Taliban’s Sweeping Offensive in Afghanistan Was “Inevitable”

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Spencer Ackerman on How the U.S. War on Terror Fueled and Excused Right-Wing Extremism at Home
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
AUGUST 20, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/20/ ... _on_terror

GUESTS
Spencer Ackerman: national security reporter who publishes the Forever Wars newsletter.

As Republicans raise concerns that Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops will turn Afghanistan “back to a pre-9/11 state — a breeding ground for terrorism,” Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman lays out how the U.S. war on terror after the September 2001 attacks actually fueled white, right-wing extremism. Ackerman says U.S. elites consciously chose to ignore “the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history.” His new book is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour with Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

Spencer, you begin your book, with the prologue, with Timothy McVeigh visiting the far-right paramilitary compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, before what you call, the prologue’s chapter heading, “the worst terrorist attack in American history.” Talk about the connection you see between the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and the so-called war on terror.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: I thought it was extremely important to see the war on terror in its fullness, in its totality, and only then can we understand its implications. And I think the only way to really do that is to look at who were the exceptions to the war on terror, who the war on terror didn’t target, despite fundamentally similar actions. And there we can understand not just what the war on terror is, but its relationship to American history, which shapes it so deeply.

And so, I also wanted to kind of start with a journalistic cliché, where the reporter kind of zoologically takes a reader through this unfamiliar and scary world of violence committed by fanatical people who are training with heavy weapons and talk about committing mass atrocity for a sick and supposedly divinely inspired religion. But I wanted those people to be white. I wanted the reader to see how similar these actions were, how similar some of the motivations were, how similar some of the justifications were. But we never treated them like that.

The whole purpose of the phrase “war on terror” was a kind of social compromise amongst respectable elites in order to not say the thing that they were in fact building, which was an expansive war only against some people’s kinds of terror, only against nonwhite people’s kinds of terror, only against foreigners’ kinds of terror, and not against the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history, one that seeks to draw its own heritage out of the general American national heritage, people who call themselves not dissenters, not rebels, but patriots, people who are restoring something about America that they believe a corrupt elite, that is now responsive to nonwhite power at the expense of the extant racial caste, that has been deeply woven inside not just the American political structure, but the American economy, that drives American politics — how that ultimately never gets treated.

This is exactly what Timothy McVeigh was about. This is what Timothy McVeigh had as his motivations for murdering 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, including 19 children. And we looked away from it. We looked away from how deep the rootedness of white supremacist violence was in this country. We listened to what I believe are principled civil libertarian objections against an expensive category of criminalized association. Treating people who might have believed as McVeigh did, odious as I believe that is, but ultimately not committing acts of violence — treating them as, essentially, indistinct from McVeigh was absolutely intolerable, as it always should have been, to the American political elites, but that intolerability did not extend to Muslims.

And there it was easy, after 9/11, to construct an apparatus fueled by things like the PATRIOT Act, that expanded enormous categories of criminal association, known as material support for terrorism, authorized widespread surveillance, that certainly would not be focused simply even on American Muslims, as disgusting as it was that it was focused on them primarily. But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political cast and association. And never would any of this be visited upon white people. From the start, the war on terror showed you exactly who it was going to leave out from its carceral, from its surveillance and from its violent gaze.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to Donald Trump this week, considering a 2024 challenge to President Biden, said in a statement Biden “surrendered” to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee demanded a plan from Biden to stop Afghanistan from becoming a, quote, “safe haven” for terror groups after the Taliban takeover. This is Republican Congressman Michael McCaul on CNN.

REP. MICHAEL McCAUL: We are going to go back, Jake, to a pre-9/11 state, a breeding ground for terrorism. And, you know, I hate to say this — I hope we don’t have to go back there — but it will be a threat to the homeland in a matter of time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have the Republicans now talking about a foreign terrorist threat. The Republicans, who have been denying the insurrection of January 6, calling it, you know, no worse than a group of tourists coming to Washington, D.C., and not wanting to investigate that, even though, under Bush, under Trump, the intelligence agencies have said the number one domestic terror threat is right-wing white supremacists.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: We see who the war on terror, then as now, is a mechanism for having terrorism excused, not terrorism dealt with: when that terrorism is white, when it is politically powerful. When, for reasons that they themselves probably ought better to explain, politicians sympathize with it, seek to draw strength from it, that’s a real serious red flag for American democracy. We don’t have to treat it as if it is a new red flag for American democracy. This is always how American democracy has been eroded. This is always alongside the ways in which capital has been extremely willing to ally with white supremacy. This is what the creation of Jim Crow was. This is how the maintenance of segregation in the North of the country, which we don’t often talk about as much in its different permutations — I’m a New Yorker. This city is segregated even still. You see that definitely with the way the school system is constructed.

Ultimately, we are seeing, throughout this past week, the ease with which the Republican Party, supposedly now in the Trump era feeling antipathy to the war on terror, readily snapped to war on terror politics when it comes to the demonization of refugees, the idea that America has a responsibility to take in the refugees that it itself creates, out of this psychotic, racist fear of white replacement, that demographics are ultimately driving the erosion of, you know, in its respectable settings, white political power, not just on the fringes, but at the centers of American governance.

And that is a politics of the war on terror that has been here from the start. Trump makes it vastly less subtle, to the extent that it was subtle, than it was before. And his hold on the party is not an accident. His hold here has everything to do with the way that he was able to recognize the ways in which the war on terror is an excellent sorting mechanism for figuring out who is a real American and who is a conditional American. And then, as we saw him using the tools of the war on terror on the streets of cities like Portland and Washington, D.C., and New York and in the skies over as many as 15 cities last summer, he’s willing to use it on Americans that he calls terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, you write repeatedly about Adham Hassoun. Tell us his story.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Amy, I just want to thank you so much for asking about Adham. I knew you would. You have truly been one of the journalistic heroes of this era.

And Adham Hassoun is a symbol of the ways that the war on terror criminalized people. Adham Hassoun is a Palestinian-born man who survived — he grew up in the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s and immigrated to Florida in the 1990s. And as a refugee himself and an active participant in his community in Miami, in South Florida, in the Islamic community there, he wrote a lot of checks to refugee charities, people that he had thought were helping refugees and helping war victims in places like Bosnia, where the wars became genocidal in the Balkans against Balkan Muslims.

And, ultimately, among the people that he met and tried to help was a convert named José Padilla. José Padilla would, after 9/11, become famous as someone John Ashcroft accused of trying to set off a radiological weapon inside the United States. And very shortly after that happened — Padilla was at first placed in military custody, an American citizen; that was allowed at the time — the feds came for Adham. And even though Adham had committed no violence, Adham had done nothing criminal, the feds and immigration authorities locked him up, and they leaned on him to try and inform on his community, to try and be an informant. And he refused to do that. He considered it an affront to his dignity. He considered it unjust.

And as a result, he spent a tremendous amount of time — he spent years in jails in Florida, while, ultimately, the FBI and the local prosecutor — who eventually would be the Trump Cabinet member Alex Acosta — came up with pretexts to prosecute him. He was originally charged as a co-defendant with José Padilla, who is now placed in federal custody. And even though there was no way that the government could connect him to any act of violence, thanks to the PATRIOT Act and thanks to, frankly, the atmosphere politically in the years after 9/11, that he could be charged with things that simply were not acts of violence or acts of active contribution to specific people committing specific acts of violence that the government could name, and he was convicted. And as he was sentenced, the judge reduced his sentence — the feds were seeking life for Adham — because the judge recognized that the government couldn’t point to any act that he — you know, act of violence that he was responsible for. That was in 2007. He served until 2017 in federal prison, a variety of federal prisons.

And then, in 2017, when he had finished his sentence, he had figured that he would be deported, that ultimately he would go back to probably Lebanon. He was kind of done, as you can imagine, with the United States at that point. But he didn’t. What happened instead was that he was sent into ICE detention in western New York, outside of Buffalo, at a place called Batavia. And after the PATRIOT Act became law in 2001, there was great civil libertarian fear over one of its provisions, Section 412. Section 412 said that any nondeportable noncitizen, which is to say a stateless person who doesn’t have a country that will take that person in, who is deemed a threat to national security by the authorities — ultimately, in this case, the determination is made by the secretary of homeland security — could be imprisoned indefinitely. That never happened throughout the whole war on terror, until it was time to keep Adham Hassoun locked up.

Ultimately, in early 2020, around like late February, early March, Adham gets sick, to the point where he — we don’t know for sure, but he thought that he got COVID. By April of that year, Batavia was the ICE detention facility with the highest COVID outbreak inside. So, here was a figure who the United States criminalized, robbed of his freedom, and then ultimately endangered his life by the incompetence and indifference that it showed in allowing COVID to run wild in facilities filled with people that the United States functionally treated as nonpeople.

And it took a very valiant effort by local attorneys and by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge his detention. Ultimately, instead of outright losing the case, as a judge indicated after she ruled Adham had to go free, because the FBI admitted —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Spencer.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: — that it relied on a — sorry. Adham was ultimately successful, once the government dropped its case in order to preserve its power to do this. And he lives in freedom, I’m happy to say, right now in Rwanda.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds. What has surprised you most about what is happening today?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Very little at this point, I’m sorry to say, surprises me. But the general indifference by the American political and intellectual elites to the relationship between the war on terror and the erosion of democracy is also a very deep thread and very historically rooted, not just in the war on terror, but before, and certainly seeing that those connections have to be made in order to have any form of real democracy in this country and safety and dignity for so many people.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter. His new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.

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Sarah Chayes: Afghanistan Was an “Afterthought” for U.S. as Bush Was “Hellbent” on Invading Iraq
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
AUGUST 26, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/26/ ... transcript

GUESTS
Sarah Chayes: author and reporter who worked for two commanders of the international forces in Kabul and lived in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009.
LINKS
Sarah Chayes on Twitter

As the U.S. proceeds with evacuating people from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country, we speak with author and former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes, who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, then lived in Kandahar until 2009, where she ran a soap factory, and went on to become a special adviser to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mike Mullen in Kabul. She says it was apparent shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that the country was an “afterthought” for the Bush administration, which was “hellbent” on invading Iraq. “Well into 2002, there was basically no one home at the U.S. Embassy,” says Chayes. “It wasn’t until later that I realized that by early 2002, personnel were all pivoting already to Iraq.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the desperate efforts by many Afghans to flee Taliban rule.

We’re joined now by author and former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes. She covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001. She went on to live in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from 2002 to 2009, where she ran a soap factory there. She also worked for two commanders of the international forces in Kabul. She served as special adviser for Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from 2009 to 2011, under the Obama administration. Her most recent book, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake.

Sarah Chayes, welcome to Democracy Now! Thank you for joining us from Paris. Can you respond to what’s unfolding in Afghanistan right now, what you think it’s most important for people to understand?

SARAH CHAYES: Well, the shock and shame of it, I don’t think I need to really elaborate on that. And when I hear people saying, “Oh, it was going to be messy,” I just think, “Wow! Messy, hmm,” and then to say that it matters not just what you decide, but how you do what you’ve decided to do. And that goes both for how the United States chose to engage in Afghanistan, going all the way back to two thousand and, let’s say, two, and to how the Biden administration has handled its decision for a pretty arbitrary total withdrawal at the current moment.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sarah, you mentioned the way that the U.S. initially — you know, following right after the invasion in October 2001, the way that the U.S. conducted itself there. And also, if you could elaborate on the fact that the U.S. reportedly turned down possible negotiations with the Taliban, who at the time were, of course, wholly defeated and were seeking amnesty? Why did the U.S. decline? And what do you think the effects of that were?

SARAH CHAYES: I have no personal corroboration of that information, so I really can’t discuss it, because I honestly do not know that that was in fact true, and so I really would rather not speculate.

But what I would say is that, number one, the United States never really — sorry, the United States government at the time was not at all interested in Afghanistan. It was an afterthought. The Bush administration was hellbent to invade Iraq. And it was really only because there was absolutely no intelligence connecting the 9/11 terrorist attack to Iraq that sort of forced the administration to, almost reluctantly, conduct the operation that it did in Afghanistan.

And I was on the ground, you know, starting about — I was in Kandahar maybe a day or two after the city fell, meaning the Taliban regime at the time fell. And well into 2002, there was basically no one home at the U.S. Embassy. There just was nobody there. People would rotate in on two-week deployments. No one spoke a local language. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. And it wasn’t until later that I realized that, by early 2002, personnel were all pivoting already to Iraq. So, I think that’s the first thing you have to understand.

And secondly, that, therefore, the U.S. personnel that it was — that Afghanistan matters were largely left to were members of the CIA. And they had a history in the region which really involved a very close partnership with the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. And what I came to understand is that the Taliban did not emerge spontaneously in Kandahar, as we often hear. And this is work that I did over the course of years, interviewing both ordinary people who lived in Kandahar and lived across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, as well as some of the main actors in that drama, who became friends of mine. The Taliban were concocted across the border by the Pakistani military intelligence agency and sent across the border. There was a negotiation process — and we’re talking 1994 now, 1993 and 1994 — with the local mujahideen commanders. And that process was, in fact, led by none other than Hamid Karzai. So, when I learned that in the early 2000s, I was pretty gobsmacked, because I realized that sort of the individual that the United States government had chosen to lead a post-Taliban Afghanistan was the very person who had brought the Taliban into Afghanistan in the first place and who had served as their ambassador-designate to the United Nations, as late as 1996.

And so, I would — you know, I would just raise some questions with what Obaidullah was telling you, because his family retained very close links with the Pakistani military intelligence agency throughout. And I found myself almost smiling when he said, “How do I reconcile the two me’s? And maybe that’s a way that Afghanistan can reconcile its own internal divisions.” And I want to say, “Boy, I’m sorry, but that’s called being a double agent.” And I really think that that family, in particular now — I can’t speak to him, because I don’t know him personally, but the family right now is playing precisely the role that he was playing on your air, which is to present a kind of moderate and acceptable facade in order to get the international community to reengage and open the money spigots once again.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: If you could just clarify, what do you think the alternative is? What do you think the international community should be doing?

SARAH CHAYES: Reserving judgment. And I certainly do agree that the money spigot is the only leverage that the international community has left. But I also think that the role of the Pakistani military government in all of this really needs to be taken into account. And it’s one of — I mean, I have, and have had, a number of very consistent criticisms of the way the United States has handled this from the start, the first being this absolutely inexplicable, I want to say, persistent relationship with Pakistan, when the Pakistani government, as I say, organized the Taliban in the first place, organized the Taliban resurgence, harbored Osama bin Laden, and, you know, in the midst of all this, provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. I mean, it’s just difficult to quite understand why that country continues to be considered an ally.

And then, secondly, of course, was the behavior of those Afghan leaders that we, the United States, kind of put forward toward their own citizens, and the role of U.S. officials and U.S. development organizations in reinforcing and protecting and enabling, I mean, just an unbelievably corrupt and abusive governmental system, so that, you know, my Afghan friends, who were not in university — they were ordinary villagers in and around Kandahar — they just didn’t know what to make of it. It was like, “Look, the Taliban shake us down at night, but the government shakes us down in the daytime.” And so, I would say that, in my experience, even among very conservative Kandaharis, it was not so much an ideological issue. It was not so much that the United States was an invading country, at least certainly not in the first years. My neighbors were saying, you know, that they were sick of being abused by their own government, and they were sick of the international or Western role in propping up that government, and they wanted a government that was acting in their interests. And that was where their frustration with the Western engagement came from.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Sarah, you worked for Admiral Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Obama. I watched you debate a member of the Obama administration. You’re very critical of Obama, and what should have happened at that time. Can you elaborate on this and what you think needs to happen now, as well? I mean, of course, Biden was part of the Obama administration: He was vice president.

SARAH CHAYES: That’s right. And so, I have — I’m just a little bit distressed when the Biden team makes out that their involvement with this began sort of now. These are the same people who really were involved in the decisions not to address, as I said, either of the questions that matter, which were Afghan government corruption, and our role enabling it, and the behavior of the government of Pakistan.

And I was in those interagency debates, and I was doing whatever I could to try to change the vector there, try to change the orientation. Admiral Mullen very quickly came around on the issue of corruption, and he was making that argument in the Cabinet. But he’s the guy with a uniform on, right? The problem is, he doesn’t own the agencies that could have addressed the problem. That was the State Department, which was, at the time, of course, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and in particular, on her staff, Mr. Sullivan, who is now, you know, the national security adviser.

To be fair, Vice President Biden, of the whole senior leadership of the Obama administration, was the one who really raised the issue of corruption very early. I guess I would just say, once again, that it doesn’t just matter what you do; it matters how you do it. And I fear that President Biden has kind of constantly had a sort of on/off-switch approach to Afghanistan: It’s all or nothing. And I just think that situations like this require a much more tailored engagement. You know, again, let’s just remember, there were two wars going on, and there was an economic meltdown that was about to sort of crater the world economy. One country and one presidential administration cannot handle that many complex problems. And the result makes that clear.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being on, and we’re going to ask you to come back soon. We hope you’ll agree. Sarah Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban 20 years ago as an NPR reporter, went on to run a soap factory in Kandahar for years, later became a special adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Admiral Mike Mullen. Her latest book, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake.

Next up, we go to Greece to speak with the former British Labour leader

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“An Inquiry Needs to Take Place”: Jeremy Corbyn on Afghanistan & Preventing the Next War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
AUGUST 26, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/26/ ... transcript

GUESTS
Jeremy Corbyn: British member of Parliament who served as leader of the Labour Party and leader of the opposition from 2015 to 2020.

We get reaction to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan from British member of Parliament and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, one of the leading critics of the Afghan War in Britain. He says critics who warned against invading Afghanistan, and later Iraq, have been vindicated, and calls for an official inquiry into the war. “It’s horrible to read back to 2001 and 2003 and say all the worst predictions that any of us ever made have all come to pass,” Corbyn tells Democracy Now!

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

As we continue to look at the crisis in Afghanistan, we turn now to one of the leading British critics of the U.S. war: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. In 2001, he helped form the Stop the War Coalition to campaign against the U.S. invasion. This is Corbyn in October 2001 questioning then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the British Parliament, two weeks after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

JEREMY CORBYN: Does the prime minister not recognize that the continued bombing campaign, including the use of cluster bombs, in Afghanistan is forcing large numbers of people to seek refuge in Pakistan, that it’s bringing devastation and poverty to the people of Afghanistan, and it seems to be directed, in part, against conscripted soldiers and against civilian targets? Does he not accept the call of the aid agencies last week for a halt in the bombing to allow the humanitarian aid to get in, rather than more death and more destruction?

PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR: Mr. Speaker, I just answered, a moment or two ago, about the humanitarian program, and I drew attention to comments of spokespeople for the World Food Programme that it is not the bombing that is preventing the food getting through. In respect of the campaign itself, there are no civilian targets at all. We do everything we can, unlike bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, who set out to kill as many civilians as they possibly could — we do everything we can to minimize civilian casualties.

But, as I was saying earlier today, there is a simple choice in this respect. We either decide, after an atrocity like the 11th of September, that we are going to act against those responsible, against those sheltering those who are responsible, or we don’t. And I can’t see, in the light of that atrocity, the fact that we know that that network of terror intends committing further such atrocities, how we could possibly stand back and do nothing in those circumstances. So, I respect entirely his right to disagree with the course that we are taking, but I believe that course to be right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Tony Blair responding to Jeremy Corbyn just after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Corbyn would go on to serve as Labour Party leader in Britain from 2015 to 2020, during which time he continued to be a leading antiwar voice in Parliament. He’s joining us now from Greece.

To continue the debate, Jeremy Corbyn, if you could respond to Blair, the former British prime minister, blasting Biden recently, saying the U.S.'s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is “imbecilic,” saying the move has “every jihadist group round the world celebrating”? Your response to what's happening now and what has happened over this 20 years?

JEREMY CORBYN: I was simply saying to Tony Blair, and to George Bush, “You took us into a war that made no sense whatsoever in 2001. You exacerbated the problems there. You created the poverty there. You created the poppy production.” The only people that have benefited from all of this have been the world’s arms dealers and the real estate of Middle Eastern cities, particularly Dubai and other places. The corruption, as Sarah pointed out, is rife in Afghanistan. And we are now reaping that whirlwind.

But I think we also have to look at this in the slightly longer historical context. It was the obsessions of Cold War politics of the 1970s that encouraged the U.S. to fund the mujahideen, which eventually formed into the Taliban, working with Pakistan, because they felt they had to oppose what they believed to be the Soviet continued occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was driven out by those forces. And then 9/11 happened. They decided that the whole purpose of 9/11 had come from Afghanistan, rather than that bin Laden had gone back there — and, in fact, he was found in Pakistan anyway eventually. And we’ve then been involved now in 20 years of war.

Two years after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we had the absurdity of the Iraq War, in which Bush and Blair claimed that Iraq was both harboring ISIS and was also developing weapons of mass destruction, neither of which were true. There were very few of us in the British Parliament who consistently spoke up against the human rights abuses in Iraq before 2003. I was one of those. We went into that war in 2003, and we warned that this would create the wars of tomorrow, the terrorism of tomorrow, the poverty of tomorrow and the refugees of tomorrow. It’s horrible to read back to 2001 and 2003 and say all the worst predictions that any of us ever made have all come to pass.

I was on a call last night with the U.K. defense secretary. A lot of MPs were on that call. And we were making desperate pleas on behalf of individual people from the communities that we represent. I have Afghan people living in my community. They have family back in Kabul, in Kandahar and other places, and they’re trying to get out to get to a place of safety.

We’ve just created this terrible situation. And it’s now a question of, one, making sure that those people that are most at risk are brought out safely; secondly, that the food problem, the aid problem, is dealt with very rapidly; and what kind of engagement there’s going to be with any government that’s formed in Kabul in the future, because if there isn’t some form of engagement, there isn’t some form of recognition and some huge pressure on human rights, on women’s rights and all the other issues, then I fear yet another conflict will break out in Afghanistan. It is a terrible situation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jeremy Corbyn, you’ve called on Prime Minister Johnson to start an inquiry into the Afghan War. Could you explain what you want that inquiry to include?

JEREMY CORBYN: After the Iraq War had started, many of us continually asked for an inquiry into the way the decisions were made. And eventually, after three or four attempts, there were various parliamentary inquiries and so on. Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry was set up, and he produced a huge and very lengthy report which indicated the inefficiency of decision-making, the way in which the intelligence reports had been messed about with and the inaccuracies of many of the decisions that were made. And as leader of the party, I formally apologized for Labour’s role in promoting the Iraq War.

I think we did exactly the same over Afghanistan — what decisions were made at the very beginning, why so many British troops went in, why Britain accepted the role of being the custodian of Helmand province, with the loss of hundreds of British soldiers in that particular conflict, and what has happened to the vast amounts of aid that Britain and other countries have sent to Afghanistan. I’ve met soldiers that have came back from Afghanistan. Indeed, quite a number have — or, in fact, a small number are now members of the British Parliament, and they’ve described what the situation was like there. And Clive Lewis, in particular, a Labour MP, is very concerned that we might be about to make the same kind of mistakes again in the future.

And so, I think an inquiry needs to take place, because those that have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, soldiers — British, American, German, Afghan, many, many others — all the thousands of lives that have been lost, their loved ones, their families need to know: Did that person die in vain? Was this necessary? Could this have been avoided? Otherwise, we’re just going to march into one war after another. And the only beneficiaries are those that are either after the mineral riches of Afghanistan — and they are huge, as even the Russians indicated in the 19th century — or it’s going to be the arms dealers, that do very well out of it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jeremy Corbyn, you talked about your own constituents whose family members are Afghan Brits, whose families are still in Kabul. What do you think the U.K. government can do to allow refugees safe access to the U.K., I mean, given the scenes at the Kabul airport, and also the fact that when Prime Minister Johnson was the mayor of London, he actually advocated for giving undocumented people residence in the city?

JEREMY CORBYN: Yes, Boris Johnson’s politics are a wonder to observe. I remember him contacting me, when he was mayor of London, asking me to support his campaign that undocumented refugees should be given right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in Britain. I agreed. I supported it. I supported it then, and I support it now. He then went on to become prime minister and has led a horrible campaign against refugees, and his government is now trying to push through Parliament a piece of legislation that will make it a criminal offense — a criminal offense — to assist a refugee at sea in getting to safety at shore, contrary to the international law of the sea.

Now, as to the British people in Afghanistan or the Afghan families who have a family member in Britain, or some who have British passports and are in Afghanistan, they’re obviously all entitled to come out. And the RAF has been doing its best to get people out, and quite a lot have got out. But not everybody has got out. There is chaos around the airport, as everyone can observe at the present time. And it is a desperate argument that’s going on: Who has got the greater priority, this person or that person?

Fortunately, the government has relaxed quite a lot of the rules on entry to Britain. In other words, biometric tests are no longer required. And it appears to be that if one family member has a right to enter Britain through holding of a U.K. passport, then the rest of the family can come, as well. But they’re not all going to get out through Kabul airport. There is no other, as I understand it, international airport in Afghanistan that works or people could get to, anyway. Or they’ve got to try and get across the border into Tajikistan, into Iran, into Pakistan, or wherever else. It is a humanitarian crisis.

But, interestingly, the U.S. sent the director of the CIA, it is reported, to Kabul to discuss matters with the Taliban. It seems that we’re now having, through the U.S. and, presumably, through other countries, as well, direct negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. There has been a contact point for a long time in Qatar. Surely, all this could and should have been done years ago, and all the lives that could have been saved and all the misery that has happened since then could have been reduced, if not completely avoided. Surely, there’s a huge lesson for us all here. But, obviously, the priority at this very moment is to bring safety to those most vulnerable people in Afghanistan from the excesses of what the Taliban have done in the past, and —

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Corbyn, we’re going to have to leave it —

JEREMY CORBYN: — there are reports of doing on the ground [inaudible] — I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we thank you so much for being with us, former British Labour leader, one of the leading critics of the Afghan War in Britain from the beginning. And that does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Stay safe.

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The Ides of August
by Sarah Chayes
Aug 16, 2021
Updated: Sep 2, 2021

I’ve been silent for a while. I’ve been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid.

I won’t try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened.

For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.

I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends' sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.

It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.

I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)

From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:

Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?

Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.

I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.

For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.

Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.

I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.

And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.

Is that American democracy?

Well…?

Pakistan. The involvement of that country's government -- in particular its top military brass -- in its neighbor’s affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.

You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan.

The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.

Both label and message were lies.

Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour’s drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.

Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That’s why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.

By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”

And now this.

Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethnic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?

Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.

Hamid Karzai. During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned this breathtaking fact: Hamid Karzai, the U.S. choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994.

I spent months probing the stories. I spoke to servants in the Karzai household. I spoke to a former Mujahideen commander, Mullah Naqib, who admitted to being persuaded by the label and the message Karzai was peddling. The old commander also admitted he was at his wits’ end at the misbehavior of his own men. I spoke with his chief lieutenant, who disagreed with his tribal elder and commander, and took his own men off to neighboring Helmand Province to keep fighting. I heard that Karzai’s own father broke with him over his support for this ISI project. Members of Karzai’s household and Quetta neighbors told me about Karzai’s frequent meetings with armed Taliban at his house there, in the months leading up to their seizure of power.

And lo. Karzai abruptly emerges from this vortex, at the head of a “coordinating committee” that will negotiate the Taliban’s return to power? Again?

It was like a repeat of that morning of May, 2011, when I first glimpsed the pictures of the safe-house where Usama bin Laden had been sheltered. Once again — even knowing everything I knew — I was shocked. I was shocked for about four seconds. Then everything seemed clear.

It is my belief that Karzai was a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994, this time enlisting other discredited figures from Afghanistan's past, as they were useful to him. Former co-head of the Afghan government, Abdullah Abdullah, could speak to his old battle-buddies, the Mujahideen commanders of the north and west, and their comrades within the Afghan armed forces. You may have heard some of their names as they surrendered their cities in recent days: Ismail Khan, Dostum, Atta Muhammad Noor, or Defense Minister Bismillah Khan. The other person mentioned together with Karzai is Gulbuddin Hikmatyar -- a bona fide Taliban commander, the man responsible for the sack of Kabul in 1992, who could take the lead in some conversations with them and with the ISI.

"The whole world knew that talks were going on with provincial officials and army commanders," says a former police officer and member of my cooperative, who went on to serve in district government in Kandahar province. "The only people who didn't know were officers who were totally opposed to the Taliban. And they were killed or detained. We were sold out."

As Americans have witnessed in our own context — the #MeToo movement, for example, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — surprisingly abrupt events are often months or years in the quiet making. The abrupt collapse of 20 years’ effort in Afghanistan is, in my view, one of those cases.

Thinking this hypothesis through, I find myself wondering: what role did U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad play? An old friend of Karzai's, he was the one who ran the negotiations with the Taliban for the Trump Administration, in which the Afghan government was forced to make concession after concession. Could President Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?

Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces’ steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban’s eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their “desperation” and their “inability to control territory?” How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?

Who were we deluding? Ourselves?

What else are we deluding ourselves about?

-- 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley

One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.

Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?

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Rep. Barbara Lee, Who Cast Sole Vote After 9/11 Against “Forever Wars,” on Need for Afghan War Inquiry
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
SEPTEMBER 10, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/10/ ... gainst_war

Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Lee spoke with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about her fateful vote in 2001 and how her worst fears about “forever wars” came true. “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress,” Rep. Lee says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. In the days that followed, the nation reeled from the deaths of over 3,000 people, as President George W. Bush beat the drums for war. On September 14, 2001, three days after the devastating 9/11 attacks, members of Congress held a five-hour debate on whether to grant the president expansive powers to use military force in retaliation for the attacks, which the Senate had already passed by a vote of 98 to 0.

California Democratic Congressmember Barbara Lee, her voice trembling with emotion as she spoke from the House floor, would be the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The final vote was 420 to 1.

REP. BARBARA LEE: Mr. Speaker, members, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world.

This unspeakable act on the United States has really forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my god for direction. September 11th changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter.

Now, this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, “Let’s step back for a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

Now, I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today, and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Thank you, and I yield the balance of my time.

AMY GOODMAN: “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” And with those words, Oakland Congressmember Barbara Lee rocked the House, the Capitol, this country, the world, the lone voice of more than 400 congressmembers.

At the time, Barbara Lee was one of the newest members of Congress and one of the few African American women to hold office in either the House or the Senate. Now in her 12th term, she is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress.

Yes, it’s 20 years later. And on Wednesday this week, I interviewed Congressmember Lee during a virtual event hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, which was founded by Marcus Raskin, a former aide in the Kennedy administration who became a progressive activist and author. I asked Congressmember Lee how she decided to stand alone, what went into that decision, where she was when she decided she was going to give her speech, and then how people responded to it.

REP. BARBARA LEE: Thanks so much, Amy. And really, thanks to everyone, especially IPS for hosting this very important forum today. And let me just say to those from IPS, for historical context and also just in honor of Marcus Raskin, Marcus was the last person I talked to before I gave that speech — the very last person.

I had gone to the memorial and had come back. And I was on the committee of jurisdiction, which was the Foreign Affairs Committee with this, where the authorization was coming from. And, of course, it didn’t go through the committee. It was supposed to come up on Saturday. I got back to the office, and my staff said, “You’ve got to get to the floor. The authorization is coming up. The vote is coming up within another hour or two.”

So I had to race down to the floor. And I was trying to get my thoughts together. As you can see, I was kind of not — I won’t say “not prepared,” but I didn’t have what I wanted in terms of my sort of framework and talking points. I had to just scribble something on a piece of paper. And I called Marcus. And I said, “OK.” I said — and I had talked to him for the last three days. And I talked to my former boss, Ron Dellums, who was, for those of you who don’t know, a great warrior for peace and justice from my district. I worked for him 11 years, my predecessor. So I talked with Ron, and he’s a psychiatric social worker by profession. And I talked to several constitutional lawyers. I’ve talked to my pastor, of course, my mother and family.

And it was a very difficult time, but no one that I talked to, Amy, suggested how I should vote. And it was very interesting. Even Marcus didn’t. We talked about the pros and cons, what the Constitution required, what this was about, all the considerations. And it was very helpful for me to be able to talk to these individuals, because it seems like they didn’t want to tell me to vote no, because they knew all hell was going to break loose. But they really gave me kind of, you know, the pros and cons.

Ron, for example, we kind of walked through our background in psychology and psychiatric social work. And we said, you know, the first thing you learn in Psychology 101 is that you don’t make critical, serious decisions when you’re grieving and when you’re mourning and when you’re anxious and when you’re angry. Those are moments where you have to live — you know, you have to get through that. You have to push through that. Then maybe you can begin to engage in a process that’s thoughtful. And so, Ron and I talked a lot about that.

I talked with other members of the clergy. And I don’t think I talked to him, but I mentioned him at that — because I was following a lot of his work and sermons, and he’s a friend of mine, Reverend James Forbes, who is the pastor of Riverside Church, Reverend William Sloane Coffin. And they in the past had talked about just wars, what just wars were about, what are the criteria for just wars. And so, you know, my faith was weighing in, but it was basically the constitutional requirement that members of Congress can’t give away our responsibility to any executive branch, to the president, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican president.

And so I came to the decision that — once I read the resolution, because we had one before, kicked it back, no one could support that. And when they brought back the second one, it was still too overly broad, 60 words, and all it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress. And I knew then that it was setting the stage for — and I’ve always called it — forever wars, in perpetuity.

And so, when I was at the cathedral, I heard Reverend Nathan Baxter when he said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” I wrote that on the program, and I was pretty settled then that I — going into the memorial service, I knew that I was 95% voting no. But when I heard him, that was 100%. I knew that I had to vote no.

And actually, prior to going to the memorial service, I was not going to go. I talked to Elijah Cummings. We were talking in the back of the chambers. And something just motivated me and moved me to say, “No, Elijah, I’m going,” and I ran down the steps. I think I was the last person on the bus. It was a gloomy, rainy day, and I had a can of ginger ale in my hand. I’ll never forget that. And so, that’s kind of, you know, what led up to this. But it was a very grave moment for the country.

And, of course, I was sitting in the Capitol and had to evacuate that morning with a few members of the Black Caucus and the administrator of the Small Business Administration. And we had to evacuate at 8:15, 8:30. Little did I know why, except “Get out of here.” Looked back, saw the smoke, and that was the Pentagon that had been hit. But also on that plane, on Flight 93, which was coming into the Capitol, my chief of staff, Sandré Swanson, his cousin was Wanda Green, one of the flight attendants on Flight 93. And so, during this week, of course, I’ve been thinking about everyone who lost their lives, the communities that still haven’t recovered. And those heroes and sheroes on Flight 93, who took that plane down, could have saved my life and saved the lives of those in the Capitol.

So, it was, you know, a very sad moment. We were all grieving. We were angry. We were anxious. And everyone, of course, wanted to bring terrorists to justice, including myself. I’m not a pacifist. So, no, I’m the daughter of a military officer. But I do know — my dad was in World War II and Korea, and I know what getting on a war footing means. And so, I am not one to say let’s use the military option as the first option, because I know we can deal with issues around war and peace and terrorism in alternative ways.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened after you came off the floor of the House, giving that momentous two-minute speech and going back to your office? What was the reaction?

REP. BARBARA LEE: Well, I went back into the cloakroom, and everyone ran back to get me. And I remember. Most members — only 25% of members in 2001 are currently serving now, mind you, but there’s still many serving. And they came back to me and, out of friendship, said, “You have got to change your vote.” It wasn’t anything like, “What’s wrong with you?” or “Don’t you know you have to be united?” because this was the pitch: “You have to be united with the president. We can’t politicize this. It’s got to be Republicans and Democrats.” But they didn’t come at me like that. They said, “Barbara” — one member said, “You know, you’re doing such great work on HIV and AIDS.” This was when I was in the middle of working with Bush on the global PEPFAR and the Global Fund. “You’re not going to win your reelection. We need you here.” Another member said, “Don’t you know harm is going to come your way, Barbara? We don’t want you hurt. You know, you need to go back and change that vote.”

Several members came back to say, “Are you sure? You know, you voted no. Are you sure?” And then one of my good friends — and she said this publicly — Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, she and I talked, and she said, “You’ve got to change your vote, Barbara.” She says, “Even my son” — she told me her family said, “This is a hard time for the country. And even myself, you know, we’ve got to be unified, and we’re going to vote. You need to change your vote.” And it was only out of concern for me that members came to ask me to change my vote.

Now later, my mother said — my late mother said, “They should have called me,” she said, “because I would have told them that after you deliberated in your head and talked to people, if you’ve come to a decision, that you’re pretty bullheaded and pretty stubborn. It’s going to take a lot to get you to change your mind. But you don’t make these decisions easily.” She said, “You’re always open.” My mother told me that. She said, “They should have called me. I would have told them.”

So, then I walked back to the office. And my phone started ringing. Of course, I looked up at the television, and there was the, you know, little ticker saying, “One no vote.” And I think one reporter was saying, “I wonder who that was.” And then my name showed up.

And so, well, so I started walking back to my office. Phone started blowing up. The first call was from my dad, Lieutenant — in fact, in his latter years, he wanted me to call him Colonel Tutt. He was so proud of being in the military. Again, World War II, he was in the 92nd Battalion, which was the only African American battalion in Italy, supporting the Normandy invasion, OK? And then he later went to Korea. And he was the first person who called me. And he said, “Do not change your vote. That was the right vote” — because I had not talked to him beforehand. I wasn’t sure. I said, “Nah, I ain’t gonna call dad yet. I’m going to talk to my mother.” He says, “You do not send our troops in harm’s way.” He said, “I know what wars are like. I know what it does to families.” He said, “You don’t have — you don’t know where they’re going. What are you doing? How’s the Congress going to just put them out there without any strategy, without a plan, without Congress knowing at least what the heck is going on?” So, he said, “That’s the right vote. You stick with it.” And he was really — and so I felt really happy about that. I felt really proud.

But the death threats came. You know, I can’t even tell you the details of how horrible it is. People did some awful things during that time to me. But, as Maya Angelou said, “And still I rise,” and we just keep going. And the letters and the emails and the phone calls that were very hostile and hateful and calling me a traitor and said I committed an act of treason, they’re all at Mills College, my alma mater.

But also, there were — actually, 40% of those communications — there’s 60,000 — 40% are very positive. Bishop Tutu, Coretta Scott King, I mean, people from all around the world sent some very positive messages to me.

And since then — and I’ll close by just sharing this one story, because this is after the fact, just a couple years ago. As many of you know, I supported Kamala Harris for president, so I was in South Carolina, as a surrogate, at a big rally, security everywhere. And this tall, big white guy with a little kid comes through the crowd — right? — with tears in his eyes. What in the world is this? He came up to me, and he said to me — he said, “I was one of those who sent you a threatening letter. I was one of those.” And he went down all what he said to me. I said, “I hope the cops don’t hear you saying that.” But he was one who threatened me. He said, “And I came here to apologize. And I brought my son here, because I wanted him to see me tell you how sorry I am and how right you were, and just know that this is a day for me that I’ve been waiting for.”

And so, I’ve had — over the years, many, many people have come, in different ways, to say that. And so, that’s what kept me going, in a lot of ways, knowing that — you know, because of Win Without War, because of the Friends Committee, because of IPS, because of our Veterans for Peace and all the groups that have been working around the country, organizing, mobilizing, educating the public, people really have begun to understand what this was about and what it means. And so, I just have to thank everybody for circling the wagons, because it was not easy, but because all of you were out there, people come up to me now and say nice things and support me with a lot of — really, a lot of love.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, now it is 20 years later, and President Biden has pulled the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. He’s being fiercely attacked by both Democrats and Republicans for the chaos of the last few weeks. And there’s been — Congress is calling an inquiry into what happened. But do you think that inquiry should extend to the whole 20 years of the longest war in U.S. history?

REP. BARBARA LEE: I think we need an inquiry. I don’t know if it’s the same one. But, first of all, let me say I was one of the few members who got out there early, supporting the president: “You’ve made the absolute correct decision.” And, in fact, I know that if we stayed there militarily for another five, 10, 15, 20 years, we’d be probably in a worse place, because there’s no military solution in Afghanistan, and we can’t nation build. That’s a given.

And so, while it was difficult for him, we talked a lot about this during the campaign. And I was on the drafting committee of the platform, and you can go back and kind of look at what both Bernie and the Biden advisers on the platform came up with. So, it was promises made, promises kept. And he knew that this was a hard decision. He did the right thing.

But having said that, yes, the evacuation was really rocky in the beginning, and there was no plan. I mean, I don’t guess; it didn’t appear to me to be a plan. We did not know — even, I don’t think, the Intelligence Committee. At least, it was faulty or not — or inconclusive intelligence, I assume, about the Taliban. And so, there were a lot of holes and gaps that we’re going to have to learn about.

We have an oversight responsibility to find out, first of all, what happened as it relates to the evacuation, even though it was remarkable that so many — what? — over 120,000 people were evacuated. I mean, come on, in a few weeks? I think that that is an unbelievable evacuation that took place. Still people are left there, women and girls. We’ve got to secure, make sure they’re secure, and make sure there’s a way to help with their education and get every American out, every Afghan ally out. So there’s still more work to do, which is going to require a lot of diplomatic — many diplomatic initiatives to really accomplish that.

But finally, let me just say, you know, the special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction, he’s come out with reports over and over and over again. And the last one, I just want to read a little bit about what the last one — just came out a couple weeks ago. He said, “We were not equipped to be in Afghanistan.” He said, “This was a report that will outline the lessons learned and aim to pose questions to policymakers rather than making new recommendations.” The report also found that the United States government — and this is in the report — “did not understand the Afghan context, including socially, culturally and politically.” Additionally — and this is the SIGAR, the special inspector general — he said that the “U.S. officials rarely even had a mediocre understanding of the Afghan environment,” — I’m reading this from the report — and “much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions,” and that this ignorance often came from a “willful disregard for information that may have been available.”

And he’s been — these reports have been coming out for the last 20 years. And we’ve been having hearings and forums and trying to make them public, because they are public. And so, yes, we need to go back and do a deep dive and a drill-down. But we also need to do our oversight responsibilities in terms of what just recently happened, so that it’ll never happen again, but also so that the last 20 years, when we conduct our oversight of what happened, will never happen again, either.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, in this part of the evening, especially for young people, what gave you the courage to stand alone against war?

REP. BARBARA LEE: Oh gosh. Well, I’m a person of faith. First of all, I prayed. Secondly, I’m a Black woman in America. And I’ve been through a heck of a lot in this country, like all Black women.

My mother — and I have to share this story, because it started at birth. I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. And my mother went to — she needed a C-section and went to the hospital. They wouldn’t admit her because she was Black. And it took a heck of a lot for her finally to be admitted into the hospital. A lot. And by the time she got in, it was too late for a C-section. And they just left her there. And someone saw her. She was unconscious. And then they, you know, just saw her laying on the hall. They just put her on, she said, a gurney and left her there. And so, finally, they didn’t know what to do. And so they took her into — and she told me it was an emergency room, wasn’t even the delivery room. And they ended up trying to figure out how in the world they were going to save her life, because by then she was unconscious. And so they had to pull me out of my mother’s womb using forceps, you hear me? Using forceps. So I almost didn’t get here. I almost couldn’t breathe. I almost died in childbirth. My mother almost died having me. So, you know, as a child, I mean, what can I say? If I had the courage to get here, and my mother had the courage to birth me, I guess everything else is like no problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, a member of the House Democratic leadership, the highest-ranking —

AMY GOODMAN: California Congressmember Barbara Lee, yes, now in her 12th term. She is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress. In 2001, September 14th, just three days after the 9/11 attacks, she was the sole member of Congress to vote against military authorization — the final vote, 420 to 1.

When I interviewed her Wednesday evening, she was in California campaigning in support of Governor Gavin Newsom ahead of this Tuesday’s recall election, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland. Barbara Lee represents Oakland. On Monday, Newsom will campaign with President Joe Biden. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

[admin]

Wilkerson on Afghanistan
by Ralph Nader
September 4, 2021
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/wil ... ghanistan/

RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR EP 391 TRANSCRIPT

Steve Skrovan: Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Skrovan along with my co-host, David Feldman. Hello, David.

David Feldman: Hello. Good morning.

Steve Skrovan: Welcome. And we also welcome the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph.

Ralph Nader: Hello, everybody.

Steve Skrovan: First, on today's show, we're going to return to the topic of Afghanistan. The United States spent 20 years trying to remake Afghanistan's government and military in our own image. Billions of dollars and thousands of deaths later, the US has finally withdrawn its troops. We've left the people of Afghanistan to fend for themselves in the nation we “built” and it's not going well. The resulting chaos has left pundits and politicians blaming Afghan leaders for failing of their country. President [Joe] Biden for withdrawing, President [Donald] Trump for promising to withdraw, President [Barack] Obama for not withdrawing earlier, and President George W. Bush for invading in the first place.

But all of this performative outrage distracts from a truly outrageous fact. Our elected officials and military leadership have known for years that our war in Afghanistan was a failure. And they knew that the Afghan government that we have been propping up was ill-prepared to stand on its own. Now that we're facing the fallout from their choices, what do we do? Can these same people who brought war in Afghanistan, who lacked the courage to admit their mistakes, reverse course? We’ll ask our first guest, Colonel Lawrence [Larry] Wilkerson how we got here and what our leaders should do next.

Then we'll turn to a progressive beacon on Capitol Hill. Jacob Wilson is a congressional staffer who came out of the peace movement. Weapons manufacturers have successfully lobbied for a bloated military budget and corporate lobbyists have cultivated direct access to our elected representatives while advocates for peace and other progressive causes have been left out in the cold. So Jacob set out to create the kind of progressive network he wanted to see.

One year later, at the Congressional Progressive Staff Association [CPSA] has over 550 congressional staff members. Mr. Wilson will be our second guest. We'll ask him about the association's goals, how it has been received on the Hill and how progressives can use grassroots organizing strategies in the halls of power. Then Ralph will answer more your listener questions. And as always, somewhere in the middle we'll check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhiber. But first, let's continue our conversation about our 20 years in Afghanistan and what it says about what America is today, David?

David Feldman: Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired US Army Colonel and former chief of staff to [US] Secretary of State Colin Powell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you, David. Good to be back with you.

Ralph Nader: And he's been teaching for years at [College of] William & Mary in Virginia. Welcome, Larry. When this whole Afghan effort, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, toppled the Taliban after 9/11, the invasion started in October 2001, you were in the [US] State Department. What can you tell us about the origins of this invasion that has had 20 years of frustration, slaughter of innocence, huge amount of money that could have rebuilt part of America. What can you tell us about those early days? And was there much dissent? Was there a consensus they had to topple the whole government of Afghanistan and take over?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, let me say first, I can tell you a great deal and will try to do so in the time allotted, but let me say one thing that I'm really angry over this morning, because I'm a veteran of Vietnam. We never learn anything. I have already heard the “stabbed in the back” phraseology from the military. It's being couched now as – it was not a military defeat, it was a political defeat. This is an abandonment of everything the military was responsible for in Afghanistan, and a lot of the failure should be laid right at the feet of the Pentagon.

After 9/11, there was a rage in the government. There was also a fear, a very palpable fear, because George W. Bush had no political mandate. He had the mandate of the US Supreme Court – period. We thought we were going to be thrown out of office on our heads because we just allowed the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. That quickly abated when we realized after he was on the debris pile in New York and said, “The people who did this will hear from us soon,” and his poll ratings went to 90% plus. And then it became a rage. The President even expressed that rage in an interview when he had some evangelical leaders in the Oval Office and he said, “Please help me. I want to rip, roar, and thunder. I'm in a rage.” And he asked them to help him calm down in accordance with his Christian values.

So, that's how we went at it in the first place. We at the State Department, Richard Haass in particular, and my boss, Colin Powell, were very much alarmed that such a rage persisted, because we knew the world was coming together in a way it had not come together before. We called it “a moment of global solidarity” that could be used in a very positive sense to advance a lot of our better wishes and objectives. We quickly saw that going to hell in a handbag with this rage for war, but we did what we could to attenuate it. We pointed out, for example, that we had used law enforcement before as the principal instrument against terrorists, with the exception of Ronald Reagan's raid in April of 1986 on Libya, which was the exception that proved the rule. We went right back to law enforcement. And we pointed out that if you go to war with these criminals, you will elevate them to warrior status, which is precisely what we did. You'll have to deal with Geneva and the other laws of land warfare and so forth. You will have a real problem. [Donald] Rumsfeld was - typical Rumsfeld, [US] Secretary of Defense - saying, essentially, “Well, we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.”

Well, we've been crossing those bridges ever since Rumsfeld got fired in November of 2006. But it was a response out of rage. And as [Carl von] Clausewitz or any other theorists of war will tell you in no uncertain terms, when you go to war based on rage, it's probably not going to turn out too well. And indeed, it deviated into Iraq in 2003. The war planning started for Iraq as early as November. We went into Afghanistan in October. November 2001, General [Tommy] Franks at the time, the man in charge, said, “This is crazy. How can I do Afghanistan?” He was right. We turned Afghanistan into an economy of force theater, which Colin Powell had told the president would happen. And Dick Cheney had put his finger in Colin's chest and said essentially, “You're not a military man anymore. Quit operating in the military realm.” Well, he was telling him we don't have enough troops to do two major regional contingencies simultaneously. And of course we let Afghanistan go to pot. Not that it would have turned out any differently had we had half a million troops for Afghanistan, but at least it would have been better in terms of all the Afghans who had to die for our invasion and incompetent occupation thereafter.

Ralph Nader: Well, you know, just to etch the history a bit, it's often said that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to get buried and the British Empire got buried in the 19th century there. And then Russia, Soviet Union came in and then they had to leave after ten years, defeated. And we didn't seem to think that that area of the world in terms of resistance applied to US Armed Forces. Tell our listeners who drew the lines of Afghanistan's boundaries to begin with. These were tribal regions. There was no Afghanistan. Who drew the lines, Larry?

Lawrence Wilkerson: It's not a state. It never has been a state. And I dare say, given present conditions and conditions estimated for the future, I don't think it will be a state. The British and others in the Great Game drew the current lines. And what you have is Uzbeks living in Uzbekistan and Pakistan. You have Uzbeks living in Afghanistan. You have Tajiks living in Tajikistan and in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have Pashtuns and others, Azeris, living in other places. You have them living in Northern and Eastern Iran and you have them living in, of course, Baluchistan, which is not really - talk to the tribes - a part of Pakistan. And you have him living in Pakistan proper. You have them everywhere. And when you go out in the hinterland, as Sarah Chayes has pointed out in her book Thieves of State[: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security] and recently in an article called “The Ides of August” A brilliant article, which I ask everyone to read. She has pointed out that you go into the hinterland of Afghanistan, which is almost everywhere outside Kabul, and you ask Afghans and they don't even know the term Afghanistan, let alone understand what it should imply in terms of a national entity. They know their tribe. They know their tribal shura. They know other things related to that kind of culture. They don't know nationalism, statehood and so forth.

So in that regard it was insanity for us to start an occupation aimed at state building in Afghanistan, but of course it wasn't aimed at that. What it was aimed at ultimately was becoming a cash cow for the military industrial complex, which it has been for these past 20 years. Lockheed [Martin Corporation], [The] Raytheon [Company], all those big guys have made a fortune off Afghanistan. Just look at their CEO salary increases and their share price increases. Iraq and Afghanistan together have saved and sustained and put them into ultimate prosperity over the past 20 years. Not to mention Syria, Libya, Somalia, and a host of other places. It's a disaster. And it's all about this sucking at the tit, as it were [Abraham] Lincoln’s terminology, “too many pigs for the tit,” he said, of the US war complex.

Ralph Nader: Kind of, again, the prescience of [Dwight] Eisenhower's warning in military industrial complex. And his warning indicated that he thought it was going to be a lot worse than it was in the 1950s when he made those statements. I wanted to get your view on the Afghan government and Ashraf Ghani. Ashraf Ghani was an anthropologist teaching at Johns Hopkins [University] and he renounced his US citizenship in order to run for election in Afghanistan. He is a Pashtun. He comes from the Pashtu tribe. He had traveled all over Afghanistan before he ran for the presidency and knows the culture very well. He was the [Afghan] finance minister before he ran for the presidency of Afghanistan. And then he got elected [and] he had to share power with another powerful person, Abdullah Abdullah. And then what happened? It seems like the US didn't utilize his knowledge. He was known to be incorruptible personally. They sidestepped him. They started negotiating with the Taliban even before Trump without the Afghan government on board. And now the whole Afghan government is getting the recriminations by the hour of its collapse. Could you give us your take on all of this?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Ashraf Ghani showed that what you said was absolutely true. You said something to the effect of he knew Afghanistan very well. I think that's the case. He knew Afghanistan very well, so he fled immediately. He didn't stick around. He knew what was going to happen. Unlike some of the people around him from Washington and elsewhere, he knew exactly what was going to happen. You can't have a government in a place that is a non-state any more than you could have a government in a place like Saigon that has no legitimacy with the bulk of the people. In the case of Afghanistan, probably over 90%, no legitimacy, whatsoever. Only has a relationship with a superpower that sustains it and expect when that superpower leaves, as in Vietnam and now Afghanistan, that things will hold together. They simply won’t. The fact that some in the Pentagon and some in the State Department and elsewhere in our government thought it would shows us the depths to which our competence has sunk as we have increasingly become an empire rather than a republic. If you will consult history, you'll see that that's an effect of empire in many respects, whether it's Rome chasing Hannibal for years and years after Cannae in order to get him, or whether it's the British Empire holding on and holding on until Suez in 1956, when Eisenhower essentially put the stake in their heart. That's the way empires act.

Ralph Nader: Well, we never really get the story of what Ashraf Ghani was trying to tell the US government over these years, whether they heard him, whether they saw he was powerless. What's the story there? Of course he has never spoken out. He has never presented his case. He is now getting criticized for fleeing Kabul and his response briefly, about a week and a half ago was that he wanted to avoid a real bloodbath and then he and his circle would have been hung in Kabul if they didn't flee and just have the Taliban deal with the US. You see some sense in that approach?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I do, personal sense in respect to him and his entourage, but I'll say this. If you've read Thieves of State by Sarah Chayes and that article I referred to, The Ides of August, you understand that the United States was not interested in Afghan leaders from [Hamid] Karzai on. It was only interested in figureheads, whom it could hold up to the world as examples of its ability to pick true Democrats to be in charge of Kabul and Afghanistan. And I say Kabul because that's really the only thing they were ever in charge of. And Sarah points that out vividly.

There was one example in Sarah's book that I'll briefly summarize. It tells everything. She kept pointing out, she was there 12 years, fluent Urdu and Pashtu speaker. She was there 12 years-- Kandahar, Kabul--all over the country. She was very close finally to Karzai and [David] Petraeus and she was absolutely intent on doing something about the massive corruption she saw that was essentially corrupting everything that we were trying to do, or at least the better things we were trying to do.

So, they finally managed, she and Petraeus managed to get a person who was one of the biggest and most corrupt drug dealers in Afghanistan into the courts, the Afghan courts, the national government’s courts. And just as they were about to go to trial, and she describes the scene almost as if she and David Petraeus were walking this man in handcuffs up to the courtroom, Afghan courtroom, and in steps to the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and says, “You can't take this man. You can't.” And they win. The argument goes to the highest levels, and they win, because their relationship with the Inter-Services Intelligence group in Pakistan, ultimately the godfather of the Taliban, is so tight, and they are so prominent in the scheme of things in Afghanistan. We have to go back to the beginning. The CIA won Afghanistan, not the military. That gave them a lot of clout in Afghanistan afterwards. The fact that they could win that kind of argument, the fact that they were in cheek and jowl with the ISI in Pakistan, the fact that the CIA was running things in Afghanistan to that extent tells you the whole story.

Ralph Nader: This word “corruption” is always bandied about as if it's only people in these countries who are corrupt. Ashraf Ghani was actually an academic expert on corruption. And the US would send entire cargo planes full of $100 bills that would land in Kabul airport [and] be transshipped to Kandahar. What is this corruption all about and what is the US role in this corruption? And when police are paid just a few dollars a month and they have to live, naturally they're going to take stuff under the table; that's petty corruption. Give our listeners some idea of the nature of this corruption and how it is used by the US government to put down people in other countries as if the US government doesn't have a role in this right down to handing out a $100 bills and even paying the Taliban to let them through certain mountain passes. Can you elaborate on that, Larry?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, as Sarah points out, the United States is the fulcrum of the corruption, whether it is, as I just pointed out, with this individual who was one of the biggest drug dealers probably in the world, not just in Central Asia, or whether it's the packets of money that you're talking about. So many of those disappeared going to Iraq. Vividly do I remember our budget guy coming into the office, my office, and saying, “We're all going to jail. We're all going to jail.” I said, “Joe, Joe, sit down. Tell me what you're talking about.” And he said, “We just sent $18 billion and there's 9 billion in the residual fund for Oil-for-Food Programme in the UN [United Nations] and it's gone. It's gone!”

Well, there was never any accountability for that because we are the most corrupt institution in all these wars. We are the leader in corruption and it ranges the gamut from mainstream American banks laundering drug dealers’ money to the fact that some of the money going to Afghanistan in these pallets of $100 bills, as you said, is going to American contractors who pass it right back to their cronies in the United States--some of their cronies being the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and so forth. [This is] all legal through PACs [political action committees] and so forth. But nonetheless it's corrupt. It's major and filthy corruption. It's a product of what I call predatory crony capitalism of which the United States, despite China's attempts to unseat us, is still the leading country in the world. Predatory capitalism. Incidentally, predatory capitalism is destroying the planet right now.

We are the leaders in corruption, but it's made to look legal, if not cursorily actually legal, because of our laws in our system and our banks' participation in it. But you put your finger on one of the principal things that Sarah is trying to reveal. When she started out Thieves of State, the title of her book, she's not just talking about thieves in Kabul. She's talking about thieves in Washington and London and Riyadh and elsewhere where this thievery goes on.

Ralph Nader: But the banks laundering drug money and knowing it is criminal behavior of course, and they're very rarely prosecuted. The money to the chairs of the House Armed Services and Senate, you're talking about campaign contributions, right?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Absolutely.

Ralph Nader: David Brinkley of NBC once called legalized bribery. So there is a bright light in terms of investigating some of this corruption. It's the IG [Inspector General] for the US expenditures in Afghanistan. Tell us about this remarkable man in and the reports he keeps putting out, including one that just came out a few days ago.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, in my view, for one man [David E. Horwitz] and his staff, which I know is limited, to have put out the volume that he has in terms of what I call indictments of the system and of people in that system, is remarkable. He is one of the few IGs that I note, in my time in government, roughly half a century, who actually is doing his job. What's happened to the IG complex over the last few years is it has become so embedded in its institutional fabric, whether it's DOD [US Department of Defense], DHS [US Department of Homeland Security], DOJ [US Department of Justice], or whatever, it has become a sing song for its own institution's interests and not a defender of whistleblowers or a looker for crimes and corruption. But this guy has defied that tendency and that development. And he won't be listened to, though. We'll go after a few low-hanging fruit like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ll punish a few staff sergeants or their equivalent in the civilian world, but we won't get the big guys. We won't go after the big guys because the big guys are many of the same people that are involved, for example, in the [Jeffrey] Epstein scandal.

Ralph Nader: Right.

Lawrence Wilkerson: There are many of the guys who were really some of the guys and gals who were involved in what Bradley Birkenhead, a whistleblower who got $75 million plus as a fee and a few years in prison for his revelations about tax avoidance and so forth. Did they go after any of the big kahunas? Well, they went after a Russian in California. They went after a few others, but DOJ had Bradley's actual revelations. Those revelations featured some names that every American would know if they heard them, but they didn't prosecute.

Ralph Nader: Well, we're talking with retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for Colin Powell, who has been a voice for truth and justice, clarity, candor, and historical context for years. And I think we should identify this Inspector General and ask Larry if a commercial publisher wanted to put these books into his reports into paperback, because they are really detailed and forthright, is this possible from the point of view of who owns the copyright? What is this man's name to begin with?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, you know, you've got a problem there with all the agreements that you have to agree to and you have to sign or whatever, even as the Inspector General. And you have a problem with the entire apparatus of what I would call and Thomas Mueller's book, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, sums all this up in terms that you'll cry just about every chapter. We've put such a labyrinth in place to restrict them, even though they are charged with the mission they're charged with, and ultimately, they were charged by Congress, that it's difficult to get anything done.

[The] Boeing [Company] is maybe the most visible case in point right now but look at what happened with the Torture Report [The Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture: committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program], Ralph. We have been laboring the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture, particularly, to get that 6,000-page report, which I am absolutely convinced would call on some accountability for at least some CIA people, if not, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, ultimately.

We've been trying to get that released. We can't get it released. We can't even get the Democrat, Mark Warner, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to release this report. We've been trying to get a meeting with Senator Warner for a month, the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture. We can't because no one wants to do the kind of accountability. No one even wants to do the kind of truth commission work that's necessary to clean up some of these terrible messes.

Ralph Nader: This is a Senate report, too, to make it worse.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes! Yes!

Ralph Nader: This is supposed to be an independent branch of government and it's a report on what went on in the executive branch and Senator [Dianne] Feinstein wouldn't release it. Now, Senator Warner wouldn't release it. What's the prospect of this ever getting out?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Let's get the culprit there really right. Richard Burr of North Carolina, whom I've been trying to get unelected for about ten years was the real culprit here. He is the guy who determined that President Obama could have a copy and put it in his papers in his museum or whatever the hell they're going to call it, and it couldn't come out for 25 years. And he told everyone who got a single copy of the report that they had to guard it for their life until they died. I mean, Burr is the culprit here. Feinstein is no shining example nor Warner now, but Burr is the real culprit. And what he did was unconscionable. The American people will never know that from the highest levels of their government, we've tortured before, Ralph. You know that in the Philippines and Vietnam, but we have never had a president of the United States, as a policy matter, authorize torture. This is a first in the history of our country. And we're not going to know anything about it for 25 years.

Ralph Nader: Well, speaking about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, you know, there's a lot of media coverage now on how the Afghan War got started and they almost never mentioned George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. There was a long article on this in the New York Times recently. And the main war criminals, the initiators, the people who got the US in the mess, all the deaths of US soldiers and many, many more hundreds of thousands of Afghanis, and they're just sitting there living the life of Riley--Bush and Cheney. So what's your view on holding them accountable? They can still be criminally prosecuted since there is no statute of limitations.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Unfortunately, Donald Trump resurrected George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to a certain extent. People were comparing them and saying, “Oh, I'll have George W. Bush back anytime.” I don't know what that means about us. That's quite a statement on us. But I will tell you this, and I said this publicly; I think I said it on the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC or someplace like that. I would gladly go to jail if they will put Dick Cheney and George Bush in jail for torture. To me, that was the low point of our history, the low point of our existence as a national entity--that a president of the United States would formally authorize other people to be tortured.

Abu Ghraib was the end result of that in one respect for the military. And the very idea that the President and Vice President involved the military just sickens my heart because the military has enough problems not doing that sort of thing on its own as the Philippines and Vietnam readily attest. And to have the President bless it for them and the Secretary of Defense add to that blessing by his famous memo that went from A to double D listing the things they could do to these so-called terrorists. And for me, to know that 750 odd people at Guantanamo had 700 people amongst them who weren't guilty of anything but being picked up and captured and sent there, and to know that some of them were being tortured was torture to my own heart and my own system and my own patriotism. And so that is why I say, I'll go to jail alongside of them if the courts decide to as long as Dick and George go prominently. Right behind them, where he not dead, would be Rumsfeld.

Ralph Nader: Well, just a few days ago, when Biden struck the vehicle that was laden with explosives near Kabul Airport, another errant drone, described as such in the New York Times, blew up a home and killed ten people, seven children, and the Ahmadi family. One of the men killed was an engineer working for an American aid program, a nutrition food program in Afghanistan. And the other one was a contractor with the US military and Biden gave this statement and he didn't have one sentence of regret for what's left of this family.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I watched this morning the webinar from the “Costs of War Project” at Brown University. One of the panelists talked about this and talked about the arrogance of power and the arrogance in particular of Washington, D.C., whether it be the president, the Congress, the courts, or whatever. She was absolutely right. We do not – I'm paraphrasing her now. We do not care about the almost million deaths which this project has documented--929,000 people precisely that we have caused. We only care about, for example, the 13 who died in Kabul. Watch how that titillated the American people and the American mainstream media. Watch how that captured their attention so quickly. Do you know how many Afghans died never capturing anyone's attention in America to speak of? Do you know how many Iraqis died, Syrians, Libyans, Somalians, Malians, and so forth as we're killing them on the globe?

Ralph Nader: Yemenis.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yemenis, yes. Our support for that war is unconscionable and we can't get out of it. We've got two pieces of legislation passed by previously cowardly Congress that said stop the support for the war in Yemen and Trump vetoed it. And we didn't have enough votes to go back and override his veto.

Ralph Nader: Well, let's look forward here on US Afghanistan relations with the Taliban. What do you see coming? And what do you think we should do? Let's assume you were in charge of American foreign policy after the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Two very different things. What I see coming is arrogance continued, and therefore, a disaster. What I wish were coming would be a Secretary of State Tony [Antony] Blinken, maybe Jake Sullivan calling Sergey Lavrov, one of the most accomplished diplomats in the world, working for [Vladimir] Putin, but he really works for Russia. And calling Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister for China and their equivalents in Iran and Turkey and elsewhere., Pakistan comes to mind, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and saying, “Let's meet. I don't care where. I'll meet in your home territory. Or we go to neutral territory like Geneva. And let's talk about how we're going to make sure that whatever government evolves in Afghanistan has a reasonable chance at feeding, clothing, caring for, and essentially, turning into a peaceful, and as far as possible, relatively successful economic situation in this tortured area called Afghanistan.” That's what I wish would happen, but I don't think it will.

Ralph Nader: And you think Congress is going to rise to the occasion at all? Anybody in Congress give you hope?

Lawrence Wilkerson: What I'm hearing from the Congress is anger and arrogance and punishment. It certainly is not coming from the [Congressional] Progressive Caucus or from those you and I know well. It's coming from the people like [Jim] Inhofe and [Robert] Menendez and others who are beholden to the complex and beholden to their grip on national security as a political issue that they can sell to their people and their constituents. It's coming from them but they're the ones who run that place. And I fear that we will do something really noxious and harmful, like increase sanctions on the Taliban and their leadership. I'm guardedly optimistic that the Taliban may have learned a few lessons. This is not the people that we invaded in 2001. Their rank and file still act rough from time to time, but no rougher than, for example, General [Abdul Rashid] Dostum, our ally who fired machine guns into a railroad car with people in it. But I'm hopeful that they might understand they're not going to survive and Afghanistan is not going to survive in any form, tribal or otherwise, if they don't calm down and try to be a reasonably good government and a tolerable government and a tolerant government.

I know that's a lot to ask, but I'm hoping that pressure from those outside powers, that I just enumerated, can help that along and pressure from the United States could help that along. But I fear we will be the arrogant beast we usually are and seek revenge rather than accommodation, rapprochement [or] whatever you want to call it. The only deal I can point out, and it took a while to affect, that defies that stereotype, of course, is Vietnam. But as much as I had to argue with John McCain towards the end of his life, and it was much, that was mostly his effort to get the United States to face up to the crimes that it conducted and was actually the perpetrator of. In Vietnam and the ripple trauma that came about, though it took some time, was a result of that, I think. My heart hurts when I think about what we might do in the next months or years to Afghanistan in retribution for what they “did” to us.

Ralph Nader: Well, thank you again. We've been talking with retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a voice of history, a voice of wisdom, a voice of truth and candor. And we hope that you'll reach many, many more millions of people, Larry. Thank you very much for coming on.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you, Ralph, for having me. And I hope for you the same thing. Steve Skrovan: We've been speaking with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. We will link to his work at ralphnaderradiohour.com. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we will speak to Jacob Wilson, a young congressional staffer who wants to do more than just polish his resume. But first, let's check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhiber.

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“Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire”: Deepa Kumar on How Racism Fueled U.S. Wars Post-9/11
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
SEPTEMBER 14, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/14/ ... _of_empire

According to the Costs of War Project, the wars launched by the United States following 9/11 have killed an estimated 929,000 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The true death toll may never be known, but the vast majority of the victims have been Muslim. “Racism is baked into the security logic of the national security state in the U.S., as well as in terms of how it operates abroad,” says Islamophobia scholar Deepa Kumar, a professor of media studies at Rutgers University. “The war on terror was sold to the American public using Orientalist and racist ideas that these societies are backward.” Kumar is the author of “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years After 9/11,” an updated version of her 2012 book that examined how the war on terror ushered in a new era of anti-Muslim racism.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty years ago today, President George W. Bush visited the National Cathedral in Washington to remember the victims of the September 11th attacks. He vowed to, quote, “answer these attacks and rid the world of evil,” unquote. The U.S. bombining and occupation of Afghanistan would begin less than a month later, beginning 20 years of endless war.

According to the Costs of War Project, the wars launched by the United States following 9/11 have killed an estimated 929,000 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The true death toll may never be known, but the vast majority of the victims have been Muslim.

Today we’re going to look at Islamophobia, how it has driven U.S. foreign policy and its impact at home. We’re joined by Rutgers University professor Deepa Kumar. She’s the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years After 9/11. It’s an updated version of her book which examined how George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror ushered in a new era of anti-Muslim racism.

Professor Kumar, welcome back to Democracy Now! I’m so sorry you have to come back to deal with this issue 20 years after the 9/11 attacks. Now, you do a deep dive into centuries of history, going back to Spain. But if you could start off now, on this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, by talking about what drives the Islamophobia? You say this is about racism, it’s not about religious bigotry.

DEEPA KUMAR: Absolutely right, Amy. And before I get started, I just want to say a huge thank you to you, Juan and the team at Democracy Now! for doing such important and ethical journalism, especially in troubling times like this.

So, my argument basically is that it’s not enough to understand Islamophobia simply as hate crimes, although hate crimes do exist; it’s not enough to understand it as religious intolerance or microaggressions or hate speech and so on, although we do know that all this exists; but to look at the roots of where it comes from, because what happens when you don’t do that is that people accept the rhetoric coming from people at the top of society.

So, Bush argued, for instance, this is not a war on Islam, it’s about the extremists. Obama, who was an extremely sophisticated orator, talked about how Muslims are such a deep part of American society, that Muslim civilizations have contributed to world history, and so on. And people accept that rhetoric and don’t see how post-9/11, and even before that, there has been a systematic targeting of people who are Muslim.

So, let me give some examples of how the security establishment works and why deep-seated racism is what drives these policies. So, if you look at the FBI’s entrapment policy — right? — the FBI sends agents provocateurs into Muslim communities to entrap vulnerable people with things like, you know, giving them cash to set up these plots. And, of course, immediately after they set it up, they nab them. What’s the logic here? The logic is that all Muslims are “potential terrorists,” and therefore we should nab them before they do anything. Right?

You look at Obama’s counterradicalization program, the CVE program, and it’s about trying to recruit people from the Muslim community — imams, school teachers, coaches and so on — to spy on their own community. Again, the idea is that there are people in the Muslim community that we should nab before they do anything. Same with the ubiquitous surveillance program, right?

Now, there are some people who would say, “Oh, that’s just smart security policy.” But if the shoe were on the other foot, I think there’d be howls of anger. Take, for instance, you know, Michael Wade Page, Dylann Roof. These are people who’ve committed hate crimes. But there’s no corresponding program with the FBI or local police departments to go into white communities and spy on them because they can produce people like this, right? There is no program to entrap them before they do anything. If anything, the Second Amendment rights of far-right-wing groups, of militias and neo-Nazis are respected.

So, that’s why it’s important to see that racism is baked into the security logic of the national security state in the U.S., as well as in terms of how it operates abroad, because if we don’t understand where something is coming from, we can’t target the roots, and therefore dismantle it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Deepa, I wanted to ask you — you go into some of the historical roots of Islamophobia. Most people think it’s just a modern phenomena. But if you could talk a little bit about going back to the earliest days of the construction of the Western empires and going all the way back to Spain during the first contact, let’s say, with the New World and the wars then between the Muslim world and the Western world?

DEEPA KUMAR: Absolutely. Yeah, so, a lot of people think of Islamophobia as a post-9/11 phenomenon, but it has a much longer history, both in the U.S. as well as in Europe. Now, I cut against one argument that this goes back all the way to the Crusades. That’s not true. The modern notion of race and of racism actually begins in the 1500s and beyond. And the context, really, is this, which is that Spain emerges — Spain and Portugal emerge as one of the key leading empires in the era of mercantile imperialism.

Now, keep in mind, through the bulk of the Middle Ages — right? — it is Muslim empires, it is the Chinese, it is the Indians, who are prominent on the world stage, and, you know, Europe is relatively backward. So, the idea that you could have some sort of inferior Muslim race be even thought about at the time made no sense, when these people had such incredible cultural and political accomplishments. In the early modern era, the Ottomans were seen as the key enemy, but by no means were they racialized as inferior, because they were so powerful, right? So, in many quarters in Europe, they were seen as Europeans as a sort.

But, nevertheless, as these European nations emerged from what’s called the Dark Ages and turned to the oceans, they are battling this powerful, land-based empire. And that’s the context in which, domestically, as well as internationally, the idea of race comes into being. So, there are blood purity laws that start to get used, first against Jews and later against Muslims. This is the first sort of biological notion of race. It’s the idea that even if you convert from Islam or Judaism to Christianity, your blood was impure. This never used to exist. Earlier, in the Middle Ages, if you converted, even if you were considered an enemy, you were accepted as part of the Christian community. That changed quite decisively after 1492, when Jews were expelled and seen as less than, right? But at the same — and this happens to Muslims, as well. They are also expelled in the early 17th century.

But it’s a very nascent form of racism. It’s not the full-blown version that we see after the Enlightenment, the philosophical and intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th century. Why? Because it’s contradictory. On the one hand, there is this notion that these people are impure and so forth, but not a sense of inferiority, because Spain, Portugal, Britain, France have to deal with these powerful North African empires, as well as the Ottomans, and so it’s very contradictory in that sense. So, it’s the roots of this notion of, you know, a radical alterity, of this other, of Muslims as other, but it doesn’t get fully developed until the era of colonialism in the 19th century.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk, as well, about the roots of Islamophobia in the U.S. before 9/11, especially in the ’60s and ’70s?

DEEPA KUMAR: Yeah. So, quick history before that, which is that Edward Said talks about Orientalism, which is a body of knowledge which is used to enable European colonialism in North Africa, in the Middle East, in India, right? This composite Oriental is created as a figure to be dominated, to be understood and dominated.

Now, some of that language — you know, the U.S. is a settler colonial state, based on the movement of Anglo settlers into the U.S. Some of that seeps in to the U.S., as well. But, interestingly, the first major Muslim population to be brought to the U.S. are West African enslaved people who are Muslims. But they were not targeted for their religion. In fact, you know, scholarship shows that they were actually — they occupied a space between Black and white, because they were educated. And it’s not until the early 20th century that Black Muslims are targeted for being Muslims.

But to zoom ahead to the period you asked about, Juan, essentially, there are very contradictory notions about Muslims, about Arabs and so on, all the way up until the Second World War. That’s when the U.S. replaces France and Britain as one of the key imperial powers in North Africa, in the Middle East, in South Asia and elsewhere. And that’s when you start to see a process by which, first, Arab Americans are created as terrorist threats, and then Iranians after the Iranian Revolution, and then South Asians.

And the particular moment that scholars point to is the Munich incident of 1972, when a Palestinian group takes Israeli athletes hostage and, in the context of a rescue attempt, murders all of them. And this is, you know, a really grisly event that’s covered by the media worldwide. What happens in the U.S., Nixon actually now sees all Arab Americans as responsible for the Munich incident and begins programs of surveillance, such as Operation Boulder, which is modeled on the infamous COINTELPRO. And from then on, the idea that this is a suspect population, that these are “potential terrorists,” has been the way in which the security establishment has functioned.

AMY GOODMAN: So, now let’s take it to 9/11. And I wanted to use one story that sort of illustrates what happened right after: the remarkable story of Salman Hamdani. He was a Pakistani New York City police cadet who died on September 11, 2001, after he raced to ground zero to try to save lives at the World Trade Center. Even though Salman was singled out by former President Bush and mentioned by name in the PATRIOT Act as a hero, the New York Post and other right-wing media outlets falsely claimed he was a possible terrorist on the run. The Post ran an article headlined “Missing — or Hiding? — Mystery of NYPD Cadet from Pakistan.” His remains were later found at ground zero. On the eve of the second anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, on September 11, 2003, I interviewed his mom, Talat Hamdani.

TALAT HAMDANI: Three days before going to Mecca. And then, the day we were leaving, these reporters came home. You know, first the New York Post guy came home, and then, shortly later, you know, the Daily News guy came, then, I think, the Newsday. So I asked them, you know, “Why are you all here again now? What happened?” It was a month later, October 11th. So I says, “What happened? What brings you back to our house?” So, they told us, “There’s a flyer circulating amongst the NYPD with your son’s cadet picture on it: If anyone has seen him, to come forward. We need some information about him.”

And then we left for Mecca. And when we were there, my sisters told us that, you know, this is what the newspaper — the Post printed a very horrible heading, you know, “Missing — or Hiding?” And amongst the news that — the way they presented it, it had, you know, insinuations that he was seen near the — at 11 a.m., he was seen near the Midtown Tunnel. And is he really hiding? Most probably. Is he really missing? He’s not missing, but he’s hiding, and he could be one of the terrorists. I have that article.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what came of this, “Missing — or Hiding?” suggesting that he was a terrorist? What did the authorities do then? And how did you feel?

TALAT HAMDANI: The authorities? What authorities? Who would take action? Who do you think should take action against the newspaper? You tell me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the mother of — Talat Hamdani, the mother of Salman Hamdani. So, let’s use that as a way to talk about what happened after 9/11, not only the attitude to Muslims in the United States, but the whole shaping of U.S. foreign policy, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond.

DEEPA KUMAR: Well, thank you for, you know, bringing to light stories like this. It was mostly activists in New York City and around the area who were involved in defense campaigns around people who were just disappeared, thrown into jail, not allowed to talk to a lawyer even, not allowed to speak to their family. And it’s so important to talk about the thousands of people who have been detained, imprisoned or deported, to see the full force of what actually happened based on the presumption that you’re guilty. Just because you’re Muslim, you’re guilty, and then you have to be proven innocent. This logic is called preemptive prosecution.

But on the international stage, essentially, what the U.S. did is that the War in Afghanistan, which was the first sort of intervention in the war on terror, it was sold not simply as “We’ve got to go root out terrorism and get Osama bin Laden,” all the rest of it, but it was sold to the U.S. public as “rescuing” Afghan women. Now, there’s no doubt that women in Afghanistan, particularly in the cities, had suffered tremendously under the Taliban regime. But this was not newsworthy. A study I did with a colleague found that the broadcast news media — you know, television, radio and so on — barely dedicated a couple of dozen stories in the year before 9/11. But all of a sudden, when people like Laura Bush, when Colin Powell are all talking about how the war on terror is also a war to liberate women and for human rights and so forth, you start to see tremendous media coverage, right? Nine hundred-something stories in a matter of a few months.

And, unfortunately, feminist organizations also signed on to the war on terror. And colleagues of mine in women and gender studies departments also have noted how, you know, people gave their consent to what was going to be 20 years of a horrible situation for all people in Afghanistan, but also for women.

We know, of course, that women were not liberated in Afghanistan. And the resources you mentioned earlier in the program, Amy, the trillions that were spent, 90% of that went towards militarism, and 10 on infrastructure and nation-building. Sure, some things improved, such as education and healthcare in the city centers, but for the vast majority of people — 70% of Afghans live in the countryside — they were thrown from the frying pan into the fire, because the U.S. allied itself with mujahideen warlords. These were the people that the U.S. trained back in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union. Those were the people who then came to power.

So, the war on terror was sold to the American public using Orientalist and racist ideas that these societies are backward. They don’t value their women, so we must go in and liberate them. Or in the case of Iraq, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, it was “We should bring democracy.” Never mind, of course, that we don’t have a very good form of democracy right here in the U.S. and that women continue to fight even today to hold serial rapists and harassers accountable in our court system. And yet, this white man’s racist argument, white man’s burden argument, was the one that was mobilized for U.S. intervention around the world.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Deepa, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned it earlier, the role of Iran and its use — the use of the national security state of Iran as this Muslim extremist bogeyman, that — I mean, obviously, Iran is a very large country, over 80 million people, has for decades now resisted being controlled by the European powers. How is that used to continue to foment Islamophobia?

DEEPA KUMAR: Absolutely. So, I mentioned earlier, Juan, how it was the Arab terrorist that was the first in this process of germination, germinating this notion that Brown people from this area are threats. But after the Iranian Revolution, and particularly the hostage crisis, where personnel in the U.S. Embassy were taken hostage for 444 days, that became a key turning point in the vocabulary in the U.S. and in the development of the idea of an Islamic threat — right? — of an Islamic terrorist.

And the reason it was portrayed in this fashion is because a U.S.-backed dictator, the shah, was overthrown, not by an Islamic movement, but by a people’s movement — right? — workers going on strike, women, college students, poets, intellectuals, religious minorities — all who rebelled against the shah’s iron rule, iron fist, if you will. And ultimately, Khomeini comes to power and takes over. But that’s the framework that’s used, is that this is a move back to the Middle Ages. These people are just so backward, they can’t deal with the modernizing reforms that the shah had forced on people, and therefore, you know, it’s a huge threat to modernization, modernity, and the U.S. must see Iran, from then on, as this enemy and as the fount of Islamic terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you about what’s happening now, the kind of reflection, if there is any, over the last 20 years and what this means for Muslims in the United States and around the world. You had yesterday U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, defending President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. But the way they put it was — he put it was, basically, you know, we inherited a timeline from Trump — this is his fault — and we had to move forward with that. And there’s been a lot of criticism of the chaotic last few weeks as the U.S. pulled out, but that seems to be replacing a reflection on what took place over this 20 years. A call for an inquiry into these last few weeks, but what about the last 20 years and what this war has meant, not to mention, two years later, President Bush bombing Iraq? Can you talk about what this has meant and what a different kind of analysis would lead to?

DEEPA KUMAR: Yeah. So, let me start by saying that there are people within the foreign policy establishment who are drawing the conclusion that U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, of Iraq, has been a total disaster. Right? These have been defeats for the U.S., both in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. So, that model of establishing imperial hegemony is one that was already shelved — right? — by Obama, but that increasingly has become a bipartisan consensus, is that you can’t go in in the way the U.S. did in Japan or in Germany and remade societies in ways that fit in with the U.S.’s global geopolitical order.

So, that lesson has been drawn by, certainly, sections of the political elite. And what’s going on is a blame game, right? You know, it was Trump’s fault, there was no plan, and so forth. And the question that’s not being asked is “Why did the U.S. go in in the first place?” and questioning, you know, whether empire, whether colonialism — this was colonialism — whether colonialism is justifiable.

All that said, the war on terror is not over, and I don’t think that we should act like it’s over. At least since the mid-2000s, when Obama put out his posture of the pivot to Asia, there’s been a desire to have less resources targeted at so-called terrorists around the world, with a focus instead on China, that is seen as a key threat to U.S. interests on the global stage. And various administrations — right? — have tried to scale back, but that has not been possible. But the war on terror is going to continue nevertheless, but it’s going to take a different form.

There are now anywhere between 800 and 1,000 military bases, U.S. military bases, around the world. And it’s from these bases that drone strikes are possible, right? These drone strikes are not things that we know about. They just happen. And very often, as recently happened in Afghanistan, innocent people are killed. So, that’s going to be the muscle power, along with special operations forces, as Biden and others have already admitted. And so, unfortunately, that puts us in a situation where it’s no longer going to be dramatic and, therefore, covered by the media. And people will somehow think that all the persecution of Muslims, both domestically or internationally, has ended.

You mentioned the figure from the Costs of War Project. I just want to say — of the number of dead because of the war on terror. And I just wanted to say that that study says “direct war violence.” Right? It does not include deaths due to the destruction of infrastructure, deaths that are not counted in official statistics, as Anand Gopal points out in a really great piece in The New Yorker which is from the point of view of Afghan women, that the deaths in the ones and twos in Afghanistan are typically not counted in official statistics, which is why somebody like Malalai Joya, who you’ve had on this program, puts the deaths at over 1 million. So, all of that is going to be papered over, unfortunately, as the U.S. continues its counterterrorism policies.

And I’ll end with this, which is that we know also that between 2018 and 2020, the U.S. was conducting counterterrorism operations in 85 countries around the world. That’s practically half the world. And so, terrorism has become a very useful way to establish U.S. hegemony and control on the global stage. So, I do think that there’s going to be more attention on China, but, at the same time, the war on terror is far from over.

AMY GOODMAN: Deepa Kumar, we want to thank you so much for being with us, scholar and activist, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years After 9/11, the first edition of the book published in 2012. Professor Kumar teaches media studies at Rutgers University.

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U.S. Drone Killed 10 Afghans, Including Aid Worker & 7 Kids, After Water Jugs Were Mistaken as Bombs
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
SEPTEMBER 15, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/15/ ... rike_aug29

We speak with reporter Matthieu Aikins about how his investigation for The New York Times found an August 29 U.S. drone strike, which the Pentagon claimed targeted a facilitator with the militant group ISIS-K, actually killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children and Zemari Ahmadi, an Afghan engineer who had worked since 2006 for an American aid group. A review of video evidence by the Times shows Zemari loading canisters of water at the charity’s office, after the Pentagon claimed surveillance video showed Zemari loading what they thought were explosives into a car at an unknown compound earlier in the day. “We put together evidence that showed that what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves from the sky was, according to his co-workers and colleagues and video evidence, just an ordinary day for this aid worker,” says Aikins.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Afghanistan. It’s been one month since the Taliban seized control of Kabul after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken defended the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan during a second day of questioning on Capitol Hill. Blinken was grilled about a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on August 29th. It’s the last drone strike before the withdrawal. The Pentagon claimed the strike targeted a facilitator with the militant group ISIS-K who was preparing to attack the Kabul airport. But local residents said the strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children and Zemari Ahmadi — not an ISIS-K operative, but an Afghan engineer who had worked since 2006 for the California-based charity group Nutrition and Education International. The Pentagon claims surveillance video showed Zemari loading what they thought were explosives into a car at an unknown compound earlier in the day. But video evidence obtained by The New York Times found Zemari was actually loading canisters of water at the charity’s office to deliver to those in need. The Pentagon has described the drone attack as a “righteous” strike. But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Blinken acknowledged the U.S. is not certain who was targeted, when questioned by Republican Senator Rand Paul.

SEN. RAND PAUL: The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: The administration is, of course, reviewing that — that strike, and I’m sure that a, you know, full assessment will be — will be forthcoming.

SEN. RAND PAUL: So you don’t know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: I can’t speak to that. And I can’t speak to that in this setting, in any event.

SEN. RAND PAUL: So, you don’t know or won’t tell us?

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: I don’t — I don’t know, because we’re reviewing it.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, see, you’d think that you’d kind of know, before you off somebody with a Predator drone, whether he’s an aid worker or he’s an ISIS-K. See, the thing is, is this isn’t just you. It’s been going on for administration after administration.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Kabul, Afghanistan, where we’re joined by Matthieu Aikins of The New York Times. He wrote the recent piece headlined “In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb.”

Matthieu, talk about going to the site, to the family’s home, where the car was, and describe what you learned happened that day, August 29th.

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Well, August 29th, there was the strike in the evening. And we went the next morning, myself and a photographer for the Times, Jim Huylebroek, and we arrived at the scene. It was inside a courtyard of a house, where a car had been hit. And there was a small crater, still flesh and blood spattered around the interior of the courtyard. And we spoke to the family who lived there, and they were extremely distraught, because they had just lost 10 members of the family, including seven children. So, it was immediately apparent that there had been civilian casualties in the strike. And then, you know, when we followed up with our investigation over the past two weeks, we put together evidence that showed that this — what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves from the sky was, according to his co-workers and colleagues and video evidence, just an ordinary day for this aid worker.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Matthieu, the continued stonewalling, effectively, of the government in terms of what they have found out since is really remarkable. I’m just wondering — basic stuff like how many people died. And there’s a big difference between 10 and the official count that the U.S. is still saying of three civilians. They haven’t quite explained why they claimed Mr. Ahmadi was driving into an unknown compound at one point, which actually was the aid agency’s headquarters in Kabul. And also, they’re not even making clear whether they’ve checked if he was an employee of this U.S.-based aid group. What do you make of this continued almost refusal to explain the results of what they’ve investigated so far?

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Well, certainly, they have a lot to answer for, a lot to explain. But they are conducting an investigation, and typically when the military does this sort of investigation, you do have to wait for the results. They’re going to be classified, but they’ll probably brief them to lawmakers and then eventually release a redacted version of the investigation. So, at this point, I don’t think we’re going to hear anything, at least not officially, until that’s completed.

AMY GOODMAN: On September 1st, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, described the drone attack as a “righteous” strike.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We know that there were secondary explosions. Because there were secondary explosions, there is a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle. The third thing is, we know from a variety of other means that at least one of those people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator. So, were there others killed? Yes, there are others killed. Who they are, we don’t know. We’ll try to sort through all that. But we believe that the procedures, at this point — I don’t want to influence the outcome of an investigation — but, at this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s General Mark Milley. Evidence examined by The New York Times at the scene of the drone strike suggests there was not a second explosion.

NARRATOR: We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared the evidence with three weapons experts, who said the damage was consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car, and the damage from the metal fragments of a warhead. This plastic melted as a result of a car fire triggered by the missile strike.

All three experts also pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large secondary explosions described by the Pentagon — no collapsed or blown-out walls, including next to the trunk with the alleged explosives; no sign that a second car parked in the courtyard was overturned by a large blast; no destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded and triggered a large fire.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s The New York Times video report based on Matthieu Aikins’ investigation of the U.S. drone strike. So, if you could elaborate on that, Matthieu, and also talk about why the children, why there were seven children in Zemari’s car?

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Sure. Well, the investigation was definitely a team effort. And we had experts look at the photos and videos that we were able to collect from the scene. And that was really the military’s justification, from what we’ve learned at least thus far, for taking the strike, you know, that this was an imminent threat to the airport, because they took the shot inside a crowded residential neighborhood, where there was a very high likelihood of civilian casualties. You know, that’s a kind of assumption that I think would have been fair in that circumstance. So, really, the way they would have justified this was that this was a car bomb or some kind of imminent threat. And I think it’s pretty conclusive that there was not a larger explosive in this car.

Now, what happened was, is that Zemari’s family, you know, the kids — he lived with his three brothers, so there was a lot of kids in this house. And when he came home every day from work, as I was told by his brother, you know, he’d pull up, and the kids would run out, and they’d be excited to see him. And they’d get in the car, and, you know, usually one of them would sit behind the wheel, maybe on his lap, and they would back the car in the courtyard. So, that’s what they said happened that day, so those kids were in the car when it was struck by a Hellfire missile. And that is the reason why seven of them were killed.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Matthieu, what does this — from your reporting in Afghanistan, what does this tell us about the limitations of these drone strikes, the inherent problems that exist when you rely, essentially, on aerial surveillance to determine who you strike, or not, versus on-the-ground, real human intelligence?

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Yeah. So, this is not an isolated incident. You know, we’ve had civilian casualties from drone strikes many times over the years. But the fact of the matter was, this happened in Kabul. You know, I was able to go to the scene, and we were able to do the story in two weeks. Normally these happen in remote, dangerous areas, difficult to access. So, often all we have is the military’s official version of the events — in this case, that this guy was an ISIS facilitator and that there was explosives in the car.

So, the danger with these strikes, which — again, this may have been the last drone strike of the 20-year American war, but the war on terror continues, and there’s going to be more drone strikes, you know, as promised by the administration, in an over-the-horizon role in places like Afghanistan. The danger is that we’re going to have more of these incidents, there’s going to be more children killed, but that we’re not going to really even know about it, because, again, we’re not going to have access to what’s happening on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, these drone strikes lessen the chance of U.S. soldiers being killed, as they fly over from another country, as you said, the over-the-horizon capability they’re talking about. But I wanted to go to one last video that you obtained, security camera footage from the office of the U.S.-based aid group Nutrition and Education International, where Zemari Ahmadi had worked earlier in the day.

NARRATOR: At 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi pulls out a hose. And then he and a co-worker fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning, we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic containers to the office. There was a water shortage in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought water home from the office.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re looking at this closed-circuit footage of him gathering this water to bring home. The U.S. apparently was monitoring him for hours that day, Matthieu.

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Yeah, they said that they were surveilling him with an MQ-9 Reaper drone. But, again, you know, what they see from the sky and what’s happening on the ground are not necessarily the same thing. And in this case, you know, this was a man who had loaded water in the car to bring home to his family.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Matthieu, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Matthieu Aikins, Kabul-based contributing writer to The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, his investigation into the drone strike headlined “In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb.”

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The Other Afghan Women: Rural Areas Hope Taliban Rule Will End Decades of U.S. & Warlord Violence
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/16/ ... ens_rights

Violence in Afghanistan’s countryside has reportedly dropped after the Taliban takeover and the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but the country continues to face an ongoing humanitarian and economic crisis, with millions of children at risk of starvation. Joining us from Kabul, New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal says he was shocked by the “sheer level of violence” Afghan women outside the cities have experienced in the last two decades of war. “The level of human loss was really extraordinary,” Gopal says. “I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Afghanistan a month after the Taliban seized power. The New York Times is reporting there’s been a dramatic drop in violence in the Afghan countryside following the Taliban takeover and the U.S. withdrawal of troops. One doctor in Wardak province reports his hospital has no patients with conflict-related injuries for the first time in over two decades. But the hospital is in a crisis as it is unable to pay salaries or buy new medical equipment.

On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Afghanistan is facing a “dramatic humanitarian crisis,” and urged foreign governments and institutions to keep supporting the people of Afghanistan. UNICEF has warned a million Afghan children are at risk of starvation.

We go now to the capital, to Kabul, where we’re joined by Anand Gopal. His latest article, “The Other Afghan Women,” appears in The New Yorker. It’s based on his deep reporting in the rural villages of Afghanistan that have been devastated by decades of war. Anand Gopal is also the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.

Anand, thanks so much for joining us. Can you talk about who the “other Afghan women” are?

ANAND GOPAL: Thanks, Amy.

You know, when we were watching the images streaming from Kabul of people desperately trying to get to the airport, including many of my friends, you know, it was easy to come to the conclusion that perhaps what was happening right now was the worst thing that had happened in the last two decades. And, of course, there were many Afghans who wanted to get out because they desperately want a better life, and I don’t blame them for that.

There was another reality, actually, at the same time that wasn’t really covered as much, and that was happening outside of Kabul in rural areas, where, for the bulk of the last 20 years, the war was actually being fought. So, we think of the War in Afghanistan as just happening in Afghanistan, but, actually, it wasn’t fought in most of the country. There was only particular provinces where the fighting was happening.

So, I visited Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, which is really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades. And I wanted to see how women there, who had been facing roadside bombs and night raids and airstrikes — what they thought about the U.S. withdrawal. So, that’s the “other Afghan women” in the title. And so, the piece is actually about trying to get their views of how they looked at the American withdrawal after two decades.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand Gopal, just to make clear, 70% — over 70% of Afghanistan’s population is rural, so we have, in a sense, a highly distorted view, because we hear about urban areas — and, in fact, not just urban areas, only Kabul, or principally Kabul. Now, among the people that you spoke to in one village, Pan Killay, a woman told you that a large number of her family, all civilians, had been killed in the last years. And you went and spoke to many other families in the village and found that, on average, every family had lost 10 to 12 family members during the war, the war that they refer to as the American War. Could you elaborate on what they told you?

ANAND GOPAL: Sure. So, the woman in question, her name is Shakira, and she’s a housewife who lives in a very small village in the valley of Sangin, which was one of the areas of the most intense violence over the years. And so, I had the opportunity to meet her and interview her a number of times. And, you know, I’m somebody who’s been covering this conflict for many years, and even I was taken aback by the sheer level of violence that people like her had gone through and had witnessed.

So, she lost, as you said, 16 members of her family. But what was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident. This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years. So, there was one cousin who was carrying a hot plate for cooking, and that hot plate was mistaken for an IED, a roadside bomb, and he was killed. There was another cousin who was a farmer, who was in the field and had encountered a coalition patrol, and he was shot dead. Shakira told me his body was just left there like an animal. So, there were so many different instances.

So people were living — reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary.

And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not — there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, one of the other women that you spoke to, Pazaro, said to you, “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here. Is this justice?” she said. I mean, in a sense, as you show in this piece, “The Other Afghan Women,” there are two different realities in Afghanistan — there are probably more, but with respect to the attitude towards the Taliban taking over the country. Could you talk about that? You’ve covered, of course, as you said, the war extensively over many, many years, from Kabul as well as elsewhere across the country.

ANAND GOPAL: Yeah, I mean, when we think about women’s rights in Afghanistan, we tend to think about the ability to go to school, to work, to have representation in Parliament. And these are real gains that were made in the last 20 years. But there are other women’s rights that aren’t talked about.

So, when I asked Pazaro or other women, you know, “What do you think about the claim that the U.S. was bringing women’s rights to Afghanistan?” they told me, you know, “We can’t walk outside without worrying if we’re going to get blown up. So, what right do — you know, how is that protecting our rights?” It’s also a part of women’s rights to be able to walk without fear, to be able to live. To live is a woman’s right, right? So, they had a very different conception of women’s rights, which was not that they rejected the aspiration for wanting to get educated or to wanting to have a public role, but they also didn’t want to be shot at or have their loved ones killed. And so, they had a very different conception.

And so, when I asked them about the claim that the U.S. was bringing women’s rights, they were very skeptical, and many of them were cursing the United States, saying, “They brought us nothing.” So, for example, like, one person said, “They were bringing rights to Kabul, and they were just bombing us here,” essentially. So, it’s a country that has different realities, and I think we need to be able to hold both of those realities in our head at the same time.

AMY GOODMAN: Anand Gopal, if you can talk about the empowering of warlords by the U.S. occupation? If you can tell us the story of Amir Dado and take that right through to a person who ended up at Guantánamo?

ANAND GOPAL: So, Amir Dado was a member of the mujahideen, which was the holy warriors or the rebels, the rural rebels, that were fighting against the Soviet occupation. The Soviet occupation was a brutal occupation that killed millions of people in Afghanistan, and so, naturally, people were rising up against it. But at the same time, some of these rebels were being supported by Pakistan, by Saudi Arabia, and especially by the CIA. And so, there was the creation of warlords or strongmen. There was never warlords in Afghan history until the start of the wars in 1979.

So, Amir Dado is one of these warlords. And he came to prominence in the Sangin Valley in the mid-’80s. He was a major drug trafficker. He was also somebody who held a religious court, and he basically acted the way we think the Taliban would act now. You know, he would make sure women stayed in the home. When people tried to marry for love, he would have them arrested. He kidnapped people. I mean, he was really considered a real brutal strongman.

When the Taliban emerged in the mid-'90s, the main reason they emerged was to fight against people like Amir Dado. So they came to the Sangin Valley and Helmand in early 1995, and they demobilized him, and he fled the country. And then, for the next few years, the Sangin Valley and places in southern Afghanistan were at peace. And so, that was the kind of perspective that a lot of the women there had, which is that they don't like the Taliban, but they hated the warlords. And so, at least the warlords were gone, and they would accept that.

Then, when the U.S. invaded in 2001, they did something astonishing, which is that they brought those very same warlords back into the country. You know, they had a choice there. They could have tried to support local Afghans. They could have tried to help build a democracy, with the incredible yearning there is in Afghanistan for a better world. I mean, people like Shakira, the woman I profile in the piece, she wanted the U.S. to invade. She hated the Taliban, and she wanted the support. Instead, what the U.S. did is they brought people like Amir Dado back into the country. The reason they did that is because the U.S. never really cared about building a democracy in Afghanistan. The mission was always about counterterrorism. It was always about trying to find the, quote-unquote, “bad guys.” And so they brought these warlords back in who could be their partners.

And so, for the next two or three years, from 2001 until 2004, Amir Dado basically terrorized the Helmand countryside. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, innocent people, were arrested. People were killed. There’s the multiple cases of people who were wrongfully accused of being Taliban members and sent to Guantánamo. There was essentially a one-sided war that was waged by the U.S. and its allied warlords, like Amir Dado, against the Afghan population in Helmand. And that, ultimately, is what led to the reconstitution of the Taliban by 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you talk about Amir Dado suspected of being responsible for the killing of U.S. Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales in March of 2003, but he managed to point the finger at a Taliban member who ended up being sent to Guantánamo.

ANAND GOPAL: Yeah. I mean, this is just an example of the extraordinary chaos that was happening there and the ways in which these strongmen were using their access to the Americans to eliminate their enemies. So, what happened in this case was that the U.S. Special Forces went to meet some members of the Afghan government in Sangin, and Amir Dado, who was a U.S. ally, engineered an attack, an ambush, on U.S. troops. It killed two U.S. soldiers, Special Forces personnel. They were the first two U.S. soldiers who died in Helmand as a result of violent activity. And the U.S. themselves, internally, among the Special Forces, began to suspect that their own ally, Amir Dado, was the one who was behind the attack.

Nonetheless, Amir Dado took some — basically, some random guy who had nothing to do with the attack, who was an ex-Taliban who had surrendered and was sitting at home, took him, tortured him and then delivered him to the U.S. and said, “This guy here is the person who was the real culprit.” The U.S. sent him to Guantánamo. He spent three or four years in Guantánamo. And when I looked at the classified documents from Guantánamo, which were eventually released by WikiLeaks, you know, what was extraordinary in those documents was that the investigating judges and others knew that this person was innocent. They wrote in the documents that Amir Dado, the U.S. ally, was the one who actually sent — who was the one who actually conducted this ambush. But, nonetheless, this person languished in Guantánamo for three or four years. His case is not unique. This has happened hundreds of times across the country in those years.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, as you’ve pointed out in a recent interview with Reveal News, one of the effects of the way in which the U.S. supported these warlords and made them extremely wealthy is that they had an incentive to continue the war and an incentive to continue producing terrorists. Now, you mentioned earlier that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — Pakistan, in particular — played a critical role in supporting the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. Could you say more about the role of Pakistan in supporting the Taliban all of these years and what role you think the country will play, Pakistan will play, in the interim government, its relations to the people who have been appointed in the interim government by the Taliban?

ANAND GOPAL: Well, Pakistan supports the Taliban very closely. A number of the senior leaders of the Taliban were living in Pakistan, so the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, was basically sheltering the senior Taliban leadership. There’s a very close working relationship there.

But it’s very important to understand the history here, which is that in 2001, when the U.S. invaded, the Taliban was defeated. You know, to a man, they basically either surrendered or, you know, escaped and ran away. So, there was, in 2002, no Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no resistance whatsoever. Al-Qaeda, as well, fled the country. They went mostly to Pakistan, and some of them to Iran. So you had thousands of U.S. troops on the ground in 2002 with a mandate to fight a war against terror, but with no enemy actually to fight.

And so, this was the context in which they began to incentivize the allied warlords to basically produce bad guys and enemies for them. They started to arrest these people and kill them. This created the insurgency. Once the insurgency was created — and this is now 2004 — then Pakistan got involved and tried to influence the insurgency for its own interests. Its own interest is, it basically views Afghanistan as its own backyard and doesn’t want Indian influence. And so, Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan has been a very malign role. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the ultimate cause of the War in Afghanistan was by the U.S., its actions in the early years.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a part of the article that hasn’t gotten very much attention. Anand, you tweeted, ”CIA-created Afghan death squads were evacuated before many American citizens.” Can you explain?

ANAND GOPAL: So, from the very beginning, the U.S. created these militias. As I mentioned earlier, warlordism and militias, that’s not something that’s natural to Afghanistan. It really emerged in the late 1970s, early '80s, as a result of the war. In 2001, the U.S. really invented some of these, created some of these groups. So, there is a group called the Khost Protection Force, which was a CIA-created militia in the southeast of the country. There's many groups like this around the country. And they were seen as the CIA’s closest allies in trying to fight the Taliban. And many, many innocent people, many, many civilians suffered as a result of this. And so, their methods were seen as extraordinarily brutal.

What happened with the evacuation last month was that these CIA death squads were essentially the ones that were one of the guards of the airport itself. And the reason they were there is, ultimately, they were going to be evacuated, as well. And it was a horrific scene. As I was talking to colleagues and friends who were on the ground, sometimes these death squads are shooting at crowds. Also, the Taliban wasn’t always letting people through. It was chaotic. But, ultimately, all of these death squads got evacuated. There are still American citizens here in Afghanistan today trying to get out, but the CIA militias are all out. They’re now living in the United States. And it’s not the first time this has happened. There have been other CIA-backed strongmen who have been living comfortably in the U.S. for the last decade or two decades. And so, this is kind of, I think, an indictment on what the CIA’s priorities are in terms of Afghan lives.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, before we conclude, if you could comment on the people the Taliban has appointed to serve in the interim government? You’ve said that what’s striking in the list is that the most powerful members of the Taliban, those who were running the insurgency in the last 20 years, have been excluded. What are the implications of this? You’ve said that this might create a shadow government.

ANAND GOPAL: Yeah, I think that, you know, when we see the Taliban Cabinet that was announced a few days ago, I mean, all of those figures in the Cabinet held similar positions in the '90s. But, really, the powerful people in the movement, some of them were military commanders, others do have Cabinet positions, but they all kind of exist in what's called a shura, a leadership shura, which is in Kandahar. That’s really who’s controlling the country. There’s a prime minister. He’s a longtime member of the Taliban. But I’m not sure how much power he actually has. The real power is behind behind the scenes.

And I think that’s tragic for Afghans, because that means even less accountability. The previous regime, that was here for 20 years, had very little accountability. There was elections, but those elections were mostly rigged. And a lot of the real decision-making was done behind the scenes. And I think there were some Afghans who were hoping that this would be a change. I think this is not going to be a change. It’s going to be further down the line of zero accountability and power being wielded behind the scenes.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I wanted to ask you — a main issue that you write about is the countryside versus Kabul. We know a lot more about what’s happening in Kabul. You write, “The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness.” Can you end with that?

ANAND GOPAL: Well, you know, there was a lot of — there’s activists, women’s rights activists, you know, people who are part of civil society, etc., all of which only appeared in the last two decades, and only appeared because of the American occupation. And for people like that, this obviously is a lot of — they’re facing despair, and it’s very understandable. Many of them have been able to leave the country. Many are still stuck here in Kabul. And Kabul is a relatively liberal area compared to the countryside. And there are more freedoms for women here than there are in places like Helmand, where I visited. And the idea that the Taliban are going to impose the mores of Helmand onto Kabul, I think, is a tragedy, because it means that people who have enjoyed some freedoms for the last two decades are going to see them rolled back.

All of this, I think, didn’t have to be this way. The U.S. had the opportunity in the early years to negotiate with the Taliban, when they were much weaker. They had the opportunity to try to create an inclusive government. But instead they chose the path of war, and here’s where we are now. Nobody has really won from this. The people in the countryside are breathing a sigh of relief because there’s no war, but the people in the cities are terrified. Nobody is actually happy with the outcome. And that’s a tragedy.

AMY GOODMAN: Anand Gopal, I want to thank you so much for being with us, journalist and professor at Arizona State University. His article, “The Other Afghan Women,” is in The New Yorker magazine. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. He is also author of the book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.