back to indexRobert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #244
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The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz,
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a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history
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of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Robert Cruz.
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Was it a mistake for the United States
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to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?
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As simple as yes, why was it a mistake?
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I'm a historian, so I say this with some humility
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about what we can know.
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I think I'd still like to know much more
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about what was going on in the White House
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in the hours, days, weeks after 9 11.
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But I think the George W. Bush administration
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acted in a state of panic.
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And I think they wanted to show kind of toughness.
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They wanted to show some kind of resolve.
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This was a horrific act that played out
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on everyone's television screens.
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And I think it was really fundamentally a crisis
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of legitimacy within the White House,
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within the Oval Office.
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And I think they felt like they had to do something
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and something dramatic.
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I think they didn't really think through who they were fighting,
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who the enemy was, what this geography had to do with 9 11.
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I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us,
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not to say I was clairvoyant or could see into the future,
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but I think many of us were, from that morning,
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skeptical about the connections that people were drawing
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between Afghanistan as a state, as a place,
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and the actions of Al Qaeda in Washington
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and New York and Pennsylvania.
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So as you watch the events of 9 11,
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the things that our leaders were saying
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in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed,
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maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline
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of what was being said.
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When was the actual invasion of Afghanistan?
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And also, what were your feelings
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in the minutes, weeks after 9 11?
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I was on the way to American University,
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hearing on NPR what happened.
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And I thought of the American University logo,
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which is red, white, and blue.
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And I thought, Washington is under attack
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and symbols of American power are under attack.
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And so I was quite concerned and at the time lived
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just a few miles from the capital.
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And so I felt that it was real.
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So I appreciate the sense of anxiety and fear and panic.
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And four, two, three years later in DC,
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we were constantly getting reports, mostly rumors
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and confirmed about all kinds of attacks
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that would fall in the city.
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So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.
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But in watching television, including Russian television
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the other day, because I just installed a satellite thing.
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So I was trying to watch world news
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and get different points of view.
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And that was quite useful to have an alternative set of eyes.
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Yeah, in Russian, yeah.
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OK, so your Russian is good enough
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to understand Russian television.
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The news, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming
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that were not shown on American television.
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I don't know how they had it, but they
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had they were not filtering anything in the way
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that the major networks and cable television
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So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence
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of the moment in New York City of people diving
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from the towers and it was really they didn't hold back
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on that, which was quite fascinating.
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I think much of the world saw much more than actually
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the American public saw.
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But to your question, amid that feeling of imminent doom,
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I watched commentators start to talk about al Qaeda
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and then talk about Afghanistan.
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And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin, who's at NYU,
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who's a kind of long, very learned Afghanistan hand.
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And he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News
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to kind of lay this out for everyone.
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And I thought he did a fine job.
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But I think it was formative in submitting the view that somehow
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al Qaeda was synonymous with this space, Afghanistan.
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And I think, again, I was no al Qaeda expert then,
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But I think my immediate thought went to war
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and because my background had been with,
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at that point, mostly,
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Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war,
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who might encounter in Uzbekistan, who were refugees
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I thought immediately my mind went to the suffering
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of Afghan people that this war was going to sweep up,
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of course, the defenseless people
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who have nothing to do with these politics.
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So we should give maybe a little bit of context
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that you can speak to.
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So assume nobody's an expert in anything.
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So let's just say you and I are not experts in anything.
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What, as a historian, were you studying at the time
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and thinking about, is it the full global history
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Is it the region where you're thinking
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about the Mujahideen and al Qaeda and Taliban?
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Were you thinking about the Soviet Union,
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the proxy war through Afghanistan?
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Were you thinking about Iraq and oil?
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What's the full space of things in your heart,
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in your mind at the time?
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I mean, just at the moment, of course,
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that's the sense of the suffering and the tragedy
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of the moment of the deaths.
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And that was, I think, I was preoccupied
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by the violence at the moment.
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But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan
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as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment,
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I think immediately what came to mind was that the little I
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knew about al Qaeda at the time,
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that the geography was inaccurate,
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that this was a global network, a global threat,
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that this is a kind of a movement that went beyond borders.
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And I think it felt early on that Afghanistan was
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going to be used as a scapegoat.
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And intellectually, at the time, I
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was teaching at American University.
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My course is touched on a range of subjects.
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But I was trying to complete a book on Islam
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and the Russian Empire, actually.
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But in doing that research, which took me across Russia,
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and Central Asia, purely by accident,
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I had developed an interest in Afghanistan
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because, again, a series of coincidences,
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I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan,
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without housing, doing an American friend who
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was like the king of the market in Tashkent.
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He run into some Afghan merchants there.
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They found out I didn't have a place to live.
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I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly.
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I had a vague idea it was next door.
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Well, you lived in Uzbekistan?
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Yeah, in Tashkent, doing decision research.
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Because it was a hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia.
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So just by accident, I ended up with these young Afghans
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who took me in as roommates.
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And then I think that the sense of that community
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shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.
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It was my first exposure to them.
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They were part of a trading diaspora.
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They had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.
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They had somehow brought flour and some agricultural products
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And they were sitting in closed containers in Tashkent
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waiting for these Pakistani state to permit them to trade.
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So these guys were mostly hanging out during the day.
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They would get dressed up.
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They'd put on suits and ties like you're wearing.
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They'd polish their shoes.
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And they would sit around offices, drink tea,
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Then they'd feast at lunch.
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And then at night, we would go out.
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So part of my research, because I also had a bottleneck
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at my research, I was going to the state archives in Tashkent.
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And because of the state of Uzbekistan,
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that was a very kind of a suspicious thing to do.
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So it took a while to get in.
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So I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys.
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So I got to know them pretty well.
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And it was really just an accidental kind of thing.
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But grew quite close to them.
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And I developed an appreciation of, which now I think, again,
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thinking of the seeds of all this,
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these people had already lived, young guys in the 20s,
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they'd already lived in six or seven countries.
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They all spoke half a dozen languages.
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One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer
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and breakdancer trained in Tehran.
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His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.
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He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan
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during the Civil War, going to Uzbekistan,
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escaping death there.
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And these were very real stories.
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Can you also just briefly mention, geographically speaking,
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Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
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you mentioned Iran, who are the neighbors of all of this?
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What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?
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I was always terrible at geography and spatial information.
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So can you lay it out?
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So Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan.
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It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century.
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The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty
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It becomes the city, the hub of Soviet power in Central Asia
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It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan,
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which becomes independent finally in 1991
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when the Soviet Union collapses.
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So these are all like these republics
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are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia.
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And they've been independent since 1991,
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but they have struggled to disentangle themselves
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from Moscow, from one another.
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And now they face very serious pressure from China
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to form a kind of periphery of the great machine
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that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions
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to stretch across Asia.
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For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends,
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hailed from Afghanistan had fallen into civil war
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in the late 1970s when leftists tried to seize power there
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The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan,
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crossing the border with its forces in 1979
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to try to shore up this leftist government
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that had seized power in 1978.
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And so for Central Asians in the wider region,
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their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan
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in a variety of ways,
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but it became much more connected in 1980s
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when the Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years.
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And here, I refer your listeners and viewers to Rambo 3
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as the guide to...
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The historically accurate guide.
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The historically accurate, the Bible of Afghan history
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in Rambo 3, as a fantastic window onto the American view
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of the war, right?
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But for most Afghans, there are people who fought
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against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation,
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the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.
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And so they fled in waves by the millions to Pakistan,
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to Iran, some went north into Central Asia later in the 1990s,
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and some were displaced across the planet.
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So California, where we're sitting today,
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has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s
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Can I ask a quick question that's a little bit of a tangent?
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What is the correct or the respectful way to pronounce
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Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran?
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So as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan,
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the on versus the and, is it different country by country?
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As an English speaker in America,
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is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan,
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or is it the opposite of respectful to say it that way?
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What are your thoughts on that?
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That's a fascinating question.
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I defer to the people from those countries
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to of course sort out those politics.
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I think one of the fascinating things about the region broadly
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is that it is a place of so many cultures
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and it's really quite cosmopolitan.
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So I think people are mostly quite forgiving
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about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
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It's not like Paris.
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Yeah, right, right.
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The French are not forgiving.
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No, no, no, exactly.
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I think people are very forgiving.
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And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive
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and suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right?
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Iraq, Iraq, I think there's come to be a fit
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between certain ways of pronouncing these places
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and the position that Americans take about them, right?
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So it's more jarring when people say Iraq
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and it comes with a claim
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that a certain kind of person should be the victim
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of violence or, right, so does that, yeah.
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It's kind of like talking about the Democratic Party
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or the Democrat Party.
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It's sometimes using certain kind of terminology
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to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement
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about your beliefs.
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That's fascinating.
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Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran,
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I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional
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in the case of a Democrat or is it just a,
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and it's a whatever.
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Again, I think most Iranians and Afghans,
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people I know have been very cool about that.
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What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's great to say,
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I don't mean to speak for mainstay group people,
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but I can just share with our non Afghan friends.
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The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense
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because that's the name of the currency.
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And so lots of people ask, you know, why having,
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especially again, it's more directed at Americans
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because, you know, we've been so deeply involved
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in that country, obviously for the last 20 years, right?
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So Afghans ask why after 20 years,
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are you still calling us the wrong name?
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What is the right name?
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Just, they prefer Afghans.
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Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency.
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I just dodged the bullet
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because I was gonna say Afghans.
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That's really great to know.
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Yeah, and it's, again, I think,
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but I would emphasize that people are quite open
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and you know, it's a whole region of incredible diversity
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and respect for linguistic pluralism actually.
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So I think that, you know,
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but I also appreciate that in this context,
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when there's a lot of pain, you know,
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in the Afghan diaspora community in particular,
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you know, being called the wrong name after 20 years
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when they already feel so betrayed at this moment,
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you know, just kind of,
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if one follows us on social media,
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that is one kind of hot wire, right?
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Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation
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is because, yes, it is true
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that there are certain things where mispronounced
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kind of reveal that you don't care enough
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to pronounce correctly.
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You don't know enough to pronounce correctly.
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And you dismiss the culture and the people,
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which I think as per your writing is something that,
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if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan.
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Just because I'm used to it.
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I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan.
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As you do in your writing, Afghanistan suffers
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from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world.
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But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
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the whole region that gives us context
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for the events of 9 11.
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So yeah, if we get back to that day,
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in the weeks that followed,
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in my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent,
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which was interesting.
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I mean, they were,
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so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US
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about 9 11, right?
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Everyone to know what was the relationship
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between the terrific violence and that religious tradition
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with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right?
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That became the issue of course
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for American security institutions,
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for local state and police institutions, right?
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I mean, it became the,
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I think it was the question
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that most Americans had on their minds.
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So again, I didn't imagine myself
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as someone who had all the answers, of course,
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but given my background in coming at this
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from Russian history,
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coming at this from studying empire
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and trying to think about the region broadly.
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You know, I was very alarmed
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at the way that the conversation went.
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Can I ask you a question?
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What was your feeling on that morning of 9 11?
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Isn't that a natural feeling?
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There's a, it's coupled with fear of what's next,
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especially when you're in DC.
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But also who is this? Is this an accident?
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Is this a deliberate terrorist attack?
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What were your thoughts of the options
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and the internal ranking given here by expertise?
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I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative
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that this was international.
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I mean, I'd also lived in New York
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during one of the first bombings in 94
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of the World Trade Center.
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So it was clear to me that a radical community
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had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of,
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and I immediately thought it was a,
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it was a kind of blow to American power.
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And, you know, I was drawn by the symbolism of it.
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You know, if you think of it as an act,
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it was a kind of an act of speech,
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if you will, kind of a way of speaking to,
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from a position of relative weakness,
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speaking to an imperial power.
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And that I saw, I saw it as a kind of symbolic,
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you know, speech act of that with horrific,
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you know, real world consequences for all those innocent victims
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for the fire and for the police
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and just the, you know, the horror of the moment.
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So I did see it as transcending the United States,
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but I did not see it as really having anything
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necessarily to do fundamentally about Afghanistan
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and the history of the region that I'd been studying
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and the community people that I knew
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who were not particularly religious, right?
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The guys I hung out with actually wore me out
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because they wanted to go out every night.
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They wanted to party every night.
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We had discussions about alcohol.
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I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its.
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Drinking. It's drinking.
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That's something to look forward to.
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So I do want to travel to that part of the world.
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When was the last time you were in that part of the world?
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Well, then mid 2000s, 2010s.
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So wait, so by the way, we're drinking vodka.
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What's the, what's the weapon of choice?
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Uzbekistan has a cooperative vodka as the choice.
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And it informs, you know, and it's,
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but the fascinating thing, you know,
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and as a student is what you're observing as a non Muslim,
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you know, I'm a non Russian.
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I'm this is all, you know, culturally new to me.
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And I'm, you know, a student of all that, right?
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So I got a student doing my work there.
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So you're like Jane Goodall of vodka in Russia.
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That's right. Just observing.
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That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
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And then you get the, you get the some of gone,
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the grass vodka, you get, you know,
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I have, I've had some long nights
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on the Kazakhstan frontier that I'm not proud of, you know,
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but you got to know the people
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and some of them from, yeah, yeah.
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But intellectually, so the thing,
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I mean, the, the, the fascinating thing there was it,
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and just as a, I mean, there's a whole,
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yeah, I'm destroying, right?
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But there are great contributions by, you know,
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anthropologists and ethnographers who,
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who've gone across the planet and tried to understand
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how Muslims understand the tradition at different contexts.
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So many usbecks will say, you know,
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this is part of our national culture
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to drink and eat as we please, right?
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And yet I'm a very devout Muslim.
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And so of course you can encounter other Muslim communities
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who won't touch alcohol, right?
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But it's become kind of, I think it's very much, you know,
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Soviet culture left a deep impression
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in each of these places.
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And so there are ways of thinking, ways of performing,
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ways of, you know, enjoying oneself
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that are shared across Soviet and former Soviet space
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to this day, right?
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And you've written also about Muslims in the Soviet Union.
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The, there's an article that there's a paywall
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so I couldn't read it and I really want to read it.
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Is a Moscow in the mosque or something like that.
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By the way, just another tangent, not a tangent.
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So I bought all your books, I love them very much.
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Thank you, thank you.
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One of the reasons I bought them
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and read many parts is because they're easy to buy.
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Unlike articles, every single website has a paywall.
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So it's very, very frustrating to read brilliant scholars
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I wish there was one fee I could pay everywhere.
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I don't care what that fee is,
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it just allows me to read some of your brilliant writing.
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No, no, thank you, I hear you.
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No, I think moving toward more kind of open source,
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formatting stuff, I think is what a lot of journals
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are thinking about now.
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And I think it's definitely for the kind of
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democratization of knowledge and scholarship.
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That's definitely an important thing
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that we should all think about.
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And I think, you know, we need to exert pressure
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on these publishers to do that.
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So I appreciate that.
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This is what I'm doing here.
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Yeah, yeah, good, good.
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No, I appreciate it.
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So your thought was Afghanistan is not,
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it's not going to be the center, the source of where.
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Exactly, it's not the center of this.
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And if that country isn't going to fix,
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isn't going to fix the, you know,
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toxic malformal politics that produced 9.11, right?
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I think it's thinking of some of the personalities
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just thinking about going back to the Tashkin story
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which I'll end with.
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I mean, just observing, you know,
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real Muslims doing things and then asking questions
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about it and trying to understand through their eyes
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what the tradition means to them.
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And then, you know, you have a,
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we had a very narrow conversation
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about what Islam is that, you know,
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generated immediately exploded in, you know,
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on the day of 9.11, right?
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And then of course, I think the antipathy
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toward Islam and Muslims, you know,
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was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.
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So it became a perfect storm.
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I think of demonization that didn't sit with, you know,
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what I knew about the tradition
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and with the actual people that I had known
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because then going back to,
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I mean, they're other friends and encounters and so on,
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but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tashkin for a moment.
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I mean, just that thought about my friends
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who had been, who had suffered a great deal
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in their short lives, who had been, you know,
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cast aside from country to country,
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but had found a place in Tashkin
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with some relative stability.
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And, you know, they wanted to go out every night
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and, you know, they explained, you know,
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one friend, we talked about it with the alcohol
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and he didn't get crazy, but he was like,
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you can drink, but just don't get drunk.
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That's permissible within Islam, right?
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And he was, you know, ethnic Pashtun.
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I think Uzbeks had a different view, you know,
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often the more vodka, the better, you know?
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And it doesn't violate, as I understand Islam.
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So even, you know, it's kind of a silly example,
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but it's just an illustration of the ways in which
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different communities, different generations,
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different people can come at this very complex tradition
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in so many different ways.
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So obviously, if whatever kind of scholar you are,
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or any kind of expert, whatever, you know,
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it's always disconcerting to see your field of specialization
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be flattened, right?
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And then be flattened and then be turned to
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arguments for violence, right?
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Mixed up with natural human feelings of hate.
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And, and hurt, and pain.
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So I, you know, I mean, that day I vividly remember
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I sat with other PhD historians in different fields.
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We, you know, we oddly enough had lunch that day
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and it kind of deserted Washington.
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Some place was open when we went.
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And we just thought, you know, this is going to kind of
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open up like a great maw of destruction.
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And, you know, the American state is going to destroy
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and it's going to destroy in this geography.
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And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.
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And then I think if when, you know,
link |
I'd been doing some research on Afghanistan then
link |
I was kind of shifting to the South.
link |
And I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar for some years.
link |
And, you know, I think it's clear now that in retrospect
link |
there were opportunities for alternative policies
link |
So what should the conversation have been like?
link |
What should we have done differently?
link |
Because, you know, from a perspective of the time
link |
the United States was invaded by a foreign force.
link |
What is the proper response?
link |
Or what is the proper conversation
link |
about the proper response at the time, you think?
link |
You know, I know my colleague at Sanford,
link |
Connolly Saris would tell me this is above my pay grade.
link |
And, you know, she makes a point in her classes
link |
to talk about how difficult decision making is
link |
under such intense pressure.
link |
And I appreciate that.
link |
You know, I am an historian who sits safely in my office.
link |
I don't like battlefields.
link |
I don't like taking risks.
link |
So I can see all those limits.
link |
You know, I'm not a military expert.
link |
I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone
link |
because of the way I look and because of my nationality
link |
and so on, but I'm not a spy.
link |
So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise
link |
of all those communities.
link |
But I think they acted out of ignorance.
link |
They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the,
link |
in a way, there was a compensatory aspect
link |
of this decision making.
link |
I mean, the Bush administration failed.
link |
This is an extraordinary failure, right?
link |
If we're going to break down the...
link |
A failure of intelligence.
link |
I mean, if you follow the story of Richard Clark...
link |
Who's Richard Clark?
link |
He was a national security expert
link |
who was tasked with following Al Qaeda.
link |
Who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration
link |
that he passed on to the George W. Bush administration.
link |
And if you look at the work of Conleysa Rice,
link |
she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaywalled
link |
foreign affairs article that you can read,
link |
announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook.
link |
And it was all about great powers,
link |
is about the rise of China, is about Russia.
link |
I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover
link |
of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman
link |
The Clinton administration repeated again and again
link |
the idea of making sure the bear stayed in his cage,
link |
which is why the United States threw a lifeline
link |
to the Central Asian states, hoping to have pipelines,
link |
hoping to shore up their national sovereignty
link |
as a way of containing Russia initially,
link |
but also Iran, which sits to the south and west,
link |
and then peripherally looking down the road
link |
to China, to the east.
link |
So the bear is what, like Russia?
link |
Or is it kind of like some weird combination
link |
of Russia, Iran, and China?
link |
The bear is Russia, and Russia is this...
link |
I'm trying to characterize the imagination
link |
of some of these national security figures.
link |
This is an image formed in the Cold War.
link |
I mean, it has deeper seeds in European
link |
and Western intellectual thought that go back,
link |
at least to the 1850s and the reign of Tsar Nicholas I.
link |
When we first get this language about the Russian Empire,
link |
is this kind of evil polity.
link |
Obviously, this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism,
link |
but the Clinton folks kept that alive.
link |
They wanted to make sure that American power would be unmatched,
link |
and they, being creatures of the Cold War themselves,
link |
they looked to Russia as a recession power
link |
well before Putin was even thought of.
link |
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned one deep,
link |
profound historical piece in Rambo.
link |
This probably, this conflict has to do
link |
with another Celestino movie, Iraqi Four,
link |
which is also historically accurate and based on...
link |
It's basically a documentary.
link |
So there is something about the American power,
link |
even at the level of Condoleezza Rice,
link |
these respected, deep kind of leaders and thinkers
link |
about history in the future,
link |
where they like to have competition with other superpowers
link |
and almost conjure up superpowers,
link |
even when those countries don't maybe, at the time,
link |
at least deserve the label of superpower.
link |
That's right, that's a great point.
link |
Yeah, they're all awesome points.
link |
So yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many,
link |
many experts, I mean, my mentor at Princeton,
link |
Stephen Cochran, was then writing great things
link |
about how, if you look at Russia's economy,
link |
the scale of its GDP, its capacity to actually add globally,
link |
it's all quite limited.
link |
But Condoleezza Rice and the people around her,
link |
came into power with George Obi Bush,
link |
thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era
link |
would be those of the past, right?
link |
Richard Clark and others within the administration
link |
warned that, in fact, there is this group
link |
that has declared war against the United States,
link |
and they are coming for us.
link |
The FBI had been following these people around
link |
And so by the time George Obi Bush comes to power,
link |
lots of Alcatraz activists, well, not lots,
link |
but perhaps a dozen or so,
link |
are already training in the United States, right?
link |
And what we knew immediately from the biographies
link |
of some of the characters of the attackers of 9.11,
link |
it was a hot spot for people from across the planet,
link |
but most of them were Saudi, right?
link |
And that was known very early on,
link |
or presumably very early on.
link |
So again, if we go back to your big question
link |
about the geography, why Afghanistan,
link |
it didn't add up, right?
link |
It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target.
link |
It was a place to have explosions,
link |
to seemingly recapture American supremacy.
link |
And also, I think in many quarters,
link |
there was a deep urge for revenge.
link |
And this is a place to have some casualties,
link |
have some explosions.
link |
And then I think, you know,
link |
restore the legitimacy of the Bush administration
link |
by showing that we are in charge, we will pay.
link |
And I think there was a very old fashioned punitive dimension
link |
which rests upon the presumption that
link |
if we intimidate these people,
link |
they'll know not to try this again, right?
link |
All these I would suggest are all misreadings
link |
of an organization that was always global.
link |
It had no real center.
link |
I mean, it called itself the center.
link |
It's one way to translate Al Qaeda,
link |
but that center was really in the imagination.
link |
Bin Laden bounced around from country to country.
link |
And crucially, I think a dimension
link |
that I don't claim to know anything new about,
link |
but has endured as a kind of doubt,
link |
is the role of Saudi Arabia and the fact that, you know,
link |
the muscle in that operation of 911 was Saudi, right?
link |
I mean, this was a Saudi operation with,
link |
if one thinks again, just on the basis of nationalities,
link |
Saudis, you know, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy,
link |
and the Egyptian guy had been studying in Germany.
link |
He was an urban planner, right?
link |
So if one thinks of the imagination of this, I mean,
link |
and if I did, if you look at the kind of typology of
link |
the figures who have led this radical movement,
link |
I mean, if you think of the global jihadists,
link |
they are mostly not religious scholars, right?
link |
Bin Laden was not a religious scholar.
link |
His training was an engineer, you know,
link |
some biographers claim that he was a playboy
link |
for much of his youth, but really that these ideas,
link |
I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers.
link |
I mean, this is an imagination fueled by training
link |
and engineering, I mean, a lot of the, you know,
link |
the sociology, if you do a kind of prospochography
link |
of a lot of these leading jihadists,
link |
their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship,
link |
but actually in engineering and kind of practical sciences
link |
and professions, medical doctors are among their ranks.
link |
And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars
link |
who devote their whole lives to study of texts
link |
and commentary and interpretation.
link |
And then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals,
link |
new Muslim authorities,
link |
who actually have secular university educations,
link |
often in the natural sciences or engineering
link |
and technical fields, who then bring that kind of mindset,
link |
if you will, to what Muslim scholars call
link |
the religious sciences, which are, you know,
link |
a field of kind of ambiguity and of gradation
link |
and of subtlety and nuance and really of decades of training
link |
before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues
link |
like whether or not it's legitimate
link |
to take someone else's life.
link |
Were the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden?
link |
Bin Laden was a visitor.
link |
If you look at his whole life course,
link |
part of it is an enigma still.
link |
You know, he is from a Saudi elite family,
link |
but a family that kind of has a Yemeni Arabian sea
link |
kind of genealogy.
link |
So the family has no relationship to Afghanistan
link |
past or present, except at some point in 1980s,
link |
when he went like thousands of other young Saudis,
link |
first to Pakistan, to places like Bashar on the border,
link |
where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.
link |
And for the most part, the Arabs who went
link |
opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.
link |
The bin Laden family had long been
link |
based in engineering construction.
link |
So it's thought that he used some of those skills
link |
and resources and connections to build things.
link |
You know, we have images of him firing a gun for show,
link |
It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun
link |
in what we would call combat.
link |
Again, I could be corrected by this.
link |
And I think, you know, there are competing accounts
link |
So he's kind of a...
link |
I mean, many of these figures who sit at the pinnacle
link |
of this world are, you know, fictive heroes
link |
that people, you know, map their aspirations onto, right?
link |
And so people like Mullah Omar,
link |
who was then head of the Taliban, was really seen in public.
link |
The current head of the Taliban
link |
is almost never seen in public.
link |
I mean, this is kind of studied air of mystery
link |
that they've cultivated to make themselves available
link |
for all kinds of fantasies, right?
link |
Do you think he believed, so his religious beliefs,
link |
do you think he believed some of the more extreme things
link |
that enable him to commit terrorist acts,
link |
maybe put another way,
link |
what makes a man want to become a terrorist
link |
and what aspect of bin Laden made him want to be a terrorist?
link |
I mean, let me offer some observations.
link |
I think, you know, there are others
link |
who know more about bin Laden
link |
and have far more expertise in al Qaeda.
link |
So I'm coming this in an adjacent way,
link |
kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training.
link |
So this is my two cents, so, you know, bear with me.
link |
I don't have the authoritative account for this, but...
link |
Which in itself is fascinating
link |
because you're a historian of Afghanistan.
link |
And the fact that bin Laden isn't a huge part
link |
of your focus of study just means
link |
that bin Laden is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan,
link |
except that America made him a key part
link |
of the history of Afghanistan.
link |
I would endorse that, definitely.
link |
I mean, you've put it in a very pitty, pitty way.
link |
Yeah, so listen, he was an engineer.
link |
He was said to be a playboy
link |
who spent a lot of cash from his family.
link |
You know, like many young Saudis
link |
and from some other countries,
link |
he was inspired by this idea
link |
that there was Jihad in Afghanistan.
link |
It was gonna take down one of the two superpowers,
link |
the Soviet Union, who, you know,
link |
the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands,
link |
perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians
link |
during that conflict.
link |
It's very plausible and very, you know,
link |
completely understandable that many young people
link |
would see that cause as, you know,
link |
the righteous, pious fighters for Jihad,
link |
who call themselves Mujahideen,
link |
arrayed against this evil empire, right,
link |
of a godless Soviet empire that,
link |
I mean, there's even confusion about what the Soviets wanted,
link |
right, now we know much more about like
link |
what the Kremlin wanted, what Brezhnev wanted,
link |
and how the Soviet elite thought about it
link |
because we have many more of their records.
link |
But from the outside, you know, for Jimmy Carter
link |
and then for Reagan, it looked like the Soviets
link |
were making a move on South Asia
link |
because they wanted to get to the warm water ports,
link |
you know, which Russians always want supposedly, right?
link |
And it was kind of a move to take over our oil
link |
and, you know, to assert world domination, right?
link |
So there are lots of ways in which this looked like
link |
good receivable in Congress.
link |
It looked like, you know, kind of Vietnam again,
link |
but this time, this is our chance to get them.
link |
And there are lots of great quotes, I mean, disturbing,
link |
but really revealing quotes that American policy makers
link |
made about wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam.
link |
So the CIA funneled, you know,
link |
hundreds of millions of dollars into this project
link |
to back the Mujahideen, you know,
link |
who Reagan called freedom fighters.
link |
And so, Bin Laden was part of that universe.
link |
He's part of that, you know, he's swimming in the ocean
link |
of these Afghans Mujahideen who out of size, you know,
link |
did 95% of the fighting.
link |
They're the ones who died.
link |
They're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right?
link |
The Arabs who were there did a little fighting,
link |
but a lot of it was for, you know, their purposes.
link |
It was to get experience.
link |
It was to kind of create their reputations
link |
like Bin Laden began to force for himself
link |
of being spokesman for a global project.
link |
Because by the late 80s, when Bin Laden, you know,
link |
I think was more active and began conspiring
link |
with people from other Arab countries,
link |
the idea that, you know, Gorbachev became a power in 85.
link |
He's like, let's get out of here.
link |
This is draining the Soviet budget.
link |
It's an embarrassment.
link |
We didn't think about this properly.
link |
Let's focus on restoring the party
link |
and strengthening the Soviet Union.
link |
Let's get out of this costly war.
link |
You know, it's a waste.
link |
It's not worth it.
link |
We're even losing anything by getting out of Afghanistan.
link |
And so their retreat was quite effective and successful
link |
from the Soviet point of view, right?
link |
It's not what we're seeing now.
link |
What year was the retreat?
link |
I mean, it began, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
link |
You know, he was a generation younger than the other guys.
link |
He was a critic of the system.
link |
He didn't want to abolish it.
link |
He wanted to reform it.
link |
He was a true believer in Soviet socialism
link |
and in the party as a, you know, a monopolist, right?
link |
But he was critical of the old guard
link |
and recognized that the party had a change
link |
and the whole system had a change to continue to compete.
link |
And so Afghanistan was one element of this.
link |
And so he pushed the Afghan elites
link |
that Moscow was backing to basically say,
link |
listen, we're gonna share power.
link |
And so a figure named Najibullah,
link |
who was a Soviet trained intelligence specialist
link |
sitting in Kabul, agreed.
link |
And he said, we need to have a more kind of pluralistic
link |
accommodations approach to our enemies
link |
who are backed by the US mainly, sitting in Pakistan,
link |
sitting in Iran, backed by his Arabs to agree,
link |
getting money from Saudi.
link |
And he said, let's draw some of them into the government
link |
and basically have a kind of unity government
link |
that would make some space the opposition.
link |
And for the most part, with US backing,
link |
with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing
link |
and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no,
link |
we're not going to reconcile.
link |
We're gonna push you off the cliff.
link |
And so that story goes on from at least 1987,
link |
the last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989.
link |
But the Najibullah government holds on for three more years.
link |
It is the, I mean, they're still getting some help from the Soviet Union.
link |
Its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly.
link |
And it's not until 1992 that they lose.
link |
And then Mujahideen come into power.
link |
They immediately, they're deeply fractured.
link |
And that's where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll.
link |
And he's part of the mix, but he's also mobile.
link |
So he at one point goes, is in Sudan.
link |
He's moving from place to place.
link |
His people are all over the world.
link |
In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the,
link |
once the Mujahideen take power,
link |
you know, they have difficulties with Arab fighters too.
link |
And they don't want them coming in and, you know,
link |
messing with Mujahideen regard this as like, you know,
link |
this is an Afghan national state that we're going to build.
link |
It's going to be Islamic.
link |
It's going to be an Islamic state,
link |
but you can't interfere with us.
link |
And so they're always tensions.
link |
And so the Arabs are always kind of, I would say they were,
link |
Arab fighters were always interlopers.
link |
Yes, the Africans are happy to take their money,
link |
send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons,
link |
but they were never going to let this be like a Saudi
link |
or Egyptian or whatever project.
link |
But then many of those fighters went home.
link |
They went back to Syria.
link |
They went back to Egypt.
link |
Some wanted to go back to the Saudi Arabia,
link |
but the Saudis were very careful.
link |
I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan
link |
as a kind of safety valve.
link |
In fact, they had, you know, fundraisers on television.
link |
They chartered jets.
link |
They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan,
link |
get out and push our and say, you know, go fight.
link |
And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy,
link |
very cleverly, I think,
link |
created a kind of escape valve
link |
for would be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right?
link |
Just send them abroad.
link |
You want to fight Jihad.
link |
Go do that somewhere else.
link |
Don't, don't bother the kingdom.
link |
But all this became dicier in the early nineties
link |
when some of these guys came back home
link |
and some of the scholars around them said, you know,
link |
let's we've defeated the Soviet Union,
link |
which is a huge, huge boost.
link |
And I think part of the dynamic we see today
link |
is that the Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration
link |
for people who think, look, we beat the Soviets,
link |
now we beat the Americans.
link |
And so already watching the Soviet retreat
link |
across this bridge, back into Uzbekistan,
link |
if you see these dramatic images of the tanks, you know,
link |
moving, a lot of people interpreted this as like,
link |
you know, we are going to change the world.
link |
And now we're turning to the Americans.
link |
And our local national governments
link |
are backed by the Americans.
link |
So let's start with those places.
link |
And then let's go strike, let's go strike, you know,
link |
the belly of the beast, which is America, which is New York.
link |
And going back to Milan, your question about, you know,
link |
what motivates him, what motivated him, you know, again,
link |
he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar.
link |
And that I think, you know, when this comes up in our classes,
link |
you know, I think, especially young people,
link |
I mean, people who aren't even born when I live,
link |
I mean, they're shocked.
link |
They see, they see his appearance.
link |
They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf
link |
He's got the Klashnikov.
link |
He's got what looks like a religious scholar's library
link |
behind him, right?
link |
But if you look at his words, I mean,
link |
one fascinating thing about this our politics
link |
and just one thing that kind of sums this up,
link |
I mean, the fact that on 9 11, we had to have a few people,
link |
a few experts, people like Burnett Rubin,
link |
who was an Afghanistan expert.
link |
So that was one way in which I think, you know,
link |
I'm not faulting him personally,
link |
but it's just one way in which that relationship appeared
link |
to be, you know, formed, right?
link |
Of linking Afghanistan to that moment.
link |
If one looks actually, you know,
link |
what bin Laden was saying and doing,
link |
people like Richard Clark were studying this.
link |
There were Arab leaders.
link |
The Arab press was watching this
link |
because he gave some of his first interviews
link |
to a few Arab newspaper outlets.
link |
But speaking of our American kind of, you know,
link |
monolingualism, a lot of what he was saying wasn't known.
link |
And so I think for several years,
link |
people weren't reading what bin Laden said.
link |
I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic,
link |
but there was great anxiety around transiting his works.
link |
So, you know, we have Mon Comf, we have all this stuff.
link |
You can buy the collective works of Lin and Stalin, Mao,
link |
whatever you want in whatever language you want.
link |
But bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.
link |
And so it was only a verse though in the UK
link |
that published a famous volume called,
link |
Messages to the World,
link |
which was the first companion of bin Laden's writings.
link |
So he has a mind conf.
link |
He has a tight, does he have a thing with you?
link |
I mean, it's a kind of collective works.
link |
It's a collective works of his.
link |
Okay, so he had, well, like a blog.
link |
Like it's a collection of articles versus.
link |
Yeah, these are interviews.
link |
These are his missives, his declarations,
link |
his decrees, right?
link |
But I think just in terms of,
link |
if we zoom out for a second about, you know,
link |
American policy choices and so on,
link |
the powers to be didn't trust us
link |
to know what he was really about.
link |
I put it that way.
link |
And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense.
link |
I just think that it was, you know, it was a taboo.
link |
I think people, you know, there was a kind of consensus
link |
that, you know, trust us.
link |
We know how to fight al Qaeda.
link |
And you don't need to know what they're about
link |
because they're crazy.
link |
They're fanatics, they're fundamentalists.
link |
Remember that language?
link |
But if you read bin Laden,
link |
that's when it gets messy.
link |
That's where the bin Laden's argumentation
link |
is not fundamentally about Islam.
link |
And if you were sitting here with an Islamic scholar,
link |
he would say, you know, to anyone
link |
which is Islamic scholar,
link |
they would tend to go through and dissect
link |
and negate, you know, 99% of the arguments
link |
that bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?
link |
But what strikes me as an historian,
link |
who's again, looking at this adjacently,
link |
if we read bin Laden, I mean,
link |
the arguments that he make are, first of all,
link |
they're sophisticated.
link |
They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics.
link |
He uses terms like imperialism.
link |
He knows something about world history.
link |
He knows something about geography.
link |
So imperialism is the enemy form
link |
or what's the nature of the enemy?
link |
And like a good politician,
link |
which is what I would call him,
link |
he is adept at speaking in different ways
link |
to different audiences.
link |
So if you look at the context in which he speaks,
link |
if you look at messages to the world,
link |
if you look at his writings,
link |
and you can zoom it out now.
link |
And we now have compendia of the writings
link |
of al Qaeda more broadly.
link |
You can purchase these, you know,
link |
they're basically primary source collections.
link |
We now have that for the Taliban.
link |
I mean, what's fascinating about,
link |
I think if you like this culture,
link |
acknowledging it's very, you know, diverse internally,
link |
is that these people are representatives
link |
of political movements who seek followers.
link |
They often are very, I'd say, skilled at visual imagery.
link |
And especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that,
link |
I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions.
link |
They used to, you know, blow up VCR, you know, videotapes.
link |
They used to string audio videocassettes
link |
from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right?
link |
That we're killing this nefarious,
link |
infiddle technology that is doing the work of Satan.
link |
And yet today, and one of the keys to the Taliban's success
link |
is that they got really good at using media.
link |
I mean, brilliant at using the written word,
link |
the spoken word, music, actually.
link |
And, you know, Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard.
link |
And these guys have studied how to create drama,
link |
how to speak to modern users.
link |
I mean, Islamic State did this.
link |
I mean, the role of media, new media.
link |
I mean, I follow and I am followed
link |
by senior Taliban leaders, which is, you know, bizarre,
link |
you know, on Twitter.
link |
I don't know why they care about me.
link |
They follow you on Twitter?
link |
So they're part of our modern world
link |
and it's how they talk and it's how they recruit.
link |
And this is part of the, this is why they are, you know,
link |
so Bin Laden, if you read Bin Laden, he,
link |
he speaks multiple languages, I would say.
link |
It's environmentalism.
link |
You know, the West is bad because we destroyed the planet.
link |
The West is bad because we abuse women.
link |
So in class, you know, especially, you know,
link |
female students are very surprised to learn
link |
and actually say, you know, this feminist argument
link |
is not, you know, we start with, you know,
link |
This is a person who has taken human life,
link |
innocent life, over and over again.
link |
And he is, you know, aspirational and genocidal.
link |
But let's try to understand what he's about.
link |
So we walk through the texts, read them,
link |
and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about,
link |
you know, quotations in the Quran
link |
strung together in some irrational fashion.
link |
He knows, I mean, at the core I'd say
link |
is the problem of human suffering.
link |
And he has a geography of that that is mostly Muslim,
link |
but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir.
link |
All right, so if you have a student in your class
link |
who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir,
link |
you know, he or she will say,
link |
that's not entirely inaccurate, you know.
link |
The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir.
link |
You know, Pakistan is even that too.
link |
You know, Palestine is an issue, right?
link |
So you have an American university setting
link |
people across the spectrum who get that, you know,
link |
Palestinians have had a raw deal.
link |
And so it's a, victimhood is central.
link |
And it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary,
link |
but as a number of scholars have written,
link |
and I'm, you know, I definitely think this is a framework
link |
for what this useful.
link |
I mean, in this kind of vocabulary,
link |
in this framing, in this narrative today,
link |
in today's world, if we think of today's world
link |
being post Cold War, 91 to the present,
link |
looking at the series of Gulf Wars,
link |
and seeing the visuals of that, I think that, you know,
link |
I think the American public has been shielded from some of this,
link |
but if you look at, you know,
link |
it's the carnage of the Iraqi army
link |
that George H. W. Bush produced, right?
link |
Or you think of, you know,
link |
the images of the suffering of Iraqi children
link |
under George H. W. Bush's sanctions,
link |
U.S. British air strikes,
link |
then you have Madeleine Albright
link |
answer a question on 60 Minutes saying,
link |
do you think, you know,
link |
the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids is worth it?
link |
You know, is that justified to contain some Hussein?
link |
And she says on camera, yes, it's worth it to me.
link |
If you put that all together,
link |
I mean, American kids, and of course, the American public,
link |
they're not always aware of those facts of global history,
link |
but these guys are,
link |
and they very capably use these images,
link |
use these tropes, and use facts.
link |
I mean, in fact, I mean,
link |
some of these things are not deniable.
link |
I mean, these estimates about the number
link |
of Iraqi civilian children dead, you know,
link |
that came from, I think, the Lancet,
link |
and it came from, you know, those are estimates,
link |
but look at this point of view of Amman,
link |
of, you know, Jaffa, of Nairobi,
link |
you know, just think around the planet.
link |
And if you see yourself as the victim
link |
of this great imperial power,
link |
you know, you see why especially young men
link |
would be drawn to a road of self sacrifice.
link |
And the idea is that in killing others,
link |
you are making them feel how you feel
link |
because they won't listen to your arguments reasonably
link |
because they won't, you know, recognize Palestinian suffering,
link |
Bosnian suffering, right?
link |
Chechen suffering, you go across the planet, right?
link |
Because they won't recognize our suffering,
link |
we're gonna speak to you
link |
in the only language that you understand,
link |
and that's violence.
link |
And look at the violence of the post 1991 world, right?
link |
In which American air power really becomes a global,
link |
you know, kind of fact in the lives of so many people.
link |
And then the big mistake after 911, among many,
link |
I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror
link |
to some, you know, 30 or 40 countries, right?
link |
So that you have a more and more of the globe feel
link |
like they're under attack, right?
link |
And the logic is essentially, it's not,
link |
it's not, it's really been law and it's not,
link |
we're going to convert you and turn you into Muslims,
link |
that's why we're doing this.
link |
That appears, that claim does appear at times,
link |
but it's, if you look at any given bin Laden text,
link |
I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.
link |
I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying,
link |
but he's a modern politician.
link |
He knows the language of social quality,
link |
you know, that there's a class dimension to it,
link |
there is an environmental dimension to it,
link |
there's a gender dimension to it.
link |
And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in,
link |
and when he wants to speak that language,
link |
he knew that, you know, he's not a scholar.
link |
So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on.
link |
So some of his declarations of Jihad had his signature
link |
kind of sprinkled in with like a dozen other signatures
link |
from people who were somewhat known
link |
or at least, you know, with titles, right?
link |
So as a kind of intellectual exercise,
link |
it's fascinating to see that he is throwing everything
link |
at the wall at one level.
link |
That's one way to see that it's a,
link |
these are kind of testaments toward recruitment
link |
of people who, yes, they're angry, yes, they're unhappy.
link |
And this is what, you know, I think
link |
for a broader public, it's hard to get, you're like,
link |
well, Bin Laden suffered, he wasn't poor.
link |
Like, yeah, I mean, linen, pulp hot.
link |
I mean, they're speaking to the empathetic
link |
to the suffering, the landscape,
link |
the full landscape of suffering.
link |
It's interesting to think about suffering, you know,
link |
America, the American public,
link |
American politicians and leaders,
link |
when they see what is good and evil,
link |
they are often not empathetic to the suffering of others.
link |
And what you're saying has been Latin,
link |
perhaps accurately could speak to the ignorance of America,
link |
maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people.
link |
And I mean, if you look at the speeches
link |
and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s,
link |
he spoke quite accurately to the injustice
link |
and maybe the suffering of the German people.
link |
I mean, charismatic politicians are good
link |
at telling accurate stories.
link |
It's not all fabricated, but they emphasize certain aspects.
link |
And then the problem part is the actions
link |
you should take based on that.
link |
So the narratives and the stories
link |
may be grounded in historical accuracy.
link |
The actions then cross the line, the ethical line.
link |
I find that too, I mean, it's a, again,
link |
if you pick up just one of these texts,
link |
I mean, it's a claudoscope.
link |
So the Hitler analogy is interesting
link |
because it's, you know, Hitler spoke to,
link |
he could speak to things like inflation, right?
link |
Which really existed, but he also appealed
link |
to the irrational emotions of Germans, right?
link |
He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma,
link |
disabled people, homosexuals, and so on, right?
link |
I mean, that's also there in Bin Laden too.
link |
I mean, daddy of, you know, an anti semitism,
link |
the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders.
link |
It's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers.
link |
But I also hasten to add that it's
link |
for all of the things that we could take off saying,
link |
well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered,
link |
Chechens have suffered, and so on.
link |
Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.
link |
I mean, it never really, I think the,
link |
I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right?
link |
I mean, I think the blood on his hands
link |
always limited his appeal among Muslims and others.
link |
But Bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a,
link |
there's a great book by a great scholar at UC San Diego,
link |
Jeremy Prestholt, who read a great book
link |
about global icons in which he has Bin Laden.
link |
He has Bob Marley.
link |
You know, he asked why, you know, when he's doing research
link |
in East Africa, why did he see young kids
link |
wearing Bin Laden shirts?
link |
They're also wearing like Tupac shirts.
link |
They're wearing Bin Bob Marley shirts.
link |
And basically it's a way of looking at
link |
a kind of partial embrace of some aspects
link |
of the rebelliousness of some of these figures,
link |
some of the time by some people under certain conditions.
link |
Well, the terrifying thing to me.
link |
So yeah, there is a longing in the human heart
link |
to belong to a group and a charismatic leader
link |
somehow, especially when you're young,
link |
just a catalyst for all of that.
link |
And I tend to think that perhaps it's actually hard
link |
to be a Hitler, so a leader so charismatic
link |
that he can rattle a nation to war.
link |
And Bin Laden, perhaps we're lucky,
link |
was not sufficiently charismatic.
link |
I feel like if his writing was better,
link |
if his speeches were better,
link |
if his ideas were stronger,
link |
but it's like more viral,
link |
and then there would be more people
link |
kind of young people uniting around him.
link |
So in some sense, it's almost like accidents of history
link |
of just how much charisma,
link |
how much charisma a particular evil person has
link |
for a person like Bin Laden.
link |
I think it's fair, evil works, I think.
link |
Do you think Bin Laden is evil?
link |
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, he was a mass murderer.
link |
I'm just saying that his ideas were,
link |
they're more complex than we've tended to acknowledge.
link |
They have a wider potential resonance
link |
than we would acknowledge.
link |
I mean, and also I guess one fundamental point
link |
is that thinking about the complexity of Bin Laden
link |
is also a way of removing him from Islam.
link |
He is not an Islamic thinker.
link |
He is a cosmopolitan thinker who plays
link |
in all kinds of modern ideologies,
link |
which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right?
link |
So antisemitism, populism, environmentalism,
link |
and the urging to do something about humanity,
link |
do something about suffering.
link |
That's why I think the actual,
link |
you ask about what motivates people to do this kind of stuff.
link |
I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership,
link |
and this is being reported,
link |
if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris
link |
of the Bataclan murders, I think, the court allowed
link |
some discussion of the backgrounds of the accused,
link |
and they come from different backgrounds,
link |
but if there's any common bond,
link |
it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime.
link |
Famously in the 7.7 bombings in London,
link |
the Metropolitan Police, UK authorities
link |
looked at all those guys,
link |
and what people want is this idea
link |
that they must be very pious.
link |
They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff.
link |
They must be fanatical true believers,
link |
but what they found with those guys
link |
was that some were nominally Muslim,
link |
some went to mosques, some didn't.
link |
Some were single young guys with like criminal backgrounds.
link |
Some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits
link |
who never succeeded in anything,
link |
but others had at least one thing,
link |
had a wife and family who he would owed and orphaned.
link |
And so there's no, I mean, for policing,
link |
I mean, if you're looking at the Bataclan's,
link |
there is no kind of typology
link |
that will predict who will become violent.
link |
And that's why I think we have to move beyond
link |
thinking about religious augmentation narrowly
link |
or by itself and think about things like geopolitics,
link |
thinking about how people respond to inequality,
link |
the existential threat of climate crisis,
link |
of a whole host of matters and think about,
link |
this is a mode of political contestation.
link |
I mean, it's a violent one, it's one I can do,
link |
it is evil, right?
link |
But these are people that are,
link |
they're trying to be political,
link |
they're trying to change things in some way.
link |
It's not narrowly about like,
link |
I don't know, impose sharia law on you,
link |
you must wear a veil, you must eat this kind of food,
link |
it's not that parochial.
link |
But what went, another quick thought
link |
about your interesting claim about charisma in this,
link |
I think that the one self limiting feature
link |
of this subculture is that definitely,
link |
I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen
link |
and that the kind of invisibility
link |
is a productive force of a power,
link |
you know, which a colleague of mine who knows
link |
ancient history far better than I,
link |
you know, so this is, you know,
link |
when she looked at Malomar initially
link |
or we time up in Laden, I mean,
link |
this kind of studied posture of staying in the shadows,
link |
you know, is also a source of authority potentially
link |
because it, it invites the idea,
link |
and it's partly dictatorships too as well.
link |
I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working
link |
and maybe it's the basis for a lot of QAnon
link |
or other conspiracy today that someone's working
link |
behind the scenes and things are gonna go the right way,
link |
you can't see it, that's almost preferable
link |
because you can kind of feel it.
link |
And so not having someone out front
link |
can maybe be more effective
link |
than having someone out in front constantly.
link |
Then the whole. Maybe, maybe.
link |
And then the whole Bin Laden, you know,
link |
Malomar thing like you can't see me
link |
or if you look at Bin Laden's photographs
link |
and his video stuff, I mean, he's, he's coy.
link |
Some observers have noted that he's kind of effeminate.
link |
He doesn't strike this kind of masculine.
link |
He's not a Mussolini.
link |
He's not a Hitler macho.
link |
I'm standing, might dump in my chest.
link |
He's not doing the theatrical chin, you know.
link |
The theater people tell us it's so aggressive, you know.
link |
Oh, a chin? What, putting your chin up?
link |
I saw a great BBC theater person.
link |
It was kind of a, it was a makeover show
link |
about how to become a better.
link |
Just a powerful, yeah, leader authoritarian figure.
link |
No, just how to, how to like get ahead in life.
link |
And then. Oh, okay, cool.
link |
And just like about acting,
link |
like how you can act differently, right?
link |
So it was, it was a BBC thing.
link |
And this woman claimed that, you know,
link |
sticking your chin out like a wrestler does, right?
link |
Is the most like male to male.
link |
I love this kind of.
link |
Hilarious analysis that people have about power.
link |
But watch the chin, watch the chin.
link |
It's the same as analyzing, like in wrestling styles
link |
that win or fighting or so on.
link |
There's so many ways to do it.
link |
Well, the chin, I mean, the chin is a,
link |
could be interesting verbal gesture.
link |
And I, I've watched enough Mussolini footage for my classes
link |
to try to pick the right moment.
link |
And the chin is, Mussolini's all about the chin.
link |
And I have watched human beings and human nature enough
link |
to know that there's more to a man,
link |
a powerful man than a chin.
link |
Yeah, no, no, I'm saying it's an act of aggression.
link |
I'm not saying it's.
link |
It's one of the many tools in the toolkit.
link |
So she definitely.
link |
It's not, it's not all about the chin, but it's, it's a.
link |
But that's what I'm trying to tell you about Bin Laden.
link |
I don't think he was deliberate enough
link |
with the way he presents himself.
link |
What I'm saying about Bin Laden,
link |
that makes him different from these other characters is it,
link |
because he played it being the scholar.
link |
He played it being a figure of modesty and humility.
link |
And that meant that he was often,
link |
again, if you watch his visuals, I mean, yes,
link |
there's one video of him firing a gun,
link |
but if you watch how he moved,
link |
how he wouldn't look at people directly,
link |
how his face was almost,
link |
I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy.
link |
He saw spoken, you know, his voice was low.
link |
He attempted to be poetic, right?
link |
So it wasn't a warrior kind of image
link |
that he tried to project of like a tough guy.
link |
It was, I'm, I'm demure, I'm humble.
link |
I mean, you know, I'm, I'm offering you this message.
link |
And that, and that the, the appeal that he was going for was
link |
to see, you know, to project himself as a scholar,
link |
his knowledge and humility, the whole package,
link |
carried with it an authenticity and a valor
link |
that would animate, inspire people to commit acts of violence.
link |
So it's a different kind of like logic of like go and kill.
link |
So he put, he presented himself in contrast
link |
to the imperialist kind of macho power.
link |
Yeah, bombastic, whatever.
link |
So that's just yet another way of,
link |
and you have to have facial hair
link |
or hair of different kind that's recognized.
link |
We had a very recognizable look to,
link |
or at least later in life.
link |
Now he, he tried to look apart.
link |
But I'm saying we're fortunate that whatever
link |
calculation that he was making,
link |
he was not more effective.
link |
I mean, there's the world is full of terrorist organizations
link |
and we're fortunate to the degree any one of them
link |
does not have an incredibly charismatic leader
link |
that attains the kind of power that's very difficult
link |
to manage at the geopolitical level.
link |
Yeah, and we credit the, we credit the publics,
link |
you know, who don't, you don't buy into that, right?
link |
Who see through this.
link |
We credit the critics, you know,
link |
barely on, going back to not allowing itself.
link |
One of the problems was that U.S. government officials
link |
kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this
link |
as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility
link |
And in fact, dozens of scholars and organizations,
link |
hundreds condemned this,
link |
but their combinations never quite made it out.
link |
But it created an attention where, you know,
link |
if you were avail, you must have been one of them
link |
and you must be on team Bin Laden.
link |
And so a lot of the, you know,
link |
I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination
link |
and profiling came out of that urge to
link |
see a oneness, which, you know, Bin Laden projected, right?
link |
He wanted to say, we are one community, you know,
link |
if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right?
link |
But I think the, that's where the diversity
link |
of Muslim communities became important
link |
because outside of small pockets, I mean,
link |
they didn't accept his leadership, right?
link |
People wore T shirts in some countries.
link |
I mean, non Muslims wore T shirts
link |
because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans.
link |
So in Latin America, people are like, yeah, that was sad.
link |
But, you know, finally, I mean,
link |
there was a kind of shot in Florida
link |
in that moment internationally.
link |
It's like Che Guevara or somebody like that.
link |
Che's the other character in Priscilla's book.
link |
Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right, yeah.
link |
It's just a symbol, it's not exactly what he believed.
link |
Or the cruelty of actions he took.
link |
It's more like he stood for an idea of
link |
revolution versus authority.
link |
And that's, and that's the great way to understand
link |
Bin Ladenism and the whole phenomenon,
link |
but I think looking at the big picture,
link |
it's also, you wonder, without ever end, right?
link |
I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk of being
link |
a kind of hyperpower like the U.S. where you,
link |
in assisting on a kind of unipolar world,
link |
in 2001, 2002, 2003, I mean, that created
link |
an almost irresistible target, you know,
link |
wherever the U.S. wanted to exert itself militarily.
link |
Before we go to the history of Afghanistan,
link |
the people, and I just want to talk to you about
link |
just some fascinating aspect of the culture.
link |
Let's go to the end.
link |
Withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
link |
What are your thoughts on how that was executed?
link |
How could it have been done better?
link |
Yeah, an important question.
link |
I mean, I would preface all this by saying,
link |
you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.
link |
I had hoped the war would end sooner.
link |
I think there were different exit routes all along the way.
link |
Again, I think there were lots of policy choices
link |
in September, in October, when the war began.
link |
There were choices in December, 2001.
link |
So we could look at almost every six month stopping point
link |
and say, we could have done differently.
link |
As it turns out though, I mean, the way it played out,
link |
you know, it's been catastrophic.
link |
And I think the Biden administration
link |
has remained unaccountable for the scale of the strategic
link |
and humanitarian and ethical failure
link |
that they're responsible for.
link |
Well, okay, let's lay out the full,
link |
there's George W. Bush, there's Barack Obama,
link |
there's Donald Trump, there's Biden.
link |
So they're all driving this van and these exits
link |
and they keep not taking the exits
link |
and they're running out of gas.
link |
I do this all the time thinking,
link |
where am I gonna pull off?
link |
I'll go to this empty.
link |
How could it have been done better?
link |
And what exactly, how much suffering
link |
have all of the decisions along the way caused?
link |
What are the long term consequences?
link |
What are the biggest things that concern you
link |
about the decisions we've made in both invading Afghanistan
link |
and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have?
link |
I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed,
link |
you know, the horrific scenes of the airport,
link |
you know, that was just one dimension.
link |
I think in the weeks to come,
link |
I mean, we're gonna see Afghanistan implode.
link |
There are lots of signs that malnutrition, hunger,
link |
starvation are going to claim tens of thousands,
link |
maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter.
link |
And I think there is really nothing,
link |
there's no framework in place to force all that.
link |
What is the government,
link |
what is currently the system there?
link |
What's the role of the Taliban?
link |
So there could be tens of thousands,
link |
hundreds of thousands of starve,
link |
either just almost the famine or starve to death.
link |
So this is economic implosion.
link |
This is political implosion.
link |
What's the system there like?
link |
And what could be the one, you know,
link |
some inkling of hope?
link |
The Taliban sit in control.
link |
That's unique when they were in power in the 1990s
link |
from 1996, 2001, they controlled some 85 to 90%
link |
Now they own it all, but they have no budget.
link |
The Afghan banking system is frozen.
link |
So the financial system is a mess.
link |
And it's frozen by the US
link |
because the US is trying to use that lever
link |
to exert pressure on the Taliban.
link |
And so the ethical quandaries are of course, legion, right?
link |
Do you release that money to allow the Taliban
link |
to shore up their rule, right?
link |
The Biden administration has said no,
link |
but the banks aren't working.
link |
If you're in California, you want to send $100 to your cousin
link |
so she can buy bread, you can't do that now.
link |
It's almost impossible.
link |
There are some informal networks,
link |
they're moving some stuff, but there are bread lines.
link |
The Taliban government is incapable fundamentally
link |
I mean, they can discipline people on the street.
link |
They can force people into the mosque.
link |
They can shoot people, they can beat protesters.
link |
They can put out a newspaper.
link |
They can have their graded diplomacy, it turns out.
link |
They can't rule this country.
link |
So essentially the hospitals
link |
and the kind of healthcare infrastructure
link |
is being managed by NGOs that are international.
link |
But many people had to leave
link |
and the Taliban have impeded some of that work.
link |
They've told adult women essentially to stay home, right?
link |
So a big part of the workforce isn't there.
link |
So I mean, the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt.
link |
Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors,
link |
I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy.
link |
It exports fruits.
link |
Pakistan has been closing the border
link |
because they're anxious about refugees.
link |
They want to exert pressure on the international community
link |
to recognize the Taliban.
link |
Because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed and power
link |
because they see that in Pakistan's national interest,
link |
especially through the lens of its rivalry with India.
link |
So the Pakistani security institutions
link |
are playing a double game.
link |
And especially the Afghan people are being held hostage.
link |
And so the Taliban are also saying,
link |
if you don't recognize us,
link |
you're gonna let tens of millions of Afghans starve.
link |
So to which degree is Taliban,
link |
like who are the Taliban?
link |
What do they stand for?
link |
What do they want?
link |
Obviously, year by year, this changes.
link |
So what is the nature of this organization?
link |
Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful government
link |
sort of holder of power?
link |
Or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so?
link |
I mean, the briefest answer would be that they are a clerical
link |
slash military organization.
link |
They have, this is kind of an imperfect metaphor,
link |
but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan
link |
And that has some attractive elements
link |
because different people have joined the Taliban
link |
for different purposes at different times.
link |
But today, and people tell us scholars
link |
who know more about the women than I have said,
link |
listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge
link |
of different actors and people and competing interests.
link |
And I think, so we have a lot of scholars who say,
link |
listen, it's polycentric.
link |
It's got people in this city and that city and so on.
link |
I think actually, I was obviously skeptical,
link |
how do they know this?
link |
I mean, this is an organization that doesn't want you to know
link |
where that money comes from and so on.
link |
But I would say now that we have a clear picture
link |
of what has happened, I'd say they are a standingly,
link |
well organized clerical military organization
link |
that has a very cohesive and enduring ideology,
link |
which is quite idiosyncratic if we zoom out
link |
and continue the conversation we're having about Islam
link |
and how we think about radicalism and who's drawn to what.
link |
People throw different terms around to describe the Taliban.
link |
Some use a term that links it to a kind of school thought
link |
born in the 90th century in India, the Doha Bandi school.
link |
But if you look at their teachings, it's very clear now,
link |
I think that these labels, it's like saying,
link |
you're an MIT guy, well, what does that mean?
link |
I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different potentially
link |
kinds of intellectual orientations, right?
link |
I mean, attaching them to school doesn't quite capture,
link |
I mean, your position.
link |
It's complicated. I mean, actually MIT is interesting
link |
because I would say MIT is different than Stanford, for example.
link |
I think MIT has a more kind of narrow...
link |
Bad analogy in my part, maybe.
link |
Well, no, it's interesting because I would argue
link |
that there's some aspect of a brand like Taliban or MIT,
link |
no relation that has a kind of interact...
link |
The brand results in the behavior of the...
link |
Enforces a kind of behavior on the people
link |
and the people feed the brand.
link |
I think Stanford is a good example of something
link |
that's more distributed.
link |
There's sufficient amount of diversity
link |
in all kinds of centers and all that kind of stuff
link |
that the brand doesn't become one thing.
link |
MIT is so engineering.
link |
Okay, the scratch...
link |
The scratch same for two because I think Stanford's more like MIT
link |
than you might imagine.
link |
But isn't Taliban, isn't it pretty...
link |
I don't think there's a diversity.
link |
Sorry, just a rephrase.
link |
So people say, oh, the Deobandi school.
link |
I'm like, what is that?
link |
I mean, the Taliban are...
link |
They're an ethnic movement.
link |
They represent a vision of Pashtun power.
link |
The Pashtuns are people who are quite internally diverse,
link |
who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto,
link |
who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
link |
There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet.
link |
There's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere.
link |
So it's a global diaspora of sorts.
link |
Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination,
link |
so that lots of Pashtuns can tell you the names of their grandparents,
link |
great grandparents, and so on.
link |
And that's kind of a...
link |
There's a sense of pride in that.
link |
Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity,
link |
but it's not universal.
link |
So for example, you can meet people who say,
link |
I am Pashtun, but I don't know Pashto.
link |
So as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous.
link |
It also means different things to different people at different times.
link |
So saying the Taliban are Pashtun requires lots of qualifiers,
link |
because lots of Pashtuns will say,
link |
no, no, I have nothing to the Taliban.
link |
I hate those people.
link |
So the Taliban tried to mobilize other Pashtuns with limited success,
link |
but their core membership is almost exclusively Pashtun.
link |
And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans.
link |
We represent Pious Muslims.
link |
And so in recent two, three years,
link |
they've gone further to say, no, we have other groups.
link |
And in the north of Afghanistan, in recent years,
link |
they did do a bit better at drawing in people who were very disaffected
link |
because of the government.
link |
And they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat.
link |
But if you want to say August 15 and who they've appointed,
link |
what language they've used, how they've presented themselves,
link |
it's clear that they are Pashtun.
link |
And they are extremely ideologically cohesive and disciplined,
link |
So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah,
link |
some of that stuff was a way to fight a war.
link |
They are fundamentally a guerrilla movement.
link |
They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods.
link |
The rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich,
link |
taking from the privilege, giving to the poor,
link |
being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.
link |
And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing,
link |
their central theme, their brand, is about public morality.
link |
And so their origin story, going back to 1994,
link |
is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals
link |
who were trying to rape people.
link |
And so there's a very interesting kind of like,
link |
emphasis on sexuality and on public morality
link |
and really being the core of like,
link |
we're going to restore order and public morality
link |
and how that translates into governance
link |
is something they've never sorted out.
link |
I mean, how do you run a banking system?
link |
If your intellectual priorities are really about the length of a beard
link |
and then their path to power and a kind of abstract sense.
link |
I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by,
link |
if you like, propagating the problems of martyrdom.
link |
And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way
link |
to make it sound ridiculous, to make it sound like it's,
link |
you know, a moral judgment.
link |
It's simply, I think a fact, it's a fact of their appeal
link |
that they promised young men who have known nothing else
link |
but studying in certain schools, if at all.
link |
But they've known fighting and they've known victimization.
link |
And this isn't, I'm not asking for like sympathy for them,
link |
but I think the reality is that a lot of the,
link |
we know about the kind of foot soldiers
link |
they lost families and bombings in air strikes, in night raids.
link |
You know, I mean, orphans have always been a stream
link |
living in all male society, not knowing girls,
link |
not knowing women, hearing things from outside
link |
about places like Kabul.
link |
And so there's always been this kind of urban, rural dimension.
link |
It's not just that, but I think there's a whole imagination
link |
that being Taliban captures.
link |
And the whole margin of things is really, it's,
link |
you know, I think to any religious person,
link |
I mean, it's not a bizarre idea.
link |
I mean, it animates, I mean, so many global traditions.
link |
But you try to tell like an army colonel,
link |
if you were to have a conversation with, you know,
link |
a U.S. Marine about this.
link |
I mean, some would get it from their own religious backgrounds,
link |
but I think it's an alien idea,
link |
but I think it's essential to kind of stretch
link |
our imagination to understand that's attractive.
link |
And now one of the dilemmas going forward is that
link |
they've got to pivot from martyrdom.
link |
And some have been, some have told foreign journalists,
link |
I mean, it's good that we're in charge now.
link |
We're going to build a proper state, but I,
link |
it's kind of boring.
link |
I want to keep fighting.
link |
I want to, maybe I'll do that in Pakistan.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they are expressing that thought,
link |
some are not even honest, sufficiently with themselves
link |
and express that kind of thought.
link |
If you're a fighter,
link |
you see that with a bunch of fighters
link |
or professional athletes, once they retire,
link |
they don't know it's very, it's boring.
link |
And so like the spirit of the Taliban,
link |
even the best version of the Taliban is to fight,
link |
is to be martyrs, is to,
link |
and to paint the world as good and evil
link |
and you're fighting evil and all that kind of stuff.
link |
That's difficult to imagine how they can run
link |
an education system, a banking system,
link |
respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds
link |
and religious beliefs and women and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Yeah, and they've watched in Kabul and other major cities.
link |
Some are young, they didn't know those places,
link |
but also the very important obstacle for them
link |
is that African society has changed.
link |
I mean, it's not what, even for the older guys,
link |
it's not what they knew in the 1990s.
link |
Some always had some ambivalence about the capital,
link |
but now it's totally different.
link |
I mean, they've been shocked to see,
link |
I think to me, one of the most striking features
link |
of the last few weeks has been that women have come out
link |
on the streets and have stood in their faces and said,
link |
we demand rights, we demand education,
link |
we demand employment, and these foot soldiers
link |
are paralyzed, they're not sure.
link |
They don't know what to do with women, period.
link |
Yeah, and they don't know what to do with being yelled at
link |
and having someone stick their fingers in their faces.
link |
I mean, this is not what they've imagined.
link |
And so I think, and at this juncture,
link |
there are still foreign cameras around.
link |
So they have committed acts of violence against women,
link |
against journalists, they've beaten people,
link |
they've disappeared people.
link |
Even with cameras around, even in this tense period.
link |
Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat,
link |
and that's like it happened, it's gonna get much worse, I think.
link |
So the challenge now is, you know, can the Taliban rule?
link |
And then this is where the diplomacy is so important,
link |
because the Taliban can't rule in isolation,
link |
and they know that.
link |
And part of the success is due to the fact that they were,
link |
they became very good at talking to other people in the last,
link |
I mean, it's been building for the last decade,
link |
but I said the last five years,
link |
and they always had Pakistan's backing.
link |
And so the Taliban are, we noted they're a military force,
link |
very effective guerrilla force, they beat NATO.
link |
I mean, this still hasn't sunk in.
link |
I mean, the fact that they, with light arms,
link |
using suicide attacks, using mines,
link |
you know, improvised explosive devices, machine guns.
link |
And some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles,
link |
and you know, from the summer,
link |
they got American equipment on a broad scale, right?
link |
They have airplanes, they have a lot that
link |
they will be able to use eventually.
link |
So, but still, basically, it's a story of AK47s,
link |
some American small arms, and mines.
link |
So it's very Ho Chi Minh, very old school guerrilla fighting,
link |
And they defeated the most powerful military alliance
link |
in world history probably.
link |
So that has not yet sunk in,
link |
and what that means for American and global politics.
link |
And now they're trying to rule, right?
link |
They know they need international support.
link |
And their most consistent backer has been Pakistan,
link |
who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.
link |
You know, and this is very important for a Pakistani elite
link |
that, of course, is looking toward India.
link |
They want to have their rear covered, right?
link |
They want to make sure that these postions
link |
don't cause trouble for Pakistan.
link |
And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces,
link |
they like this vision of the Islamic State
link |
that the Taliban are building there,
link |
because those are not so distant from their views
link |
of what Pakistan should be.
link |
But the Taliban have been smart enough
link |
to kind of diversify their potential international allies.
link |
So everyone in the neighborhood has wanted the US to leave, right?
link |
If we go back to 2001, there were Iranian and American
link |
special forces in the North working together against the
link |
Taliban to displace them using, you know,
link |
Iranian, American, and then Afghan resistance forces
link |
against the Taliban.
link |
And that was the real moment of repression.
link |
If we go back to the missed exits,
link |
the relationship with Iran could have been different
link |
But the US under George W. Bush, you know,
link |
devised this axis of evil language,
link |
put them together with their enemy Iraq in the North Korea,
link |
all that went south.
link |
That was the most opportunity.
link |
But in recent years, the Taliban in Iran have kind of
link |
papered over the differences.
link |
They allowed the Taliban to open some offices on Iranian territory,
link |
likely share some resources, some intelligence,
link |
some sophisticated weaponry.
link |
And then the Taliban went to Moscow.
link |
And for the Putin administration, you know,
link |
they've long been worried that, you know,
link |
they see the Taliban as a kind of, you know,
link |
disease that will potentially move north.
link |
In fact, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
link |
Kurdistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,
link |
and maybe creep into Russia's sphere of influence.
link |
Maybe that's why they have, you know,
link |
a bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan.
link |
I mean, the one, you know,
link |
forward base that Russia also has in Central Asia is in Tajikistan.
link |
And so the Taliban were always, you know,
link |
a worrying point, but also useful because they could say,
link |
well, you know, in case the Taliban get out of control,
link |
we need to be here.
link |
And so Tajikistan said, okay, you know,
link |
you're helping, you're helping secure us.
link |
And yes, it impinges upon our sovereignty,
link |
but it's okay, you know.
link |
So Putin said, you know, let's, you know,
link |
give another black eye to the Americans.
link |
And let's, you know, treat the Taliban
link |
as if they're the kind of government in waiting.
link |
Let's have them go to Moscow multiple times.
link |
This summer, you know, for the last year or two,
link |
they've been talking to China, right?
link |
So the photographs of senior Taliban figures
link |
going from their office in Qatar,
link |
made your blow to the US back government.
link |
The fact that they were able to open up an office in Qatar,
link |
at one point began to fly a flag
link |
of the Islamic Emirate Afghanistan
link |
that basically said we're a state in the waiting.
link |
And as the US backed Afghan government failed
link |
and failed and failed at ruling too, right?
link |
As they showed how corrupt they were.
link |
And as they really alienated more and more Afghans
link |
by committing acts of violence against them,
link |
by stealing from them,
link |
by, you know, basically creating a kind of kleptocracy, right?
link |
The Taliban said we are pure, we are not corrupt.
link |
We're winning on the battlefield internationally.
link |
Look, we're talking to China.
link |
We're talking to Putin.
link |
We're talking to China.
link |
We're a legitimate powerful center of Central Asia.
link |
And also kind of, you know, hinting that, you know,
link |
we have a website.
link |
I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing
link |
because they began to,
link |
and this is important actually.
link |
They had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.
link |
Again, after having, you know, shop televisions
link |
and look at these kind of ceremonial killings
link |
of these infidels devices, right?
link |
They said we have a government.
link |
We have commissions.
link |
We have a complaint line.
link |
They lifted all this technocratic language
link |
that you get from any UN document, you know,
link |
about good governance and all that kind of, you know,
link |
generic language that the NGO world has produced for us,
link |
right, in English.
link |
They reproduced that in five languages
link |
on their top on website.
link |
And of course, I'm not saying you wouldn't believe this,
link |
but it was like, you know, just put me in coach.
link |
You know, I know the playbook.
link |
I know how to run a government.
link |
And look, we have an agricultural commission.
link |
We have, you know, a taxation system.
link |
And again, this idea, and then on the ground,
link |
they had their own law courts
link |
and they would creep into a district,
link |
assassinate some people, the local authority figures,
link |
men of influence, talk to local clerics,
link |
either get them on board or kill them,
link |
and say, you know, this state is corrupt,
link |
but we're bringing you justice.
link |
This is our calling card.
link |
We're bringing public reality and justice.
link |
And then to a broader world, they said, you know,
link |
yeah, things didn't go perfectly.
link |
The whole Al Qaeda thing, you know,
link |
you know, we should be kind of do over on that.
link |
We're not going to let anyone hurt you from our territory.
link |
We just want a rule and people like us and look.
link |
And so if you look in the neighborhood,
link |
Iran, even the Central Asian states after a while,
link |
recognizing they can make some money.
link |
I mean, one of the, one thing that aspects down likes
link |
about the current arrangement or they're not,
link |
they're not hostile to is that they have all these contracts.
link |
They can potentially make some money from, you know,
link |
the pipeline dream remains alive,
link |
running natural gas, oil to, you know,
link |
which is the Indian Ocean to markets, you know,
link |
beyond Central Asia.
link |
It's sitting on a couple of trillion dollars,
link |
probably in mineral resources that China would love to have,
link |
And so people looking at Afghanistan now,
link |
after 20 years saying, you know,
link |
under American rule, it was a basket case, right?
link |
There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent.
link |
The world did not start counting civilian casualties
link |
in Afghanistan until 2009.
link |
I mean, think about that.
link |
The war went on for eight years.
link |
The Taliban were never really defeated.
link |
They just went to Pakistan.
link |
They went to the mountains, they went to the woods.
link |
And so all of these different American operations,
link |
as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on,
link |
killed countless civilians.
link |
The US never counted for that.
link |
We never, we never even counted.
link |
Trump escalated the civilian casualties
link |
by escalating the air war.
link |
But a lot of this was like very ugly on the ground,
link |
you know, night raid stuff,
link |
where you drop into a hamlet and, and massacre people.
link |
And then, you know, honest about what happened, right?
link |
So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth
link |
of the Taliban from below.
link |
So the foot soldiers, they never, they never ran out of foot soldiers.
link |
I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands,
link |
maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters
link |
over the last 20 years.
link |
But they just sprouted up again.
link |
And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture,
link |
the male bonding of, of, of martyrology,
link |
of, you know, of martyrdom and of, and of, you know, revenge
link |
and a sense of, you know, the foreign invader.
link |
And I've heard, I mean, I've, you know, I haven't taught a ton
link |
of US military people, but through the Hoover,
link |
you know, they put officers in our classes sometimes
link |
and met a few wonderful, you know, army and,
link |
and Marine officers who I really enjoyed, you know,
link |
we came from the South like me, always had great rapport with them.
link |
And, and they expressed a range of opinions about this.
link |
I think that, you know, I learned a lot from someone who said,
link |
yeah, I mean, I get that, I get why they hate us.
link |
I get why they're still fighting because, you know,
link |
in the week we just killed 14 of their, you know, fellow villagers.
link |
So the officers, the guys on the ground, you know, fighting this war,
link |
we're not stupid about that.
link |
I mean, they, they got the human dimension of that.
link |
And yet no one got off the exit.
link |
As you said, people, people kept driving.
link |
But going forward now internationally, it's critical that they have,
link |
I mean, they've, they've had meetings.
link |
I mean, what the top line have done since August 15th is the
link |
diplomacy. They've had meetings.
link |
They've had people, they've had touch can't come.
link |
They've had Beijing come.
link |
They've had Moscow come.
link |
I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad,
link |
from security people, from diplomatic circles.
link |
And they're counting on things being different this time.
link |
I mean, the first time around, the only people who backed the Taliban
link |
by recognition, giving them a diplomatic recognition
link |
were the Saudis, Pakistanis and the UAE.
link |
And because of al Qaeda, because of opium,
link |
because of some of the human rights stuff, you know,
link |
the U.S. pushed everyone to like, you know, let's not recognize the state.
link |
Even though the U.S. did, I mean, Colin Powell famously,
link |
you know, the summer of 2001, you know, we did give a few grants and aid
link |
to the Taliban as I kind of like massaging negotiations.
link |
They kept talking about bin Laden,
link |
but they also wanted them to stop opium production.
link |
I mean, Afghanistan throughout all this period we've talked about
link |
is the global center of opium production.
link |
I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy
link |
continued to today is devoted to the opium trade.
link |
Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin,
link |
some of the painkillers.
link |
And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to Hoboken,
link |
they're not the source of American deaths, you know?
link |
They are part of a universal market, a global market,
link |
which, you know, I think any economist would tell you
link |
is part of the story of our opium, you know, problem.
link |
Something I read maybe a decade ago now,
link |
and I just kind of looked it up again to bring it up to see your opinion on this,
link |
is a 2010 report by the International Council on Security and Development
link |
that showed that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province
link |
know nothing of the 911 attacks on U.S. in 2001.
link |
Is this at all representative of what you know?
link |
So basically, put another way,
link |
is it possible that a lot of Afghans don't even know the reason
link |
why there may be troops or the sort of American provided narrative
link |
for why there's troops, American soldiers, and American drones overhead
link |
I mean, my gut response, not knowing the details of this actual poll,
link |
is that that's a very unhelpful way to think about
link |
how Afghans relate to the world.
link |
And I think it could be, you know, if you go to my hometown in North Carolina,
link |
if you knock on some doors, you may meet people who don't know all kinds of things.
link |
I could probably walk around this neighborhood here in California,
link |
and there'd be all kinds of people who don't know all kinds of things.
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You know, Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat.
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I mean, you know, so we could make a lot of certain kinds of ignorance,
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But I think what I would say, and then there's also, I mean, a companion point,
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maybe, that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse, the return of the Taliban,
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there's been a big conversation about, you know, what Afghans think of us really.
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And this famous piece in The New Yorker was about how many people like the Taliban,
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you know, that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece, you know,
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were sympathetic as they lost family members and all the violence.
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And the idea kind of was that, you know, we haven't thought about that at all.
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And in fact, you know, of course, we have, and lots of people have.
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But I think if you're just dropping into the conversation,
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if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage of Afghanistan in the United States,
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I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during, of course, 911 and it's aftermath.
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Lots of coverage during Obama's surge.
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And then quickly dropped down the last decade has been almost nothing.
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So if you ask the same question about Americans or other Americans,
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I'm not sure what they would say to you,
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what percentage would actually know why the US is in X, Y or Z either, right?
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But on the Afghan side, just to return to that for a moment,
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I think that, you know, we can fetishize these provinces.
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They are a kind of, you know, a place where Taliban support has been greatest.
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Also where there's been the most violence,
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where the Americans have been most committed to trying to root out the Taliban movement.
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Where, exactly in the south, in the south of Afghanistan.
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Yeah. And it's mostly Pashtun, not exclusively, but mostly Pashtun, you know, mostly rural.
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That's the other group, you know, that the Taliban claim to represent, right?
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So they are this group.
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What other groups are there?
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Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry.
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So in cities, you'll find everything, right, that is an Afghanistan.
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You'll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras.
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These are people who, you know, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right?
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Most Uzbeks live in Uzbekistan, but they form majorities in some northern parts of the city.
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I'm sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.
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But what I emphasize is that, and you can find online an ethnographic map of Afghanistan,
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and you'll see green where Pashtuns live, red where Hazaras live,
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orange Uzbeks live, you know, purple where Tajiks live.
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And then there are a bunch of other smaller groups of different kinds.
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You know, there are Norsanis, there are Baluch.
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There are different religious communities.
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There are Sunni Shia, different kinds of Shia.
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What are the key differences between them?
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Is it religious basis from the origins of where they immigrated from?
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And how different are they?
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Yeah. So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous, I think.
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I mean, there's a kind of mythology that some groups have been there longer, right?
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So they have a greater claim to power, but historically, I mean, it's like, you know,
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at the groups anywhere, people have different narratives about themselves.
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But many, many Pashtuns would tell you, not all, but many would say,
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we are the kind of state builders of Afghanistan.
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The dynasty that ruled much of the space that was born in the mid 18th century,
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that ruled until 1973, more or less, generalizing, you know, was a Pashtun dynasty.
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The Taliban have definitely said to some audiences, we are the rifle rulers
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because we are Pashtun.
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The trick though is, I don't mean to be evasive, but just to get evasive on the complexity,
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one quick answer as well, there are majorities and minorities.
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I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps.
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But I would say suspend any firm belief in that because that could be entirely wrong.
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In fact, there's never been a modern sense of Afghanistan.
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So when journalists say Pashtuns are a majority, or they're the biggest group,
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I would say not so fast.
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I would say not so fast because of migration is one major issue.
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No major modern census.
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Actually, the Soviets got pretty close, but didn't quite, you know,
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find something comprehensive and didn't publicize it,
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knowing that it was, you know, in modern times,
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ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization.
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It's not, it's not innately so, but it's been part of the story.
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There's a lot of mixed families, right?
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So a lot of people you'll meet, you'll encounter in the diaspora and around.
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I mean, well, I am, you know, my one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right?
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Or I'm Pashtun, as I mentioned before, but I don't speak Pashto, right?
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Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as Shii Hazaras.
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In fact, I'm a Suni Hazara, or I'm a secular Hazara, or I'm an atheist Hazara.
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I mean, everything's possible, right?
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And one of my friends, if he were here, he'd say, I'm Kabuli, you know, I'm from Kabul.
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So if you think about it in Russian terms, you know, it means a lot.
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If you're a Moskvich, you know, if you're from Pizder or Moskva, I mean, you know.
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Yeah, well, even here, there's Bostonians, Texans, Californians.
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Yeah, East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff.
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Those are all part of the mix here.
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You ask about Kandahar and Helmand, and I would say, yeah, if you go out to, you know, a pomegranate, you know, field,
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you'll meet a guy who may reckon time differently from you and me, who may not be literate,
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he may not have ever had a geography lesson.
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But if you go one door over, you may meet a guy who, you know, his life path is taking him to live in, you know, six countries.
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And he may speak five languages.
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And these are all things I'm not saying they're all these are just because people have money can go fly around.
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I mean, they're people who are displaced by war from late 1970s, right?
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Even already in the early 70s, people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran, you know, as labor migrants.
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And once you get to Iran, once you get to Pakistan, once you get to Uzbekistan,
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you then connect to all kinds of cosmopolitan cultures.
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In fact, I think one of the themes of the book, you know, that you may have read, it may put you to sleep, you know,
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Afghanistan Modern was about, you know, conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place where
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for centuries, people went on the move and trade in this area.
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You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization of places like Helmand and Konhar, you know, you fly in,
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or you're part of a marine battalion, and you see people there and they look different.
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And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize, you know, they look like they've been there for millennia, right?
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The dress or whatever, right? You think of technology, you think of the mud compounds and so on.
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You think of, you know, animal drawn transportation, that kind of stuff, right?
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Or the motorbike, right? At most is what they have.
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But in fact, if you follow those families, their trade is taking them to Northern India for centuries, right?
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Their trade is connected them to cosmopolitan centers.
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You know, say they have a scholar in the family, that scholar may have studied all of the Middle East, South Asia, right?
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You know, their ancestors may have been horse traders who went all the way to Moscow, right?
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I mean, we have the historical records of all these people traveling across Eurasia, pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.
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And so Afghanistan is this paradox of visually looking remote and looking like it's kind of stuck in time.
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But the family trajectories and the current trajectories are astoundingly cosmopolitan and mobile.
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And so, and a conception of being a world center is also quite strong.
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So, you know, another way to frame that question about like, do they know about 911 would be like, why should we know about 911?
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Because we are at the center of something important, right?
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We are the center of Asia. We are the heart of Asia.
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We have a kind of historic greatness.
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We are, you know, a proud culture of our own achievements, right?
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So we're not worried about that, right?
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That said, I mean, sure, there are different narratives about why Americans are there, why people are being killed.
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You know, of course, you'd find, you know, they want to convert us.
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You know, they want our gold, they want our opium, they want X, Y, and Z, right?
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There was a recent story about a Taliban official sitting in an office in Kabul and a journalist asked him, can you find in this rotating globe, find your country?
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Where are we sitting right now?
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And he was filmed not being able to do it.
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And so a lot of, you know, racefiscated Africans in the diaspora were saying, you know, haha, look at this.
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I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom and there'd be a lot of kids who wouldn't know where Afghanistan is too, right?
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But I wouldn't use those metrics to suggest that this is a place that doesn't have a sense of its place in the world and of geopolitics.
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I think if anything, being a relatively small country in a very complicated neighborhood, I mean, everybody, every cab driver.
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I mean, people have a, I mean, you know, this is where America is different because I don't think Americans have this sense.
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You know, we're talking about Moscow stuff.
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You know, Moscow cab drivers, I think a lot of them are going to tell you, like, what's happening in the world and why, right?
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And it's just part of, it's part of their thing, right?
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You can find that in Ghana, you can find that in Mexico City, right?
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You find that lots of places.
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So I think Africans are part of a very sophisticated kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in.
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And a lot of them, remarkably, he had done it firsthand, which is what struck me so much.
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And, you know, really, my experiences from the 1990s in Tashkent places that these guys had already lived in more countries than I've ever been.
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They already knew half those languages.
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I mean, this one friend's Russian was impeccable.
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And of course, it helped.
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They had Russian girlfriends.
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They had, you know, they mixed with the police.
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I mean, this wasn't something you got from a book, right?
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This was like hard knock life.
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I mean, one friend was from a wealthy family in this trading diaspora and he was imprisoned.
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I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan.
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And he talks about how he could start like running the jail, you know, taking cigarettes to people, doing little things and kind of, you know, these are not stories of like, oh, I went to Harvard and so I'm so learned because of this.
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I mean, it's a whole range of experiences.
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The interesting thing is the survey is a survey and it doesn't reflect ignorance, as you're saying, perhaps.
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But it may reflect a different geopolitical view of the world than the West has.
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So if, you know, for a lot of the world, 911 was one of the most important moments of recent human history.
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And for Afghanistan to not to know that, especially when they're part of that story, means they have a very different, like there could be a lot of things said.
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One is the spread of information is different, the channels of the way information is spread.
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And two, the things they care about, maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc of history where the bickering of these superpowers that seem to want to go to the moon are not as important as the big sort of arc that's been the story of Afghanistan.
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That's an interesting idea, but it's still a bit if at all representative of the truth, it's heartbreaking that they're not do not see themselves as active player in this game between the United States and Central Asia, because they're such a critical player.
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And I feel in obviously in many ways get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction with occupation, you know, invasion of Afghanistan for many years and then this rushed with withdrawal of troops and now the economic collapse and it's sad in some ways.
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I mean, you know, another way to put it is this. I mean, yeah, there's a range of knowledge and you're right, the information flows are are peculiar to geographies and histories and stuff.
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And I think that you're plucking out one sample from some fairly remote area from one like follow that follow the agriculture products. I mean, this is where, you know, I think urban rule divides used to mean a lot more in the 19th century, right? So a lot of like nuts and bolts of histories about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions, you know, but I think that if one has the privilege of traveling a bit, you see that like
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urban areas are fed by rural hinterlands. And if you look, think of who actually, you know, brings the bread, the milk, you know, pomegranates and so on. It creates these networks and then, you know, mobility channels, information and so on.
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But yeah, but your broader point about like the tragedy of this, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student of mine, an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD, who's now, you know, doctor, he's a great scholar, you know, we've done several events now trying to just think through what's
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happened. And before she's very emotionally affected by it. And she continues to ask a really great question. If I can get her phrasing right, you know, if you think of the cycle of like the top on being empowered 2001, in the way in which that affected women in particular, you know, half African half
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of the society, right? Then you think of this 20 period of violence and, and, you know, missed exits, right, and repeated tragedy, that also created a space I mean it created a space for a whole generation, it created a sense of space for people to
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realize something new. And I think so we have to attend to the, the dynamism of the society, right? So yeah, this happened in mostly Kabul, other big cities, Mazar Sharif, Harat, and Kandahar. But you can't limit your analysis to that because things like radio,
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television, everyone got a TV channel. There's a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star that I recommend to your listeners and viewers that it's about a singing show, a singing contest show. But you see just just personally things about like connections. I mean,
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it's a, it's a show by an independent, you know, television network that did drama, it did, it did kind of infomercials for the government and huge American investment in it. So it wasn't politically neutral, but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff. But at the singing
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show that became, you know, incredibly popular, modeled upon the British American, you know, American Idol kind of stuff, you know, and you can vote. So it had a kind of democratic practice element. But it's fascinating to see that, you know,
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people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this, you know, you think of like literacy rates, literacy rates are imperfect. And, you know, people who study, you know, medieval modern Europe, talk about how, yeah, no one could read, and there weren't many books. But if someone had a book, it'd be read
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aloud to a whole village potentially, or gathering. So there was, you know, some of these metrics don't get what people actually receive as information or exposure, because there's the magnifying power of open spaces and hearing radio and group settings,
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seeing television group settings, having telephone, you know, cheap telephones, which then become an access point to the world and social media, right. So all this stuff swept across African society as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more.
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So African society became, you know, in important ways, really connected to everything going on. And so you see that reflected politically and what people wanted. So you had some people, obviously, back to return to the Taliban. Some people wanted the status quo, but increasingly many more people wanted
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something else. And one of the great failures was to expose people to democracy, but only give them the rigged version. And so the US, in the State Department in particular, continued to double down on faked elections for the parliament and for the presidency in
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Afghanistan. What kind of elections? Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament and for president in Afghanistan, again and again, from the very beginning. And those elections were partly theater for the US, like for remaining on the road that you're describing, right, for not deviating, for
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not exiting because we were building democracy there. In reality, the US government knew it was never really building democracy there. It was establishing control. And elections were one means to gather control, right. But then you had on the ground, especially my young people, going to university,
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having experiences that were denied to them before, they took these problems seriously. So part of the disillusionment that we see today is that they believe what the US told them that they're constructing democracy. And of course,
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you know, cynics like us may have been thinking, well, you know, you're not really doing that. You're backing fraud. They believed it when they were younger. And now they're actually smart enough to understand that it's a farce. Yeah. But and so indirectly had the consequence of actually working.
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And that it taught the young folks over a period of 20 years, young folks to believe that democracy is possible and then to realize what democracy is not. Exactly. Beautiful side. Beautiful side. And so, but now look at us. Now it's, you know, it's now November.
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And so this whole period, and I wouldn't say like, you know, I wouldn't cast the last 20 years, if you're looking at all the achievements, you know, I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet like this, something we should pat ourselves in the back for.
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I think that much has happened actually against what the Americans wanted. I mean, that the kind of free thinking, democracy wanting, I mean, even like, you know, we could point it on the religious, go back to the religious sphere. I mean, the African religious landscape became very pluralistic.
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Lots of young people wanted a different kind of secular politics. But the old, the old guard who wanted the saddest quo and wanted something that they'd fought for 1980s tended to still get American backing as the political elites who still tended to monopolize political power.
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So also it was happening in different ways. I mean, the Americans established this American University of Afghanistan, which is I think one of the best things the US did there. And I regret that the US didn't fund 20 more, you know, sprinkling them across the country, making them accessible to people.
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Because it was, you know, again, it wasn't an engine of Americanization. It was just opportunity. And so the thirst for higher education is really extraordinary. It was never never really met the US tended to put money in primary education, which much of that too was was fraudulent.
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So you have all this interesting dynamism, you have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space. I mean, I call it a public sphere in the classic European sense, you know, the Africans made of their own. And again, it wasn't Americanization, it wasn't imposed.
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It's something that Afghans built across generations, but really with a firm foundation among youth, who wanted, importantly, a multi ethnic Afghan society, you asked about Pashtuns and that kind of stuff. And a lot of that language in recent years was they were aware that the US backed government was playing
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ethnic politics and trying to kind of put people in the blocks and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity. And there was a younger cohort of people who said, you know, we are Afghan. And then there's interesting social media stuff where people would say I am Hazara, but I'm also Tajik,
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I'm also Uzbek. I mean, it was a way of creating a multi ethnic Afghan national identity that embraced everything. I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian, right. But symbolically, it's very important that they've rejected being mobilized politically, you know, voting as a Hazara or voting is
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whatever. And of course, there were communities who wanted to, you know, vote as that ethnic community. But there are also people who said, you know, let's put a kind of civic nationalism first, one that accommodates ethnic pluralism in a way that rejected a kind of
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majoritarian politics of a one ethnic group dominating the thing. So all this stuff was quite interesting. I mean, women were serving themselves in across multiple spheres. Of course, it remained patriarchal. Of course, there's struggles. Of course, there's violence. Of course, you know, there's no utopia.
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But the door and all that shut in on August 15. So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer from the student now professor, was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this, you mentioned the tragic arc here.
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You take the 20 years, like she asked, you know, why did you go to war in our country? Basically, why did you do this to us for 20 years when this was never about us? And you never asked us if you wanted to come. You never asked us what you wanted to build here.
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You didn't ask us when you were coming and you didn't ask us when when you're leaving. You just did this all on your own. And we tried to make the most of it. And then you pulled the rug out from under us, you know, at the 11th hour, and returned returned to power.
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Partly by diplomacy. It wasn't, at the end, just a military loss. I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions. I mean, the idea you asked about alternatives. I mean, giving up background, I mean, holding to the timeline. I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold to the Doha agreement that Trump
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assigned. I mean, every American president writes his or her own foreign policy, right? So the Biden administration acted as if they tried to convince us that their hands were tied. And that it was either this or 20 more years of war or some absurd kind of, you know, false alternative.
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And so, but I think that's important for American audiences to hear that, you know, they're like, you came to here to experiment. You came here to punish, you came here to kind of reassert your dominance, the world stage, you know, to work out the fear and and hurt of 911 that we talked about, which was
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so real, you know, impalpable. And it's important for American politics since then. Like you did, you worked out your problems, you know, on us, on our territory. And now what do we have for it? You know, and then the people who who had a stake in that system, imperfect as it was, have been desperate to leave.
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And so this, I don't know how much people are aware of this, but, you know, I'm a scholar, I work in California, you know, I have friends, I edited a journal on Afghanistan, and, you know, but I'm not a politician, I'm not a soldier.
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But people assume that, you know, Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American to help get them out. You know, that's kind of like, you know, the symbol of voting with your feet, you know, is quite powerful.
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I mean, they, there's a huge swath of society that doesn't want the system, and is literally living in terror about it. Naturally, women, you know, I mean, especially women of a certain age, I mean, they, they feel like their lives are over.
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I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide. They feel betrayed. And, and some people have done some good things and getting people out, you know, I mean, some, you know, the US military vets have been, you know, at the forefront of working to get out people, you know, that they, you know,
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they owe. But the US government doesn't want these people. I mean, they have created all these obstacles to, to allowing a safety valve for people to leave.
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Looking forward, from a perspective of leadership, how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes? So, obviously, some interests, some aspects of human nature led to this war.
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How do we resist that in the future?
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I guess, beyond my moral and intellectual capacity, I'll just say this, I mean, looking at, again, looking at it from, you know, my home ground is the university. And I think of the, the intellectual, you know, ways of, ways of thinking that, that students should develop for themselves as citizens, right?
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Maybe that's where to start is like, historical thinking. I mean, these are all, and I try to tell people, you know, if you want to do robotics, computer science, you'd be a doctor, whatever.
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You should study history.
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Yeah. I mean, you don't have to be an historian like me. And it's, you know, my job isn't perfect. My profession is deeply flawed, right? But as I get older, I'm like, they're fewer and fewer historians actually like, you know, want to hang out with and stuff.
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So it's like, I'm not offering myself as like a model for anything. But, you know, whether you're a, you know, you carry the mail or you're a brain surgeon, whatever. I mean, I think it's, it's a way of civic engagement and the way of like, you know, ethical being in the world that we need to familiarize ourselves with.
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Because in, if you're an American or if you're from a rich country, you know, you need to be aware of your effect on a, on an interesting world. You can't, you can't say anymore that you don't know or care what's happening in Afghanistan or really circle the globe and point of place.
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I mean, we're all connected and we're all, we have ethical obligations. That's one place to start. I would just say this, and this is a lot for a self critique. And that is so much my teaching and like the themes of my research have been about empire, you know, how
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big states work not only on big territories like the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and stuff, but the way in which power often, you know, is projected beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see.
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So this is where things like neoliberalism or just, you know, if you want to take capitalism or just things that, you know, the idea of humanity or of liberalism or of humanitarianism.
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The ideas that move beyond state boundaries are all things that we think about as affecting power in some ways that, that often harm people, right?
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So I think part of, as I've seen my job so far is to think about, you know, building upon the work of my people in grad school and, you know, scholars have affected me.
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I mean, you know, we're all concerned with how power works and its effects and trying to be attuned to understanding things that aren't visible, right?
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That we should be thinking about, that should be known to us. And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role in showing effects that aren't, you know, obvious initially.
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So empire is a framework to think about this. And so you think about invading foreign countries. Obviously, if you're a scholar of empire, you've seen what that looks like.
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And that's horrific, right? You look at things like racism as one of the ideological pillars of empire.
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You know, that's horrific. It must be critiqued. It must be, you know, we must be educated against.
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Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire is also something to highlight, you know, to rectify and so on.
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You know, to be moral beings, we need to think about past inequality and the legacies of violence and destruction that live on, I mean, living in the Americas.
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I mean, look at, you know, we're all on stone land. We're all in the sense living with the fruits of genocide and slavery and all those things that are hard to come to terms with, right?
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But the last few months in Afghanistan and thinking about empire, I think, made me more humble when I read people who say, to put it simply, have taken some joy in this moment, saying like,
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well, the Americans got kicked out of Afghanistan. You know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing.
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This is a kind of victory of anti colonial.
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You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan that America is not some kind of place that has an ideal of freedom and all the kind of things that we American tell ourselves.
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But it's more America has the ideal of empire, that there's one place that has the truth and everybody else must follow this truth.
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And so from a perspective of Afghanistan, it could be a victory against this idea of centralized truth of empire.
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That's another way to tell this story. And then in that sense, it's a victory.
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And in that sense also, I mean, you push back against this somewhat, this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires.
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And I'll say this, I mean, it's, I mean, I'm a critic of empire.
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I mean, colonialism is a political phenomenon that stays with us.
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And I think we need scholars to point to the way in which it still works and still does harm.
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But it's part of being an empire that you can just get up and leave a place, right?
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That you can remake its politics on one day.
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And then because it fails to advance your agenda at one moment, you simply walk away.
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I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.
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I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent, you know, the way that the British withdrew played a significant role in mass violence, you know, that the company partition.
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It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know, dictated that, right?
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There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know, the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.
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I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment as there is now in what's happening in Afghanistan.
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But I think the, the capriciousness, I mean, the, the, the ability to act is if you're, you're political decisions about other people's lives.
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You know, or something that can be made, you know, in secret, they can be made willy nilly.
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They really are beyond the accountability, you know, of, of those who are actually going to live with the consequences of shifting the cards on a deck in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't.
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I would love to hear your conversation with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson, who argues on the topic of empire.
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That you can also zoom out even further and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire.
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And he argues, I think he gets a lot of flak for this from other historians that like the British empire did more good than bad in certain moments of history.
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And that's an uncomfortable truth.
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There's like levels, it's a cake with layers of uncomfortable truths, and it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good.
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Right. I mean, I would continue to disagree with that.
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For instance, I'm still, I'm still working out where I am.
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And what this moment does to kind of, I think qualify, qualify my understanding of the past into, I think in a moment of humility, you know, I do, and I'm probably, I'm probably reacting to the kind of, you know, as you put it.
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I mean, the idea that this is like a good thing that American power has been defeated here.
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I mean, I do think American power should contract.
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And I don't think, and again, if I had to create a tally sheet of what the Americans did in the US, I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan, right?
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It could have done that without invading the country and killing people.
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But if, you know, I'm not, I've not now become an apologist for empire. I'm not, I'm not now a mini, not a person, but, you know, ending empire is, I mean, it does, how you, does it, as soon as you make or in some ways a continuation of imperial hubris, right?
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So you're not really out of empire yet.
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You're not really contracting empire for those who are living it, you know.
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But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way, it's be careful what you ask for, you know, I mean, I wanted, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan.
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But I wanted there to be a political settlement. I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right?
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I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?
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But why is going to Afghanistan even needed for that? You can play all those games of geopolitics without ever invading and taking ownership of the place.
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It feels like the war.
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Yeah. I mean, it feels like, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what military force is necessary for, except for targeted, intense attacks.
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It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9 11 was to show what was a display of force unlike anything the world has ever seen for a very short amount of time, targeted at, sure, a terrorist at certain strongholds and so on.
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And then in and out, and then focus on education, on empowering women into the education system, all those kinds of things that have to do with supporting the culture, the education, the flourishing of the place.
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That has nothing to do with military policing, essentially.
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But I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it through that lens, I mean, if any Afghanistan and then invading Iraq didn't end Al Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right?
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It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely.
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There were, if you like, you could say there were, you know, some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.
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But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing. I mean, it spread. I mean, it was never an Islamic thing. It was never, you know, a Muslim thing.
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Some Muslims adopted it in some places, but the circumstances of knowledge about how to do these kind of things only expanded with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then they kind of became connected.
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They became to the president. I mean, Islamic State is, it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever because it's on the basis of its supposed newsstands as a counterterrorism outfit that it will get recognition from all its neighbors.
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It will get recognition from Russia. I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport, the United States was collaborating with the Taliban against Islamic State and openly talking about the Taliban as if they were partners in the security operation.
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So, and then Al Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan. So.
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Trillions of dollars spent.
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The drones up above bombing places that result in civilian death, the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers, and those stories, even at the individual level, propagate virally across the land, creating potentially more terrorists.
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And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars is the military industrial complex where there's just a momentum where after 9 11, the feeling like we should do something led to us doing something.
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And then a lot of people realizing they can make money from doing more of that something. And then it's just a momentum where no one person is sitting there, getting a cat in an evil way, saying we're going to spend all of this money and create more suffering and create more terrorism.
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There's just something about that momentum that leads to that. And it to me, honestly, I just I'm still a sucker. I believe in leadership. I believe in great charismatic leaders and the power of that want to do evil and to do good.
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And it felt like I honestly put the blame on George Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden for lack of leadership.
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And yeah, there is the military industrial complex component, which is huge. And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership, it's also, I'd say the imbalance of power within Washington. I mean, the Pentagon use this moment.
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The whole beginning in 2001, I think to assert its authority at the expense of other institutions of national government. I mean, the State Department diplomacy has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.
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And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians, which I'm not firmly a story of the United States, but we can go back to talk about Vietnam. We talk about lots of Cold War and post Cold War engagements.
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And I think, you know, we need a reckoning about how the United States uses military power, you know, why we devote so much to our military budget and what could be available to us if we had a more sensible view of the value of military power of its effectiveness.
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And I think we need to hammer home that this is a defeat. I mean, I think there should be accountability. And if you, and this could be a kind of opening for a kind of bipartisan conversation, because if you are a kind of American militarist, I mean, you have to look at the leadership that got you to a place where you were defeated by men wearing sandals firing a K47s, right?
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Yeah, there should be a humility with that. I mean, we should actually say that we like literally the
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Oh, we lost. You say we lost. It wasn't just, you know,
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The American military lost.
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Yeah. And I feel I have very mixed feelings and, you know, it's, I don't know a ton of veterans, but, you know, I've mentioned I've taught my share and have a student now and, you know, they are, they're suffering because they look at the sacrifices that they made that I didn't make.
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I mean, American society to make the sacrifices. I mean, men and women lost limbs. They lost eyes. They lost lives. You know, there's been this, of course, quiet, evidently of suicide among, among veterans.
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And I, I've heard some stories the fact that the State Department is seeing a similar surge of suicides because they see their adult lives work collapse.
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They've seen their relationships. I mean, they've seen, they were seeing phone calls in the middle of the night from people who they entrusted with their lives, who they know are going to be targeted.
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I mean, some have already been killed. They've seen the, I mean, I think just, I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally what they believed in and what they, what they sacrificed for has vanished.
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And I think that's a, that's, that's bad. I mean, historically, thinking of some of the precedents you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of, you know, first of all, you know, at a human level, I feel horrible for those people who, you know, may not have agreed with everything they had done and their choices
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in life, but I respect the fact that many good people went out of, you know, the best intentions as young people to, to do the right thing and make things right. And I respect that. And I've met enough to know that there were people who saw the gray and complexity and
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that's, you know, all you can hope for. But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans. You know, if we look at the other post war moments, and this is kind of a post war moment where, you know, I think we need a conversation with American veterans about, about what they've gone through and what they're feeling.
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And they have, they saw skin in the game, you know, because their personal connections and their, and their histories and also going to be future leaders. I mean, veterans already.
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People who have served are often great men and women. That's, that's true. And you know, throughout history, whether you sacrifice, you served in fighting World War II and fighting Vietnam, that's going to mold you in different ways.
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That's going to mold how you are as a leader that leads this country forward. And so you have to have an honest conversation about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan, the war in the Middle East, the war on terror in the history of America.
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You just look at the context at the end of this 21st century, how we're going to remember this and how that's going to result in our future interactions with small and large countries with China or some proxy war with China, with Russia or some proxy war with Russia.
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What's the role of oil and natural resources and opium and all those kinds of things? What's the role of military power in the world? And now with COVID, you know, it's like, it's almost like the, because of the many failures of the US government and many leaders in science and politics to respond effectively and quickly
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to COVID, we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too. And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive. They seem to be symptoms of something of a same kind of source problem.
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Of leadership, of bureaucracy, of the way information and intelligence flows throughout the US government, all those kinds of things. And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things.
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Right. Definitely. I mean, I think if there's one theme that jumps out to me and thinking about this moment, I mean, if we recognize that we live in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States and in other countries that have long been proud of their democratic traditions.
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If we see them be under assault from certain quarters, I think military defeat is yet another addition to all the aspects of this that you mentioned. I mean, the fact of military defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this fire, potentially.
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If we think of its legacies and other post war environments, when the veteran angle is one, when you have people who feel betrayed, I mean, they have been fodder for the far right and other settings. I mean, interwar Europe is very much about mobilizing dissolution veterans in the name of right wing fascist politics.
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I mean, if one thinks too of this moment of really increasing xenophobia, our immigration debate is now talking about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all in the United States after 20 years.
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I think immediately they're sponsored in Europe, which I thought to some extent, you know, focusing on Germany, because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans leading up this collapse. And now they have been, you know, a lot of right wing center right politicians in Germany have been watching all this with an eye to using it to their
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advantage for a domestic German audience to say, you know, in the context of recent elections that, you know, we're the party who will defend you against these Afghans are going to be coming from this.
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So, you know, what I've tried to emphasize in talking to different groups about this moment is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan or even the region. I mean, obviously, malnutrition, hunger will send Afghans to neighboring states.
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But where the European right is resurgent, this has been a gift, right, to say that the Afghans are coming, they're brown skinned, they're Muslim, they're uneducated, they're going to want your women.
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And they will take, you know, the odd sexual assault case or the odd, whatever, dramatic act of violence that, you know, happens numerically in any population. And they will magnify that to say that, you know, our far right group is going to save the nation.
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And what I tried at the main point I wanted to speak of leadership was that I think the serial, well, there were many, many carnal sins, if you like, but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits, I mean, what blocked some of those exits was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying.
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I think that this is no secret anyone has followed this, but we've allowed, and you think that's the general mistrust of government, mistrust of authority across the board of professors, of economists, of scientists, doctors, right?
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I think that's the hopeful thing to me about the internet is the internet hates inauthenticity. They can smell bullshit much better. And I think that motivates young leaders to be transparent and authentic. So like, the very problems we've been seeing, this kind of attitude of like,
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of authority where, oh, the populace, they're too busy with their own lies. They're not smart enough to understand the full complexities of the things we're dealing with. So we're not going to even communicate to them, the full complexities.
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We're just going to decide and then tell them what we decided and conceive some kind of narrative that makes it easy for them to consume this decision.
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And as opposed to that, I really believe I see there's a hunger for authenticity of when you're making decisions, when you're looking at the rest of the world and trying to decide, untangle this complexity.
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And the internet, the public, the world wants to see you as a leader struggle with the tension of these ideas to change your mind, to recognize your own flaws and your own thinking from a month ago. All that, the full complexity of it also acknowledged the uncertainty as with COVID, also with the wars.
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I think there's a hunger for that. And I think that's just going to change the nature of leadership in the 21st century.
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I hope so. I think, you know, all the things you highlighted, I mean, accountability is part of that, right? I mean, we need, you know, honesty, openness, and then, you know, acknowledgement of mistakes, humility is the key to all learning, right?
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But also, I mean, you think just the headline from yesterday, the horrible drone strike, which was really the last kind of American military action on the day that the US was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul, wiped out an entire family, mostly children.
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You know, the US acknowledged that, yes, this was not the ISIS bombing outfit that they thought it was. But yesterday, they did a quick review. I'm not an expert on drone strikes and aftermath, but those of you who are more closely said it was basically
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whole cloth taken from what the US government has been saying after all these strikes, you know, reproducing the same language and basically pointing to technical errors, but denying that there were any procedural mistakes or flaws, or it was just kind of, you know, they found little ways of acknowledging
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things that goes plan, but, you know, we follow the policies essentially. And, you know, that's it. It's not a crime. It's the way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up. And it's kind of the legalese that suddenly makes a war crime, not a war crime, you know, and that,
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that is, I feel like, are feasible to take accountability. I think people are really sick of that. Yeah. In a way where the opposite is true, which is they get excited for people who are not, for leaders who are not that.
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Right. And so there's, they're not going to punish you for saying, I made a mistake. Yeah. Yeah.
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I just had a conversation with Francis Collins, the director of NIH, and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci has been that it's like such subtle, but such crucial communication of mistakes made.
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If you make a small mistake, it is so powerful to communicate. I think we messed up. We thought this was true. Yeah. And it wasn't. So the obvious thing there was with masks early in the pandemic.
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There's so much uncertainty. It's so understandable to make mistakes or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria different statements you make lead to just being transparent about that and saying we were not correct in saying the thing we said before.
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It's so powerful to communicate, to gain trust. And the opposite is true. When you do this legalese type of talk, it destroys trust. And again, I really think the lessons of recent history teach us how to be a leader and teach young leaders how to be leaders.
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And so I have a lot of hope. Yeah. Good. Partially thanks for the internet. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. No humility. I mean, we need humility, accountability, honesty.
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And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that. I mean, to learn from past mistakes. And obviously there's always inspiration and courage. And we can take some kind of assistance from that too.
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But also learning from learning how not to do things, right? And then analogies are never like one to one. I mean, we talk about Vietnam. I mean, I think many Vietnam veterans would say, this is like deja vu.
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You know, I mean, there's the story, the visuals of the Kabul Airport and of the Saigon embassy. We're not the same, but close enough that people would juxtapose them. All of us right now. But I would just ask people that, you know, overanalogizing is also, you know, a kind of path down, making errors of judgment and comparison and then sameness.
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But it's stretch. I mean, like 911 itself, I think the idea that people lack the imagination within our security apparatus to think this was even possible, right? And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock on a cockpit door, you know, could have wanted all this.
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And again, I'm not saying out of the time or hindsight that I am on mission about all this. But, you know, I just been living in Germany the year before. And there was a plot there. This guy was hatching from Germany to blow up the mausoleum of Otterswerk in Ankara with an airplane.
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And so if you kind of dig, you know, it wasn't unimaginable that you would use an airplane as a weapon. And the Bush was fishing up saying, no one had ever heard of this. Who would do this? Well, not a lot of people do this. And then, you know, at that very moment, my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel Secret Agent, which was about a conspiratorial organization that wanted to bomb.
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Actually, in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing, because I think they tricked this guy into doing it, but they wanted to bomb the Greenwich Observatory for some obscure political purpose.
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So that's an instance in which, you know, the novel, right, to go back to our kind of humanities pitch, right? That is my point was that, you know, as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination, right?
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And part of expanding our imagination is by, you know, I mean, obviously delving into your fields, you know, of engineering and the sciences and robotics and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape.
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And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature, I mean, just the kind of stretching that that we need to do to really educate ourselves more fully, right, across the, across the spectrum of everything humans need to imagine, to reimagine security.
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You know, so much what we talked about today, I mean, so much of, you know, our security is affected by others perception of their insecurity, right?
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Which unleashes a whole web of emotions.
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Can you tell me about the Afghan people, what they love, what they fear, what they dream of for themselves and for their nation? Is there something to say, to speak to, to the spirit of the people that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns and the hopes they have?
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Yeah, I think I, you know, as an outsider, I hesitate to make any grand statement, but I would say listen, I mean, there are a number of documentary films that are incredibly rich that will offer your listeners and viewers a snapshot.
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So there is Afghan Star, you know, which really brings you to the homes of a set of people who, you know, they want to start them.
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They're artists, they want to express themselves. Some want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries. There's a woman who gets into hot water for dancing.
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But, you know, you realize that, I mean, people, I mean, they love art, they love music, they love poetry, they love expression.
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You know, people want to care for their children, they want safety to families, they want to enjoy what everyone enjoys, you know, I think it's very humanizing portrait.
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There's another great documentary film called Love Crimes of Kabul, which is a great snapshot of the post 2000 world that the Americans shaped a lot of ways.
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And it's about a women's prison. And it's incredibly revealing because it's about young girls and what they want.
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Well, not just young, but young teenage and then some middle age people who were accused of moral crimes, ranging from homicide, which one moment it gets to, to having such relations outside of marriage.
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And so it shows in a way continuity with the previous Taliban regime and that women are imprisoned for things that you wouldn't be imprisoned for elsewhere.
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And that Islamic law operates as the kind of judicial logic for these, for these punishments.
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But in letting these women kind of speak for themselves. I mean, it's fascinating.
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I mean, I don't want to give too much away, but women make ranging choices in this film that land them in this predicament.
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So they don't all profess innocence. Some are like, I'm guilty, but they're guilty for reasons.
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In one case, one woman is guilty. She's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure on her fiance to finally marry her.
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So you get ethnicity, you get kind of Romeo and Juliet things where their families don't like each other necessarily, but they find each other.
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You have questions of love, money, clothing, furniture. It's beautiful.
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I mean, the parts with it, I remember showing it in class. There was a wonderful Afghan student who was, I think, a Fulbright at school in Stanford.
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And she's a genius. She's amazing.
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It was awkward for her because talking about young women having sex and stuff, and it was just, it wasn't, you know, the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.
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And obviously there's so much more where they're great writers and, you know, musicians and, I mean, you know, music is a huge thing.
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I mean, poetry, all these things are great.
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So she found it, you know, I hear you. I mean, it's kind of a taboo subject.
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But I thought the American students singing it really identified with these women because they're just so real.
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And so, you know, young people trying to find like, I mean, relationships that are universal in circumstances that are very difficult.
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Love. Love is universal.
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Yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean, we do have resources to humanize. I mean, you know, some of your people will know Khaled Hussaini, you know, he's an African American.
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He's done his stuff, but there are, there are a number of novelists and short story writers who do cool things.
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And I think that another tragic aspect of this moment is that those people have now pretty much had to leave the country.
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So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you named Khadim Ali is a Hazara based in Australia.
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He does extraordinary work in blending a tradition of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary.
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His work is between Australia and Afghanistan, but he also he had to flee.
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I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul, but it's a extraordinary kind of visual language that he's adapted that has been shown all over the planet now.
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He's got some of his work is in New York galleries is in Europe.
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He's been shown in Australia, but he talks about migration.
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In a way that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center, but it's totally universal about, you know, our modern crisis of, of all the mains people who were displaced across our planet.
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And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them in a way that like everyone can get.
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I mean, the visual imagery experts will know that it's from, you know, like the, the Shahnameh, like an ancient Persian, you know, epic that Iranians were attached to that Afghans are attached to that people can quote, you know,
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at length that has mythical figures of good and evil that kids grow up embodying their names, the names of the characters that are.
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It's called, you know, the Book of Kings, the heroes and villains are the staple of conversation and poetry.
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And, you know, like Russians, I mean, the kind of the resort to literary references and speak is something that, you know, Americans don't do.
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Western countries don't do, but the fact that everyone's got to know this character, everyone has this reference, the wordplay, the linguistic finesse in multiple languages is, you know, a major value of Afghan storytelling.
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As an outsider, I'm scratching at the surface of the surface.
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Yeah, but there's a depth to it, just like it is fascinating.
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The layers of Russian language that's.
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It's like the culture, I've been struggling and this is kind of the journey I'm embarking on to convey to an American audience what is lost in translation between Russian and English.
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And it's very challenging in some of the great translators of the CS gift Tolstoy of Russian literature struggle with this deeply and they work.
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It's an art form just to convey that and it's amazing to hear that I've got to stand with a full mix of cultures that are there have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect.
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I mean, the humor thing is that that's, you know, I'm so much our visual imagery is about like this sad place and Dower and everything.
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I mean, socially, again, I'm going to engage in some stereotypes about generalization stuff, but just the, you know, the Afghan friends and I have come to be closer to really love.
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I mean, the, the humor, there's so much there of common common stuff of like, when I go to Ireland, it's one of my favorite places and just like the, I feel a sense of pressure like the humor all around me.
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I feel like there's something between iron, like Ireland and Russia with the humor stuff where it's like you've got to be on your game if you want to be, you know, so it's.
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Yeah, it's like, you know what I mean?
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The intensity of conversation in terms of, yeah, you have to be on your game in terms of wit and so on. I mean, you have to, there's certain people I have like when I talked on this podcast, they're like that.
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Certain people from the Jewish tradition have that.
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Like what the wit is just like, okay, I have to, oh yeah, I really have to pay attention.
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It's like, you know what it feels like?
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It feels like speed chess or something like that.
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And you really have to focus and play.
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And at the same time, there's body language in the, and then there's a melancholy nature to it, at least in the Russian side.
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The whole thing is just a beautiful mess.
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I mean, there's a funny TikTok video that went around it that I got from like some Afghan acquaintances that was a, that he's an Irish comedian, kind of highlighting, you know, kind of Irish and German national stereotypes around hospitality.
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And this Afghan moment is that, you know, I didn't know that the Irish were just white Afghans because the whole like, you know, hospitality, like politics of like a refusal, you know, you, you know, you don't, you don't take something that's offered you the first time.
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You don't, I mean, it's the, the culture of, of receiving a guest, you know, that's, you know, Americans aren't, I mean, that's not, you know, that's not always, I mean, the different, the regional cultures or that's the thing, there's whatever, but it's, I mean, the, the kind of like generosity and the kind of, you know,
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that's, that's real.
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I mean, that's, and that's a cool thing.
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And that's amazing.
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That's, you know, the food, I mean, going on with just the superficial things, but the, but all of that, the warmth of hospitality and, of wit and humanity.
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I mean, it's, that's what we don't see viewing the place just through war and geopolitics and the moving pieces of the map and stuff.
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And that's, and that's hard to see when, you know, there are gaps in language and religious tradition and all that stuff.
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And then, you know, being open to the fact that people do, do things differently.
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You know, and it's, and the gender dimension there is important, right?
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They're, they're kind of, you know, arguably each culture has a kind of gender, gender.gen make this different.
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And so I think it's helpful to have humility and thinking that some Africans will do something, something's different, differently.
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You know, but then you'll also have Afghans who say everyone should be educated.
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Everyone should work and so on and so on.
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So there's no, there's no single way of, yeah.
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And there is a gender dynamic in Russia too.
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We need to be respectful of that.
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And that's not, that's not always what it looks like at first.
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That's where power is. I mean, that's definitely, I don't know.
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Yeah. That's a whole other conversation where the power is.
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Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet who was born on the land that is now Afghanistan.
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Is there something in his words that speaks to you about the spirit of the Afghan people?
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I mean, everyone owns Rumi.
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I guess that's gonna get me in trouble with certain Afghan fans of Rumi who want to see
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I would say, are they proud of Rumi?
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Do they see him as an Afghan?
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I mean, it depends.
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I mean, some people will be militant and say, you know, the Iranians can have him.
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But they also say, you know, he's, I mean, you can say, again, he's like a Rorschach blood.
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He's a Sufi. He's a Muslim. He's a Central Asian. He's Iranian. He's Afghan. He's a Turk.
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I'm trying to think of the analogy, but he's something special to everyone.
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So I guess I would not walk into that conversation and claim that he's one or another.
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But it's a cool thing.
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I mean, it's the, but I'm glad you brought that up because that's a good way of seeing
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something that Afghans, I mean, we live in our countries in Afghanistan and say, okay,
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Rumi is everyone, you know, Madonna helped make a famous in the United States, you know,
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they used to sell stuff at Starbucks.
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And that's all complicated and embarrassing.
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And his, his translations are very much disputed where you have people be like, there's some
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awful Rumi translations.
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And there are, there are also a lot of, speaking of the internet, there are lots of fake Rumi
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You know, like Rumi said, always be your best.
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We didn't say that.
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You know, that was, you know, I mean, that's kind of stuff.
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But the cool thing is like the, I mean, I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker,
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but you can also, you know, read Rumi as a, you know, in an Islamic sense, but you can
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also read him as a kind of spiritualist, right?
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As someone who, or an ethicist or moralist.
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And so I think that's, I like the, the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan ecumenicism
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and cosmogenism, you know, the theme I keep emphasizing of, of meeting actual Afghans who
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were actually, you know, fluent in Russian, fluent in German, fluent Turkish, they know
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Pashto, they've gone to university or sometimes they haven't.
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And yet, I mean, they're, I like the category of the popular intellectual, you know, the
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intellectual who isn't, isn't formally educated necessarily.
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Although of course that's represented too, especially increasingly now with this generation
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of going to university all over the world, you know, Stanford, MIT, everywhere.
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Afghans are war reps into there.
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But just being, I don't have any kind of worldly knowledge that is not limited to a province
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to a village to a hamlet.
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But it sometimes is, but sometimes it's not because of, again, not because of some fairytale
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story of curiosity wanting to globe out of, you know, some sense of privilege, but out of
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necessity out of survival of having to adapt.
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And it's really extraordinary that, I mean, also let me think about like professions of
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like, you know, as an Afghan, you know, what does he or she do for a living?
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And what have they done in the past?
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I mean, the answer is one gets shoe salesman, tax cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.
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I mean, that's not just Afghan, but that's, you know, that's very common.
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But it's also Russia is the same.
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Whenever there's complexities to the economic system and the short term and the long term
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history of how the country develops.
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And it's basically the people figuring out their way around a mess of a country politically,
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but a beautiful, flourishing culture and humanity.
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And that creates super interesting people.
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So we can often see, okay, there's Taliban, there's war, there's economic malfunction,
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there's harboring of terrorists, there's opium trade, all that kind of stuff.
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There's humans there with deep intellectual lies.
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And I love the movie Love Crimes and the same kind of hopes, fears and desire to love the
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old Romeo and Juliet story.
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And I think Rumi to me represents that the wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent
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and just beautiful representation of humanity of love.
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Some of the best quotes about love are from him, half of them fake, half of them real.
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The best ones are real.
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The best ones are real.
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The best ones are real.
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Robert, this is an incredible conversation.
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Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan and making me, making us realize that there's much
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more to this country than what we may think.
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It's a beautiful country and it's full of beautiful people.
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You made me think about a lot of new things too.
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So it was definitely, definitely great for all mine too.
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So thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Cruz.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill.
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History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.