Welcome to this evening's classic episode. Guys, do you remember Afghanistan?
Yeah? Yeah, how could I forget? It was a golden time in Afghanistan that we all spent together.
The Breaker of Empires. The US invaded Afghanistan on October seventh, two thousand and one, and back in twenty twenty, weirdly enough, on New Year's Day, we started looking into this, into this excellent work by the Washington Post.
Oh yeah, back in twenty nineteen, Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post published at War with the Truth and the world said, uh what.
That was a really good impression of the world.
Matt, Yeah, what do you say?
We jump right into this classic episode.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They don't go on you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. I'm not wearing a hat.
You're wearing pants, though.
I am wearing pants. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck. In most importantly, you are you, you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. This is a wartime episode. As we record today's episode, the United States of America is still in the middle of the longest war in the country's history. That means there are literally people listening to the show today who were not alive
when this war began. Think about that. The United States invaded Afghanistan on October seventh, two thousand and one, and we are still there as we speak. Why how much did our leaders know and when did they know it? To answer that, oddly enough, even though this country has been at war in this other country for the better part of two decades, many people, many voters, aren't one hundred percent sure what Afghanistan is, where it is, and why it's such a big deal.
And it's also now the first time we've been engaged there.
No, no, no, no, no, this has an interesting name. First things first, here are the facts. Afghanistan is located in what is commonly called Eurasia, right the vast stretch of land between Asia and the continent we call Europe. It's landlocked, It's bordered by some greatest hits countries. In the rogues gallery of the United States historically Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Zbekistan, and China. Its capital is a place called Kabul. Outside
of several cities, the country is extraordinarily rural. We're talking places that are simply physically hard to access in the mountains or in the rugged wilderness. The country itself was not officially formed until seventeen oh nine, but as you alluded to, Matt, it has a history, a long and bloody history of being a battleground. In fact, Afghanistan is sometimes called the Graveyard of Empires due to just the sheer number of militaries that tried and failed to control it.
And it's an interesting thing there because and just when we're talking about it's the battleground, right the place where the wars are fought or the battles are fought, and generally controlling the area is kind of the goal. But a lot of times, and this is what we're going to kind of outline here, is that it's the the land, the place where two different warring powers end up where they just kind of go right. So it's not as though Afghanistan itself is rising up to you know, fight
A lot of the battles. It's generally it's where proxy wars happen. It's where it's interesting. We're gonna continue on with this throughout the show. So let's just keep going down into the history of Afghanistan.
Okay, let's do a little ancient history, shall we, Yes, okay, So, experts believe that early humans were living in Afghanistan as long as fifty thousand years ago because it was rich soil for farming. There were communities of farmers in Afghanistan that were some of the very earliest farmers in the entire world, and for a time the area was known as Ariyana, or the land of Arians. This is because multiple waves of people from Central Asia migrated to the region,
and many of these settlers were in fact Arians. They were speakers of the parent language of Indo European languages. Arians also, so migrated to Persia and India in those prehistoric times.
And then let's jump to the sixth century when the Persian Empire of the Akimenid dynasty controlled Ariana. And good luck saying, Achimenid, it's really fun and to look at and write. In about three hundred and thirty BC, the little guy you might remember named Alexander the Great, defeated the last ruler of the Akimenid dynasty there, and he made his way to the eastern borders of the place
that was called Ariana. Now after this guy, old Great Alexander himself died in three hundred and twenty three BCE.
In his early thirties, feeling that he was a failure by the.
Way, Yeah, no, that Alexander, he sure was great, wasn't he.
I mean he was, Uh, he's a guy.
Who's a guy.
He did great things.
He did some huge stuff. Whether it was great or terrible is depending on which side of the battles you were on.
I said, it had some large scale stuff.
Let's leave it. Okay, that's yes, there we go. So he died three hundred and twenty three BCE. All these other kingdoms that were out there, let's name them off here, the Seleucids, maybe Seleucids Seleucids, the Bactria, and the Indian Mayuran Empire, they all were fighting to attempt in an attempt to control this territory that was known at the time as Ariana.
So understandably, there were a lot of folks jockeying for position and a lot of kind of power grab situations.
In the vacuum. Yes, the history of afghanistun involves a ton of handoffs and power grabs with a lot of names that might be unfamiliar to you know, unless you have specifically studied this history. So strap in, we're just going to do some highlights. A lot of these empires are no longer around and the names will sound unfamiliar.
In the seventh century AD, or whichever way you want to go with that, Arab armies carried this brand new religion of Islam to Afghanistan, and the western provinces of Harat and Sastan came under the rule of these Arab forces. But the people of these provinces revolted. They returned to their old, pre existing beliefs as soon as these military forces were not you know, literally using violence to make
them pretend to practice Islam. In the tenth century, Muslim rulers called Samanids from Bukara and what's now is Pakistan extended their influence into the Afghan area. And this kind of when we see extending influence, it means that there was a soft hegemony, you know, expanding there. People started to use the currency of those rulers, they started to speak similar languages they acquire their culture. Sos Samanid established
a dynasty in Gazhni called the Ghaznavids. And again matt prescient with that pronunciation, we do not speak these languages. The greatest of the Ghaznavids was a king named Mahmoud who ruled from nine ninety eight to ten thirty. He is the one most responsible for establishing the solid foundation of Islam throughout the area of modern day Afghanistan. He led a lot of military expeditions into India. Even back then people started thinking of of Afghanistan to as the
gateway to these kingdoms of India. That state falls in the middle of the twelfth century to the Gurud Kingdom which arose in gur that's a west central region of present day Afghanistan. Those guys get kicked out early in the thirteenth century by another Central Asian dynasty. And these folks are all swept away around twelve twenty CE by Jengas Khan.
Oh, yeah, that Genghis Khan. Guy that's actually called Jengis Khan. I like to call him Jangi Janki, k j Janki sure.
Reminds me of that tower game Djenga.
Oh yeah.
And so we we include some of this ancient history because it's important to know that. Already it's twelve twenty Already two of the greatest conquerors in the world have come through this place, and now a third one appears. Near the end of the fourteenth century, the Central Asian military leader timor Lang or the Lame Timur, also known as tamer Lane in the West, conquered Afghanistan. Then he
immediately moved on to India. And when he moved on, his children and his descendants couldn't hold the empire together. They couldn't rule everything. Their grandfather, their patriarch, took over, but they were able to keep a hold on Afghanistan roughly for a little while. And now we get to where it eventually becomes an independent nation, as we said, you know, in seventeen hundreds, becomes independent. But there's a story behind that too. There's even more switching off. People
are trying to control this. They're dying left and right.
And we're going to talk about let's say a strategy. You're something that's going to ripple across time here that occurs in the eighteenth century, the king of Persia around that time, a guy named the Deer Shaw. He was employing this tribe of Pashtuns, an Abdhali tribe of Pashtuns, and he was using them in his wars in India. So he's got a contingency of other fighters. I wouldn't call them mercenaries, but they're fighters for under another flag,
essentially fighting under his flag. Right. And Ahmad Shaw, this Abdhali chief who'd gained this high post within the army there, he established himself after Nadir Shah's assassination, that the guy we're talking about, the King of Persia, after he was assassinated in seventeen forty seven. So Ahmad Shaw is, you know, looking to move up a little bit, and thankfully this
assembly of tribal chiefs proclaim him the new Shaw. And then the Afghans extend their rule as far east as Kashmir and Delhi and then north to the Amu Daria and west into northern Persia. So they really just begin expanding there under the rule of Ahmad Shah.
Yeah, and he retires from the throne in seventeen seventy two. He's one of the few people with the distinction of retiring. He dies in Kandahar. He has a son, Timor Shah, who assumes control the Afghan Empire survives mostly intact through the next twenty years.
Now think about that time. Yeah, seventeen seventy two. America is forming right right in this time period.
Here, increasingly irritated colonists half a world away are dreaming of revolution and saying, hey, one day there will be a popular Broadway play about us. And you may be wondering, rightly, so, when does all this have to do with me? When does all this obscure Eurasian history have to do with me? When does my team enter the game? A lot of people in the West are wondering, Well, there is an entire era of history involved, heavily involving Afghanistan that concerns
just this. It's called The Great Game. We did an episode on this earlier, longtime listeners may recall. But let's like, what's the quick and dirty way.
The Great Game is world dominance? Really, that's what it is. It's a bunch of extremely powerful countries and people deciding, Hey, I want to maybe be the ruler of all this. Let's see what we can do, but there are all these other people trying to do the same thing, so we have to play these mind games and diplomatic games and resource control games. Yeah.
So for most of the nineteenth century, eighteen thirty to eighteen ninety five to be precise, the British and Russian Empires were vying for control of Central and South Asia, including the country of Afghanistan.
This period was.
Known, as you mentioned Matt, as the Great Game, where both empires were trying to protect and secure their own territories they already held and also expanding outward into others. Britain was a huge player in this game, and that they were very concerned that Russia might take control over India, which was the crown jewel of the British Empire, despite the fact that Russia this wasn't really something that they
had designs on. But you know, Britain that you got to protect what she got, and they were to be a little paranoid. Afghanistan became once again, as you mentioned matt, a very fertile battleground.
Right you can see you can see some excellent fiction based on this period of time. A work by Ridard Kipling intensely problematic author, but I would I would say a talented poet. He wrote a novel called Kim, which is about a child becoming embroiled in what they later learn is the Great Game.
Rudyerd.
Kipling, of course would be uh. I would be remiss not to mention this is the person is the person most responsible for the phrase white man's burden. So he's not a good dude. But that was a well written book. A series of conflicts transpire in real life, not just in the book, and these are these are breaking out to wars, but they don't really turn into world wars
at this point. One of these conflicts, the Second Anglo Afghan War, which was from eighteen thirty eight to forty two, ended in a treaty that gave Britain control of Afghanistan's foreign affairs, so it turned into a vassal or a puppet state until nineteen nineteen, when Amanala Khan declared independence from British influence. He tried to introduce some social norms, such as abolishing the practice of product which is the idea that women should not be allowed to be seen
or interact in public. So he was a more forward facing leader in some social regards.
He was trying to do that.
He was trying to he ended up fleeing the country in nineteen twenty nine. People did not really people were not receptive to this change. Next, Zahir Shah becomes king and for the following four years, Afghanistan is a monarchy. In nineteen fifty three, a guy named General Mohammad Daoud became prime minister. He turned to the Soviets, to the USSR, and he said, help me out with the economy. Helped me out with military assistances. Also, I want to introduce
some social reforms, including the abolition of pradah. He was forced to resign in nineteen sixty three. It's a ten year rule there. But in nineteen seventy three he regained power in a coup and he said, okay, now we're a republic, and he said, you know what, I get the trend of history here, So I'm going to try to play these world powers against one another. It doesn't work the way he wanted it to, because just a few years later, in nineteen seventy eight, he is murdered
or assassinated in a pro Soviet coup. There's a new governing faction, the new kids on the block in this situation, and the People's Democratic Party they come to power, but they have a lot of infighting in their own, jockeying for position in the hierarchy. And then of course they are eternally battling the Mujadin groups that are backed by Uncle Sam. That was at one time seen as controversial. That is clearly a proven fact. And let's pause for word from our sponsor, and then we'll get to the
modern history. So the Soviet era, Paul, can we get some kind of you know, like really authoritarian sounding big but yeah, that kind of music. There we go. Soviet era.
Yes, So the USSR, it's in Afghanistan in nineteen seventy nine, and it really is trying to shore up this newly established regime. Right that we talked about, the People's Democratic Party that's running things over there, and those guys are by the way in the capital Kabul, and in short order, nearly one hundred thousand Soviet soldiers took control of a lot of the major areas, the cities, the highways, the ways,
things are being transported by all means. And here's the thing people didn't really take to that there was rebellion. It came quickly. It was all over the place. The Soviets were dealing harshly with the Mujahadeen rebels and the people, you know, the families, the small groups that were supporting them. They were just taking out entire villages. Again, it like sounds so familiar with the course of our history, with
the things we've talked about. They're trying to deny any place where or that would be considered a safe haven for enemy soldiers to be hanging out and you know, regrouping. And while this is happening, there are outside foreign supporters who were propping up all of these diverse groups of rebels that are fighting back against the Soviet Union.
Playing the great game once again.
Exactly that that whole the proxy the proxy battle thing is in full effect here. And you know, you've got rebels pouring from Iran, Pakistan, China. The US even has some people over their training folks and having fighters over there.
And there's this brutal nine year conflict that just goes on and on and on, and an estimated one million civilians are killed in this conflict Afghanistan civilians as well as others, and there are also ninety thousand Mujahideen fighters, eighteen thousand Afghan troops, and fourteen five hundred Soviet soldiers, all of them who are killed in this battle, these battles in this conflict.
And the US support varied in many different ways over the course of this conflict. This we do have to remember this is Cold War era, right. So, so originally they had some suits and some agents from the company.
The company right right right, and it starts with a C. It does, this company, it does.
And by nineteen eighty six they were becoming more they were being less subtle, Uncle Sam was. They started supplying Stinger missiles to the mosh Din, which were a game changer because these Stinger missiles allowed people on the ground to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. In nineteen eighty eight, four countries, Afghanistan, the USSR, Pakistan, the US signed peace accords, and the Soviet Union says, okay, we'll start pulling out troops.
The last of the troops leave the next year in nineteen eighty nine, and civil war consumes the country, which should not have surprised anyone.
Let's talk really quickly about some of the landscape there and the mountains, the mountain ranges, the mountains areas, the very hilly, sometimes very stark areas where if you know, as the Mujahadeen, if you're given something like a stinger missile, when you're just troops on the ground, it's very difficult to battle against something like these Soviet gunships, the helicopters
that can roll through. They can just travel across these landscapes to wherever they need to be in They're heavily armed. But you know, if you're on the ground as just a single person or even a battalion, small battalion anywhere from one hundred to ten people, fighting back against a gunship is very, very difficult. But if you're given a stinger missile and you can hide out somewhere within you know that terrain, you can easily have an upper hand there.
And again these are ripples throughout time of things that we are going to see. We're an explosive in the hands of somebody that understands the area, that has lived there. You only need a few people to gain the upper hand on large military forces.
It's one of those things where you see it. I mean, it's even in like SNL sketches from the time, and going back and watching a lot of Will Ferrell sketches from those days, and there's the one where he's the old prospector.
You know, oh yeah, you've seeing this.
It's great, but it's well, Chris Catan is playing the sergen or whatever, and he keeps making the joke that it's an unconventionable, unconventional war, so he got to use unconventional methods, which in this sketch is having an old prospector to lead them through the terrain. But it's true, that's what they're talking about. That's the thing you heard thrown around constantly in the news was what an inconventional war was and required unconventional tactics.
Yeah, and in this case, an old prospector, I forget the premise with an old prospector who is like a cousin of somebody who was in command of the military isn't going to do you much good. You need somebody who has lived there and knows the history and the terrain. Yeah.
And also, for the record, the old Will Ferrell sketches in general, hold up, oh yes, my god, not saying that because he's technically a coworker of ours, just saying it because they do hold.
Up shoes, sentiment, and gravy.
So who comes out ahead in this next iteration of the power vacuum that would be a group known as the Taliban. They seize control of Kabul. By nineteen ninety seven, they have they have a solid grip on about two thirds of the country, and they're starting to be recognized in the international sphere. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for instance, both recognize the government. Until that is the US enters the Great Game as a full on combatant. And it's
different because before proxy wars, right, let's call these people rebels. Yeah, yeah, And so fast forward, as we said at the top, in October of two thousand and one, US led bombing of Afghanistan begins. And this is right after the attacks on September eleventh, two thousand and one on the US soil anti Taliban Northern Alliance Forces Intricrable, pretty much right after and this marks the official beginning of what has
become the longest war in US history. Across the next eighteen years, multiple presidents, three different administrations from both sides of the US political divide would continually escalate the conflict. They would send more troops. They would propose what they called surgis. They would vow we were making progress in a war that we knew we could win. Today's question, what if they were lying? Here's where it gets crazy. So behind the scenes, yeah, everyone knew, All of the
decision makers knew this was a disaster. And Matt, you recently had a conversation that touched on some of this.
Is that right? Yes, quite a bit. And I spoke with the gentleman named Steve Hooper that I very much want to have on the show. We want to have on this show. I forget his exact titles within the FBI, but he was a high level person. I hope he doesn't mind me saying his name. He has a podcast on the iHeart network that he talks about some of
this stuff, so I think it should be okay. But he was just talking to me about how the United States was keeping was aware, very much aware of one Osama bin Laden and Taliban forces, you know, after all of the conflicts and help that we've essentially given to that area, and we know our intelligence agencies know a lot of the operators, We know a lot of the mechanisms that exist out there with some of these forces, and they also knew just from past bombings like the
nineteen ninety three attack on the World Trade Center where a writer truck was used and thankfully did not destroy the entire building then in nineteen ninety three, but it was certainly a disaster and a terror attack and a major warning sign basically that oh, we need to be paying attention to this. And he was just telling me that after that attack in ninety three, the intelligence apparatuses
were so aware of it. However, we went right back to the FBI at least went right back to focusing on drug gangs and drug cartels that existed and were operating within the US, and they didn't turn their eyes towards terrorism at that point.
Because there was a lot of siloing of information and gatekeeping, right.
Yes, Because again, you think about operating outside of the US where intelligence is gathered, operating inside the US, a lot of times it separated and this whole thing, it kind of became a mess, at least according to Stephen our conversation, after you create the Department of Homeland Security and as that behemoth of organizations begins trying to keep tabs on things like that and organize. You know, who's controlling what, who's looking into what I say, a mess.
But that's not true. Anyone who's out there working in any of these organizations. You know that's not necessarily true. But it was certainly the birth pains of something bigger.
Oh that's poetic. I like that. Yeah, it's it is. It is unfortunately true that many of the same people publicly touting progress in this quagmire, we're often the very same people lamenting the doomed situation, at least doomed as they saw it behind closed doors. We know this is not a conspiracy theory. We know this is indisputably true. Thanks to the fantastic journalistic efforts and of the Washington Post and the recent publication of something called the Afghanistan Papers.
On December ninth of this year, the Washington Post finally won a legal battle that was three years in the making, and like the war in Afghanistan, continues today. But what did they get? What happens, We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
So three year legal battle, Washington Post acquires more than two thousand pages of quote lessons learned end quote. And these are interviews that were conducted by the Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or cigar Yeah, yeah, no, give me. I love a good cigar, and it's not pretty. What's uncovered here. There was no internal consensus on any objective, any reasons for going to war. The country was spending billions of dollars with no idea whatsoever, what any kind
of endgame. Looked like they literally had no idea how to get out of the war. There was no exis strategy.
Well yeah that if you guys recall back. And this was just to date myself a little bit. This was occurring right around the time that I was going to
be finishing and graduating from high school. As all of these conflicts are occurring, as the debates about this stuff is happening, and I remember for the first time, not for the first time, but maybe for the first time looking at the news with a little more understanding of history after some classes that I was taking and hearing people discuss this, They would argue on the news like, well, what what does it actually? What does this conflict actually?
What does victory mean? What does it look like? And you have even the president coming on and kind of giving you a vague you know, it's a victory. You know it's good. We're gonna victory, right right, It's like, what what does that mean?
Yeah? The thing is that there was not There were some metrics for ideas of success, but there was nothing that people agreed on with concrete steps. There was no universal definition, and without a universal definition, as Chenua Chaba would say, things fall apart. The Post got hundreds of memos that are really they're almost like they're almost like
YouTube er Reddit comments from Donald H. Rumsfeld. They were called and this has nothing to do with the current usage of the word today, Yes, but they were called snowflakes. You know, that's a more of a right wing pejorative on the internet today, But in this case, they were called snowflakes because they would just sort of be sprinkled on all these communications, brief instructions or comments that Rumsfeld would tell his employees during the course of his time
working on the war. And they are things that are so so informal, like there's one where it says, I'm not sure who the enemies are here. We don't know we're shooting at someone for sure. So all together these memos and these two thousand plus pages revealed by this
Freedom of Information Act. They function as a genuine secret history of what we know about the war, and some people taking a longer view of history would say, well, this is just another act in the ongoing war that has been occurring on the land of Afghanistan for much much longer than eighteen years. But here's what we learned
the reports. The journalist and the analyst at the Washing Post found four common and disturbing themes running throughout these papers, and they're pretty brutal to hear, but we look through them and they are well re searched, and there's not a ton of editorializing. So every single year covered by these papers, US officials, at least some of them, purposefully refused to tell the public the truth about the war.
In some way or another. They would issue these pronouncements, they would say stuff that they straight up knew wasn't true, and they would hide unmistakable evidence that for one reason or another, the war had become unwinnable, which was.
An odd concept of it being winnable or unwinnable, because it just didn't seem like there was one or the other.
Right, Chocolate rations have been increased, right, yeah, and now they're going to be eighty percent less than they were. So they also in these papers we see that officials who were interviewed, and again this was all internal documentation, and so they wanted to tell the truth. They depicted purposeful explain efforts by the US government to mislead the public.
And then they also it's you could describe it. Maybe this is a little bit too much editorial voice here, but you could describe it as a sort of collective disbelief in the facts, kind of cherry picking the stuff that would be good, ignoring the stuff that would run counter to the narrative. So everybody is like, everybody's doing a thing where they're like, all right, we're going to all agree that this is fine.
Everything's great, We're gonna win, and stuff's gonna be good afterwards.
You know what, You know what that guy who said the house is on fire, what he meant was it's warm and cozy in here.
Just look at this banner. What does it say, mission accomplished, We're done.
Look at that sweet bomber jacket. I mean, look at that shrutt and gate that the president has.
Seriously, and again, it's funny because people who consider themselves domestic political partisans in the US, like someone who would definitely hate the right side of American politics would be would levy valid imbiting criticism of the misleading pr that the Republican side was doing when they had a presidential administration, And then people who hated the left side would levy the same again valid criticism at the Democrat administrations because
they were doing the same thing. All that changed was the brand names on the facts. It was still a bucket of poison pills. They just had different labels.
Dude, you're still right though, And I remember seeing that we're going.
To have a surge, right, and a surge will thing. But that's okay. So that's just one deliberate, at the very least at the most generous, deliberately misleading the public, who is, by the way, paying billions of dollars for this.
And here's the thing we kind of mentioned up above. This is number two. By the way, the officials from you know, the United States and the Coalition of Forces, the allies that were going into Afghanistan with us, they pretty much admitted openly that the mission had really no discernible strategy, like we don't know. There doesn't seem to be a strategy. We've got a lot of people there. There are a lot of troops there and some facilities
that we're building. But yeah, we really don't have great objectives. We're not sure what we're doing.
There's stuff on the level of like, well, have you guys talked to Todd, because to Todd put it really well, Like I remember walking out of a meeting and I was like, this is for sure what we're doing, and UH just can't I can't recall one hundred percent of it right now.
He just seems so confident, you know, he's just he's such as got such a good haircut. I mean, I just love the cut of his jacket.
You can tell he man like he goes to a manicure.
Absolutely, his cuticles are impeccable, and you just you can't really disbelieve.
A guy like that.
So, as far as I was concerned, if Todd's good, we're.
Good, right, Yeah, you're right. Hopefully hopefully Todd can just keep us keep that morale up, you know.
And the interviewers like Todd, who I think, oh that's a great uh you got disappeared. There are a lot of he worked. You weren't somewhere in the building. It may have been the subway, he may have been in general. I just look you guys, You'll know him when you see him.
It's true.
At first, there was this pretty solid rationale they were going to we were aiming to destroy al Qaeda. Who was you know, we're involved in these very US terrorist acts, not just being accused of involvement in the September eleventh attacks, but also being active in attacks throughout the nineties that you had mentioned earlier, Matt.
With certain leaders with names that you might know or people that were purportedly a part of them.
Yeah, but Todd would never do that. Once once al Qaeda been you know, largely muzzled, the officials involved said they had mission creep. The goals got muddy and unclear, and they began adopting strategies that might contradict the strategies of other agencies or institutions, and they started having goals that were unattainable. And people who were running this war, folks are dying, billions of dollars going down the drain. The people in charge were saying, I have problems with
basic questions. Who is the enemy here.
I am not being.
Hyperbolic when Donald Rumsfeld said that who is the enemy here? Who amidst these various complicated groups and alliances can we count on as allies? And also, you know, I know there's a weird question to drop at four thirty on a Friday, But how do we know when we've won?
Yeah, there's no bell that goes off, or specific person you have to defeat, or a king to overthrow r you know, there's no goalpost like that. Yeah.
And it turns out that the Third Revelation, years into the conflict, the United States still had a very poor understanding of the country overall. Officials from not just the US but also from the Afghan government told interviewers that a lot of the policies and initiatives coming from Uncle Sam, everything from like training Afghan forces to trying to I'm going to say it again, trying to woosh, trying to stop the opium trade, all of them felt like they
were designed to fail. Whether that's because of incompetence, because they were based on flawed assumptions, or whether because there was some sort of ulterior motive, or whether it was just a country they did not understand.
Or you know, I don't want to put my biases on it, but a country that maybe some of those people in charge just didn't care about at a certain level.
There are disturbing accounts or allegations and interviews in some of these papers where an officials say something like we were just giving consultants tons of money, and you know, somebody would fly on a plane and they would read the Kite Runner or something while they were on the plane, and they would hop out and think that they understood everything about this place that has been a battleground for centuries and centuries and has been trod upon by one
outside empire after another, the fourth one, which clearly is a bit of a cheap scape. Myself, I've been having a hard time not mentioning this. Yet the US flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the geopolitical drain trying to nation build in Afghanistan. Nation building is a risky endeavor that can pay great dividends if you get it off the ground.
It was once called colonialism.
That's building a different kind of nation, I know, but that's I mean, yeah, so they wanted to, I don't know, they were just so out of out of touch with what was happening. So they's this, there's this great comparison. Or similarly, in the accounts of the early days here, it was an economic boom for the military industrial complex obviously for the associated energy and defense industries. It was a boom contractors, of course.
And we can just say like that was immediately affected by the September eleventh attacks and the public acceptance essentially that yeah, we should probably protect ourselves more and spend a lot more money than we were.
Sure, so we'll pay for it. You handle the details. Yeah, I want to feel good when I see the news and feel like I've done my part. So since so here's the simile. One of the sources says money is like water, and Afghanistan was like a desert, and when you pour too much water too quickly, the land cannot absorb it. Yeah, and it becomes a wash with this money. And that that struck me because it not only does it feel true, but it has the unfortunate quality of
being true. Since two thousand and two, the US has allocated more than eighty three billion dollars in security assistance to Afghanistan that dwarfs the defense budget the entire defense budget of other developing nations. In twenty eleven alone, at the peak of the war, this country got eleven billion dollars in security aid from Washington. That's three billion more than what Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons and a way bigger army, spent on its entire military that year. That's nuts.
They spent eight billion, and the US gave Afghanistan eleven billion. Now, I do want to say it may sound like we're being unfair here, we have to remember that the military operators, people working for the US government, and the contractors involved, they're not in these rooms, they're not in these board rooms, in these war rooms and so on. They're being sent to a place to risk their lives, and they are trying to save people on the grounds, you know what
I mean. They're trying to help civilians, they're trying to prevent these deaths.
Yes, But the other side of that coin is that the almost the feeling of a goalless occupation like that caused a lot of situations where, you know, a few a small amount of those contractors and military personnel felt as though or at least acted as though there was no rule of law. There were no rules. That's really good things could happen there, and I think it's because that top down guidance just didn't exist.
Well, we talked too about how you know, maybe this is hyperbolic, and I've heard people kind of poopoo this idea, but comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam in the sense that it was very difficult terrain, it was an enemy that they didn't fully understand, and it seemed to have empowered a lot of military personnel to commit some.
Atrocities, right, we also have to consider I think that is I don't think that's not based comparison. We also have to consider that a lot of the horror stories we hear came from the crimes of private contractors, so people were working in private industry that have been subcontracted out by the US government or NATO, or they come from people who were supposed to be the authorities in
like from Afghanistan. Yes, so you know there are stories which are true of military service members being brigged in danger, being dishonorably discharged because they refuse to tolerate the sexual abuse of children which they saw firsthand. Not in not in some like, not in some sketchy part of town necessarily, but like in the police chiefs compound in the police station, or having to make nice with warlords and crack a deal with them because of their influence over a you know,
a region of the area. Adjusted for inflation and for just as they say talking Turkey, for perspective, eleven billion US dollars is more than the US spent in the entirety of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War Two. Think about that, the entirety. But after almost two decades of help from Washington, or attempts at help from Washington, the Afghan army and the police force are still not probably not going to be capable of fending
off all these insurgents. It's not just the Taliban, It's is the Islamic State and others without outside assistance, without backup from the US military.
I just want to jump in there really fast before we keep going. Just to we mentioned the Marshall Plan, which was uh the the program we mentioned it was after World War two as well, but that was the program of aid right that we that we gave to most of or a lot of Europe just to rebuild after the battles were fought in that region.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, and thank you. So back to the money, which I promise I'll stop, I'll stop harping on at some point.
It's just like it's crazy.
Yeah, what could eleven billion dollars do you know what I mean?
Superpowers could be rocked there, it could be brought into life. Right.
There was so much money flowing that bribery, fraud, and corruption, they became superpowered as tendencies and trends. One advisor who was working for the US said that when he was working this particular air base, any Afghan people, meaning native Afghan people who were working there regularly reeked of jet fuel because they were just smuggling so much of it out to sell on the black market. And then we
have another point about corruption within the police force. And this this comes from an INTERVIEWEE who was comfortable being named yes.
And one interview Thomas Johnson, who was a Navy official serving as a counter insurgency advisor in Kandahar Province, said that the Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits. He called them quote the most hated institution in all of Afghanistan.
And then another interviewee, an unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated thirty percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government issued weapons so they could quote set up their own private checkpoints aka highway robbery.
Right, literally.
Just extorting people that were traveling through what they were doing.
Right, right, And the other statements these officials make don't sound pretty. But of course we you know, we have to point out again that part of this is a maybe a function of these shifting goalposts, right, But to not know who your enemies are and not know who the difference between your enemies and your allies is, that's tough, especially in a situation like this. There were other revelations.
It turns out that several senior US officials believe there was a realistic opportunity to cut a piece deal with the Taliban back in two thousand and two or two thousand and three. Again, we're not saying it's definite, we're saying that's what they felt was in the cards. Also, when this stuff came out, you know who else was surprised? Congress And with Congress, it's tough, like how many is it? Performative?
Right? I have to be upset at the for my constituents, so they know that I was definitely upset at this.
Right, And there's bipartisan there's bipartisan anger at this. At least if we look at Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Howley, they're both on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they've already called for hearings based on these reports. Even former Afghan President Hamen Karzai gave an interview to the AP Associated Press recently and he said the Afghanistan papers proved
the US was at fault for his country's corruption. However, Praig Whitlock, one of the journalists who brought the story to light from the Post, said the US was at fault, but the Afghan government did not prosecute many people for corruption or fraud, that's for sure.
Geez.
And this is where this is where this leaves us. I know it's a high level look, but there's so many other things to report.
Well, there'll be new revelations surely, right, I mean there's a lot of documents here.
I'm glad you brought that up, because, yeah, as we record today the Washington Post, we said it was an ongoing war for them, right, they're still in court fighting for more documents, and they're pressing Cigar to identify everyone they interviewed for the Afghanist on papers, which they haven't yet. Currently, the Trump administration is holding direct peace talks with the Taliban.
A lot of the experts that The Post spoke with said that they believe the only way to end this war is to cut a deal that militarily, it is impossible to entirely defeat the Taliban unless it's something like sewing the Earth with salt aka nukes, which no one wants.
Scorched to earth policy, right, Yeah, please don't do that. Anyone who's listening who has one of those things?
Yeah, and and this has given these out of civilians now, yeah, costco, baby, it's the only things you have to buy three to get the deal, got it?
Yeah? Don't you remember in twenty twenty three that whole declaration happened and we all got nukes. That it was the Mutually Assured Destruction Agreement of twenty twenty three.
I'd rather have a giant psychic squid.
Those are coming too. Have you heard the news, the good news? Yeah, there's this guy, he's working on a giant the intergalactic squid. Thing. I don't know. I don't know the details. I have no comment. Well are you the guy I know?
Look, let's go to a different abb yours. This is another thing about this story that is still continuing, and this I don't know, This is just my I want to be too conspiratorial. I do want to note it is a fact currently Afghanistan still dominates global opium markets. Last year, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes, so twenty eighteen, right, eighty two percent of the world's opium supply was produced in Afghanistan. Some of the biggest
problems in the US, they're drug related, come from opium. Yeah, they're not growing a ton of it here, are they. No, Like you know, the different the different pharmaceutical companies that are probably gonna avoid too many serious consequences of creating the opium crisis.
Nobody's saying conspiracy here, people, We're just we're just going, hey, look at this. I'm just saying we talked about this in a previous episode. Just how much security was devoted to what looks like from the reporting and the images that were sent back over the course of years up until very recently, that we are protecting the poppy fields, I guess from allowing anyone to.
Use them, right and well, it's also tough because you can see interviews with farmers in the area who say, you know, I'm a subsistence farmer. Yeah, Like there were different plans to institute new crops for cash, but obiam makes the most money to sell and the markup is huge. The worst part is those farmers are not making what you know, nobody's going to be buying a mansion doing that.
Well, it's the same way with cocaine in Colombia and stuff, right, I mean, largely the cartels put the burden of cultivating it and growing it on these families who look at it as you know, some sort of subsistence living, but they're not sharing in the profits of the criminal enterprise.
Again, elephants war and grass. Right, when elephants make war, the grass suffers. It's there's a lot of stuff that we missed and we've got to emphasize. Just on the ending note, we have to emphasize the human element, you know what I mean. People who are soldiers are not bad. People who are civilians in a country that is being subjected to a conflict are not bad. Either this is these are all human beings who are trying to survive.
And the horrific thing is that a lot of decisions upon which lives hinged are made by people who will never physically travel to the places where they see their consequences of their decisions made real. And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
That's right, let us know what you think.
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