The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson on Afghanistan: An American Catastrophe (Part One)

I'm B Duncan, Executive Producer at Intelligence Square. Here's a thought. We don't often connect our modern digital world with something as physical as water, but the two are deeply linked. Data centres, food production, your morning coffee, the clothes you're wearing. Water is behind it all. Our world is held together by water in ways we rarely stop to notice. That's why we're proud to be kicking off twenty twenty six by working in partnership with WaterAid to shine a

That connects us all, water. Journalist Coco Kahn speaks to Helen Rumford and Vera Klutchin about how water is shaping the future of innovation, climate resilience, and global development. Because when water flows, so Helen Rumford is lead policy analyst for climate policy and campaign.

focusing on inclusive, sustainable change and climate justice. And Vera Klutchen, WaterAid's climate and environment lead, brings over a decade of international experience working on climate resilient water, sanitation and Listen in to discover why investing in water is one of the most powerful ways to secure a sustainable, equitable future for everyone. This is the second episode in our series in partnership with WaterAid, both of which are available to listen to now on the Intelligence.

Lyot svårakut var i din hermerse. Du plattade alltså håret utan värmesyd. What's wrong with you women. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with John Lee Anderson, staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the great foreign correspondents of our time.

Anderson joined us at the Kiln Theatre to reflect on decades of reporting from Afghanistan, from the US-backed Mujahideen's insurrection in Kabul to the American invasion launched in the days after 9-11. and the long war that followed. Drawing on his years on the ground, he explored how the conflict evolved into what many now regard as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era, and what it can teach us about global relations today.

He was in conversation with journalist Clarissa Ward. Let's join them now live on stage in London.

Thank you. Thank you so much for that generous introduction, Margarita. Um I am beyond thrilled to be here tonight with John Lee Anderson, who I was fortunate enough to meet For the first time in 2006, he barely remembers it. Of course for me it was like a seminal event in my life. and I was just starting out as a young journalist and it was the Lebanon Hezbollah Israel War in 2006. and we met on the beach, I believe, outside the US embassy as the US was evacuating people.

And um it was a huge honor then and it continues to be a huge honor and John Lee Anderson continues to be really one of the great foreign correspondents of our time. And today we are gonna be talking about Lots of stuff, but primarily this brilliant book um that you see here, To Lose a War. which is a fascinating look at the uh the full and rise, I guess, of the Taliban over four decades.

And um it's a pretty sobering read, I think, particularly as an American, but a very important read. Um and of course given that it's John Lee um imminently readable as well. So um I'm gonna ask some questions and then obviously we'll open it up for everybody else to to chime in and and we can expand the conversation of course beyond Afghanistan as well. But I wanted to start with this idea of

you know, we're taught that Afghanistan is the sort of graveyard of empires, right? And I think the actual what you write in your book and I'm quoting you here, is that it's more of a battleground of history. than it has been a nation. And I just wonder if you can tell us what you mean by that and how you see conflict as as shaping Afghanistan's identity.

Well, first of all, hello everybody and thanks Clarissa for that generous introduction. Forgive me all for having a I'm battling a heavy cold. Uh just arrived back in the rain here. on Sunday from Cuba and places like that. Um so if I'm a little heavy headed or thick tongued, you'll you'll s you'll know why. Mm look, yeah, it's it's it's a it's a famous adage, isn't it, that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. But it is, it has been.

you know, it's it's on the old silk road between Europe and and Central Asia. Um Everybody went through there from Alexander the Great to the Golden Hordes, the Brits twice. the Russians and finally the Americans. I probably missed a few along the way. There were m others in the kind of prehistory. and Afghanistan is a landlocked country surrounded by mountains, it's desert, it's mountainous, it's rugged and its people are tough as nails. They are warriors and they've experienced uh

Uh warfare all their lives. Um pretty much in ev any time I've been there w and that is I've I've been going there since the late eighties, so the first time I went there was when the Russians were pulling out And I remember um spent a we on one of my expeditions there with a couple of bodyguards in a in a hut in the mountains. It was snowbound. It was an ammo dump. And we just spent, yeah, a week in this place and w f you know, feeding um ammo boxes into this stove to keep warm.

And I watched the you know, the behavior of the guys who were with me and one of the things that struck me about them and later on at the front and so on, was that they had nothing soft in their lives. And that's something that's kind of continued over time in Afghanistan. Especially once you leave the the the big city, Kabul and some of the others, which are barely cities, they're really towns.

is there's nothing soft in that landscape. You have to be it's harsh and uncompromising. You have to know how to survive in it. And invaders by necessity are outsiders and don't know the land as well as the people who live there. And it's something we've seen again and again. So uh and my point about saying that it's more a battlef a battlefield of history than a nation.

In a way I'm riffing off the old graveyard of empires, but I'm also saying that each period of peace has comes through bloodshed. So Afghans and it's n it's not exclusive to Afghanistan. I think there's a few other nations on earth where this is the case. Where the dynamic of of peace or war is turned on its head, we have a kind of I think we have a um I would call it a uh

a kind of diplomatic fiction that we tell ourselves in the West that uh peace necessarily comes through negotiations and and an end to war. But in certain societies peace is c only ever come through Total war, the vanquishing of one's enemy, and the imposition of the rule of force on the other.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons I've always found Afghanistan particularly fascinating because I feel like it it truly is a kind of time travel. Um if you read Prince's Machiavelli or Machiavelli's Prince rather. uh when you're in Afghanistan, a lot of that um seems to bear out. in the battles one sees sometimes it's less about the right or wrong than the who prevails.

Um some of the early scenes I describe in the book in the in the war in two thousand one show that as you see enemies cross the battlefield through an agreement with a commander on this side And within hours or the very next day they're now fighting on this side. I found that fascinating, this idea of this switching sides and shifting allegiances and I mean help us understand that a little bit better. Like this wasn't ideological.

Mm. No, no, it's about power. It's about what you can do. In some cases there was a kinship through a clan. or some family history. But in other cases, it was simply a calculation that, you know, if if let's say a group of Taliban on this side of the battlefield uh pr persisted in fighting uh in those days. It would have been the Northern Alliance with the American B fifty twos overhead. They knew, you know, the they did the math. They would not win.

but if they joined the other side, they would. And very soon they would m meld with the new amorphous forces that were gonna be the post Taliban powers that be. And that's exactly what happened. Um I um I saw it again and again um in the north uh when the Americans were beginning to try to push the Taliban back and eventually uh took took the towns and cities of Afghanistan and and then the Taliban mysteriously melted away.

Where the Taliban ended and the new forces began, you would be hard pressed to sort of find uh f you know, find the place. Um a case in point. I returned to Kandahar in two thousand early two thousand two, which was sort of the last stand of the of the Taliban. um w and I s I sought out my old host, a man called Mulan Akib, with whom I'd spent time w w during the Soviet withdrawal. So twelve years had gone by and he had been the He had been the the power in the rural area around Kandahar.

uh one of seven commanders that ruled the areas around Gander. And at the time I'd spent with him he had been firing recoilless rockets, which is a fairly big rocket, into the city. A lot of things happened on that occasion. But twelve years later I found him in Kandahar. uh the American special forces were roaring around. The Taliban had disappeared. And I found out that Molina Kibb, my old host, was under a dark cloud.

from the new powers that be, that is to say, Karzai, the man the Americans had chosen to run Afghanistan, his family, which was from that area, and the Americans themselves, because they said he had let Mullah Omar and the Taliban escape. They had gone to him to ask him to get the Taliban to surrender, and he had said he would, but on the appointed night they had all disappeared.

And sure enough he'd cut some kind of deal with them. What deal it was I never knew, but when I went to visit him he uh conceded that he was, you know, not well liked by the new powers that be. But but he wanted to show me this convoy of super edition luxurious um Toyota Lang cruisers that Mullah Omar had left behind for him. And we, you know, we proceeded to go out to the old battleground in this convoy of exquisite Toyota Land cruisers that had belonged to his next door neighbor, Mart.

In other words, he had figured out a way to survive. He was not a Taliban. Um but he he knew what he had to do in order to keep his tribe, his people happy not to be killed, at least up to that point. Eventually he was killed. And as you're observing this and taking this all in and with the benefit of of the experience of having been there in the late eighties

Are the Americans understanding this? Are they appreciating these subtleties? Because It seemed early on this was a relatively easy war. It was look how well we've done, we've done so quickly, okay, we haven't found Osama bin Laden but the Taliban have crumbled and

suddenly it morphs into something very, very different, which which we'll get on to. But I just wonder, you know, when you did you see a lot of hubris, did you see any any real sort of understanding from Americans about what was really going on. Look, there were exceptions, but by and large, no, they came barging in.

By and large it was special forces led and I found them to be to behave like real cowboys. There were a few incidents that happened with the special forces and navy SEALs, those sorts of people early on. that I didn't like, including, you know, this v this is very aggressive uh groups moving around on their own with a handful of uh interpreters. People they'd hired up kind of r m rent a mob, rent a thug.

who told them where to go and what to do, and you saw them spin out on Tora Bora right away. The people they were dealing with were pretty thuggish warlords who were heavily involved in the drug business. And sure enough you know the people they thought were helping them were also double dealing, which is by the way, that's how you do war. It's about winning. It's not about right or wrong. It's about winning. And Afghans know that. Betrayal is a big part of the warfare there.

Just as I was describing the scenes on the battlefield in the north, the same thing happened uh with these warlords that the Americans hired. And they were throwing around a lot of money, the CIA was throwing around a lot of money. Did the Americans know though? I think I think I think you had you had different groups of Americans who weren't necessarily talking to each other.

My experiences with the special forces when I found them in the field there and in Iraq w were usually a really aggressive encounters. It wasn't like meeting a fellow American or a fellow Brit. In one c one of the cases that really disturbed me early on was um some journalists that I knew, two women in particular, were coming up in one of these areas that was still wild and lawless

uh I think they had an operation called Anaconda which was after Osama bin Laden fled disappeared, they started surging into the hinterlands with these sort of aggressive um actions, operations aimed at ferreting out um Al Qaeda remnants and Taliban remnants. And they were already being hidden everywhere.

And so they took people along with them who told them they know where they were. Now, in one of these cases, they had established a fort. They had they were occupying a fortress in the middle of nowhere. And on the way there these two uh colleagues were attacked. You know, they were fired upon in some m you know, benighted little mud walled place and one of the women was pretty badly wounded. And when they got to the fortress where the Americans were, they wouldn't let them in.

they had to sleep outside that night, completely exposed to the elements and without medical attention. I just could not forgive them for that. But that was kind of typical. I had run ins with them myself later and very often I found guys who were really psyched up the actually the kind of behavior we're seeing now from ICE in places like Minneapolis, very similar behavior. You know, just force protection, it's us and them. Don't get in our way. We'll shoot you. That kind of thing. And um

Look, Afghanistan became this place very quickly where, you know, the international community poured in use you know, into Kabul, a few other outposts. Uh there was a lot of well intended people that came Um wanting to help with you know. digging wells or women's rights or you know, kids' schools or whatever it was. But meanwhile we had this this army of guys who never never figured into the calculation of how many troops we had over there. I'm talking about the special forces. Um and the CIA.

Um w in the days later on when you could say that there were, I don't know, fifty thousand American troops there or ISAF troops, um, there were also, you know, thousands of um for the CIA and they were doing stuff that isn't legal or countenanced by our side or nor was it ever covered by our journalists'cause you couldn't be with them. And they were killing people. They were kicking down doors and killing people.

And anyway, I'm jumping ahead. But that sort of behavior began early on. And um I'll I'll I'll just there's so many anecdotes that come to mind, but there's one I came down with it to give you an idea of the Afghans so Actually I'll tell the story of one Afghan who remains my friend, Kais. Kais was upon the w the eruption of war. was in this place right on the Tajik border.

Uh he was twenty two, I think. Maybe you know Kais. I think you know who who I'm talking about. He was twenty two. His father was the furniture maker for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban. His mother was a black marketeer who had kept the family going ever since the Russian days by selling basically stolen goods, right? Uh to whoever. And that's just you know, it's business, right? And they lived in these sort of Soviet built apartments on the outskirts of Kabul. I met him there.

And um as the war moved forward He said that he would be happy to come and work with me. And so as the cities fell and we moved forwards down over the Hindu Kush to Kabul, I watched Kais go from being a twenty two year old but who by the way at the time the war began was planning to smuggle himself to England. and had gotten as far as the Tajik border and was only debating one thing, which was whether or not to carry I think it was two kilos of heroin.

um to Moscow on the flight from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to Moscow because it would reduce the airfare. And of course that was being done through the Russian federal police who controlled the border of Afghanistan at that time, and I think still do, anyway. And he he was free you know, free about this. And he had earned already, I think, a thousand dollars from various journalists by the time I met him. People were paying him like a hundred dollars a day or something.

Um while I was there the market stall traders, literally palisades of sticks and you know goats being slaughtered next Next door were aware that the Afghan, the local currency, was going to change because the CI was dumping lots of money into the into the um economy to buy warlords.

He traded his thousand dollars in and he made thirty thousand dollars. So he's like a future Wall Street guy. He made thirty tho by the time I met him he had thirty thousand dollars and he bought two Russian waz cheeps, one of which he put a a driver with and I spent the next week or so with him. He eventually became something like you know, something like a minister plenipotentiary in Kabul.

Um but while we were in Kabul, this new cowboy place with American troops coming in and everything else, one day we passed a slightly older guy in traffic. I let's call him, you know, Hassan. That wasn't his name. But he said, Ah, there's Hassan and I said, Who's Hassan? And he said, Oh, he's my neighbor.

He's twenty six and he's already a millionaire. And I said, How you mean a millionaire? Like a dollar millionaire? He said, Yes. I said, How did he become a dollar million? This is two months into the American occupation. He said they went to him, he spoke some English like me, um and they said, Will you find us a fortress?

So he went to his cousins and he said, Move out of your house, you know. And they paid him they said, We really like this. They gave him whatever it was, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that fortress and they said, We need ten more around the country. So by yeah, by December two thousand one? He had become a h a hustler with real money. And this is how it went in Afghanistan. Before you knew it there were these swaggering guys.

Who were calling the shots and becoming the interfaces for the Americans in Afghanistan and everything they wanted to do. And as time went on and some of them were drug traffickers, you know. Um and for about six years the Americans looked the other way. Um b they knew that, they knew they were, but they needed them for national security. I'm B Duncan, Executive Producer at Intelligence Square.

Here's a thought. We don't often connect our modern digital world with something as physical as water, but the two are deeply linked. Data centres, food production, your morning coffee, the clothes you're Water is behind it all. Our world is held together by water in ways we rarely stop to notice. That's why we're proud to be kicking off twenty twenty six by working in partnership with WaterAid to shine a sun.

That connects us all, water. Journalist Coco Kahn speaks to Helen Rumford and Vera Klutchen about how water is shaping the future of innovation, climate resilience, and global development. Because when water flows, so

Helen Rumford is lead policy analyst for climate policy and campaigns, focusing on inclusive, sustainable change and And Vera Klutchen, WaterAid's climate and environment lead, brings over a decade of international experience working on climate resilient water, sanitation and hospital.

Listen in to discover why investing in water is one of the most powerful ways to secure a sustainable, equitable future for everyone. This is the second episode in our series in partnership with WaterAid, both of which are available to listen to now on the Intelligence Squared podcast. Ving firar 70 år av resor som är svåra att släppa taget om. Och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Boka redan nu på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först. Ving semester.

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So so help us understand like w why did the Americans lose their way? At what stage did they completely lose sight of F let's put the sort of ethics and morality to the side, but just even in terms of like strategically trying to understand what the actual objective was, it suddenly took on this enormous scale and it was about digging wells and building schools and educating women and all these things that originally had not really been part of the plan. No, it was a police action and I think

The fact that they didn't get bin Laden right away is uh you know helped lead them into this morass. And of course, you know, we have a system that where you have pr changes, presidential changes, although in this case it was, you know, George Bush kind of owned it for the next almost eight years. And he he had he had people advising him as he did later in Iraq, not not long afterwards, getting diverted to Iraq, who were

giving him I think poor advice. Um so you had the kind of, you know, door kickers, the special forces off in the boondocks. You had the well intended State Department people doing the you know, women's education thing and probably getting murdered. Um and it was just

There's a term that ends with show that everybody says nowadays. That's kind of what it was. But if you went to Kabul I think you can say shit show. Shit show. You c you could be f you could be faulted for for not you know, for not understanding because suddenly There's all this money, there's all this um all these people pouring in. I remember I remember mem meeting an American woman from New York who'd married a warlord and she wrote a kind of pulp.

memoir about it about her me and the warlord. And she opened a cafe and in in in Kabul and there was a French place that a lot of us would like to go to. La Mosfaire. Remember that? La Mosfaire, beautiful place. Uh I'll never forget. To give you an idea of the uh one time I went there and the American there was no American ambassador.

But there was an acting ambassador, they brought him in from Korea. There was this kind of rollover of people. The kind of general tenor was, you know, we're gonna make this better. And I think Everybody was doing their thing and for about three years the Taliban, you know, were kind of absent. It it wasn't until the mid-2000s that they really started resurging. And then once they did that the Americans were in denial basically. As were their allies, it had become a NATO mission with, you know.

I don't know how many countries. They used to brag about how many countries were involved. And if you went through the list there was a even Mongolia was there, there were three, you know, there was uh Spaniards, there was you know a similar thing began happening in Iraq, but The Afghan mission really suffered because of the diversion to Iraq.

I was talking about this ambassador who wasn't there. And the guy that took me to meet this interim ambassador was this kind of jovial kind of beach boys guy. in his late fifties with a Hawaiian shirt and you know, he he was Hey man, how you hey dude, how you doin'? I'd never met a PA a public affairs officer like him. And we went in and while the ambassador was talking, he was kinda doing things like this with me behind and we hung out later. Turns out this guy was a friend of Donald Rumsfeld.

He was he was just what he seemed. beach bum from San Diego. He'd been a roadie for Janice Joplin. He was a dope smoking he was like the big Lebowski You know, with but w with no bowling ball. But he had a he was being paid three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to run the Embassies. PO. For every we s we set up a government and never never gave it, never invested it with true sovereignty. He bragged. He brought along this British guy. I'll never forget his name.

I always forget his name, I'll never forget this guy. This guy turned out to be the guy who had done the dossier to call him Power Christopher Steel. Paul something. Oh okay. He the the Iraq can have, you know, nuclear weapons in ninety minutes. Ah, okay, yes. Yes.

So he was the he was the author of this dossier which w by which um uh Bush justified the invasion of Iraq. He had been He had been, you know, paramilitarily kicked out of his job and now he had reemerged in Kabul two years later as the shadow interior minister. with the dude at his house and this guy, I spent an evening where they promptly got, you know, shit face drunk. And the dossier character, who was t little tiny guy, um

uh when you know, boasted about how he was the real interior minister of of Afghanistan. And dude was saying, he is, it's true, he is. The actual Interior Minister of Afghanistan, like most of the others, were earning a maximum of twenty five thousand dollars a year, maybe half that.

And he was making, you know, thirty times that or whatever, whatever three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year is. And this unfortunately went right across the board. I met other shadow ministers, people who I met one young British accountant once who came out And he was gonna be the shadow accounting minister or whatever it was. And he was maybe thirty two. And this was a big break for him.

And it wasn't as if the Afghans didn't know this and didn't feel humiliated by it. Of course they did. And so once again, on behind the scenes, just under the surface, you know Especially out in the provinces, deals were being cut. You know, Taliban re ascendant were talking to their cousins, their next door neighbors, people who were now part of this um, you know, cartoon show in Kabul telling them that, you know, we're coming back and you better know which side you're on, that kind of thing.

A lot of money was thrown around for nothing, basically. And I I just I couldn't believe these characters, but they you know, I d I don't know what he was making back in San Diego but There he was, you know, having a great old time. Sort of a boondoggle, huh? A boondoggle. Yeah. And

So at what point did they start to lose it? The Americans completed of course everything was contracted, right, out. So you had all these contractors as well. they rebuilt the ring road around Afghanistan to the tune of I don't know how many billions of dollars to some American company. So which was you know uh in in In any sort of counterinsurgency scenario you do need roads. You want to have roads into the areas where

some irate mullah might be inveying against you and you want to have everything covered. Of course they never really did. But by the time they had finally built this ring road the paved it in Afghanistan, the Taliban were back and had begun decapitating the engineers working on it.

And so it it it became once again very dangerous to work in Afghanistan for everyone. And what happened in Kabul w we w hap w y what began to happen in Afghanistan is what we'd seen happen in in in Iraq, which was a city that you could once upon have a sense of its political geography.

would disappear behind these eighteen foot high suicide blast walls everywhere, which are still there today. The old couple just disappeared as the attacks became more and more effective. They first started picking off Um the you know, the women's rights pro easy, low hanging fruit in the provinces. and then began launching, you know, ever more audacious attacks. Um and they took their time. You know, they took their time um in

But there was no there was no doubt. I would say that by so the war took place in 2001 too, the invasion. Um by 2005 they were coming back. By 2007 it was clear they were very much back. And you had certain forces, including the British, down in Helman. and others in other provinces, Canadians in further south and Americans, who were just fighting regularly and would go into villages that they knew to be uh

run by the Taliban. And ev eventually by 2009-10, around the time bin Laden was finally killed, the international forces talked about the shadow government. The shadow government was the Taliban government. And by then, I mean I was actually in meetings with American military and Afghan elders in which it was clear that one of the people there was reporting to the Taliban, or very possibly the representative of the Taliban government.

And everybody knew it was coming. And so it you know, it fell when it did, but it it was pretty obvious that it was gonna fall ten years before. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Valpato and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad-free episodes and full-length recordings, you can become a member at IntelligenceSquared.com forward slash membership.

And to join us at future live events, just head over to intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend to see our full events programme. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.