John Lee Anderson (3:32)

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, there's no escaping my Westernism. Right. Although once upon a time, some mujahideen tried to sneak me into Afghanistan, assuring me that I looked like an Uzbek and I would be a deaf mute Uzbek, which I tried to be, but I was caught and ran to ground and returned under armed guard to Peshawar, the border city in Pakistan. You know, it's an emotional place, Afghanistan. And so although, yeah, we don't write about ourselves, it was such a full body experience. I had many encounters in which, you know, there was one. I don't think it's there, but there was. And this happened early on, in the middle of a battle. An afghan carrying a.30 caliber, which is a big machine gun, came up and grabbed me by the balls in the battlefield, just like that. And I kicked him really hard, you know, without thinking, as one does. Right. Nobody does that. Right. And I wasn't thinking about the fact that he had a weapon. So we had a standoff and the guy with me was freaking out because he thought the guy would shoot. In the end, he didn't and the incident was over. But, you know, almost every few days there would be an incident of borderline hostility or passive aggressiveness. It even happened behind the lines. I mean, I had encounters with Afghans who were, you know, manning guns on tanks and saying, you come from, you know, you come from the outside world. He was on the non anti Taliban side, but he was very hostile to me as a Westerner and I had to Repeatedly defend myself. It had happened also in the 80s. There had been many encounters, and it's easy to get killed in Afghanistan. And some of us were killed by the anti Taliban forces who now had Taliban in their midst. You know, you didn't know who was who. So as you move through the countryside, it was sketchy and you had to be careful where you were. One night we came into a town. It was snowbound in the mountains, and the driver of Kai's driver went into the bazaar to get something and came back and said, we have to go. It was just before twilight. And we said. We said, why? He says they're talking about. We had been thinking we'd camp outside this town that night because it was late and it was dangerous and the road might have been mined. And we were a convoy of cars with a few gunmen with us. And he said, they're going to attack. They're going to rob us and kill us at night. They want to rob and kill it. It was like something out of Sinbad and the forty Thieves. So we made haste and we got out of town. There were rocks in the road that had been placed there to, you know, big rocks, boulders, just try to slow us down. We had a couple of accidents on the road, but eventually made it away from that town. And that night, sure enough, we were attacked. But nobody was killed. And lo and behold, nobody told us that. The town. I forget its name exactly, but it translated as the place of the gun. And it was a renowned town of highwaymen. That is what they had been doing for centuries. They attacked and killed travelers, just like something out of, you know, 1001 nights. That's what they did. And we shouldn't have been there. So that's Afghanistan. The coke thing, you had this unruly thing with the Afghan, the rent a mob, Mujahedeen soldiers, and, yeah, that happened once. The guy took it from. But it's. It's like, I don't know. Has anybody ever been in prison? You know, you can't let. You can't be a yes man if you let them do something or. It's like standing up to Trump, you know, you have to stand up. You can't let it ride. You have to stand up for yourself. So I snatch my Pepsi back. Yeah.

Clarissa Ward (7:59)

The other thing that's so interesting is that you keep going back to Afghanistan. And I think I would say when I first started going to Afghanistan, around 2007, seven was when there was already like a lull. And that's how someone young like me Got to actually go because people didn't really want to go anymore, and it wasn't such a big story anymore. And, I mean, do you think you ever could have predicted that this war would go on as long as it did until 2021? And what was it that kept propelling you to go back and tell the story when seemingly it was. There was like a Groundhog Day element to it, you know, and even by the very nature of the rotations that the military and often these political appointees would do, they come in for one year, and day one, it's like, we're here. It's all starting, and now everything's gonna change. And then last day, and it's like, we're leaving. And then the new. I mean, it was, like, kind of crazy. Almost like you felt like you were taking crazy pills if you were spending longer than year there.

John Lee Anderson (9:12)

Well, for me, Clarissa, you know, I was never an embed, you know, which is a term that probably a lot of you became aware of with these wars, the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I never liked being an embed. And I knew these countries before you had to be. The same with Iraq. I knew it before the American invasion. I knew Afghanistan, okay. I was an outsider, but I was with them. So I watched this country be subsumed by the kind of international, especially the American presence, military presence, the overlay disappear, the city disappear behind these walls, suicide blast walls, and eventually become so dangerous that by 2010, 11, myself, I myself couldn't travel outside of. Of Kabul without risk of being kidnapped, as friends of colleagues of ours were. You know, we have a number of common friends who were kidnapped and spent, you know, many months, some cases a year or so, as hostages. Fortunately, there, unlike Iraq, they weren't, you know, slaughtered on camera. But some were, like Daniel Pearl. Early on, there was always that risk. And so for the first time in 2010, the first answer is Afghanistan gets under your skin or my skin. It's an amazing country. You feel like you're really somewhere else.

Clarissa Ward (10:45)

So beautiful.

John Lee Anderson (10:46)

It's incredible. The people are amazing. They're really hospitable. All these things sound trite, but I've always felt here I am once again in the battlefield of history. Anything can happen. It's exciting. It's dynamic. It's a place where you don't know what will happen tomorrow. Nothing is truly settled. It's a place where the last blood sports are on Fridays, the warlords and men gather in the northern part of town to fight dogs. They fight everything in Afghanistan I'm not saying this is as a national virtue, but from Buzkashi, the really rough horse rodeos, they even fight scorpions, for Christ's sake. You know, even partridges, any living thing can be pitted against the other and bet upon. But so there's this wildness to it that I think gets into the skin of some of us. And so I always wanted to go back, and so. But I found that I had to be embedded. There's a story in this book that I. I think it's the only time anybody's asked the New Yorker to kill a story that had been written and edited. But I went on an embed in Afghanistan, and it happened to be back in the area where I first spent time in the late 80s with Mullah and Aqib, my warlord host. So I knew this area, but this time it was an entirely American centric experience. You know, I was flown in choppers. I was moved around in these gigantic armored vehicles that when night fell, the driver just looks into a laptop and drives through it. Explosions happen, but you couldn't even hear them, the glass was so thick. And it was this. It was like being on Mars or something. And people died and things happened, but I. And I went on raids with the Americans in these Afghan villages, and the Afghans were there, and I was here. And so I would be the first person to say that I'm not sort of. I'm not disapproving or being critical of journalists who've done embeds for a whole generation. They kind of grew up on those. That's how they cut their teeth. And there's amazing journalism that's come out of those experiences. And it tells you a lot about, I suppose, the Americans, the Brits or whoever they went with. But for me, it was not Afghanistan. I wasn't feeling it. I wasn't in the place. I felt very detached. And when I left that time, I told my editor, I said, I don't know what I have just. He said, oh, come on, Chun Li, write it. You know, it'll be fine. Write it. So I did, and I felt very flat. I sent it to him, and he said, no, no, this is fine. We can run it. And I said, no, I don't want to run it. And they respected my word. I just felt like I didn't know what that experience was. And so I killed the piece. And I went back six months later and had a different sort of experience. It was also an embed, but I was in a base where there were a Lot of Afghans and they were at each other's throats. And that told me something more about what was happening in Afghanistan then. They had really lost the war at that point because they couldn't trust their own allies. And they were, some of them were killing the Americans and so on. There had been a whole series of incidents and I was able to write about that. But years, years went by and I eventually looked back at that piece I'd killed and I realized towards the end of the American experience in Afghanistan that in fact that one embedded piece did say something. So I revived it.

Clarissa Ward (14:41)

And it's in the book.

John Lee Anderson (14:42)

It's in the book and I guess that's what it reflects is this real distancing from the country that we were in together. It was an American experience, not one that was very unplugged from the local culture. And I realized that to my dismay, that they didn't have purchase in the land they were in. And when you went to some of these really big bases that the Americans and NATO had, it was as if they weren't even fixed on the Afghan soil.

Clarissa Ward (15:16)

I know, Green bean.

John Lee Anderson (15:18)

Yeah. And it was as if they were just, they could be blown away in the wind. There was nothing permanent. And I guess over time I began to see, I guess through those experiences I saw that with more clarity, you know, that we had not built anything there. You know, we built prefab huts for ourselves. They spent $600 million to build a kind of rocket impervious embassy which became the biggest building in Kabul, but ultimately couldn't even hold that. Unlike the Soviets who actually built housing in and educated a lot of Afghans. You know, our idea was this is the free market. Do whatever you want. Have cell phones, have cars, you know, free enterprise, you know, the wild west. But there's very little there that you can point to and say the Americans built that. They didn't.

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Clarissa Ward (18:27)

I think that kind of touches on this idea that I've experienced a lot as well during this work, which is the sort of chasm that exists between how America perceives itself and how the world perceives America, or in this case, how Afghanistan perceived the US Occupation as opposed to how Americans understood it as this kind of benevolent act of, you know, we're giving you human rights and we're giving you women's rights and we're giving you trillions of dollars and we're getting rid of opium and doing all of these things, and many of which may have come from a place of good intention, but which kind of collided together in this desperately unfortunate way. And one of the things that was so frustrating to me, I was on the ground as the Taliban took over Kabul and those scenes at the airport and people desperately trying to get on these flights. And you would listen to the tone of people President Biden and it was so, if I can say, obnoxious, sort of like, you know what? We've done enough. We did everything. This is not our problem. They couldn't get it together. And there was no humility or humanity in that moment, which, and I don't want to put that squarely on him. I think maybe that was a reflection of what a lot of Americans were feeling was like we're just done with this. We tried it, we did everything. We gave them everything. It's, you know, they can't get it together. This kind of attitude. I just, I wonder if, like how you kind of perceive that or.

John Lee Anderson (20:11)

I agree with you. I mean, I felt that his attitude was very cavalier and irresponsible and of course, yeah, he will always own the fall of Kabul, even though really it was Trump that opened the door. You know, it was a series of frankly, really stupid actions. If you want to hang on to a, if you want to hang on to a colony or whatever you want to call Afghanistan, whatever it was, that you don't do certain things, you don't telegraph to your enemy that you have a sell by date that you're leaving. They just buy their time. The Taliban waged an extraordinarily impressive guerrilla war, patrician. And they won. And we spent $2 trillion and God knows how many lives to hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban. And that's a fact. That's what happened. I arrived there a couple of months later, after the fall, and it was extraordinary because here was the city that was now multitudinous. You know, Afghan's population has more than doubled in the 20 during the 20 years of the American occupation. And Kabul went from being a city of essentially two story city with a couple of, couple of tall buildings, literally two or three, to a city, a 10 story city and with triple the number of people and a whole generation of Afghans, men and women, who felt themselves to be part of this wider world where they could travel, they could be educated, girls could become professionals and go to university and become even ministers. And all of that ended. By the time I arrived, the Taliban were still going through the pretense of saying that, you know, eventually they would let the lid off and women would be allowed to come to work. But you could tell it wasn't true. When I had those. I sought out Taliban leaders as well as traveled around the country a bit. And I came away with a real sinking feeling that, well, I had a question when I went there. Is this the old or the new Taliban? You know, the old astringent, severe Taliban or the new warm and fuzzy Taliban? And it's an amalgam on the surface, the new warm and fuzzy because they, they use phones now, but they're still extraordinarily repressive and they're in a lot of denial about some of their past misdeeds. And I could see there was a lot of sophistry in the conversations we had and it was extraordinary to meet people who had been. I met three of the former suicide bomber commanders. These were the men who had been sending in suicide commandos to attack hotels, especially where Westerners were, but also, you know, Afghan, in some cases women. And they were now in charge of. One of the suicide bomber commanders was running Kabul airport.

Clarissa Ward (23:31)

I remember that, yeah, Remember him?

John Lee Anderson (23:33)

Abdul Khaneh. Another one. There was another one I'll never forget because the whole time we had an interview, his bodyguard held his gun on me over his shoulder and looked like he'd pulled the trigger if I did anything. A really dark figure, so to speak. And now they were running the country. I had some contentious interviews, including with one Taliban. He'd spent some time in Guantanamo, so he was not a happy camper, shall we say. But he had also been involved in the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which I brought up, and he was furious that I brought it up. But you could see them from his window, the big holes where these giant archaeological treasures had once stood. And you could feel the repression in the area. People were afraid, but. And there were these Kabulis, you know, however many, 2 million Kabulis, you know, including 20 somethings, girls without, you know, with just a scarf and with their faces made up. Boys with their kind of Western style haircuts. And that began to change fairly quickly. But at the time you had these Taliban in town moving around on American Humvees, directing traffic, clearly under orders not to engage or get into frakas with the locals or with us. But you could see in their eyes that they were somewhere else. And there were two types. There were the types which you saw, the ones wearing the shalwar chamis and the coal eyes and. And they'd never been in a city before, the Kunda. And then the ones who were wearing the American special forces gear and they were completely dressed in American Special forces, right down to the pistols in the, you know, the whole look, the Ray Bans. And of course it was the real stuff because the Americans left it behind. And so it's this. And long story short, just to fast forward here, you know that Afghanistan sort of has become steadily more repressive. We all know that some outside countries have begun to try to do business there. A little bit of the great game is beginning again. Russia is the first country to give them diplomatic recognition. The Qataris, they're trying to do there behind the curtains thing. Americans are sniffing around because they're worried about the Chinese coming. It's mineral rich, etc. But it remains this very isolated country, and it's not. The Taliban are not monolithic. What I described as two types that we saw in Kabul, indeed are two types that are in the country. And there are the, call them the primitivists, I guess, the ones that would want to see women, God knows what, have their mouths sewn up out of Kandahar. And the former Al Qaeda, who turned out to be the reformers. And, you know, it's not going to remain as it is forever. There will be once again, mark my words, war in Afghanistan, because that will be how they find. That will be how. That's the only way they know to sort out differences and resolve issues of hegemony. So it may not happen for a couple of years. It may be precipitated when one or more Western powers or Eastern powers gets involved, involved there. But it will happen. And that's the thing about Afghanistan. We have this habit. You talked about 2007. There was a period even during the war when it became boring to go to because nothing was happening. But there was also a period between 1989 when the Soviets pulled out and the Americans, I think they even closed their CIA listening station on the border and everybody went away for the next, what was it, 12 years until 9, 11, sort of rediscovered the country. And I feel that it's. One of the things we do in the west is inconstancy. And I'm not by saying that I'm not encouraging any particular hawkish global posturing. All I'm saying is that it's, in fact, it's just fascinating to me that we do this, we intervene in the most intimate way possible in another country, literally killing and dying there. And then we leave, and then we just ignore it for a generation or more. And then we go back.

Clarissa Ward (28:50)

It's like a collective amnesia. I'm conscious that I want to allow some of these lovely audience members to ask their questions to John Lee, either about Afghanistan or whatever tickles your fancy. Within reason, we have some microphones. I would just ask that people questions rather than speeches, as much as I would love to hear all of your thoughts on all sorts of things. So with that in mind, come on, who's the first. The first one to ask a question? I see someone in a stripy shirt.

Alex Honnold (29:30)

Hello.

Audience Member (29:31)

Okay. Thank you very much for being here today. My question was around ISIS K and the sort of conflict which may or may not be occurring between them and the Taliban, to keep it short. But it just feels like every couple of weeks we see a news article on oh, there was a terrorist attack which killed a couple dozen Afghanis and Catt came by ISIS K. I was just wondering if you could like speak to this sort of situation going on.

John Lee Anderson (29:55)

Yeah, sure. ISIS K or isis Khorasan is the, is the, is the Afghan franchise of isis. Essentially it's a, it's a, it's, you know, it's disgruntled Taliban who felt that the Taliban have, have gone all soft and that, you know, Shiites, particularly girls in Shiite schools, need to be slaughtered as much as possible. So it's like what ISIS does, isn't it? So yeah, in the eastern provinces, you know, lo and behold along the Pakistan border where everything always starts, ISS K is particularly strong and again, I'm not an expert on it, but as far as I can tell it comes again, it has to do with certain commanders, certain clans, certain areas where they make strong just as the Pakistani Taliban, which is operating on the Pakistani side of the border, apparently fostered by and supported by the Taliban in Afghanistan have, you know, have made strong in certain areas and tend to do similar things, you know, indiscriminate bombings at mosques, usually targeting Shiites, but you know, anybody they can, Christians, Sunni sellout Sunnis, etc. So yeah, it's not at all a settled area and it's what's happened repeatedly with the Taliban. I guess the surprise story in all of this is that the Haqqani network, which was the Al Qaeda linked clan that became a big part of the Taliban during the American war, the American led war is now somehow seen as the moderate reformist faction. They would like to be something like, you know, the Emirates or Qatar, you know, is the message. And they are the ones who are in Kabul, but they, their feelings about that aren't so strong that they would go to war so far with the Supreme Leader and the clans associated with him in Kandahar in the south. So watch this space. There's a lot going on but again our attention is diverted by other.

Clarissa Ward (32:44)

And I think particularly because ISIS K doesn't appear to have transnational ambitions and certainly not abilities. It just becomes.

John Lee Anderson (32:54)

Except it did pull off that. Well, no, it wasn't was. It wasn't them, was it? It was the ISIS in Tajikistan that did the.

Clarissa Ward (33:00)

Oh, in the, in the crocus mole in Moscow, you mean?

John Lee Anderson (33:03)

Yeah, so far. Yeah, you're right. But again, you know, and there are voices that call for engagement because of these moldering threats, but there's also a lot of skepticism and not least, you know, Putin, I think Westerners don't like to look back at their failures.

Clarissa Ward (33:35)

No. I feel like nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan anymore. No, it's just like other questions. We've got woo, lots. One here and then we got one there. Whoever's first with the microphone can. Yep.

Audience Member (33:48)

Hi, Clarissa and John, thank you for talking with us. I have a hypothetical question for both of you. So it's late September 2001. The Taliban control Afghanistan. Shah Massoud's been assassinated by Al Qaeda. Facts show that Bin Laden spawned the September 11 attacks with his operatives. You are the President of the United States. What do you do?

Clarissa Ward (34:16)

I'm definitely going to punt that to John. John Lee.

John Lee Anderson (34:24)

You go after the force that did what happened in New York and Washington, of course, as a police action, I think most of the world was, was with the United States in its effort to apprehend or kill the people that carried out that action. And so I'm not, I don't have a kind of philosophical, you know, opposition to the effort itself. And I suppose by nature it had to be somewhat improvised considering the fact that we had diverted our gaze from Afghanistan for the previous 12 years, other than firing some missiles into some camp under Clinton a few years before. But the kind of people that we allied with in Afghanistan, it's as if there was, there was a lack of both tactical and strategic planning, I think interagency. I don't know enough, but it seemed to me like everybody was off doing their thing and there wasn't a cohesive sort of ten year plan or a five year plan. Unfortunately, I think Americans, we don't think that way because we have four year presidencies, but that's probably what was necessary in Afghanistan. You know, I remember early on finding, as I was saying anecdotally before, just as much hostility behind the lines as on the other side. And it was this. There was a kind of deep seated xenophobia, nationalism in this country that had been isolated from the outside world for a long time and had had many ideas, you know, fed into it. We made a small elite extremely wealthy, created a kind of notional middle class in the city, in the capital, and not much more. And outside in the countryside, you know, minds weren't changed. We didn't establish a convincing coercive presence. If you're going to do war, do it well. I'm not saying that the Russians did. Taliban did pretty well. If you're going to do war, you have to make everyone join your side or fear you. And we never managed that. So I feel I learned that maxim in Afghanistan, because, yeah, there's nothing worse than you can do. You know, if politics devolve into war, there is simply nothing worse you can do than war. It's about killing people to prevail. So if you're going to do that, you should prevail or you shouldn't do it. And I think the bottom line is we never fought it to prevail. Maybe because of our own, you know, society's limitations, we couldn't fight a total war, which, by the way, the Russians did in their nine years in the country. When I went into Afghanistan way back when, I did not see a house with an intact roof. Not one. There was rockets sticking out of the ground everywhere. And every day they were bombing, bombing, bombing. They didn't care who they bombed. And a couple of million Afghans were killed, many more than during our 20 years. But this isn't about moral relativism either. The Russians as they do, understand that if you're going to fight a war, you, you know, you take no prisoners, you fight total war. It's the only way to fight it. We don't seem to have that same ability or, or motivation. So I would argue that if that's the case with the west, and I'm not saying it's wrong, maybe we shouldn't do war because you want to win it. You don't want to. You don't want to have a kind of fiction that's going to disappear like quicksand the minute you turn your back after expending huge moral, diplomatic, political and material capital.

Clarissa Ward (39:08)

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving John Lee Anderson a huge round of applause. Thank you so much.

Mia Sorrenti (39:22)

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 membership and to join us at future live events, just head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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