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- [01:56]
Podcast Host
style, every home hello dear listeners. While Conflicted's very own Oracle of Arabia is away trying to bring clarity to the ever baffling situation in the Middle east, we thought we would take this opportunity to bring you something a little different. This is a special audio version of an undiscovered story connected to the new YouTube first documentary series from Conflicted's executive producer and Message Heard founder Jake Warren. Undiscovered follows human stories from some of the world's stranger corners, speaking to people who were there on the ground for some of modern history's wilder and more revealing moments. We wanted to bring this particular conversation to the conflicted audience because in it Jake sits down with Robert Young Pelton, the veteran journalist and documentarian behind the World's Most Dangerous Places. Robert was an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Battle of Cala Ijangi in northern Afghanistan, and was there when one of the surviving prisoners was identified as John Walker Lind, the young American who became known around the world as the American Taliban. We hope you enjoy the conversation and we would genuinely love to know what you think of this kind of episode, so please do share your thoughts in the comments or in the conflicted community. Discord One final note before we begin the this episode includes descriptions of the bloody aftermath of modern battle, and some listeners may find parts of it upsetting. Listener discretion is advised. Without further ado, here is Jake Warren with Robert Young Pelton
- [03:45]
Jake Warren
Kalajangi was one of the defining battles of the opening months of the war on terror. November 2001 Less than three months after the September 11 attacks, while firefighters and recovery crews were still clearing the ruins of Ground Zero, Taliban control in northern Afghanistan was collapsing under the weight of American airstrikes and Northern alliance advances. Near the city of Mazar e Sharif, hundreds of Taliban, Al Qaeda and foreign fighters surrendered to forces loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostan, the Uzbek commander who had become one of America's most important
- [04:22]
Interviewer Jake Warren
allies in the north.
- [04:24]
Jake Warren
They were transported to Kalajangi, a sprawling 19th century fortress outside Mazar e Sharif, where they were expected to be searched, questioned and held. On paper, it was a prisoner transfer. In reality, it was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Kalajangi was not really a prison. It was an old fortress, a military compound, and crucially, an armory. A fortress that just happened to be packed to the rafters with weapons and explosives. Many of the prisoners had also managed to conceal grenades, pistols and other weapons that were not discovered during the search. Within hours of arriving, they rose up. Afghan guards were overwhelmed, weapons were seized, gunfire and explosions ripped through the courtyard. What should have been a routine prisoner transfer became a full blown battle. From November 25 to December 1, 2001, Northern alliance forces, CIA officers, US Army Special Forces, British SBS commandos and American aircraft fought to retake the fortress. Precision guided bombs, AC130 gunships, close quarters fighting and repeated attempts to force the prisoners out transformed Kalajangi into one of the bloodiest battlefields of the early Afghanistan campaign. As the siege dragged on, surviving prisoners retreated into the fortress underground chambers. The basement was flooded with freezing water. In an attempt to force the remaining fighters to surrender. Even then, some held out. By the end, only dozens of prisoners emerged alive. Hundreds were dead. Dozens of Northern alliance soldiers had been killed and many more wounded. CIA officer Mike Spann was also killed at Kalajangi, becoming the first American killed in combat during the US invasion of Afghanistan. And among the surviving prisoners was a 20 year old American from California, John Walker Lynd, the man who would become known around the world as the American Taliban. To understand this infamous uprising and its lasting repercussions, I'm joined by legendary journalist and witness to the battle of Kalajangi, Robert Young Pelton.
- [06:48]
Interviewer Jake Warren
Good to see you Ryp. I've wanted to do this properly for a time. I know we've recorded interviews together before, but probably not something quite like this. For anyone that doesn't know your work. You know you're one of the, and these are my words, right, you're one of the great danger world oddballs of modern journalism. You know, you're author of the World's Most Dangerous Places. You host the Robert Young Pelton's the World's Most Dangerous Places. And you're a man who spent years getting inside wars, insurgencies, militias, rebel movements and places that most sane people would avo. You were doing vice before vice in my mind, right, you know, strange, immersive, dangerous, first person reporting and that before really that became recognizable on today's Internet. And I know you're still up to your schemes. I know you've tracked down Joseph Kony. I know we've talked before about maybe putting some kind of crazy project together. That's a story for another day. Today I kind of wanted to stay tightly on the story of Kalajangi John Walker Lynd and those first weeks in Afghanistan post 911 focusing around that story. But you as the witness, not a pundit, not a historian, the person who was actually there. And I think I want to take it chronologically what you saw, what you did, what the camera captured, what happened next and what you only understood later. But before I get into all of that, for someone who has no idea who you are and I don't want to do it badly again, how would you describe who you are, what you do to someone that's never come across you before.
- [08:14]
Robert Young Pelton
I was a guy who on my own went to meet rebel leaders, jihadis, fundamentalists, communists, you name it. Whether it's South Sudan and finding Riak Ma' Shar and filming the White army for the first time or being with Al Qaeda in Chechnya that's my thing, right, is to go deep, figure out what's going on, film everybody, do both sides and come back with what I think is a transparent window to why that conflict exists. I started this career when I was in my 40s and series of events had led to the deaths of some of my mentors, my fathers, who were in their 50s by the way. And I was a very successful businessman. My last job, I got paid $500,000 a year by Marvel just to answer the phone, right? You know, I drove a silver Rolls Royce, I had my hand fitted cashmere suits. But I used to take a month off and go to some white spot on the map. Remember back then they had white spots on the maps and I really enjoyed that. And after the deaths of these mentors, I realized, look, if I don't start doing the thing that I really enjoy, I'm just not going to do it. I had written a book called the World's Most Dangerous Places, which was a compendium of all the world's war zones and how to survive this and how to survive that. And I had written it for myself, you know, because there was no such book. And I wrote it in my very dark, humorous tone. And it was a thousand pages. And I self published it because nobody wanted to touch it. They just thought it was a dumb idea to write a book about traveling to war zones. I thought it was imperative for young people to understand how the world works. So, you know, so I published it. I did very, very well. I kept republishing it in this first year it became sort of a cult hit and it was given away as gifts by director John Milius, by the head of cnn. I mean, it was sort of like, hey, here's this crazy book, check it out, you know, stay safe. A lot of people have come to me and said, I read that book and it changed my life. I suddenly realized that I should be doing something meaningful instead. Studying chemistry or something.
- [10:12]
Interviewer Jake Warren
You know, I read your book, right? I watched these docs and, and they were transformative for me. I probably first emailed you when I was super green, right? You know, 12, 15 years ago, something like that. And I remember emailing you and you actually emailing me back, but I saw someone, and again, I say this with the greatest amount of respect, and I've probably said it to you before, but a normal looking person who isn't doing the, you know, the macho super soldier stuff, going into some of the places that quite frankly, right, the simplest version of how I would Describe you is, you know, you go to the places you're told not to go. You try and come back alive again and with the truth. And for me, that was super inspiring.
- [10:52]
Robert Young Pelton
There's one thing that people probably don't notice is I never did fake shots. You know how journalists do the naughties and they pretend like they're interviewing somebody or they. They get the reverse shot or the walk and talk, or they get the setup, you know, early in the morning. I never did that. And I think that rawness, it pissed off my editors, of course, because they didn't have the editing bits. But I think that's what drilled into people's brains. Like, this guy is like this guy that lives in this house in Redondo beach, and he's, holy shit, he's in Chechnya with the rebels getting bombed by the Russians.
- [11:23]
Interviewer Jake Warren
I always think of that BBC journalist and he's like lying on the floor saying that there's bombs going around. I think it's Ukraine. And he's sort of lying there, you know, he's got the hard hat on and wearing all of the Kevlar. And just in frame, a local comes up to him and just sort of, you know, looks over him and goes, exactly. What are you doing? You know, you're lying on the floor, there's nothing going on.
- [11:39]
Robert Young Pelton
You know, Bear Gryllis would go in the woods. I'd go into the front lines, and ABC News did a big Internet series on me. TV series on Discovery where I did a series of specials. What I did is I went from a 50,000 view of why these people are fighting. And I would go right down into the white hot center of them actually killing each other. And I would interview both sides. And to me, that was how journalism was done. Now, I didn't realize at the time the effect I had on journalists who said, yeah, that's how you do it. But my editor won't let me do it. Before 9 11, I basically created a brand out of myself, and that's fine. But when 911 happened, you remember, I'd already been to Afghanistan. I'd already been with the combatants. Suddenly the news were like, who knows how to get into Afghanistan? And there wasn't anybody, right? And so my phone started ringing off the hook. National Geographic, cnn, you name it. Also like, can you get into Afghanistan? It was only after the news organizations started freaking out about getting coverage of this that suddenly I became like the. The best looking guy in the room, right? I became this guy that knew everything about Afghanistan. I Went all the media shows that
- [12:43]
Interviewer Jake Warren
you said, right, you've been going there for a period of time. You had the. The foresight to. To go there and know that it's an interesting and consequential place when many people didn't. But being there, right, because everyone becomes an expert after the fact, after 9, 11. But you were one of the few people that had actually been there and continued to go there when you saw it up front. What kind of different analysis is that from actually people that don't go?
- [13:08]
Robert Young Pelton
The dynamic of warfare in Afghanistan is extremely simple, right? You have tribal groups that jostle for space and resources, but they have to still survive. Their rule of combat in Afghanistan is one side makes a lot of noise, the other side makes a lot of noise. Your uncle gets killed, like, oh, stop, stop. Let's negotiate peace, deal. And they go back to sitting on their opposing hills. It's very rare. Does one group kind of wipe out another group? So the Taliban was heading north and they were wiping out the Hazara. You know, they're Shia, right? The little Asiatic guys that, you know, they don't harm anybody. I went to some of the massacres that the Talibs did. They would lock these Shia guys into their shops and they would burn them alive. And I remember seeing this shoe with this smoking ankle, and the shoe had insulated the foot from being burnt to death, but the bone was sticking out and it was black and charred. And it was just like, how can you do that to human beings? And this is what the Talibs were doing up north. But I knew all the various players there. The guy that I wanted was Dostam, General Dostom. And he had a little area in the north where he was essentially his own sort of king and ruler. Heavy D. I called him Heavy D because he's big. He wore that, like, Jolly Green Giant outfit. And I called him Heavy D. And he thought that was very funny. And then he had this special Forces team, my buddies, the 595 guys. And I called them the Boys.
- [14:24]
Interviewer Jake Warren
You know, in preparation of talking to you, I rewatched it. You know, Heavy D and the Boys. It is an amazing documentary. What do you see when you rewatch that 25 years on?
- [14:34]
Robert Young Pelton
Now, I look back at that documentary as me calmly sort of walking around events, watching multiple entities screw up and not really realizing that they're battling Al Qaeda, right? And this was a Trojan horse event that was very much created to kill as many Americans as possible. And the American combatants couldn't put their head around the Idea that these Al Qaeda guys didn't care if they died. That was why they were there. That's important.
- [15:01]
Interviewer Jake Warren
What was the narrative around Dostom then? Right, because of a way in which he is portrayed. How does that line up with, actually, the man that you spent time with?
- [15:10]
Robert Young Pelton
Dostom originally was viewed with skepticism and distrust by the CIA and by Special Forces. Dawstam was a Soviet trainee. Right. He was a warlord hired by the Russian occupants to crush local revolts. The CIA didn't like him because all the intel they read came from Pakistan about how he skinned people alive and whatever. I knew him completely differently. Now, Dostan was actually the only military commander. A lot of people think Massoud was a military commander. No. They all went to college to get engineering college together in Kabul. He just ended up being a military commander. But Dostan was actually trained as a military commander. And I'm not supporting what Dostan did when he was a military commander. I'm just saying he was a guy that knew how to deploy troops. When. When the Americans landed, they were quite concerned about landing and being involved with Dawson because they thought they'd be kidnapped or they might be killed or whatever. Sold off. He was very pro American. He really liked the idea that the Americans were on his side. And when they began using these standoff B52 raids, they were like 30,000ft. They couldn't hit shit, and they had smart bombs and everything. But there were a lot of incidences where actually Dawson's men were killed by the bombing. They thought the idea is just to wipe them out. Just keep bombing and bombing and bombing. And he's like, no, no. You use that to show them that they're all going to die. But then you cut a deal with him. Right? That's the idea. You project force and then you negotiate. You know, I've been with Dawson, where they surround the whole village with artillery pieces and tanks, and he just strolls in by himself and talks to the Talibs inside and says, okay, guys, what do you want? You want me to shell the town, or do you want to just sign a deal and off we go. They realized that he had the ability to reshape the battlefield by applying violence where it was needed and then cutting deals, right? And letting those people would vanish and they become part of his militia. And he. I think he had up to like three to five thousand horsemen at one point. Very impressive. Dostum was asked by Masoud to come in and lead the area around just south of Mazar, which is, you know, typically Uzbek ethnic groups and put an alliance together of Shia. When Dostum went into Mazar, there were still 5 to 10,000 Talib supporters in various villages around the area. And this group of 460 Al Qaeda guys that escaped from Kunduz, where the surrender was, were there to start to fire up this sort of retaking of Mazar. Nobody realized that the Taliban were still in strength, you know, surrounding Mizar.
- [17:47]
Interviewer Jake Warren
And on a human level though, with Dostan, did you like the man or is it dangerous to like someone in that scenario?
- [17:53]
Robert Young Pelton
So Dawson's rough hewn, right? And I'm rough hewn. So we got along like a house on fire. And I'm fearless. He's fearless. I have no problem going into battle. You know, he tries very hard to explain his past and there is no audience for that because it. He grew up mostly in the Soviet era, the Soviet controlled area of Afghanistan and also the communist era. And he was part of that system. Like he went was trained as a commando in Jalalabad and then he was given control of a unit. And that unit was used by Najibullah, who was the leader of Afghanistan at the time, to put down local uprisings. Like basically pissed off people. And he fought against us. When I say us, I mean, you know, Saudi and US money went into the loonies in Pakistan and those groups then created the jihad that we celebrate. But those guys turned out to be Al Qaeda. So he's trying to say, look, I'm a normal guy. I did normal things. I served in the military. Like, I'm not crazy. They make up a lot of crap about me. I was literally sitting next to a journalist who then wrote a story later about how Dawson was giving him an interview while they were skinning a prisoner alive. And Dustin said, one of my peacocks got stuck in a drain and that motherfucker invented this whole story. He could have walked like literally 20ft away. So this is the kind of coverage that sprung up after, you know, Kali Jangi and that whole thing.
- [19:16]
Interviewer Jake Warren
If you could make people understand one thing about Kali Jangi, what would it be?
- [19:20]
Robert Young Pelton
This was the first serious battle of the war on terror, right? This was the bookend to 9 11. So it had this mythical, almost medieval ring to it. And then everybody became a hero. But it was a lot of confusion, a lot of dead bodies, a lot of like, what the hell is going on? What do we do now?
- [19:41]
Interviewer Jake Warren
There's almost a slight mythology to it because it has this. People have this sense of it, of almost being this kind of, you know, Old school thought, right?
- [19:49]
Podcast Host
But.
- [19:50]
Interviewer Jake Warren
But for those that haven't seen it, what was it physically like?
- [19:53]
Robert Young Pelton
So Afghanistan was essentially Pashtun in the south and then ethnic in the north. And I mean, Turkmen, Uzbek, you know, Hazara, right. In the 1800s, they began sending Pashtun families and tribes up into the north. And they would give them sort of the high ground, like the best pieces of land, and they would push out the locals and they would get obviously whacked for that. And there was all kinds of conflict. So they built this fortune as sort of like a centralized place where you could dash out on cavalry and protect your Pashtun minions. Now, it's huge, it's thick, right? It's made out of straw, it's made out of dung, and it is almost impervious to bullets and bombs. And that was the point, right? So when they used cannons to attack, it would just go poof anyway. So the fort stood up as a symbol of power to project the Pashtunization of the north. And these were the pockets that Al Qaeda and the Taliban reached out to to then begin their conquest of the north. It was Dostum's headquarters because it was cool, right? And the idea that these prisoners, and I guess I'll use air quotes on that, were put there is because it was the only walled enclosure that they could put them in, right? And in the beginning, what there were were a lot of explosions happening in different places. And remember, I was living right next to Kalijangi, right? It was like within walking distance. People were trying to figure out what's going on, like, how could prisoners be shooting, right? And, well, Kalijangi had been used by the Taliban to collect all the weapons from all the surrounding militias. And they were stacked, you know, 30ft high. So they had literally put these 460 jihadis inside an armory.
- [21:48]
Interviewer Jake Warren
The idea, I guess, that you've got a bunch of people looking to do harm and you decide to store them all together in a place where you've got an armory, right? Not the most. It's not the most sort of art of war strategic decision that's, you know, that's ever been made.
- [22:05]
Robert Young Pelton
So Dostum is told there's like 10, 15,000 guys and Kundus that are surrendering. So Dostum takes the special forces team and says, let's go to Kunduz and let's see who's in Kunduz. Well, these guys had already escaped from Kunduz, right? Like, Kunduz is about, I think, eight hours to the. So Dassim's in a hurry and he says, oh, these guys are from Kundas. Yeah, yeah, just put them in Kali Jangi because he wanted them to be on his good side so he could negotiate a surrender. This is a key point here. These people always intended to get to Mazar and start conflict, start doing something so that the other Talibs could come in and retake Mazar. So they had basically sacrificed the 10,000 people in Kunduz in order to launch this secret attack. They had grenades hanging below their testicles with. They had like a shoelace, right, that went down through their shalwar kame. And they had pistols and they had these Russian grenades hanging from their balls, right? They. They were ready to rock and roll.
- [23:02]
Interviewer Jake Warren
When you think about To k Janki, what. What is that first image? You know, this, the first sound or smell that comes back to you because you were there in the room.
- [23:10]
Robert Young Pelton
Well, this was probably the most brutal battle that I've seen. You know, when you walk through a lot of death, when you open up a human body, it has a certain smell. It's. It's kind of a warm, meaty fe. So when you walk through the courtyard after they'd been hit with AC130s, 2,000 pound bombs, you know, snipers, I mean, machine gun, I mean, all these bodies just ripped into bits. You smell meat like a butcher shop. It literally has this weird. And I remember stepping in somebody's brains and looking down at his face and saying, half his face. He'd been run over by a tank, right? So half his face was sort of calmly smiling and the other half was just. And I'd gotten my shoes all over. Takes a lot to take it in, right? And you know, doctors and medics do it all the time when they see mass casualties. But the AC130 has a cannon, which is a fragmentation round that literally splinters everything. There were dead birds, there were like bits of trees. Everything was just in pieces. And at the same time, they had hit the armory, which one of the armories, and it had blown up munitions everywhere. I mean, bullets, mines, RPGs, I mean, you name it. So it was just probably the most surreal thing. But I don't do surreal. I do reality. So it'd be hard to communicate to someone without looking at the film how deadly and bizarre this was and how calm the Afghans were around all these dead bodies. They were exhausted, right? They'd been banging away at these guys, I think three or four days. And they would just sit and make tea right next to all these dead bodies. And they would offer me tea and I'd sit and have tea with them. And they just wanted to chill, right? They'd been killing these guys for so long, and they felt bad because they were kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, right?
- [25:02]
Interviewer Jake Warren
And I think, you know, the basement, pretty grim to be in there. And I think almost the amazement that people survived.
- [25:09]
Robert Young Pelton
These guys had been put in the basement the night before because they had grenades and they killed one of Dostum's commanders with a grenade attack. So they just shoved them in the bottom of what they call the pink house, which was actually a bunker. They found this out later, but it was made by the Russians with slabs of reinforced steel the artillery from the AC130 couldn't penetrate, right? So when they pulled these guys out, they had actually planned what they were going to do. There was 80 something of them, 86 of them. And they stayed there at night and they would run up at night and they'd carve off pieces of horses and they would cook them down there, right? And they would grab weapons and pull them down there.
- [25:45]
Interviewer Jake Warren
CIA officer Mike Spann, he was the first American on the ground to die. I mean, when did you understand what happened to him and what had happened there?
- [25:51]
Robert Young Pelton
Mike and a guy named Dave Tyson, who's a linguist, drove to Kalijangi to talk to people to find out they were basically looking for bin Laden, right? When the first rush of people out of the bottom of the pink house, there were four guys that rushed him. There's like a stairway where you come out of the basement. They saw him and rushed him and they took his weapon away and they shot him one time through the top of his head, and they shot him a second time through the side of his head. Dave went over to try to protect him or save him, and of course he got overwhelmed and he ran out to the other side of the compound. So there was some confusion as to whether he was alive or dead, which is why Tyson didn't want them to bomb the compound. And when he called the embassy guy in Uzbekistan and he's like, kill them all, kill them all, bomb them. And they started dropping bombs and they were like, no, no, we don't know if Spann is still alive. There was so much misinformation coming out of that story and that event.
- [26:50]
Interviewer Jake Warren
But there is that one line as well. And I don't know if it's you that says it or someone else, and someone just calls out, there is an American, right? And that's the introduction Of Lynd, right? John Walker Lynde.
- [27:00]
Robert Young Pelton
I was staying at a house in Shebargone with the Special Forces guys, like a little guest house. And I don't know, about midnight or whatever, this noise and clanking gates. And they come and Come on Robert and bring your camera. So I walk out and there's all these guys. There's two trucks, and they start getting them off the truck and they start lining them up for me right now. One truck is completely messed up. Human beings, they're sucking chest wounds. There's a dead guy. There's Russians there, there's Sudanese. I mean, you name it, right? Every color of every Al Qaeda race. And they think I'm going to execute them. They start screaming and yelling. I said, look, just take them to the hospital. So when they went to the hospital, one of Dawstam's guys ran over and said, there's American. And I thought, well, maybe that's Mike Spann. Like, I didn't know at that time. Everything was confusing. So I grabbed a medic, a Special Forces medic, and I said, get your bag, there's an American. Let's go see. I walked over and there was a doctor whacking this guy on his forehead. And he's. What is your name? What is your name? I said, hey, Doc, let me ask the questions here. And I started asking him, but I realized he's hypothermic. He's totally out of it. And I said to Bill the medic, Bill Bennett, let's get him upstairs. Let's get him away from all these people here, and let's get him some attention. So we took him upstairs. Bill put some Hespan in his veins, right? Which is a fluid that brings back your levels, little energy in there. And I started to ask him questions, and he was really rude, right? He's like, I don't want to be in the rude. And I think, where's that accent coming from? Like, if you're an American, how do you talk like that, right? And I realized he hadn't spoken English for, like, years. And as the Hespan hit, he kind of calmed down. And I said, look, I'm filming you because you're going to disappear. Like, I'm literally worried that you're never gonna be seen again. And it's. Now's a good time to talk to your parents and say, you know, here I am, here's who I am, blah, blah, blah. And I told him I was from cnn. And he told me to, you know, fuck off. And I'm like, well, unfortunately, that doesn't work in this occasion. I am filming you and I'm recording it. I'm a journalist. So he finally said it, warmed up, and I started talking to him about things that he understood. Like terminology about the jihadis use, like, you know, did you want to be shahid? Or whatever? And he asked me if I'm a Muslim. I'm like, no, no, no, But I understand your cause. Meaning that I'd been with Al Qaeda in Chechnya, which is the reverse coin, where they're actually fighting the bad guys, right? And he talked to me, I don't know, just under an hour or something like that.
- [29:36]
Interviewer Jake Warren
When you first saw him in that condition, right? And you realize, you know, he's an American. What are you thinking? You thinking traitor, victim, a fool, or just a wounded. Just a wounded young guy.
- [29:47]
Robert Young Pelton
When you're in combat, you render aid. You don't judge the guy. You know, like, oh, are you a Democrat or Republican? No, you render aid if somebody's wounded. And I was trying to diagnose what was wrong with him. And he's very hypothermic, very cold. It was freezing, and he was very tired. You know, he kept falling asleep, and that's why the doctor was whacking him all the time. And I thought, you know, he said, he's wounded. And I'm like, I don't see any wounds. Now, it turns out he had, like, these little tiny bits of shrapnel, like a bullet had hit a wall, and the little pieces of the bullets had made, like, a pattern on his leg. My main concern initially was render care and then secondly, identify him. And then thirdly, try to communicate to his loved ones or to somebody that this is who is here and this is the condition he's in. So that, you know, the un, he didn't want to talk to the un. He wanted to talk to the Red Cross or whatever.
- [30:37]
Interviewer Jake Warren
I mean. But it did hit America hard, right? John Walker Lynn.
- [30:41]
Robert Young Pelton
When I called cnn, I said, yeah, I just interviewed this American guy. They thought I was kidding. And I said, no, no. And as I took him home with me and he's sleeping upstairs, right? And they're like, oh, yeah, sure. And then it was only, like, I don't know, eight hours later, they called back and they go, is that the guy that's in the Newsweek picture? And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they didn't believe that there was. That was my second American jihadi, Irish American jihadi that I, you know, I went to Chechnya with an American who also fought for Al Qaeda. And to me, it wasn't like a big deal. I knew the song and dance, I knew why they went to the camps, how they smuggled them in, you know, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, so when I look at that, I think it's taken a very long time for people to wrap their head around the idea of Al Qaeda and how pervasive and how ideological it
- [31:28]
Interviewer Jake Warren
is in those first weeks after 9 11. What did America misunderstand about Afghanistan?
- [31:33]
Robert Young Pelton
America wants to liberate everybody, right? That's. That's their thing. They want to recreate their revolution, which is fine, sounds very noble, but they want to do it in an engineered sense, right. They don't want to listen to the local people saying, well, this is what I believe in. And when you go to a very traditional country like Afghanistan, very poor country, they don't just jump in their Oldsmobile and go to the In N Out burger, you know, like, they don't. That's not even a world to them. So they tend to disrupt the social structure, which then leads to a group of elites in the cities and a bunch of pissed off people in the country. Right? And they spent a lot of money in Afghanistan and they call it Afghan Rain. It never hit the ground. So I think the using money as a weapon, not respecting the social structure or history of the country, it was a problem for many years. They said this needs to be federalized. Right. You have all these different ethnic minorities. They want their own jurisdictions. They don't want to be part of some centralized, corrupt government. And Afghans would explain to me why America is great and had nothing to do with putting a royal in the head of their country that charged judges $100,000 per job. You know, it was incredibly corrupt. We tried to impose a. An unsustainable model economic model, jurisdictional model, government model on Afghanistan that was looted by an elite few. Right. And all those people live in Dubai now. Right? Like Palm, Jumeirah. They all have their million, two million dollar houses.
- [33:07]
Interviewer Jake Warren
Yeah. With his son posting on Instagram, you know, stepping on the private jet with the Rolex on his arm and all of that. I remember that coming out. Crazy.
- [33:14]
Robert Young Pelton
It's America, baby. I see a situation very similar to Iran where you have a country that's been attacked, or actually Iran has attacked this. But there's a lot of bravado and there's a lot of projection about how powerful American forces are and how we're going to crush these people. But zero understanding of the enemy, like literally none. So that these very talented, well trained individuals launch off to fight a war and they get there and they go, this is not anywhere near the war I thought I was supposed to fight. The other thing is, can we fix the world, right? Can we go over to Iran and just change the government and make everybody happy and then go on to North Korea and then Greenland and I mean, this is this weird thing we're in now where we have no history of fixing anything other than Europe, right, with the Marshall Plan. This is our claim to fame. But we exercise this right of. Of determining people's outcomes without any history of having success in that.
- [34:20]
Podcast Host
We hope you enjoyed that special audio version of Undiscovered. Please let us know your thoughts on it. Next week. Conflicted will be back as usual. Until then, take care. Conflicted is a message heard. Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Ross Field.