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Intelligence Squared
The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson on Afghanistan: An American Catastrophe (Part One)
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- [00:01]
John Lee Anderson
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- [00:46]
Mia Sorrenti
Not Bell for McDelivery welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with John Lee Anderson, staff writer at the New Yorker and one of the great foreign correspondents of our time. Anderson joined us at the Kiln Theatre to reflect on decades of reporting from Afghanistan, from the US Backed Mujahideen's insurrection in Kabul to the American invasion launched in the days after 911 and the long war that followed. Drawing on his years on the ground, he explored how the conflict evolved into what many now regard as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era and what it can teach us about global relations. Today he was in conversation with journalist Clarissa Ward. Let's join them now live on stage in London.
- [01:35]
Clarissa Ward
Thank you. Thank you so much for that generous introduction, Margarita. I am beyond thrilled to be here tonight with John Lee Anderson, who I was fortunate enough to meet for the first time in 2006. He barely remembers it, of course. For me it was like a seminal event in my life and I was just starting out as a young journalist and it was the Lebanon, Hezbollah Israel war in 2006 and we met on the beach I believe outside the US Embassy as the US was evacuating people. And it was a huge honor then and it continues to be a huge honor and John Lee Anderson continues to be really one of the great foreign correspondence of our time. And today we are going to be talking about lots of stuff, but primarily this brilliant book that you see here, to Lose a War, which is a fascinating look at the fall and rise, I guess, of the Taliban over four decades. And it's a pretty sobering read, I think, particularly as an American, but a very important read. And of course, given that it's John Lee, imminently readable as well. So I'm going to ask some questions and then obviously we'll open it up for everybody else to chime in and we can expand the conversation, of course, beyond Afghanistan as well. But I wanted to start with this idea of, you know, we're taught that Afghanistan is the sort of graveyard of empires. Right. And I think the actual, what you write in your, and I'm quoting you here, is that it's more of a battleground of history than it has been a nation. And I just wonder if you can tell us what you mean by that and how you see conflict as shaping Afghanistan's identity.
- [03:38]
John Lee Anderson
Well, first of all, hello everybody. Thanks, Clarissa, for that generous introduction. Forgive me all for having a. I'm battling a heavy cold. Just arrived back in the rain here on Sunday from Cuba and places like that. So if I'm a little heavy headed or thick tongued, you'll know why. Look. Yeah, it's a famous adage, isn't it, that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. But it is, it has been. You know, it's on the old Silk Road between Europe and Central Asia. Everybody went through there, from Alexander the Great to the Golden Hordes, the Brits, twice the Russians, and finally the Americans. I probably missed a few along the way. There were others in the kind of prehistory. And Afghanistan is a landlocked country surrounded by mountains. It's desert, it's mountainous, it's rugged, and its people are tough as nails. They are warriors and they've experienced a warfare all their lives, pretty much anytime I've been there, and that is, I've been going there since the late 80s. So the first time I went there was when the Russians were pulling out. And I remember spent a week on one of my expeditions there with a couple of bodyguards in a hut in the mountains. It was snowbound, it was an ammo dump. And we just spent a week in this place and feeding ammo boxes into this stove to keep warm. And I watched the behavior of the guys who were with me. And one of the things that struck me about them and later on at the front and so on, was that they had nothing soft in their lives. And that's something that's kind of continued over time in Afghanistan especially once you leave the big city, Kabul and some of the others, which are barely cities, they're really towns Is there's nothing soft in that landscape. You have to be. It's harsh and uncompromising. You have to know how to survive in it. And invaders, by necessity, are outsiders and don't know the land as well as the people who live there. And it's something we've seen again and again. My point about saying that it's more a battlefield of history than a nation, in a way, I'm riffing off the old graveyard of empires, but I'm also saying that each period of peace has come through bloodshed. So Afghans, and it's not exclusive to Afghanistan. I think there's a few other nations on earth where this is the case, where the dynamic of peace or war is turned on its head. We have a kind of. I think we have a. I would call it a kind of diplomatic fiction that we tell ourselves in the west that peace necessarily comes through negotiations and an end to war. But in certain societies, peace has only ever come through total war. The vanquishing of one's enemy and the imposition of the rule of force on the other. And anyway, that's one of the reasons I've always found Afghanistan particularly fascinating, because I feel like it truly is a kind of time travel. If you read Prince's Machiavelli or Machiavelli's Prince, rather, when you're in Afghanistan, a lot of that seems to bear out in the battles one sees. Sometimes it's less about the right or wrong than who prevails. Some of the early scenes I describe in the book, in the war in 2001, show that as you see enemies cross the battlefield through an agreement with a commander on this side, and within hours or the very next day, they're now fighting on this side.
- [08:14]
Clarissa Ward
I found that fascinating, this idea of this switching sides and shifting allegiances and, I mean, help us understand that a little bit better. Like, this wasn't ideological.
- [08:26]
John Lee Anderson
No, no, it's about power. It's about what you can do. In some cases, there was a kinship through a clan or some family history, but in other cases, it was simply a calculation that, you know, if, let's say, a group of Taliban on this side of the battlefield persisted in fighting, in those days, it would have been the Northern alliance. With the American B52s overhead, they knew. They did the math, they would not win. But if they joined the other side, they would. And very soon they would meld with the new amorphous forces that were gonna be the post Taliban powers, the be. And that's exactly what happened. I Saw it again and again in the north when the Americans were beginning to try to push the Taliban back and eventually took the towns and cities of Afghanistan. And then the Taliban mysteriously melted away. Where the Taliban ended and the new forces began, you would be hard pressed to sort of find, you know, find the place. A case in point. I returned to Kandahar in 2010, early 2002, which was sort of the last stand of the, of the Taliban, and I, I sought out my old host, a man called Mullah Nakib, with whom I'd spent time during the Soviet withdrawal. So 12 years had gone by and he had been the, he had been the, the power in the rural area around Kandahar, one of seven commanders that ruled the areas around Gander. And at the time I'd spent with him, he had been firing recoilless rockets, which is a fairly big rocket, into the city. A lot of things happened on that occasion. But 12 years later, I found him in Kandahar. The American Special Forces were roaring around, the Taliban had disappeared. And I found out that Mulla Nakib, my old host, was under a dark cloud from the new powers that be. That is to say Karzai, the man the Americans had chosen to run Afghanistan, his family, which was from that area, and the Americans himself because they said he had let Mullah Omar and the Taliban escape. They had gone to him to ask him to get the Taliban to surrender, and he had said he would. But on the appointed night, they had all disappeared and sure enough, he'd cut some kind of deal with them. What deal it was, I never knew. But when I went to visit him, he conceded that he was, you know, not well liked by the new powers that be. But, but he wanted to show me this convoy of super edition luxurious Toyota Land Cruisers that Mullah Omar had left behind for him. And we, you know, we proceeded to go out to the old battleground in this convoy of exquisite Toyota Land Cruisers that belonged to his next door neighbor, Muhammar. In other words, he had figured out a way to survive. He was not a Taliban, but he knew what he had to do in order to keep his tribe, his people happy, not to be killed, at least up to that point. Eventually he was killed.
- [12:11]
Clarissa Ward
And as you're observing this and taking this all in and with the benefit of the experience of having been there in the late 80s. Are the Americans understanding this? Are they appreciating these subtleties? Because it seemed early on this was a relatively easy war. It was. Look how well we've done. We've done so quickly, okay, we haven't found Osama bin Laden, but the Taliban have crumbled, and suddenly it morphs into something very, very different, which we'll get onto. But I just wonder, you know, when you. Did you see a lot of hubris? Did you see any real sort of understanding from Americans about what was really going on?
- [12:58]
John Lee Anderson
Look, there were exceptions, but by and large, no. They came barging in, by and large, it was Special Forces led. And I found them to be. To behave like real cowboys. There were a few incidents that happened with the Special Forces, Navy seals, those sorts of people early on that I didn't like. Including, you know, this is very aggressive groups moving around on their own with a handful of interpreters, people they'd hired up, kind of rent a mob, rent a thug, who told them where to go and what to do. And you saw them spin out on Tora Bora right away. The people they were dealing with were pretty thuggish warlords who were heavily involved in the drug business. And sure enough, you know, the people they thought were helping them were also double dealing, which is, by the way, that's how you do war. It's about winning. It's not about right or wrong. It's about winning. And Afghans know that betrayal is a big part of the warfare there. Just as I was describing the scenes on the battlefield in the north, the same thing happened with these warlords that the Americans hired. And they were throwing around a lot of money. The CIA was throwing around a lot of money.
- [14:15]
Clarissa Ward
Did the Americans know, though?
- [14:18]
John Lee Anderson
I think. I think. I think you had different groups of Americans who weren't necessarily talking to each other. My experiences with the Special Forces, when I found them in the field there and in Iraq were usually really aggressive encounters. It wasn't like meeting a fellow American or a fellow Brit. In one of the cases that really disturbed me early on was some journalists that I knew. Two women in particular were coming up in one of these areas that was still wild and lawless. I think they had an operation called Anaconda, which was after Osama bin Laden fled, disappeared. They started surging into the hinterlands with these sort of aggressive actions, operations aimed at ferreting out Al Qaeda remnants and Taliban remnants. And they were already being hidden everywhere. And so they took people along with them who told them they know where they were now. In one of these cases, they established a fort. They were occupying a fortress in the middle of nowhere. And on the way there, these two colleagues were attacked. You know, they were fired upon in some you know, benighted little mud walled place. And one of the women was pretty badly wounded. And when they got to the fortress where the Americans were, they wouldn't let them in. They had to sleep outside that night, completely exposed to the elements and without medical attention. I just could not forgive them for that. But that was kind of typical. I had run ins with, with them myself later and very often I found guys who were really psyched up actually the kind of behavior we're seeing now from ICE in places like Minneapolis, very similar behavior, you know, just force protection. It's us and them. Don't get in our way, we'll shoot you, that kind of thing. And look, Afghanistan became this place very quickly where, you know, the international community poured in use, you know, into Kabul, a few other outposts. There was a lot of well intended people that came wanting to help with, you know, digging wells or women's rights or you know, kids, schools or whatever it was. But meanwhile we had this, this army of guys who never, never figured in to the calculation of how many troops we had over there. I'm talking about the Special Forces and the CIA. In the days later on when you could say that there were, I don't know, 50,000American troops there or ISAF troops, there were also, you know, thousands of paramilitaries fighting for the CIA. And they were doing stuff that isn't legal or countenanced by our side or nor was it ever covered by our journalists because you couldn't be with them. And they were killing people. They were kicking down doors and killing people. And anyway, I'm jumping ahead. But that sort of behavior began early on and I'll just. There's so many anecdotes that come to mind, but there's one, I came down with it to give you an idea of the Afghans. So actually I'll tell the story of one Afghan who remains. My friend Qais Kais was, upon the eruption of war was in this place right on the Tajik border. He was 22, I think maybe you know, Qais, I think you know who I'm talking about. He was 22. His father was the furniture maker for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban. His mother was a black marketeer who had kept the family going ever since the Russian days by selling basically stolen goods, right, to whoever. And that's just, you know, it's business, right? And they lived in these sort of Soviet built apartments on the outskirts of Kabul. I met him there and as the war moved forward, he said that he would be happy to come and work with me. And so as the cities fell and we moved forwards, down over the Hindu Kush to Kabul, I watched Kaist go from being a 22 year old who, by the way, at the time the war began, was planning to smuggle himself to England and had gotten as far as the Tajik border and was only debating one thing, which was whether or not to carry, I think it was 2 kilos of heroin to Moscow on the flight from Dushanbe to Tajikistan to Moscow, because it would reduce the airfare. And of course, that was being done through the Russian federal police, who controlled the border of Afghanistan at that time and I think still do. Anyway, he was free about this, and he had earned already, I think, $1,000 from various journalists by the time I met him. People were paying him like $100 a day or something. While I was there, the market stalled. Traders, literally palisades of sticks and, you know, goats being slaughtered next, next door, were aware that the Afghani, the local currency, was going to change because the CIA was dumping lots of money into the. Into the economy to buy warlords. He traded his thousand dollars and he made $30,000. So he's like a future Wall street guy. He made 30. By the time I met him, he had $30,000. And he bought two Russian UAZ chiefs, one of which he put a driver with. And I spent the next week or so with him. He eventually became something like, you know, something like a minister plenipotentiary in Kabul. But while we were in Kabul, this new cowboy place with American troops coming in and everything else. One day we passed a slightly older guy in traffic. Let's call him, you know, Hassan. That wasn't his name, but he said, ah, there's Hassan. And I said, who's Hasan? He said, oh, he's my neighbor. He's 26 and he's already a millionaire. And I said, you mean a millionaire like a dollar millionaire? He said, yes. I said, how did he become a dollar millionaire? This is two months into the American occupation. He said, they went to him. He spoke some English like me, and they said, will you find us a fortress? So he went to his cousins and he said, move out of your house, you know, and they paid him. They said, we really like this. They gave him, whatever it was, $250,000 for that fortress. And they said, we need 10 more around the country. So by, yeah, by December 2001, he had become a hustler with real money. And this is how it went. In Afghanistan, before you knew it, there were these swaggering guys who were calling the shots and becoming the interfaces for the Americans in Afghanistan and everything they wanted to do and as time went and some of them were drug traffickers, you know. And for about six years the Americans looked the other way. 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- [24:50]
Clarissa Ward
So help us understand, like why did the Americans lose their way? At what stage did they completely lose sight of, let's put the sort of ethics and morality to the side. But just even in terms of like strategically trying to understand what the actual objective was, it suddenly took on this enormous scale and it was about digging wells and building schools and educators, educating women and all these things that originally had not really been part of the plan.
- [25:22]
John Lee Anderson
No, it was a police action. And I think the fact that they didn't get bin Laden right away is, you know, helped lead them into this morass. And of course, you know, we have a system that, where you have changes, presidential changes, although in this case it was, you know, George Bush kind of owned it for the next almost eight years. And he, he had, he had people advising him, as he did later in Iraq, not, not long afterwards, getting diverted to Iraq, who were giving him, I think, poor advice. So you had the kind of, you know, door kickers, the special forces off in the boondocks. You had the well intended State department people doing the women's education thing and promptly getting murdered. And it was just, there's a term that ends with sho that everybody says nowadays that's kind of what it was. But if you went to Kabul, I
- [26:19]
Clarissa Ward
think you can say shit show, shit show.
- [26:22]
John Lee Anderson
You could be faulted for not understanding because suddenly there's all this money, there's all this, all these people pouring in. I remember meeting an American woman from New York who'd married a warlord and she wrote a kind of pulp memoir about it, about her, me and the warlord. And she opened a cafe in Kabul and there was a French place that a lot of us would like to go to. Remember that? Lamos Faire. Beautiful place. I'll never forget. To give you an idea of the one time I went there and the American, there was no American ambassador, but there was an acting ambassador. They brought him in from Korea. There was this kind of rollover of People, the kind of general tenor was, you know, we're going to make this better. And I think everybody was doing their thing. And for about three years, the Taliban, you know, were kind of absent. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that they really started resurging. And then once they did that, the Americans were in denial, basically, as were their allies. It had become a NATO mission with, you know, I don't know how many countries. They used to brag about, how many countries were involved. And if you went through the list, there was a. Even Mongolia was there. There were three. You know, there was Spaniards. There was, you know, a similar thing began happening in Iraq. But the Afghan mission really suffered because of the diversion to Iraq. And I was talking about this ambassador who wasn't there. And the guy that took me to meet this interim ambassador was this kind of jovial kind of Beach Boys guy in his late 50s with a Hawaiian shirt. He was, hey, man. Hey, Dude. How you doing? I'd never met a public affairs officer like him. And we went in, and while the ambassador was talking, he was kind of doing things like this with me behind, and we hung out later. Turns out this guy was a friend of Donald Rumsfeld. He was just what he seemed. He was a beach bum from San Diego. He'd been a roadie for Janis Joplin. He was a dope smoking. He was like the Big Lebowski, you know, with no bowling ball. But he had. He was being paid $350,000 a year to run the embassy's PO for every. We set up a government and then never gave it, never invested it with true sovereignty. He bragged. He brought along this British guy. I'll never forget his name. I always forget his name. I'll never forget this guy. This guy turned out to be the guy who had done the dossier.
- [29:12]
Clarissa Ward
Christopher Steele.
- [29:13]
John Lee Anderson
Paul something. Iraq can have, you know, nuclear weapons in 90 minutes.
- [29:21]
Clarissa Ward
Okay. Yes.
- [29:22]
John Lee Anderson
Yes. So he was the author of this dossier, which. By which Bush justified the invasion of Iraq. He had been. He had been, you know, prematurely kicked out of his job, and now he had reemerged in Kabul two years later as the shadow interior minister. With the dude at his house and this guy, I spent an evening where they promptly got, you know, shit face drunk. And the dossier character, who was a little tiny guy when, you know, boasted about how he was the real interior minister of Afghanistan. And dude was saying, he is. It's true, he is the actual interior minister of Afghanistan, like most of the others were earning a maximum of $25,000 a year, maybe half that. And he was making, you know, 30 times that or whatever, whatever $350,000 a year is. And this unfortunately went right across the board. I met other shadow ministers, people who, I met one young man, British accountant once who came out and he was going to be the shadow accounting minister or whatever it was. And he was maybe 32, and this was a big break for him. And it wasn't as if the Afghans didn't know this and didn't feel humiliated by it. Of course they did. And so once again, behind the scenes, just under the surface, you know, especially out in the provinces, deals were being cut. You know, Taliban reascendent were talking to their cousins, their next door neighbors, people who were now part of this, you know, cartoon show in Kabul, telling them that, you know, we're coming back and you better know which side you're on, that kind of thing. A lot of money was thrown around for nothing, basically. And I, I just, I couldn't believe these characters, but they, you know, I don't know what he was making back in San Diego, but there he was, you know, having a great old time. Sort of a boondock, as long as it lasted, huh?
- [31:39]
Clarissa Ward
A boondoggle.
- [31:40]
John Lee Anderson
Yeah. And so at what point did they start to lose it? The Americans completed, of course, everything was contracted right out. So you had all these contractors as well. They rebuilt the ring road around Afghanistan to the tune of I don't know how many billions of dollars to some American company which was, you know, in any sort of counterinsurgency scenario, you do need roads. You want to have roads into the areas where some irate mullah might be, be inveighing against you and you want to have everything covered. Of course, they never really did, but by the time they had finally built this ring road, paved it in Afghanistan, the Taliban were back and had begun decapitating the engineers working on it. And so it became once again very dangerous to work in Afghanistan for everyone. And what happened in Kabul, what began to happen in Afghanistan is what we'd seen happen in Iraq, which was a city that you could once upon have a sense of its political geography, would disappear behind these 18 foot high suicide blast walls everywhere, which are still there today. The old couple just disappeared. As the attacks became more and more effective, they first started picking off the, you know, the women's rights, easy, low hanging fruit in the provinces, and then began launching, you know, ever more audacious attacks. And they took their time, you know, they took their time in. But there was no, there was no doubt, I would say that by so the war took place in 2001 too, the invasion. By 2005, they were coming back. By 2007, it was clear they were very much back. And you had certain forces, including the British down in Helmand and others in other provinces, Canadians further south and Americans who were just fighting regularly and would go into villages that they knew to be run by the Taliban. And eventually by 29:10, around the time bin Laden was finally killed, the international forces talked about the shadow government. The shadow government was the Taliban government. And by then, I mean, I was actually in meetings with American military and Afghan elders in which it was clear that one of the people there was reporting to the Taliban or very possibly the representative of the Taliban government. And everybody knew it was coming. So it, you know, it fell when it did, but it was pretty obvious that it was going to fall 10 years before.
- [34:37]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Valparto and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com forward SLME membership and to join us at future live events just head over to intelligentsquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [35:19]
John Lee Anderson
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Clarissa Ward
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John Lee Anderson
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