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Intelligence Squared
What Did Twenty Years of Western Intervention in Afghanistan Achieve? With Jon Lee Anderson
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John Lee Anderson
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Cmintmobile.com welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode we're joined by foreign correspondent John Lee Anderson to discuss the rise and fall of the Taliban. Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, covering the US backed mujahideen's insurrection against the Soviet backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 911 attacks, he was again on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. He sits down with journalist Hannah Lucinda Smith to shed light on this pivotal period in Afghanistan and to discuss his new book, Toulouse A the Fall and Rise of the Taliban. Now let's join our host, Hannah Lucinda Smith, with more. Welcome to INTELLIGENCE Squared. I'm Hannah Lucinda Smith. Our guest today is John Lee Anderson, a world renowned foreign correspondent, authority and staff writer for the New Yorker. For the past four and a half decades, John Lee has been reporting on wars, crises and revolutions from Latin America to the Middle east and Africa. But it is Afghanistan that John Lee has returned to again and again, having first reported there in the late 1980s during the Soviet invasion. In his new book, To Lose a War, he brings together a collection of his reporting there from the aftermath of 911 to to the resurgence of the Taliban 20 years later, and in doing so, presents a nuanced and engaging insight into the long arc of Afghanistan's latest upheaval. Welcome to INTELLIGENCE Squared. JOHN lee, hi.
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John Lee Anderson
Now, thanks, thanks a lot for having me.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
So let's just start by talking about your kind of personal connection with Afghanistan. You're deeply compelled by the country as you write yourself in the book. What was it that first pulled you into Afghanistan's story and kept you coming back there?
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John Lee Anderson
You know, the Afghan war in the 1980s, the mujahideen against the Soviet invasion that lasted 10 years. The occupation in that country was a huge event at the time. And although I had spent most of my young reporting career in Latin America, at the end of the 80s, I embarked on a book project about guerrillas around the world. And the Afghans were still fighting this foreign invader. They were, in fact, out of the 40 or so guerrillas fighting around the world, the guerrilla groups, they were the only ones fighting off a foreign invader. And I wanted to see that for myself. So I went there. And, you know, for anybody who's been to Afghanistan, it is like time travel. It may sound like a cliche, but it is. The men there were fighting against, you know, had been handed Stinger missiles. These were men who essentially were barefoot and didn't understand the the concept of man made flight, yet had Stinger missiles with which to bring them down. And so I made several trips into the, you know, into the battlefield and spent time with young men, boys and men who were encircling the government held cities. They alternated between activities of war and prayers. But I, I stayed with them long enough to get a feeling for their culture. You know, they were into poetry. They got lyrical about flowers and rivers. They were very separated from women. And that was kind of an issue I detected early on. But yet they were and very emotional people. The entire land that I saw had been almost completely destroyed. I never saw a house where, with an intact roof, everything had been bombed. And the other thing about Afghanistan is its history. Of course, it's fought against every foreign invader, from Genghis Khan to Alexander Great, the Soviets, the Brits. And there's something about the landscape. It's incredibly wild. You feel that you could be in the 10th century there. The hand of man is almost, you know, almost invisible. Everything is the color of the earth, and so it stays with you. There's something about that landscape, the uncompromising nature of that land and the society that it's developed that remains in you. You want to go back. I share this with a handful of other people, I think, that have also, like myself, been to Afghanistan. You know, it shouldn't be. Be a place you want to go back to. It's uncompromising. There's nothing soft about it. And yet its wildness, the passion of its people, the brutality of its history, the unrelenting nature of that history is. Is something that is. Is sort of hypnotic, and it makes you not turn away once you've been there.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah, I. I agree. I mean, I have nowhere near the kind of experience that you have in Afghanistan. But one thing that I remember from one trip that I took there is 20, 22. You know, you go from Kabul, which is this incredibly dysfunctional city, incredibly tough to live in. You know, doing anything is difficult. And you sort of go out on really bumpy roads and you're driving for hours. And I remember we were driving through the dark, through the night. I was thinking, God, where are we going? And it wasn't until the sun came up in the morning that I realized we were just in the middle of the mountains. It was the most unbelievable view I've ever seen in my life. And like you say, it was like time traveling. Really like time traveling, yeah. I've never been anywhere and experienced that kind of geography and. Yeah, that sense of really going somewhere undiscovered, I think.
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John Lee Anderson
Exactly. So an addendum to the question. And, you know, forgive me, but. So why have I gone back so many times? It's not just because of that incredible landscape or its history. It's because it's. Despite the fact that it is one of the most remote places on Earth, this landlocked country bounded by deserts, the Hindu Kush and so on, in Central Asia, it has made itself relevant again and again and again. So just as I found myself documenting the end of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, which resulted in sort of 3 million deaths, 5 million refugees and so on, and to some analysts, really symbolize, or heralded, rather really heralded the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. It began to fall apart just a year and a half after I was there. We forgot about it for 10 years. That is to say, the west turned away, having helped these mujahideen, these holy warriors, fight off the Soviet Union. Everybody just went off. And the west, anyway, especially the United States, sort of basked in the triumph of being the only superpower left. And we learned to our dismay on 9, 11 in 2001, that you can't turn away from a place like Afghanistan, that in our absence it had turned into a proving ground, a sanctuary and a gathering place for jihadis led by Osama bin Laden. By then, the Taliban had taken over this Islamist force that essentially was seeking a kind of year zero for Islam, taking the country back to some notional era of the caliphate in which women wore burkas, people could be executed in public. Child's play was banned, along with music and television and everything else. As we know, that was just a horrific period. And it culminated in those terrorist attacks in the United States which brought the United States, not the Russians now, but the United States to Afghanistan. And then we have seen. And so I returned. I returned then and I returned many times over the past 20 years. And having been there yourself, you'll know what that meant. You know, hundreds of thousands of foreign troops at height and altogether led by the Americans and their allies, invaded, occupied the country, chased off the Taliban, and eventually began fighting a rear guard battle against them as they returned. And four years ago, you know, just four years ago in a few weeks, we all watched as the Americans pulled out in horrific circumstances, returning the country to the fold of the Taliban, whom they had been fighting for the past 20 years. So it's an incredibly dramatic turn of events. It's one that I don't think, given everything else going on in the world, Trump, not least that we've had time to really reflect on and digest. And typically with our governments, whether it's the British or the American, I think most governments, our governments and our societies tend not to want to look in the mirror when there's been a failure, a national failure. And there's no doubt that that's what Afghanistan signifies to the US and to the west who participated in this 20 year effort. So my point is that it remains compelling. I think we can see in what happened during that time the seeds of the eventual defeat, because that's what it was. And it's important to know our history so that we don't repeat it. You know, the old cliche, but it's a very true one simple thing to remember.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
I mean, it is almost, you know, there's this almost poetic symmetry to it. I mean, almost 20 years to the day that the Taliban were ousted by the Americans, they were back ousting the Americans. But, you know, as we know, this isn't something that just came out of nowhere. It was a long build, a long decline in the kind of security, Security situation in Afghanistan, in the influence that the west had there. What, what point did you realize in your reporting in that 20 years that things had started to go wrong?
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John Lee Anderson
You know, it's one of the things I had to think about in compiling my stories for this book. I think I was skeptical throughout without. I wasn't necessarily against the military engagement in the beginning, and in fact, I wasn't. I thought that it was right that the Americans and their allies chase Al Qaeda after the horrific terrorist attacks of 9, 11. But once I was in country, back in this country I'd been in 12, 13 years before I began to see my countrymen behave in ways that, you know, caused me dismay and above all, a kind of consistent ignorance about the local culture and the way they behaved in the field, insensitivity to the local culture, sort of dismissing people's cultural concerns for their own arguments about national security. I saw this myself in the field. I began to sort of. These little events began to pile up in my mind. And I think it. I mean, I think you can see the skepticism and dismay in some of my reporting fairly early on. There was no point at which I stood back and said, they're going to fail in 2001, 2, 3, 4. But by about 2005, as the Taliban did return to the field and start to spoil the project of the west in Afghanistan, which was now about democratization and infrastructure and all these things. I began to, I think, look at everything with a more jaundiced light, you know, with a sense that this might not go well, I think by 2010. So in other words, you know, 11 years before the Taliban retook the country, I did predict that they would. I'm not saying I'm clairvoyant. I spent time with Americans and Afghans fighting together, embedded in the field, fighting the Taliban, and I realized that the. You could cut the air with a knife. The Americans and their Afghan allies, in many cases despised one another and I thought, if this is how they are 10 years after this invasion, this occupation, this effort to reform this country, and the Americans haven't learned the minimal amount of. Haven't acquired even a minimal amount of respect or trust in their Afghan allies. That didn't bode well. And so in a piece I wrote in 2011, the subtitle of the piece was, Is It Time to Leave Afghanistan? And I guess that was what I was beginning to say to myself by then. I didn't see how it could be fixed. And so I. I was not surprised when it eventually fell apart. Although, of course, like everybody, I was shocked and dumbfounded how it came about so quickly. And then the cackhanded way the evacuation was orchestrated, that was shameful and embarrassing and awful. And so I couldn't have predicted that. And I think as a citizen of any country, especially a country as powerful as the US I kind of. However critical I was of US Policies in times past, I always thought of it as sort of too big to fail. How could it be? And yet I had grown up as a teenager watching the US Fail in Vietnam. But it's also, I think this Afghan thing has been instructive because you realize how much you're grown. You've incorporated a certain kind of national historiography. You know, the stories we tell ourselves about are, they're not defeats, they're retreats, or they're, you know what I mean? They're not failures, they're strategic withdrawals. But in fact, these are defeats. And a lot of it has to do with cultural dissonance and I think a lack of a sense of national mission. You know, we live in different times than our forebears did. You know, the Great War or World War II, or for that matter, in centuries past when our soldiers believed in king and country. And it shows. It shows in the battlefield.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. There's been some quite. I mean, alarmist in the way that the British tabloids present it, but there's been some studies reported recently about the number of Gen Z Brits who would fight for their country. Right. And it's incredibly low. And I think you're right. I think that sense of, you know, what are we fighting for? What is it that we're fighting for? Has been completely undermined by defeats like Afghanistan and to a lesser extent, also Iraq, places like that.
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John Lee Anderson
Absolutely.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
One of the really nice things about your book, there's many nice things about it, but, you know, Afghanistan is an incredibly complicated place. And I think, you know, for a lot of people, they sort of look at and go, oh, I can't get my head around this. But the lovely thing about the way that you write is that you focus on characters a lot. And, you know, I think in the human condition and in human stories, we can always find things that we relate to. But the characters that you speak to and you tell the stories of range right from people like Ashraf Ghani, the former president, to complete unknowns, you know, people that would never have heard of. Who was the most memorable for you and why?
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John Lee Anderson
Oh, gosh, I mean, there's a few. Well, one man comes to mind. Mamour Hassan. He was my host. He was a warlord who lived in northern Afghanistan, near the Tajikistan border, that is to say the back of beyond in 2001. He lived in a mud walled fortress with his wives and children. His wives I never saw, of course, because you don't have to be a Taliban Afghan man to hide away your women. It's cultural, especially in the rural areas. Anyway, he was an interesting man because although he was a warlord and he had a kind of feudal relationship in that society, he was a lord and others were serfs, if you know what I mean. And he operated a front line on what was actually an old fortress that had been built by Alexander the Great, you know, thousands of years before. It looked like a mud hill, but in fact it was the remains of a fortress. So very atmospheric. And there were tanks firing from it. It's not the only one in Afghanistan like that. The battlefield is old and yet modern instruments are sometimes attached to them. So we got to talk. He let me stay with him. I was getting my bearings. It was during the period when the Americans were coming to Afghanistan. It was before the bombing began. And unbeknownst to us, the CIA had come into the country and was buying up the loyalties of warlords to eventually attack and prevail in the battlefield against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. So this is September, October 2001, right after 9 11. One day, Ma' Mur Hassan begins telling me his life story in which it turns out that his mother had been murdered by a rival. And so he was going to not just murder that man, but, you know, carry out a massacre as one does against his clan in that village. And then he proceeded to tell me that, you know, because of the intervention of his father, who was a holy man, and his interpretation of the Hadith, these are interpretations of the Quran, it had been resolved that he would not carry out that bloodletting, that he would in fact make peace with his mother's murderer, which he did. And then he married him to his niece and had employed him. I couldn't, as a Westerner, I just couldn't. I couldn't imagine this. And I began to think there was some great value in this story because it showed me, even before the conflict with the west began, that we as Westerners should know that Afghans had recourses of their own to resolving conflict that we should know about. So I followed up. It was one of my first reports in Afghanistan. And I eventually met his mother's killer, who sat next to him and told me exactly what had happened. And the two of them had found the means to forgive one another and then bonded their forgiveness through marriage. And it was just an astounding story. And I realized that this was something that we never saw and I don't think we see in the West. So just as we tend to think of Afghans as these wild and woolly characters, which they are, they also have this ability to find reconciliation and compassion through their own cultural codes. And so I always think of Mamour Hassan as to this day, just the other. By the way, just out of the blue, about three weeks ago, I had an email which, you know, from his son who's now grown up, I think he was, I don't know, maybe 10 when I was there. And he wrote me to say he had. He had. Someone had sent him the story, had written about his father and he wanted to, you know, he wanted to connect. And Mamour Hassan is still alive and still living in that area. So.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Wow. Will you try and find him again?
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John Lee Anderson
Sure, if I can, I will. Yeah. I hope to go back and. And I would love to see him again.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. What a story. Wow.
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John Lee Anderson
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John Lee Anderson
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
When you first go back after the Taliban's retaken control of Afghanistan, you find this kind of really sort of half hearted sort of fundamentalism. And this really stuck out with me in your book because I've, you know, realized the same thing when I went, I hadn't had any experience Afghanistan, you know, you just what I'd read about the Taliban and particularly its old iteration. And then suddenly you're confronted with, as you write in the book, these young guys wearing the uniforms that the Americans had left behind. And it was really weird. It was odd. Did that surprise you? You know, given all your experience in Afghanistan? And has it surprised you that since then they have reverted back to this kind of Taliban? 1.0 on the yes.
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John Lee Anderson
I mean, there was a cognitive dissonance to see the Taliban in Kabul. Keep in mind that when they marched into that city in August 2021, many of them, most of them, had never been in Kabul. Most of them had never even been in a city. There aren't really big cities in Afghanistan. Kabul is the biggest. And I mean as an example, one day I was at the King's tomb in A sort of barren hill on the one edge of the city. The former king and I found a couple of young men wandering around, you know, in their blankets and guns. And I talked to one of them as he looked out over this really barren landscape of mud walled houses and so on. And I said, what do you think? What are you looking at? And he said, it's amazing. Look at this city. And he was looking with, you know, just absolute amazement and admiration at this city. He'd never been in one. So there was that. There was this kind of, you know, the hillbillies come to town aspect. And those by and large, those young men, boys, you know, they wore the traditional shalwar hamis, sometimes very colorful. They like a lot of color. They would call their eyes. They had their Kalashnikovs and were pretty uncultured, let's put it that way. Then there were the others, who for whatever reason had donned because they could, because the Americans left everything they donned the look of the American special Forces, the Ray Bans, the headphones, the ankle holsters, the whole magyards and the uniforms. And they had the weapons too, and they had the Humvees. So you'd find these guys directing traffic in Kabul and looking and acting just like you might see American special forces represented on cinema, which I guess they'd been exposed to as well, and yet dissonant between the look and their own culture. However, the other big thing difference was, of course, when the Taliban came to Kabul in 1996, you know, there were no cell phones, so there was no smartphones, but they also banned photography. They banned the graven image. They destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of these horrific archaeological crimes. They destroyed everything with a graven image in the Kabul museum. This country that is the repository for antiquities going back to earliest civilization. It was a real tragedy and a crime. And in the years since then, of course, the smartphone has appeared and they all wandered around with their smartphones. So the Taliban, as I saw them in 2021 and you did in 2022, had gotten over the Graham image, but they were still severe. And so I was seeking an answer to the question, I think we all wondered, is it the new warm and fuzzy Taliban because they like our clothes and they have smartphones, or is it the old Taliban, severe, austere, uncompromising and merciless. And so I sought out as many of the leaders as I could, both military and political. And I found myself getting a lot of what I felt was insincerity back a Kind of lack of definition, at the very least. In other cases, sort of dismissals of my. I felt justifiable questions about where they might be headed, particularly when it came to women and girls and frankly, sometimes just downright sophistry and denialism about the past. So I came away feeling uncertain and actually quite suspicious. And I ended, I think, my last story on a note from a woman I met who predicted that they would put her back in a burqa. And that was one of the great tragedies of this whole thing, is that women in particular have been so discriminated against and repressed. And she was right. And I guess that reflected my own gut feelings about where I was headed.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah, I think it was very, very interesting. I was here in Istanbul on the day that the Taliban took Kabul, and we were actually having a dinner. There were a load of journalists who were all sort of getting drunk and chatting about what had happened, of course. And there was a real split, actually, between the male journalists and the female journalists. We, as women, we all said, I don't trust this. And I think it's because, you know, this kind of fundamentalism, it hits women, minorities, fear first.
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John Lee Anderson
It does.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
And so I think, you know, our. Maybe our antenna are up a bit more. But, yeah, there was a lot of credence among the male journalists, which I found astounding. And maybe it's, you know, this wanting to believe that they've changed, wanting to believe that something better can come. I don't know. But, yeah, that sticks with me a lot. And, you know, the other thing that I was just thinking is we're talking about this. Yeah, I think a lot of conflict is actually quite performative, particularly in the time that we live in now. You know, it's so interesting. You said that they're kind of aping the way that they've seen American special forces behave on tv.
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John Lee Anderson
I think so. I think they really do. And the fact that they've been brought into the world of tech through smartphones shows that there's all kinds of crazy videos that come out of Kabul nowadays. I'm sure you've seen some of them. There was this whole skater dude thing where they're hanging on to military vehicles and they go through. And these are the guys with the Kalashnikovs. But they've learned how to skate, and they're going through Kabul like, racing around on skateboards. I think it's skateboards, yeah. As opposed to roller skates. Both, maybe, but they've learned that belatedly. And so they found their own way to do it and also to show it, which everybody has to show everything nowadays, right? And the latest phenomena, of course, are these Western influencers arriving in Afghanistan and hanging out with the Taliban. And together 20 somethings, Westerners posting little short videos about them hanging out.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Obviously the Taliban now are back. They're not going anywhere. This is the new reality for Afghanistan. But do you think that Afghans have gained anything from 20 years of Western presence in their country?
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John Lee Anderson
I think the jury is still out. You know, I mean, I just, I think about all the. That generation, by the way, you know, they doubled in population during the American years, so to speak. From 2001 to now, it is. The population of Afghanistan has doubled. So the average age of the average afghan is 18 and a half. Therefore we're talking about an entire generation. 20 million people that are 18, 20 or younger, that have not known anything except that exposure to what the west brought to Afghanistan, which included Humvees and smartphones and guns and bombing, but also movies and scholarships and the ability for some to travel out new forms of business. And that's just. And then they've had it all taken away from them and especially that one half of the population that is female. And so I think about them and I think what an incredible and devastating impact this has had for them. And I think many Afghans felt and feel betrayed by the countries that were out there that for 20 years came and told them, you can be like us, you know, come and study. And in our country, they're even deporting them. They're not allowing them to arrive and they're even deporting them. How can that be a kind of lack of humanity that I think is becoming institutionalized because of migration policies and the kind of new authoritarian populism we're seeing taking root in the West? It's really disturbing. And of course, you know, the Afghans always, always trampled on by history, but very resilient and very resourceful. You know, it's happening to them again. The Afghans will survive. They always do. You know, but boy, do they get it. Do they get it on the nose, you know, or the chin, whatever the expression is. It's not, it doesn't seem fair.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. And you know, Obviously even since 2021, we multiple other crises have mushroomed in the world. We have, of course, Ukraine, we have Gaza, we have the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Do you think that Afghanistan now is getting the kind of attention it deserves for the reasons that you set out Right at the beginning?
- [34:28]
John Lee Anderson
No, not at all. Yet yesterday, I think it was during Donald Trump's state visit to the United Kingdom with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at his side. He brought up the Bagram Air Force Base, the Bagram Air Base that the US and its NATO allies operate huge in Afghanistan outside of Kabul, and which was, of course, given up just before the city fell. And he says that he wants to take it back because it's only an hour from where China makes its nuclear weapons. I presume he means by air. I don't think you can get there on a bus in an hour, but I think that's what he means, which suggests that there's some dialogue taking place. Afghanistan is also a place of, as he liked to call it, rare earths, strategic minerals that are pretty much untapped. The Chinese and the Russians have recently been making nice with the Taliban. The Russians are the first to reopen diplomatic relations, followed by a visit by the Chinese foreign minister last month. And now Trump saying this out of the blue. So, of course, it's not out of the goodness of his heart, if there is any. I think it's, you know, it's entirely transactional. So the first time we've heard him mention Afghanistan, except to blame its defeat on Joe Biden, is this out of nowhere yesterday that he wants that Bagram Air Base back, and the Taliban need things from us, he said, so watch this space. But, you know, that country, like you said, in the past four years, not only has it had the Taliban back and these successive decrees against women, mostly it has its own terrorism from a kind of ISIS offshoot of the Taliban that mostly attacks girls and girls schools. It's had an earthquake recently. Devastating. It's had a huge drought. And the neighboring countries, Pakistan and Iran, have decided to expel and deport all of their millions of very poor Afghan refugees, you know, compounding the country's problems. So, you know, it's in a tough spot. And I think. Let's see. Let's see what happens with this Bagram overture.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
More broadly, I mean, do you have any hope for the future of the country? Do you think there are any hopeful signs at all?
- [36:51]
John Lee Anderson
Look, the Taliban are not monolithic. And although they have all the power, there are factions within, just as I mentioned, one that has gone to the extremist, murderous ISIS fringe. There are, broadly speaking, two groups, one that is very, you know, year zero biblical, or, you know, in Kandahar, the supreme leader, who, you know, can't be seen and issues these decrees, women cannot now speak in public. I don't know what else he can do against women. Oh, yesterday he banned all books by females from Afghanistan's universities. It's bizarre. So there's that, but then there's this other network called the Haqqanis that were raised in Pakistan. They were very close to Al Qaeda, actually, and they seem to have evolved over the past 20, 30 years and have been making noises that they wish for a more moderate version of Islamic and for relations with the outside world. So at the moment, it hasn't erupted into factional infighting, but one can hope that that more moderate, perhaps evolved rump of the Taliban coalition will take precedence and open up. So I think there is always room for hope. You know, like I said, the Afghans are resourceful and they don't remain tyrannized forever, not even by their own kind, I don't think.
- [38:23]
Hannah Lucinda Smith
John Lee, thank you. That was John Lee Anderson, author of Toulouse A the Fall and Rise of the Taliban, which is available now online and in stores. I'm Hannah Lucinda Smith and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts.
- [38:57]
John Lee Anderson
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
What was that site?
- [39:45]
John Lee Anderson
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- [39:56]
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