept of war, not treating everything through this binary paradigm of war in which as a clear line between military

and political activity. That's not the case, especially in says context with the information revolution, whereby you know, you get

a lot more networks. What was your experience of that when you were on the ground, I mean, when did you find yourself able to try to do that kind of disaggregation at the local level and not just treat anybody who might be shooting at you and your soldiers as definitively at the Taliban Or was it simply the case that the lack of differentiation at the higher level of command made it all but impossible for you, you know, to do differently on a day and in day out

basis very much so. I mean on my first one, not so much because I was a protune commander, but on my second tour, when I was actually working on planning operations, and my third tour, I was very much able to do that, and it's totally possible. You need to think about things differently. You need to be doing

networking hours on the grounds understanding who's who. I mean, this is almost obvious, you know, if you're the British Army in Northern Ireland, it's like going in there and saying, oh, well, what's a Catholic, what's a Protestant? You know, these are

the fundamental kind of cultural drivers of this conflict. And we just went in southern Afghanistan thinking everyone's either Afghan Government or Taliban, and actually it's much more sophisticated than that, and it's not particularly hard to kind of find out who these tribes are as the barracks, alazai Ishize Popalzi, and they all have different motivations. And then there's the narco dealers as well, and you can quite easily find out what these different cultural kind of groups are just

by asking people. It is absolutely doable. But a problem. A further problem is that the nature of civil military relations, the paradigm we have is a very much one way model. It's the idea that there's this very hard division between the political side and the military side. Neither side Shoor trespass. I mean that comes from a really post Korean War model where you didn't want to get the military with their things on the nuclear trigger because then you can

have a nuclear war. And that makes sense. So it absolutely makes sense that the military should stay out of politics in a kind of political sense, and indeed in that context and the nuclear context, which should stay out that those kindcisions too. But in a counterinsurgency, you absolutely need people on the ground to be able to say this, actually, at a political level, that's not working. We shouldn't be pushing this policy lining to it doesn't work with this tribe.

We should be doing that, we shouldn't be doing this. So for example, the classic example in southern Afkanastan was narcotics. The anti narcomission pretty much alienated everybody. You know, query why we're doing it? Well, were there to fight terrorism or drugs? I mean, we could fight drugs, that's a political decision. But would we would cut about nine percent of the enemy out if we didn't fight drugs. No one would listen to the military on the ground. That's

not our job. We're not allowed to talk about politics. You just fight the enemy. We'll do the politics. This idea that politics is. It's something that's some like higher up. It's not the right approach, and it challenges and requires us to reconfigure this paradigm of civil military relations. It needs to be much more fluid and dynamic and flatter.

What I hear you saying there, and I think this is also as I read it, one of the themes if You're a Terrific book is that it would be a mistake to think that in a world where the enemy is networked and flat, that the way to fight it is in some hierarchical sense where the decisions about quote unquote politics are made somewhere up to chain and then the decisions about military tactics are made down on

the ground. In fact, to fight a war against a flat, networked enemy, you have to be flatter, you have to be more networked, and we have to break down the artificial distinction between a political judgment and a tactical judgment, especially in an operation that has certain features of trying to keep the peace, namely a counterinsurgency. No exactly, there's

this expression out gorilla. The gorilla. You know, if you're a Western, big heavy Western falls you're basically a kind of elephant trying to catch a kind of mouse, And so obviously when the mouse hears the elephant going through the jungle, hears it from miles away and runs away, and it's impossible to catch the mouse email. I want to turn now in our concluding moments of our conversation to the question of how much it matters for the US role in the international order that the US managed

to lose this war. Now, one could say, as was the takeaway from the Vietnam War, where the US learned that it couldn't defeat an enemy like South Vietnam. Here the takeaway is that the US couldn't defeat a persistent insurgent force like the Taliban, but that that doesn't necessarily mean that the position of the US visavi China with respect to Taiwan, for example, or visa its position in other places in the world where its geostrategic power remains crucial,

has really fundamentally changed. Or you could say, listen, there must be a bigger takeaway of a failure like this twenty years, a trillion dollars, failure to achieve its goals, failure to learn the lessons of counterinsurgency that should have been learned from Vietnam surely has consequences, And I'm wondering where you come down in that grand debate, which is really just beginning now. Yeah, in terms of international order, Noah, the key is what happens next in Afghanistan. So question one,

who really are the Taliban? Their pr is all very rosy and glossy. They say they're can happen inclusive government, including women, for example, and have an amnesty for government officials and everyone in fact, and if that were really worthy case, then the West could live with that and that won't badly damage US press, if you like. On the other hand, if one their pr is not true to reality, then that wouldn't be the case. But the real issue is that can the Taliban even maintain control

of the country. They've been united through a common enemy for the past twenty years and now actually the Taliban being a franchise movement, the question is whether those different factions will start to come apart. So you've got some more moderate, some more extreme, and the whole country could

send in civil war, creating a haven for terrorists. That would clearly be extremely damaging for US credibility in terms of having to potentially go back in there and deal with that, or just take it on risk and accept the consequences. Neither of those good options. Beyond Afghanistan and beyond the kind of terrorism question, I don't think that this is going to undermine US alliances in East Asia

on the country. The whole point of this move was to reinforce alliances in Asia, So I don't think that's going to be undermined. But perhaps the contrarian answer is that is the West being repeating the mistake of not

using surprise, not being imaginative here. If the West and semicly United States starts just putting all its effort into focusing on Taiwan really and the defense in the Far East in a very conventional sense, is that not going to open the door for states that basically want to undermine US and Western interests across the rest of the world.

So China and Russia primarily using all kinds of means, not just military means, but also geoeconomic means and informational means, and all kinds of sort of grazoon tactics we've seen in the past ten years or so to undermine interests Western interests in the rest of the world while we're

focused on on the Far East. In a very conventional sense, that's the actual risk, and there could be a a kind of ironic outcome where the worst there's all this effort to kind of shift pivot to Asia if you like, and telegraphics intentions in a very unimaginative way, and the other countries just plan around that. And actually there isn't any big fight over Taiwan. But there's no sort of

decisive moment which US power ends. Rather, there's kind of death by a thousand cuts, which indeed is how the British Empire basically ended, and how most empires end in that if indeed empires the right analogy. But the point is, in terms of the kind of superpower, is that really what's going to happen. I think actually that's more likely

to happen than any kind of decisive battle. And really, if we want to stand by our values and Western values, which I think personally how worth fighting for or at least worth sounding up for. Not I don't mean fighting

necessarily ligial sense. It requires us to be more agile and to think about strategy in a way that actually uses the values of surprise and flexibility of means not always focusing on the military side of things, but at the same time where there is a need to intervene, not to do regime change, but on the contrary regime support. You know, I gave the example of France and Marley earlier. Then we should do that and not always be completely predictable.

We'll be right back, Emil. I want to thank you for this fascinating account of events on the ground and they're deeper, meaning in Afghanistan, and also of course for your combination of being a soldier on the ground and then a scholar explaining things to the world and to all of us. For me talking to you, I was just deeply struck by the reality of the number of Afghan dead. Forty five thousand Afghan dead soldiers is close to the total number that the US lost in Vietnam.

It's a very significant cost. And very struck by your observation that it wasn't just that the US and the Afghan security forces lost the ward, but that the Taliban really want it. I was also very very struck by your observation that we failed to think about this war from the standpoint of the enemy and therefore failed to have the advantage of surprise. I was really struck by your point that in a networked world where the enemy is flat and networked, we need to do the same.

And then if you want to catch a mouse, you can't be an elephant, maybe you actually need to be something closer to a cat. And last, but not least, just very struck by your point that the deep failure of the US here does have broader geopolitical consequences that we're going to be grappling with in the future. So I want to again thank you for your analysis and for your commentary, for your service, and for coming on Deep Background to explain this to us on short notice.

Thank you, Amil, Thank you very much. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Gencott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at

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