Hello, this is Charles Malik with the UK Column interview. And today I'm joined by Doctor Lucy Morgan Edwards, who has intimate knowledge of the system from the inside, having worked for both the United Nations and the European Union in Afghanistan, possibly the most significant case study of Western intervention in the 21st century. Lucy, thank you very much indeed for joining me. And a warm welcome to UK Column. Thank you for having me, Charles. Not at all.
Now there is, by way of that introduction, obviously going to be an awful lot to get through. But I think we'll, we'll start with the background, I suppose to a degree in the sort of personal sphere. What, what drew you to Afghanistan or that region? Because I think you're in Pakistan initially. What? What drew you to that part of the world in the first instance?
I went out to to Pakistan to visit a family friend in 1999 who was working for the United Nations, and her housemate at the time was a Canadian woman who had had to evacuate from Afghanistan while Clinton was doing the bombings of eastern Afghanistan. Of course. And just that my discussions and conversations with this woman really drew me in. She obviously loved the place and was working as a as an engineer doing urban
reconstruction there. And in fact, a year later she came to London and invited me to go and work with her. This was a year before 911 and we I had a very old contract situation because at that stage British and Americans were supposed to be under a fatwa. So I was subcontracted through an NGO actually to work for UN Habitat and was taken by her and sort of dropped off in Kandahar and pretty much left and had to
find my own way. And in fact, ended up staying with a couple of chaps who worked for an NGO, Handicap International. But I was working in our office. So it really gave me an amazing insight into Afghanistan at a time where there are only about 60 foreigners in the whole country. The country had pretty much been
been forgotten. It was in the midst of a four year drought and you would see Pakistani, ISI and Al Qaeda representatives flying in or people coming in from Saudi Arabia to do Hawking and and so on. And at the time bin Laden was living in in Kandahar, so his staff would come around to our compound. So it was an amazing insight and I think at a time that was very special because it was before the war began.
And it enabled me to really see Afghans in the light of, for example, how they later reacted to 911 and how they were forced to deal with this massive intervention that that took place and lasted for for 20 years after that. It is an extraordinary perspective, as you say, and this might be hard to answer objectively, but from from your perspective or any of those around you, did anybody have any
inkling of what was to come? No, I mean I was there in the summer, the year 2000 and then to the autumn and then had to leave and went to Pakistan. In fact, I evacuated myself at the time of the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden. And because people were trying to link that to al Qaeda, they were linking it to al Qaeda in the media.
Now, in fact, perhaps people are starting to say that it was potentially a false flag to lead people into this idea that bin Laden would then be behind the attacks of 911. But no, I had no inkling of what was to come. And then when when 911 did happen, at the time I was actually in England, and I wrote to some of my former colleagues. And because it's very hard to communicate with people at that stage, there were no mobile phones.
There was a sort of, you could go to a telephone booth in the town and, and phone home, but then you'd be exposed to all these Arab Afghans who weren't really Afghans. And of course, the Arab, the Afghans didn't even really want them there. Well, not most of them didn't really want them there. So communications were very difficult. But my staff who were very, they
were very sweet. I mean, they were, they supported the Taliban. They were Pashtun and potentially because of that, I was quite surprised. I thought being educated, of course they're not going to support the Taliban, but they did because they saw the Taliban as a stabilising force that had cleared out the warlordism of the early 90s. And actually they were quite happy when the Taliban took Talib Khan in the North East of the country, which was a Northern Alliance territory.
And we're really hoping, hoping that they were going to then take the whole country, which they had almost had by by the time of 911. OK, Well, that that sort of takes us forward to, to one of the things obviously that I did want to talk about, which is that, you know, this issue endlessly debated about the influence of the Taliban and indeed, you know, whether they were in a position of controlling Afghanistan or whether they were being
controlled and, and all of that. And also how that relates to, like you say, the events of September the 11th, 2001 to, you know, very nearly 25 years ago. And, and I think if I'm right, you know, regardless of what one thinks was actually behind those events, the view held by most people that you came across in Afghanistan was one of complete ignorance. They had no idea that that either had even happened or was related to what was going on in their country.
Absolutely yes. They they expressed massive surprise that that that this could have come from Afghanistan. And for the first few days, we're pretty much ignorant of it actually. I mean, they weren't completely cut off. They were starting to break Taliban edicts and bringing in DVDs from Pakistan and and so on. But we didn't have the Internet access and e-mail to the same
extent that we do nowadays. I mean, you pretty much if you're going to write an e-mail home, you had to put it on a disk and then take it to the UN office and have it sent from, from the UN satellite system there. So, you know, there was really a feeling much more of isolation and after 911 when as I say, when I was in touch with colleagues who I considered to have been well educated people, many of them had been educated actually under the Soviets as
engineers. So they were, I was mostly working with engineers, they were water engineers and so on. Considered that this was something completely alien to them. And in fact, as we know, although bin Laden was there, he was actually pretty sick at the time. And I read in the Pakistani press in late 2001 that he had been treated for with dialysis and had in fact died. I think that was in, it was either Friday Times or Dawn, one of the main Pakistani papers.
And I can't remember whether it was Rob Pindy where he died or I think it was in Pakistan where they said he died. So, yeah, a lot of the, when you look back, a lot of what we were told just didn't add up. And it's only, I mean, I, I came to a new realization about the events of 911 when I moved to New York. And that was in 2014. And it wasn't something that I'd given a great deal of thought to, although I considered that it was a rather a bizarre story.
But I was very focused immediately on Afghanistan and all the people I'd met and my colleagues who I was very concerned for as the American bombing campaign started. Yeah. Well, there you go. That, I mean, I think what you've just touched on there is, is so significant because, you know, we've mentioned the Taliban, we've mentioned bin Laden.
And of course, you know, he was the poster boy for so much that people were almost distracted beyond their control by any other information, any other sort of credible story, particularly about about September the 11th, but also about Afghanistan. And and yet somehow all of this was supposed to make some sort of sense and to make the case for what became, you know, decades of horrific turmoil.
I, I think just just to go back to your own personal circumstances and situation, here we are in the UK, or at least I am. Many of the audience will be in the UK now in a year where we are being convinced, or at least there is an attempt to convince us that migration is the greatest of all our problems. That in particular it is people who come from South Asia or in many cases specifically Afghanistan, people are who are holding the Islamic faith and
all that kind of thing. And that there's a huge amount of sort of contrived narrative baggage that goes with that. Having spent that time in Afghanistan, in a society that has been so demonized, let's say in the Western media, what what were your experiences living as a as a lady at that time at
doing what you were doing? Well, at the time, I mean, at the time that I was invited to go and work in Afghanistan, I was actually working in Belgrave Square for the Country Land Owners Association and asked my boss whether I could have a sabbatical. And he just looked at me in astonishment and said, why do you want to go to a country
where they're so awful to women? And, and of course it was different for me once I was there because I was treated a little bit as a third sex, particularly when I started working as a freelance journalist. But at the beginning, when I first arrived in Kandahar, the overwhelming thing was the, the sense of hospitality and the sense of humour that the people had, that the people that I
worked with had had. I mean, of course I didn't meet their wives, but they used to talk about their wives as the sort of commander of the household. I did meet women in Kandahar and then later in her at because I was doing, I was organising sort of basic training in in public health for them with the World Health Organization.
And also working on what later became known as community forum projects, where Habitat was trying to establish a sort of community system whereby after the the war and the civil war that had had lasted for 23 years, you could start to rebuild some sort of structures and then program the aid through those consensus driven models. And so yes, my, my feeling was that I was the first thing that struck me when I walked into our office in Kandahar was that they had all these Victorian English
proverbs hanging on the wall. And it just seemed so sweet and innocent actually. And that, yeah, the people were incredibly welcoming and protective of me and kind.
So, you know, that's why after 911, my immediate reaction was distress that they were being targeted with blame or that the the Afghans in general were being targeted with blame for having held bin Laden. And of course, in relation to what's going on now, you just see the same churning over of the media, the repetition, the the drumming into people's brains that this is a, a regime that that has to be demonized.
And of course, funny enough, I mean, when I went there, part of the reason my boss said to me, Oh, well, why do you want to go to a place where they're treating women so badly was because Christian Amanpour of CNN and Emma Benino, who was a European commissioner, very liberal European commissioner, had been there a few months before and had made a small segment of news about how awful the Taliban were and how badly they were treated and how they were detained in jail in
Kandahar. Well, in the years to come, I found out from another friend who'd been working for the Afghan Wireless Telephone Company and then other people who work for the Red Cross, who were some of the few foreigners that were there, that actually Christian Amanpour and Emma Benigno had gone to the local hospital and into the women's section and had been asked to stop filming and had consistently refused and carried on filming. And it was actually the female chief of the ward who'd asked
them. So it was the female chief who denounced them to the Taliban. And they then they were taken briefly to some police station and detained very, very briefly. But they made a huge stink out of it in the media. And Emma Benigno, one, was one of the chief cheerleaders. I'm not defending the Taliban's treatment of women, Of course. It's a very conservative society. But it's equally conservative in Pakistan and also potentially in Saudi Arabia, where they also have Sharia law.
That means that people might have their hand cut off if if they're convicted of stealing. So why is it that we focus just on Afghanistan? I mean, my feeling is definitely that the relentless propaganda that you would see round the clock of footage of a woman being executed in the stadium,
et cetera, et cetera. It was very much aimed at convincing the domestic population in Britain that that, you know, that we was coming in there to save women and, and to about human rights and democracy and so on. And it was massively effective, but completely wrong. And what I subsequently saw during my six years staying in in the country where I was involved with election monitoring and journalism and worked for NGOs like the International Crisis Group, where I looked at justice
issues. So I was very interested in justice because you can't have democracy unless you've had, you have somehow had a process of transitional justice where you sideline and indict people who have been involved in earlier phases of the conflict and so that they don't then become the government. But the West didn't do any sort of process, real process of justice.
They didn't want to focus on justice issues because they wanted to partner up with warlords, many of whom had been in exile during the Taliban regime and who were facilitated by the West to come back and brought back from places like Paris and, and Turkey and and London and basically given cash and weapons and enabled to go back to their fiefdoms where they then became the partners of the West in in this whole
process of governance. Yeah. I mean, you know, the situation is in so many ways, it appears to be so complicated because there are so many different moving parts and apparent influences. But but in some sense, it's also very simple. And, and we see, we see this MO being carried out in in so many different places, At least when you do peel back the layers and you understand what is going on. And I think, you know, something you've certainly said is, is to follow the money.
And you've just talked about the, the warlords. I mean, in terms of how that money did travel, where, where was it coming from and how was it moving? How was the money influencing the situation? Well, I think Julian Assange encapsulated it most accurately when he said that the War on Terror, and particularly the war in Afghanistan, was about washing money out of the Western taxpayer base into Afghanistan, through Afghanistan.
And then of course, the money was coming out in the drugs trade, where it could then be redirected to a small elite. Now, whether that elite was related to military or intelligence agencies, freelance intelligence agencies in order that it could be redirected into black operations in other theatres of conflict, for example, on the underbelly of the former USSR, now Russia in the Caucasus and so on.
Where of course you've, you've seen the support for Islamic fundamentalism, whether it was just about enriching the, the Western banking system and, and keeping it liquid. Because of course I, you know, what I've learnt since I've become much more interested in economics and finance is that, you know, so much of what we see geopolitically has to be directly related to what's going on in the financial system.
And if you don't understand what's going on in the financial system, I think it's quite hard to understand what's going on with these major events, whether it's COVID or whether it's wars or so on and so forth. Absolutely. And I think that that takes us in some ways neatly to the excellent book that you wrote about your experiences. So I'm just going to hold up now the Afghan solution.
And indeed, you posit that there was a viable solution that was put forward by Abdul Haq and this was in effect, in short, dismissed. Now I mean that Abdul Haq is perhaps a name that that many won't know. Just give a bit of background because I think again, although we are talking specifically about 1 country and one person, this actually does speak to the model for intervening and and how you know, hope is effectively crushed at the earliest possible stage so regularly.
And of course, the the result is exactly like you've just been describing with the, the, the passage of of money. But just just give a bit of background on on his sort of Life and Times. Well, Commander Abdul Haq was a well known commander during the 1980s jihad against the Soviets. And he came from a family that were known as resistance
royalty. They were dubbed resistance royalty by many of the Western journalists who were travelling in Afghanistan and who had to go into Afghanistan with with members of the resistance. His family came from southeastern Afghanistan, from a place called Jalalabad. And in fact, I met the family. I was taken to that family a year after the events of Tora Bora by a journalist who'd been in Tora Bora. And she had, you know, that I'd said I was interested in covering the drug story.
So she said, well, I'm going to Jalalabad. Why didn't you come with me? So that was How I Met the
family. Abdul Haq had been killed a year before in October 2001. But the significance of him and and what I found was that he as someone who had he was a a leading Pashtun, but he had been working to bring back the former king as an umbrella beneath which the various tribes and even senior Taliban had agreed to collapse the Taliban regime and to work together in forging a new Afghanistan, a new solution for Afghanistan. And this would have been an
internal solution. So had having much more legitimacy and, and bearing a lot more relevance to local, local structures, whether they were tribal from the South, which is of course the area where the Taliban are from, but also involving the Northern Alliance, which Kamal that Masood was the head of. So really my investigation was into why it was that the West ignored this plan.
And I, I found documents and letters that he'd written to various Western leaders and ambassadors in the early 90s where he was warning about the fundamentalism being fostered in the training camps along the border of Pakistan. And he was just ignored it at every turn. And in fact, I ended up meeting a group of British.
One was a, a former cameraman and another was a British baronet and another was the former head of the Special Boat Service who had been trying to get support for him within the British establishment and failing. So I've got, they've given me their various sit reps which are
in the back of the book. And oh, there was also an American wing trying to find support for him in Washington, DC and the two brothers called the Richies, Joe and James Ritchie, who had been brought up in Afghanistan in in the 1950s sixties, and who'd made a lot of money on the Chicago Options Exchange. And so really it's, it's the story of what they were trying to do and what Abdul Haq was trying to do and why he felt that the bombing campaign would
just completely destroy this, this plan that he had made with Masood. Obviously Masood was killed 2 days before 9/11 with we are led to believe that it was al Qaeda that killed him. I, I now have my doubts about
that. But you know, just extremely interesting how he basically said that he had people ready in position throughout the southern arc of the, of the, the southern cities of Afghanistan, sort of Gardez, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni and so on. And that they would be ready to turn over their core commands to the new regime.
But it it required the West not to bomb because if, if bombing took place, all these moderate Taliban, because the Taliban being a stratified entity, the moderates would leave and go back to their families, leaving the more extremists in charge, the more extreme al Qaeda related elements, the Taliban, some of whom were of course foreigners. And of course, that's really what happened. And the West ignored him. The West wanted to work with its
with its partners. People had thought that it could control these warlords. I mean, there seems to be an absolute obsession about working with strong men. And of course you see that with Jelani and Syria. I remember going to give evidence to, I think it was a House of Lords or House of Commons Select Committee on Defence. And all the MP could think to ask, I think it was Caroline Moon. All she wanted to know was who's the next strongman that we can support? And I just said it's not about
that. But she's was not interested to listen. They don't understand. It's about legitimacy, it's about history, it's about trust. It's about building relationships, which takes time. And you know, I'm afraid the West just wants to impose its cookie cutter solutions everywhere it goes. It, it doesn't have the time or the interest or the patience to try to understand the people that it's dealing with. You know, most of our people in the Foreign Office we now
understand. And also the military don't speak Pashtun or, or I mean, some of them speak Dari, but they, you know, they're just, there's just a sort of, they want to do a quick in and a quick out. And of course it's not a quick thing. And we ended up being there for 20 years and, you know, spending a huge amount, trillions of dollars worth of, of money that went into it. And of course, complete
disaster. I mean, I, I was speaking to someone who's just come back from Afghanistan 2 days ago and he said it's just so depressing and there's no hope for anybody. You've got the Chinese in the North East who are extracting gold. You've got Khalilzad, who was the American Afghan envoy who who concocted so much of this disastrous plan, still overseeing Afghanistan, apparently flying in every few months.
And the rumors are that the Americans are sending in plane loads of dollars every week or so, so that the feeling is that the and the Americans are actually still in control. They're they're flying drones around Kabul. They control the airspace, according to this person, and the Taliban are enriched and happy and very confident and very arrogant and completely unwilling to take a sort of more moderate and sensible approach to the population. The population are just collateral.
They they don't appear to care about them. They don't need to have any legitimacy with them in terms of providing services, education, et cetera, that there's just no hope for the people there. And this was all predicated and predicted by Abdul Haq, who understood that there was a window of opportunity that needed to be exploited and that if that window of opportunity was lost, there wouldn't be
another opportunity. It wouldn't be easy to row back the political situation once it had unravelled. And you know, I found it very hard trying to explain this to people, you know, people in London and military people, you know, a lot of them, you know, they have, they might have good intent, but they just feel that if you just dig a few wells and you pay off a few elders that you can achieve marvellous
results. That that's just a fundamental misreading the complexity of a, of a complicated tribal society, I'm afraid. And, you know, I feel that we've lost so much since the colonial times when we used to have people like my grandfather, who was with Glove Pasture in Jordan building up the Arab Legion, that people really, you know,
they spoke the local languages. They were respected by the soldiers and the people that they worked with because they they really took the time to to try to understand the local culture. And I think we've completely lost that these days. And particularly in in the era of drone war where everyone thinks that it's just a quick fix to to, to get what we want out of a situation, which
appears to be a monetary. Well, it appears that what we wanted of out of Afghanistan wasn't just about sort of geopolitical in terms of occupying a slice of Central Asia. That was very strategic, but it, it also seems to have been related to the drugs trade and potentially smuggling of people, artifacts, children, you know, women, etcetera, into the Middle East and, and other places. So I'm afraid it's it's, it was predictable, but it's extremely depressing. That it certainly is.
And I think that there's so many more conversational points to to come out from that. I mean, you've just talked about colonialism, which has of course been turned into a hand grenade of of some magnitude these days in terms of discussion or debate. But exactly, you know, the point you make about having subject matter experts and people who actually knew the people for good or for I'll, you know, let's put the outcomes to one side.
And I think, you know, how better to articulate that than the the memoirs of Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff in Downing St. through this period. And he wrote some years later after the events of September the 11th, 2001 were were pointing towards Afghanistan or at least an Afghan incursion. Did he call the Foreign Office? Did he call the Secret Intelligence Service? You know, did he call anybody who might have had some sort of background on the area? No he didn't.
He went to Waterstones on Piccadilly and bought Ahmed Rashid book on the Taliban that that was his first action and and not only that it it absolutely beggars belief. He then told Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell that it was a really good book and he said Tony could borrow it once he'd finished it. I mean, you know, that that was the the sort of the, the state of affairs. So, so you know, what you say, I think absolutely speaks to that.
And, and I think also for so many people who are conditioned into thinking, well, say what, you know, why, why does this matter? It's got nothing to do with us. Well, I would say, of course, the, you know, taking Assange's point, the rinsing of the money, like you say, it's taxpayers money, It's our money that this is our money that is paying for
this. And, and of course the, the very obvious effect, whether or not one believes that migration is either organic or indeed a problem, the fact of it is that a huge amount is driven either directly or indirectly by exactly what it is you're describing. And, and how better to, to explain that than the, the, the absolute disaster with the so-called sort of data issue and the inflow of, of Afghans into this country. So I mean, I think there are so many things that point back.
I I slightly disagree about the migration. I definitely think the migration is being weaponized. I mean, Afghans weren't allowed to come into the country before 9/11. It was much more controlled. They still had just as much need as they do now. The UN had no budget really to pay any for anything in relation
to the drought at that stage. And people were literally starving and having to sell all their final possessions and were living in refugee camps in, in Iran and, and in Pakistan and were basically ignored and forgotten. I, I do think that the, the migration is definitely being
weaponized. It seems to be systematic and it it seems to be also about, you know, Britain seems to have this horrendous sort of schism now where everything is blamed on the Muslims and the Jews have become the victims. And, and I think that that is very much something that I see, for example, the Daily Telegraph that I used to write for as a freelance journalist. I'm astonished by the fact that they don't seem to have any foreign correspondence.
They have people like Hamish de Bretton Gordon and, well, Con Coughlin with them all the times who were basically pure propagandists. They're warmongering, drum beating, fervid, fervid sort of warmongers. And that seems to be a massive Zionist bent to everything in the Telegraph. It seems to be edited, as a friend commented, by Conservative Friends of Israel.
It's not the newspaper that I used to know and whether it's the comments section, which is potentially, you know, infiltrated or or the editorial that there's no nothing is graduated, nothing is moderate in the way that it used to be. And it's all sort of the Muslims that are blamed for everything. And you know, isn't the anti-Semitism horrendous in
Britain? And I just think it's completely nonsensical because you look at how Israel has infiltrated all of our political class, how they're all, I mean, you basically have to be a member of Labour or Conservative or now even Reform Friends of Israel. And you know, why? Why do we have our parliamentary representatives serving a foreign state? That's what people need to start
asking. And, you know, it seems to be that there's some evidence that a lot of the the migration which has been weaponized is actually being promoted by some Israeli or Zionist groups. So I think it's a little like, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's neither sort of, it's not one thing or the other, but I think it's definitely being weaponized against Britain to destabilize the population. No, I mean that that I evidently did not articulate it correctly.
That is exactly the point I was I was intending to make. It was exactly about the weaponization, particularly in in so far as setting up what could really be described as a civil war, but but also to lead people down the down the path of accepting digital ID and so many other things besides. But but you know, this just to go back to the beginning, was why I asked you how you felt you were treated in that society.
Because that, you know, such a number has been done on places that are over there and full of Muslims, you know, as they people therefore cannot countenance that there could be any, any way in which that could possibly work here. But a bit. But absolutely it is a
weaponized situation. Now what I wanted to come on to just just to go back because I think we should really just flesh out the the Abdul Haq point because it is stunning to to read some of the correspondents and you've referred not by name, but to Sir John Gunston who was out there. And I'm just going to read from the appendix that contains facts sent from him to Charles Guthrie, who was then chief of the defense staff. And this is sent in October 2001. And and just a couple of bits.
You talked about the the Special Forces chap, Major Seger, he was with. And Gunston writes that they have been over the last few weeks trying to bring to notice to those who have an interest in solving the Afghan business the potential of a remarkable Pushtun guerrilla commander, Haji Abdul Haq. And then they go on and have a meeting with a small sort of portfolio of people from the Foreign Commonwealth Office and the Secret Intelligence Service.
Service. And, and the result of that, Gunston summarizes, is the response was polite. They disinterested in Hack as they, FCO and SIS are looking at other Pushtoon assets. They will contact Hack if interested. And then it goes on to say that basically nothing has happened and they're not at all interested in Abdul Haq. And Gunston, keen to give the benefit of the doubt, presumably knowing which side his bread was buttered, says this reluctance is probably for good operational
reasons unknown to ourselves. So that's his sort of very benevolent line on it. But the first line of his proposed solution to Charles Guthrie is we believe that the quickest, least damaging, least controversial and most long lasting solution for achieving a terrorist free Afghanistan can be achieved from within in bold by Afghans. And yet look what happened. And again, for people to think, oh, well, you know, that was just Afghanistan.
Look at what's happened since. And I mean, I just be interested on, you know, your thoughts on on that exact that situation. You know, Guthrie running, running the Ministry of Defence and you know, had the ear of the Prime Minister, everybody else that needed to hear what what was to be said from the ground in Afghanistan and yet completely ignored. You know, we see this time and again, do we not? I think so. And I think it's because the people like Guthrie aren't making the decisions.
So that's he's just a cog in the wheel, fairly low level actually. I think the, the decision makers are much higher up and they have to do with the the banks, the capital markets and, you know, the currency. And I think we make the mistake and particularly where you see all this sort of Trump Derangement syndrome going on in our society. And I'm not a supporter of Trump, but I think that one needs to understand that there are different groups. They're almost like mafia
factions. And he potentially represents 1. And he's the sort of loss adjust of the United States as it goes bankrupt now. And he's everything that he's doing with Greenland, with Venezuela. It's all about resources and trying to extend the, the, the value of, of the dollar as, as it basically goes under consumed by the interest payments they have to pay as they roll over 30 and 10 year debt bonds and or gilts or treasury bills,
whatever you want to call them. And so, you know, Trump is beholden to financial pay masters in the same way as our own political class are and our own, our own military leaders. See, and, and I suppose it's all come since, particularly since the mass financialization of everything in, in the 1990s where we had that we no longer have the separation of retail banking and investment banking. You know, what used to be the Chinese wall, the Glass Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton removed.
So you have all this massive debt proliferation and all these huge problems. You know, it just seems that these decisions are made at a much higher level. And I think that it, you know, it had to do with money and black operations. And of course, poppy is something that feeds into that very nicely because it's easy, easy to transport. It's, it's a cash crop. It's, you know, it's very cash rich and so on.
And I'm afraid that when I look back on what the British and the Americans were doing, more and more hints throughout my book that they were very involved with the drug trade and that these these strong men that they brought back. The first thing that they did in October 2001 was to sow the next poppy, poppy crop, which was harvested in spring 2002.
And from then on, if you look at the UNODC figures, the poppy crop, it increased exponentially year after year, whereas it had been at 0 metric tons per year in the last year of the Taliban. Yeah. I mean, that is perfectly
extraordinary. And actually just on on a personal note, in terms of who cares and who makes decisions, it was absolutely pathetic to be on the cusp of deploying to Helmand with the Army in 2007 and to have a briefing from I think what was then called the stabilization unit for the Foreign Commonwealth Office, Diffield and MOD. And we had a briefing from a young lady who was clearly out of a depth but very enthusiastic.
And when asked about exactly this issue and what the economic plan for Afghanistan was, and bearing in mind this is, you know, we're six years in and not just six years in, but two years into the sort of surge from 2005, her answer rather glibly was, oh, we're working on that. And it was it was perfectly astonishing. It was just sort of stunned silence. It was a, you know, commander's briefing. And everyone just sat there looking at her thinking, what, what are you on?
And and again, the same with, you know, you've talked about sort of building wells and stuff. I remember during that same sort of rotation of, of talks being spoken to by somebody from DFID who stuck a map on the wall saying, yeah, well, you know, this is where we've had some, some of the projects going on. And it then transpired that this map was, I think, 20 or 30 years out of date. And he had absolutely no idea what else had gone on. They hadn't. They'd kept no records.
They had no idea where the money had gone or anything like that. But but what I wanted to get to in terms of decision making was just to really flesh this out. Who who does decide And also who cares? You have an anecdote about meeting David Cameron when he was of the opposition.
Tell me what happened then. Yes, well at the time I was, it was 2005 and I was working for the European Union ambassador to Afghanistan. So he was heading up this, the political part of the EU. There was also the European Commission, which was disbursing aid money and for him my responsibilities were counter narcotics security sector reform, which was centralising and building up the Afghan National Army and police and going around the, the PRTS, you
know, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and of course NATO. So I had to go to various NATO meetings in the CFC Alpha, which was the main American base in, in Kabul, where we had all these coordination meetings of, of various people. And I flew back from my R&R to London in May. I'd just been to Helmand and they were talking about the, the British coming out to Helmand, I think it was the following year. So there was quite a lot in the press about it. And Cameron was leader of the
opposition at the time. And I was invited by a friend who was very close to David Cameron to a dinner party. And it was, I think it was just about 3 couples. I mean we're about 6 people. And I was introduced as to Cameron as, as having just come back from Afghanistan. At the time, I'd been freelancing for The Economist, The Telegraph. And the Scotsman and I was now a political adviser to the EU ambassador and I was introduced to Cameron as someone who knew a lot about Afghanistan.
And he basically he didn't talk to me. He didn't ask me anything about what was going on, what was my perspective or point of view. He had no interest. And in fact, he spent the evening being very glib and giggling really with, with a couple of the other people there about how they just managed to topple some female Labour MP. I'm not sure what the context was of that, but it was I just felt incredibly childish and incredibly boys club and no
sense of curiosity. Because I think, you know, apparently David Cameron was really much more interested in polls and was given his talking points by others and, and didn't really seem to avail himself of of the facts or, or show any curiosity about soldiers that he was about to be sending out to Helmand to their death. So, you know, I was shocked by that. No, I'm, I'm not surprised.
I mean, you know that that has largely been not just his reputation, but that of those in his circle and others besides. But but to actually hear a first hand account of that is, is, is rather eye watering. Now you've just mentioned NATO and of course we've we've spoken about Russia and I think, you know, as we look at well, Ukraine in particular, but also of course Greenland and really, you know, anywhere else that's in line in the firing line this year.
We cannot ignore the relationship between NATO and Russia, but also between Afghanistan and NATO and Russia. And I mean, just give me your take on on how you see that, but in a not, not sort of going back necessarily too far, but at least going back to the sort of 70s and 80s and how that pertains to where we are now and where you see things going.
And I think the mistake many people in Britain make and I find it very astonishing when I come back to the UK, how anti Russia the the whole media is. And there seems to be a sense that we're still dealing with the Soviet Union.
There's there's no kind of awareness that actually we've moved on from the Soviet Union. And when you go back to people like even Kissinger and George Kennan, who was the Great American Cold War strategist, he was the ambassador post war in Moscow. And he's written memoirs and and Diaries. And in fact, one thing that I read in Scott Horton's very excellent book about George Kennan's attitude to NATO eastward expansion was that we
should be supporting Putin as a moderate rather than, you know, trying trying to, to, to act in the very belligerent way that that we have by continuing to expand NATO eastward. That, you know, that actually Putin has his own neocons to deal with behind him. And that there are people in his administration and, and also in the country who are angry that he hasn't been a lot more severe on the situation with Ukraine.
And they've been running a war of attrition and in terms of grinding down the Ukrainian army rather than taking territory very quickly. And so I think, I mean, actually when I, I went to Russia in June, I want, I was desperate to go to the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum.
And I went there as a freelance journalist and was just amazed by how advanced the the system is in terms of their relationship with other Eurasian countries, in terms of transit routes, resources development and so on. And it was 30 years since I'd been to Russia. I the the last time I was there was the mid 90s and I was in Saint Petersburg for two weeks at that stage. And there were shortages. There were queues for food, there were people shooting at each other on the corners and
everything was destroyed. And of course, when I went back this time, I was very surprised by how well developed it was. And, and it, it seemed just like a western, any sort of Western European town. And the same with Moscow, which
is really quite beautiful. And yet when I come back, I flew into Southampton Airport last month, in December, I was stopped at the, the, the, the border and essentially really hassled by the, the border guard and asked why I'd been to Russia. He clearly knew I'd been to Russia 'cause I'd just applied to renew my British passport. But I was flying in on my Swiss passport and I was then told I had to see the policeman behind him.
So I just thought, well, first of all, I'm not British, I'm Swiss. Now I'm flying in on my, I might be a dual national, but I'm flying in on a foreign passport and I'm, it's not illegal to go to Russia. So why are you trying to rough me up? So I, you know, I just think it's got really out of hand. I think people have become quite hysterical about the situation.
If only people would read more, stop listening to the mainstream media, try to inform themselves, listen to people who do know, As for example, Glenn Diesen and all the people that he interviews on on YouTube. A lot of former CIA and former American military who are very well versed in what's going on.
People like Larry Johnson, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and so on. He people who were Cold War specialists who talk about why this relentless eastward expansion of NATO by I think 1000 miles was of course going to provoke Russia. It was going to be unacceptable to them in terms of their the security architecture. And it was something that America would never allow to take place on its own borders. So why would they expect the Russians to? Yeah, absolutely.
But we're not allowed to think like that, are we? And, and, and that leads us into, you know, the, the influence of the media. But what I'd like to ask you about is the influence that the security and intelligence services have on the media and how that relationship works and how you've seen that work. Yeah, I mean, I I faced a huge amount of censorship with my book and ultimately had to self publish it. It then got taken over by Palgrave McMillan and Pluto Press.
But I found it very, very hard to get my story out, even though I the book was very, very well received and is available throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and it can be found on Amazon. But for example, if I appeared on the Today programme, which I I was able to get on the Today programme, I think largely because at the time they were being criticised for not having had women interviewees.
Most of the people that they interviewed at a certain time in, in, in at the time my book was published had been men. But I then found that people like Sir Sherrod Cooper Coles, who is SIS, that his book came out at the same time as mine. Funnily enough, the publisher had who had wanted to publish my book, his daughter was going to edit it. So that's why I pulled it and published it myself 'cause I didn't feel comfortable with having Sherrod Cooper Coles
daughter involved in my book. But I then found that of course Rory Stewart was the only lens through which anyone wanted to talk about Afghan affairs. And I found that this was the same with publishers, with radio programmes, everything.
Rory Stewart was everywhere. And despite the fact that I'd been living in Kandahar as a sort of blonde girl from London during the, the time of the, the height of Bin Laden, no one was interested, you know, and that I'd spent all that time there, he'd gone off to Iraq and, and done his own thing. But I was asked, did I know him and did he approve of my work sort of thing? So that was another kind of way
that one was censored. And then also, I forgot to say that with the Today programme, you would be drilled the day before they were going to have you on. And if you didn't answer the way that they wanted you to and within the tram lines that they'd set, you basically would be sort of asked not to come. So it was very, very controlled. And then, of course, for example, I had an interview with Philip Hammond where I wasn't given a right of reply.
And he was sort of saying, oh, well, she's just sitting in Geneva. I mean, this is the same Philip Hammond who is responsible, according to Ian Proud's book, for basically reducing all of communication and diplomacy with Russia when he was head of the Foreign Office. So yes, I mean, there are many ways that censorship takes place. But, you know, thankfully I was able to promote my book through Facebook at the time that was published and then through doing a lot of talks.
And ultimately, social media has been a good thing because it's it's been a sort of democratization of knowledge, whereas before all of this information only existed in silos that are controlled by intelligence agencies. Because I definitely feel that a lot of the journalists that I knew in Afghanistan were working for MI 6 and that, you know, that they're masquerading as journalists.
I mean, one of them even went off and spent years working back in the Foreign Office and and then suddenly reappeared at the Telegraph. So yeah, what we're the way that information is presented within the mainstream is very, very controlled and it's not going to help the public to understand the world. No, well, I don't think there's anyone who's in the business of making money who's in in whose interest it is that people do understand what's going on.
And, and I think, you know, really that strikes to the, to the heart of the concern for the people, which is can, can people do anything to stop this from happening over and over and over again? And, and it, you know, it, do people have agency? I mean, via democracy or via a
supposedly democratic process? Perhaps not, but but you know, I mean, for example, Chris Coverdale is somebody that I've interviewed now a couple of times for UK column talking, you know, his point being no, no taxation for for war. So, so, you know, holding government to account by by that means. Clearly back in 2003 and and whatnot, there were large demonstrations against going to
war in Iraq and whatnot. But I mean, do you see that, that there is a way to stop this, this sort of intervention war machine? I mean, I suppose that what I haven't seen those interviews that you've done with him, but I have heard of this through other channels. And I'd say yes, definitely people should ask where their council tax is going and whether it's legitimate and legal that their council tax is potentially going to fund these wars. And is that why it keeps increasing?
Is it all going to Zelensky and and his big money laundering operation in Ukraine? I think people need to start asking the questions where is our money actually going and what are we getting in return for it? And is it really the case that I mean, I, I saw a little clip of Chrystia Freeland being interviewed by being sort of door stepped in in Davos yesterday and she was asked about Ukraine and she kept saying Ukraine is, we're fighting in Ukraine for Canada's democracy.
And I just thought, I can't think of anything more ludicrous to say. It's nothing to do with Canada. You've got a massive ocean in between you Russia. There's no proof of Russia's expansionist, you know, that Russia's about to invade Canada. It's completely ludicrous. Why would people still believe all of this nonsense? And I think, I'm afraid that I, I feel that people are quite apathetic and possibly because they feel they have no agency.
But so therefore it means that things are going to have to get to the stage where people's pensions are, are maybe worth a cup of coffee once a month and they can't afford to buy anything else with them because our purchasing power is going to decline hugely. Particularly, I mean, if you look at what's going on in the gold and silver markets and the gilt market and and so on, you know, the currencies are falling
all the time. The British, the paper markets and, and silver in London, the LBMA are blowing up right now, which is why the silver price is going through the roof. I think until people really start to feel it in their pocket, they're not going to find the courage to really stand up to this and and say no more. I think that's a very good
point. I mean, of course in the UK and I think in a lot of European nations, the spectre of conscription is looming ever larger and that would be something that makes it a rather more stark reality. Now I know you don't have a crystal ball, none of none of us really does. But clearly you have a, you know, a very well-rounded and deeply researched background into the subjects that we're discussing.
The pace of change through the end of 2025, the beginning of 2026, has seemed sort of alarmingly fast. How, at least in general terms, how do you see events panning out over the course of this year? That's a big question. I mean, there's so much going on in the background and I think one has to take a step back and
not be emotionally tied. For example, I mean, everyone's getting hysterical about Trump and and Greenland and and what's going on in Davos and what's been going on with Venezuela. I think that one needs to try to inform oneself by looking at a more diverse set of analysts on, for example, YouTube and people like Alex Krayner, Tom Luongo, maybe those, I mean, some people say they're sort of apologists for this idea that Trump is really trying to rebuild America, to reassure industry to
America's shores. Whereas the sort of Davos elite, the Davos crowd, the Black Rock people are, you know, telling us that you'll learn nothing and you'll be happy.
So I think it's people need to be a little less emotional and to understand perhaps that what Trump is trying to do is to defend the interest as the United States, to consolidate the position of the United States in their hemisphere, which is about more influence in Canada, more influence in Greenland. I mean, I understand there's a separatist movement in Alberta. People are fed up with the globalists, fed up with the Davos crowd, fed up with Mark
Carney, all of this green washing, the high taxes, the the inability to run businesses, whether it's mining or, or whatever that people want to be free to, to build a future for their children and not to be taxed to the hilt for these sort of globalist initiatives. And so yes, I think, I'm afraid, I think Europe looks, looks to be a very bad future immediately. You know, the, the Americans are
looking after themselves. They're looking after the, the fact they've got all these interest payments to make on their debt, which of course Europe has as well. But we've managed to cut ourselves off from cheap energy from Russia while importing energy from the United States at three times the cost. And we have a massive welfare bill, which is growing as we have more and more immigration. And we have people who don't want to work because they're working from home. So they're completely
unproductive. And, you know, I mean, there are some benefits to working from home. But I think when it becomes a sort of a real thing where people are very defensive of their rights, but they don't, you know, they need to see the the bigger picture that actually how how effective can I really be when I'm not going into the office? I mean, you know, are, are people productive if they're all working from home and looking after their kids at the same time?
We have obviously also a massive demographic problem. I am one person who feels that that women should be allowed to bring up their children, that there is has been this horrible kind of demonization of, of women who choose to do that and they're called trad wives or something. Children need to be protected. You know, we hear all these awful stories of what happens to them in daycare with these sexual predators and so on. I mean, what's more precious
than the next generation? So I think also if women didn't have to to, you know, if we didn't need 2 salaries to keep life and body and soul together, women would be able to have more children and then we might not have the demographic problems
that we have had. So I think there's going to be a massive wake up call in Europe. But you know, all these issues like LGBT and transgender are going to be kicked into touch as, as it becomes increasingly obvious that they're, they're not fundamental to actually putting bread and, and water on
the table. And, you know, as we become progressively more impoverished, I'm afraid, given the appalling decisions that have been taken by our political class over things like Ukraine, which I I see is definitely has been a project by the neocons. And I've seen this since 2014 when Paul Craig Roberts has been talking about it in the United States, that this has been a project to support corporate interests of Black Rock and Monsanto and so on.
And I thought, for example, two or three years ago when the British hosted A pledging conference for reconstruction of Ukraine while the war had only just started and, and they were starting to sort of try to parcel out interests of to people like Black Rock and so on. And it just seemed completely absurd. What world are they living in? Did they really believe their own propaganda that that they were winning the war?
And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, some of the propaganda is very deeply evil, as we've seen with Butcher, as we've seen with the OPCW situation in Duma and Syria. And I'm afraid British intelligence has played a very evil role in a lot of these psychological operations to confuse the public about what's really going on. And ultimately the British people will pay the price for for these massive mistakes which have cost 1,000,000 billions of
pounds. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately I, I can't pick a hole in your logic, but I think, you know, this is, this is heavy, heavy material, which is not at all to say that it shouldn't be discussed. It absolutely should. And I think you gave some very sound advice earlier about encouraging people to read and to think more and to, to push beyond the boundaries within
which we are expected to exist. And so, you know, just just on a positive note as we sort of wind up, I mean, the fact is, we're here. We've got to get on with it. How? How do we How do you keep yourself sane and happy? I mean, I keep myself, I, I actually like to know what's going on. I have a great sense of curiosity. I started to distrust the mainstream media when I learnt that the story of 9/11 was nothing to do with what we had
been told. And ever since then, I've been, I've had a voracious appetite for, for reading books that aren't the, the, the ones that are reviewed in, in the, in the mainstream news. I mean, through the process of publishing my own book and the, the blockages that I faced and then learning about 911 just a few years later when I moved to the, to New York, I, I have really changed the way that I
think about the world radically. I mean, I've gone sort of 180° I and I think, you know, people need to think for themselves. And that means potentially, I mean, I can't say that I've got a massive vegetable garden, but I think really trying to be more self-sufficient and understanding that the state and the government is not going to look after you and that if you need to disinvest from the financial system and invest in gold and silver. Or buy some land.
Of course, if you've got any resources, most people don't have any resources, but just to try to inform yourself about what's going on and to, to take measures, whether it's, you know, trying to build a pantry or build a vegetable garden an, an alternative supply of fuel, you know, having a wood burner,
for example. I mean, the, the government's trying to get rid of all of this to make us dependent upon the state, dependent on, on them with this sort of E grid of electric cars and just keep independent and understand why they're doing this and reject digital ID. And, you know, try to keep as much of of your life non digital as as you can, whether it's using cash, as people like Catherine and Austin Fitz advise, and just being self-sufficient as much as you can.
Good sound advice and simple steps. That's absolutely I think the right note to to draw to a close on. But before I do let you go, just just remind viewers and listeners about your book and where you would prefer that they went to purchase it. Well, it's been a while now since it was published, so I'm afraid I'm at the moment I'm. I did have a website at one stage, but then it got knocked down. I'm afraid probably Amazon, Possibly, yeah.
I'm not in the UK at the moment so I can't just easily resupply people, but if they wanted, maybe if people desperately wanted and they can't get on on Amazon, maybe you could give them my e-mail address if they come to you. But you know, I've, I've certainly still got some copies, but I think they'll find on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
OK, super. Well, as I say, there will be notes about all of this in the below the interview on the UK column website and otherwise in terms of sort of getting in touch or following your, your thinking what about social media or, or any other activity that people can follow of yours? I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook, so I think Twitter is at L Morgan Edwards, something like that, and Facebook it's just Lucy Morgan Edwards. OK, so I can be followed.
All right, perfect. I'm not sure that something like that quite gets there these days, but I'll put the I'll put the exact link in the in the note. Lucy, It's it's been a huge amount of information to get through, not just information, but but opinion and and also evidence of your own experiences. And I think that is absolutely invaluable, beyond compare. So thank you very much indeed for joining me at UK Column and I hope we'll speak again. Thanks very much, Charles.
It's kind of you to have me.