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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Extremists on the Ballot, and America’s Endless War in Afghanistan
00:30:52
The 2016 Presidential primaries were a rebuke to moderates in both parties. Bernie Sanders, a sometime Democratic Socialist, built a grassroots movement that bitterly rejected the centrist Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials were deeply suspect, defeated sixteen Republican stalwarts. As the 2018 midterms approach, both parties are wrestling with the question of whether to rise with the tide of extremist sentiment, or run moderates to regain the center. Andrew Hall, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford, studies the effect of extremist candidates on elections. He tells The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin that we may be asking the wrong question. Plus, the Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll on how the repeated failures of American intelligence and policy led to the nation’s longest and most intractable war.
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- [00:04]
Andrew Hall
Floor 38. These are just anecdotes, but it's building.
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David Remnick
Up into something more coherent. And I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's this sort of country city divide.
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Andrew Hall
Their own convenient ends, and it's not.
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David Remnick
Clear where it goes next.
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Narrator
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:29]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's February of 2018, a year and a month into the presidency of Donald Trump, and we're at the point where every piece of political news is analyzed through the prism of how it will affect the midterm elections. The Democrats have openings that they haven't seen in years, as we just saw with the election of Doug Jones in Alabama. And there's talk, though certainly very speculative, of Democrats taking majorities in both houses of Congress. But a question looms over the Democratic Party. Should it run moderates and try to grab unhappy swing voters, or should they run progressive candidates on the left to re energize the party? And the Republicans at the same time face a mirror image of that conflict as they defend their majorities in Congress. Andrew hall is a young political scientist who studies the dynamics of elections, and he's analyzed the data on why both parties seem to have been moving toward more extreme candidates. He spoke with Amy Davidson Sorkin, a political columnist for the New Yorker, to shed some light on the upcoming midterm elections.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
Andy, what's your definition of an extremist candidate or a moderate candidate?
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Andrew Hall
For the purposes of my research, we use a variety of statistical techniques to try to estimate the ideological positioning of different candidates. And if you're in a Democratic primary and you're farther to the left than the other candidates, then you're more extreme. If you're farther to the right, you're more moderate and vice versa for in a Republican primary. So it's purely a relative measure and should not be thought to convey any value judgment.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
But how do you tell, like Twitter use or rhetoric or voting record?
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Andrew Hall
Yeah. So we use a variety. The main thing we use is a set of techniques that look at the composition of their campaign contributions. So let's say you've never served in Congress, you're running for Congress. We don't directly know much about you yet, but we can look at what other incumbents your donors gave to. And so if you got most of your money from donors who mostly donated to, say, far right Members of Congress, we're going to infer that you're a far right candidate. That's sort of the core technique we're using.
- [02:57]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
So things that we think of in terms of extremism, like calling names, grandstanding, things like that, you're sort of arguing a lot of that is noise.
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Andrew Hall
I think sometimes when people use the word extreme, they're really talking about that. And I think that's, that's important. But separate. What I'm looking at in this research should be thought of specifically as extremeness in your ideological positioning. And we can use your contributions to measure that.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
There's a debate going on in the Democratic Party right now about whether they should run moderate middle of the road candidates or candidates who might, for example, be more to the left and energize their face. You've done a lot of research on that. What does your research tell you about that choice?
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Andrew Hall
Yeah, I would say my research is at the individual candidate level very precisely. When you nominate, at least in congressional races, these more extreme candidates, they tend to do very badly on average in the general election. And so if you're thinking of this from the perspective of trying to win particular seats, it's not likely to be a winning strategy in the short run. That doesn't mean I should stress there are broader strategical perspectives from which it may be worth that cost. And that's a different question. So if you look, for example, at the Tea Party, the Tea Party lost a lot of general elections because of their nominations from the primaries. That doesn't mean that the movement hasn't been successful in, in moving the party's ideology in a particular direction. So it is the case that the more extreme candidates outperform the more moderate candidates in the primary, but it's quite modest and it's swamped by the general election penalty to these more extreme people. The other thing I would say, thinking sort of in the aggregate about why we see a bunch of what looks like extremism if there's this penalty, and is that actually voters just don't get a lot of opportunities to vote for more moderate candidates because they just don't run for office very much.
- [05:19]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
Why not?
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Andrew Hall
There's probably a lot of reasons. My argument, this is the subject of my book, which is coming out, is that it's just a very difficult and unpleasant job these days. So that leads these more moderate people who might have considered running for office to choose not to.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
What makes it so hard? Do you mean hard in just a practical sense or hard because it's Soul killing or.
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Andrew Hall
A lot of reasons. The number one reason, I would say, is the difficulty of campaign finance. So if you want to run for the House today, you need to be prepared to spend most of your days dialing for dollars. And the vast majority of people, even the set of people interested in running for political office, do not enjoy that activity at all. So you layer that, I think, enormous cost, psychic and otherwise, on top of all the other costs, like giving up whatever job you currently have, and it makes it very difficult to make that choice. Then you think about what are the benefits? Say you win. Say you incur all these costs and you win. What's your life going to look like once you're in office when it turns out to be. That seems to be a lot less attractive than it used to be. So one of, I think the real motivations for running office used to be the chance to influence policy once you get into the legislature to serve on important committees and be involved in drafting important legislation. And that opportunity has really dwindled in a world where now most legislation is highly centralized and run by party leadership. So I would say, from the perspective of my research, the thing we can most clearly measure and observe is, is that it is more extreme people who are systematically more willing to bear these costs. They're willing to spend all day dialing for dollars. They're willing to have a job where they don't have a lot of individual influence on the process because they really believe in the ideology that they're espousing. And that makes it more. They're more willing to bear the cost because of that.
- [07:26]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
Is it a bad thing to have candidates who are extreme, who really believe what they believe, who have a definable to voters set of beliefs?
- [07:42]
Andrew Hall
That's a very hard question. That obviously goes back to how we're defining extreme, first of all. So under my definition, where I'm scaling these candidates and identifying who's, relatively speaking, more extreme than someone else, it seems bad only in the sense that these are not the people that general election voters seem to prefer. And so my argument in my book is if we could get more moderate people to run for office, given how we see moderate people do in the general, voters would be happier if more moderate people ran.
- [08:22]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
Let's go back to the idea. Now you have all these people who've decided to run for office for whatever reasons, whatever the costs, at what point does that become, going back to the Tea Party, at what point does that become a movement that moves the party, that makes the party itself more Extreme?
- [08:44]
Andrew Hall
Yeah, I mean, I think it can pretty quickly. So I think one of the things that I think is most interesting and difficult to understand about American politics is that in a lot of ways, there really isn't a party. We have such an open system of running for office that anyone can run for office and say they're a member of whatever party they want. And that gives the party a lot less control over their own brand than most other democracies. And so when you ask or you think about how does a party come to have the positions it has, sure, they craft a national platform which nobody reads. They certainly try to recruit particular kinds of candidates and to help them by giving them resources. But at the end of the day, they are at the mercy of who will run for office for them, and they're at the mercy of who will win office. And so the party, what the party stands for, can change pretty rapidly if the set of people who run for office change. And I think that's part of what we've seen.
- [09:50]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
Well, the Trump presidency seems to have energized a lot of people who weren't previously involved in politics. And there's a sense that in 2018, there'll be a lot of candidates running for the first time. How does that interplay with what you're talking about here?
- [10:07]
Andrew Hall
Yeah, I think that's a very big deal. And I think it's a big deal for at least two reasons. Number one is simply having more people run for office gets you a better chance of picking very good electable candidates and therefore maps directly to electoral success. Number two, it's a huge leading indicator of electoral success. People in general are pretty good at figuring out when it's a good time to be running for office in a particular party. So when you see a party fielding more candidates than usual, it's a good sign that people on the ground think these are winnable seats.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
Now, one new group of potential candidates that has emerged is women. Is there a gender aspect to this? If people look at the landscape and a lot of the discussions about women in the workplace and about Donald Trump and say, this year, I'm going to run for office, I'm going to run for something, how does that change all of these calculations?
- [11:16]
Andrew Hall
I think it's going to be a huge story in 2018. I can just say, as a general election scholar, the identities of candidates matter a huge deal. Like a lot of things in politics, I sound like a broken record at this point. Who runs for office is probably the most important dimension. And historically, that has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting women into office has been that they don't run at as high a rate. And we're seeing, I think, changes in that direction.
- [11:49]
Amy Davidson Sorkin
So in a way, the real mistake is sitting around saying the Democratic Party should be doing this, should be doing that. Really what the Democratic Party needs to be doing is figuring out who wants to run as a Democrat and how that person connects with voters, either in a district or in the country.
- [12:12]
Andrew Hall
That's certainly my view. And I would say that is something the parties are certainly cognizant of. They do try very hard to recruit candidates, and it's a very hard thing to do because it's a really tough.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
Sell because it's just not that fun to be a member of Congress these days.
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Andrew Hall
No, exactly.
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Amy Davidson Sorkin
All right. Thank you so much.
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Andrew Hall
No, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [12:43]
David Remnick
Andrew hall is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford, and he spoke to the New Yorker's Amy Davidson Sorkin. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.
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Andrew Hall
Sam.
- [13:35]
David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, here's a fact and depressing one. A child born on the first day of the war in Afghanistan is probably a high school senior. Today, 17 years in 100,000 Afghans are dead, ISIS and the Taliban remain powerful in the region, and trillions of dollars have been spent and there's absolutely no end in sight. Steve Kahl wrote about the origins of the conflict going all the way back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in his book Ghost wars, and for that he won a Pulitzer Prize. That book ends, though, on September 10, 2001. And Kahl picks up the story in his new book, Directorate S, which takes us from the destruction of September 11th right through to the present. And he focuses on on what you might call the original sin of that war, what the American intelligence community got so wrong about Afghanistan. Steve now, the book begins where Ghost wars left off, shortly before 9, 11. And one reviewer, Mark Mazzetti, who won a Pulitzer for his own coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that reading your book was like watching a slow motion video of a truck going off a cliff, frame by agonizing frame. In other words, the war in Afghanistan, as your reporting shows, was doomed from the outset. Why was that the case?
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Steve Coll
Well, I don't think we knew what we wanted to accomplish there after we overthrew the Taliban and tried to disrupt al Qaeda immediately after September 11th. And that's one of the reasons why it was doomed. You had Divided views in the Bush administration after the Taliban were overthrown, should we just minimize our presence there and let the Europeans do the aid in reconstruction while we go off and invade Iraq? That was Rumsfeld's view. That was the one that ultimately prevailed. There were others who said, we need to really rebuild this place now while we've got a chance, while it's peaceful. And then as the years went by, two things just kept repeating themselves. And I was aware, writing that, you know, a problem with this narrative is that we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results. But two of them were blindness about Pakistan's intentions in Afghanistan. We really did not see the Taliban come back coming. And it really, by 2006, when it really had revived the war and there was a serious insurgency, we were deep up to our elbows in Iraq.
- [16:01]
David Remnick
Well, Pakistan's intentions are at the absolute heart of your book. Pakistan was supposed to be our closest military ally in the region. We supplied it with billions of dollars of military and economic aid. And yet as the war dragged on, it became clear that Pakistani intelligence, the isi, was, was quietly training and supporting Taliban fighters. Why in the world would the ISI be on the side of the Taliban? Why was that in their interests?
- [16:28]
Steve Coll
So there's an assessment of this question that the head of Afghan intelligence, guy named Amrul Al Saleh, did in the spring of 2006. One of the earliest kind of really thorough examinations, why are they doing this? And he concluded that there were a couple of reasons. One was the Bush administration, you may remember, did. Did a big nuclear deal with India. They basically forgave India for breaking out of the nuclear non proliferation regime and started to supply them civilian nuclear equipment and fuel. And they told Pakistan at the same time, you're not going to get one of these deals. You're not reliable enough. You've smuggled nuclear goods around the world. And the Pakistanis took that and said to themselves, we need to take care of ourselves. The second thing was that the US had effectively said, we're out of the Afghan war. And the Pakistanis said, look, we need to prepare for the next round of Afghan civil war. So they did this very quietly, but by the time you get to the end of 2006, it's quite evident what they're up to.
- [17:32]
David Remnick
You title your book Directorate S, which is, I got to tell you, a very spy novel. It's a fantastic and ominous title. But Directorate S is a real thing. What is it? And what. What was its influence in this whole Picture?
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Steve Coll
Well, it's the COVID action arm of the isi, the Pakistani Intelligence service. At least that's what the US called it in US documents. So the ISI is a very big organization, but this unit functions like the clandestine service in the CIA or the paramilitary division of the CIA. It's made up mostly of ex special forces guys and they build relationships with guerrilla leaders, Afghan guerrilla leaders, and without getting caught, try to provide them as much support as they can manage. They also work with other cross border militants in the region, like in Kashmir.
- [18:21]
David Remnick
There seems to be so many ifs inscribed in your narrative. If the United States had succeeded in rooting out Al Qaeda at Tora Bora and perhaps killed Osama bin Laden, if the Bush administration had negotiated on some level with the Taliban, if, if, if did we know in real time that we were screwing up and being involved in a quagmire that would qualify as the longest war in American history?
- [18:49]
Steve Coll
You know, when counterfactual history obviously is kind of a mugs game. But I've thought about this a lot since I've spent so much time kind of watching the bus go off the cliff frame by frame. And I think if there was a time when we could have done a lot better, certainly we wouldn't have built paradise, but we could have done a lot better. It was in that period, 2002 to 2004.
- [19:11]
David Remnick
And what would the conditions have been? How would it have gone better?
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Steve Coll
Well, first of all, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. So we would have had all of our national resources and military resources and aid budgets and reconstruction budgets available for the war we had actually just fought and succeeded in. So that would have been the biggest decision. The second thing was, and there's episodes of it that are really, you know, discouraging in hindsight because of the hubris involved, which is every time you have a lightning strike victory in a conflict like the one in the fall of 2001, what does history tell you to do? You figure out a way to incorporate the defeated in the political order that follows. Otherwise they're just going to go back to war. And the foot soldiers of the Taliban movement were treated as if they were Al Qaeda hijackers. And the Taliban had not been involved in 9, 11, so far as we know. We're not even sure their leadership about it. They had accommodated Al Qaeda. They were complicit in a legal or moral sense with the attacks. But any realistic assessment of the future of Afghanistan had to account for the fact that this movement had drawn from 50% of the population, they were destitute, poor as dirt. They needed a future. And the future we gave them was Guantanamo, or go to Pakistan and try to get started again.
- [20:25]
David Remnick
Another thing that entered the picture was torture. Beginning in about 2002, you describe the use of almost dystopian prisons and interrogation techniques in Afghanistan. Why did we do that?
- [20:38]
Steve Coll
I have no idea. I mean, there was a great deal of rationalization of this after the fact around the truth that the United States didn't know very much about where the next attacks were coming from and felt that interrogation and detention was the only line of reliable evidence that it could find. But, you know, by 2003, it was evident that there was really no Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. And the people who were being detained were Taliban lieutenants or guerrillas in the mountains who were firing off rockets at US Bases. So what justifies, really, even a serious operation around that, but never mind torture.
- [21:22]
David Remnick
So bin Laden, as we understand it, got from Tora Bora somehow to Abbottabad, which is, as we used to call it, the West Point of Pakistan. How did he live? Who protected him? What do we know about his life and arrangements in the years between Tora Bora and his final assassination?
- [21:43]
Steve Coll
Yeah, I really enjoyed kind of digging into what evidence I could get about that. I mean, what we know is, so he goes across the border in December 2001, and then from the records available, he kind of disappears for about six months and then probably went north. And then he surfaces in a small town around Peshawar. And in the years between then and his killing in 2011, so about five years, you know, the United States has now translated and published hundreds and hundreds of letters that he wrote that they captured when they raided the house. In the letters, he's very scared of running into Pakistani security. At the same time, there's in the letters evidence that Al Qaeda is negotiating some kind of truce with the Pakistanis. Not really clear.
- [22:31]
David Remnick
The question has always been, how is it possible that Osama bin Laden is hiding out, as it were, in West Point?
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Steve Coll
Yeah. Well, after he was exposed, you know, everybody who came to Islamabad would go in to see the chief of the army or the chief of ISI and ask that question.
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David Remnick
And.
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Steve Coll
And their answer was, we really are that incompetent. It had a very elaborate form of that answer. See, we didn't know that guy was there. We didn't know this guy was there. If we had known, we would have gone after them because they were killing us. We were really that blind.
- [23:02]
David Remnick
One of the amazing characters in your book is the Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, who after a while was portrayed in various ways in the press, both as torn between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United States, as somebody who is wandering the presidential palace higher than Jerry Garcia. Tell me about him and how his view of the United States changed and why that mattered.
- [23:29]
Steve Coll
Yeah, one of the things that I tried to do, knowing that a lot of impressions were out there about how people like him had evolved in their thinking and their behavior, I tried to get as many records of conversations with him over the years in private that had been carried out by visiting Americans or others, and really just kind of tracked them all the way forward. And what you see is two things that are not in the general kind of assessment of him, cliched assessment of him. One is, every time someone came to visit him, he said, why aren't you doing more about isi? They're really destabilizing my country. You keep sending in counterinsurgency forces to go, you know, connect the people of rural Kandahar to my government. But what you really should be doing is going over and stopping ISI from running these Taliban operations into Afghanistan. Well, by sealing the border by, you know, attacking them directly, by using sanctions, by pressuring them by whatever means. Why are you not doing that? And, you know, by the time you get to the Obama administration, they were saying, well, we are. You know, we are. You may have noticed we have a drone war going on over there. But he really began to believe that, look, the sole superpower in the world doesn't want to put enough pressure on ISI to get them to change their behavior. Therefore, America wants ISI to destabilize Afghanistan so it can justify having military bases in the country for as long as it wants them, that it was a conspiracy theory. And once he started enunciating this, then Americans would go to him and say, you know, Mr. President, you've got all of the Snowden records, you've got all the WikiLeaks records. Can you see any mention of this design?
- [25:10]
David Remnick
You mean as a colonial project?
- [25:11]
Steve Coll
As a colonial project. So this guy named James Dobbins has this conversation with him in 2013. Mr. President, look at all these records. Can you see anything of this kind? He says, maybe you don't know about the plan. He says, there is a deep state in America.
- [25:26]
David Remnick
Wow. He could be on Fox News any night of the week. Now, President Trump is promising to freeze over a billion dollars in aid to Pakistan. And this decision came shortly after he tweeted that Pakistan had, quote, Given us nothing but lies and deceit, and had provided a safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan. Is his basic assessment of the situation more or less correct?
- [25:50]
Steve Coll
Yeah, it's very easy to sympathize with his decision to withhold aid given Pakistani conduct. I mean, Pakistani conduct is more complex than his tweets suggest. They've also arrested a lot of Al Qaeda leaders. They've provided a lot of intelligence support, just not about the Taliban. But, yes, I think I can understand that decision. The difficulty is that there have been other attempts to use sanctions to change Pakistan's conduct, and none of them have worked. And the scale of our aid now is less significant than it was five years ago, and it pales in comparison to what China's doing in Pakistan.
- [26:30]
David Remnick
But yet again, we're sending more troops.
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Steve Coll
Yet again, we're sending more troops. I mean, this is the contradiction that recurs alongside the blindness about ISI and the narrative narrative, which is, you know, new generals go out to command the war every year or two or every six months, and they all say there is no military solution to this war against the Taliban. And yet they recommend. And the White House again and again across three administration decides to prioritize military action, as if doing the same thing is going to lead to a different outcome.
- [27:02]
David Remnick
So what does winning look like?
- [27:05]
Steve Coll
Well, winning looks like a reduction of violence. You know, people talk about the unwillingness of the Trump administration to engage in diplomacy, but, you know, when you talk about diplomacy, what you're really talking about is not some Paris peace accord where everyone agrees that they're going to enter peaceful politics, and that's not who the Taliban are. But there is negotiation and diplomacy that could potentially reduce the suffering of Afghan civilians and the scale of violence in the country. Let's not just bomb the way out of our problem. You know, we don't talk alongside the security strategies that we have. And it's frustrating because, you know, we do that in other settings. And remember the Obama administration's diplomatic achievements. They managed to hang in there with the European Union, Russia, and China to complete the Iran nuclear agreement. They reversed decades of stuck policy in Cuba and flipped that whole story around. So the United States is capable, along with others, of negotiating change in really complicated and stagnant problems, but it really hasn't tried in Afghanistan.
- [28:16]
David Remnick
Steve. It is a great book and a definitive history now in the second volume of America's Longest War. And you've got more time to write for the New Yorkers, so everybody's happy.
- [28:26]
Steve Coll
Understood.
- [28:27]
Andrew Hall
Steve, call.
- [28:28]
David Remnick
Thanks. Very much.
- [28:28]
Steve Coll
Thank you, David.
- [28:31]
David Remnick
Steve Call is a staff writer for the New Yorker and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His new book is Directorate the CIA and America's Secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week on the program, Jelani Cobb talks with Ava DuVernay. She's best known as the director of Selma, but her work takes a very different turn now with the upcoming release of A Wrinkle in Time, which is based on Madeleine l' Engle's great classic. He's trapped by a darkness that's actively spreading throughout the universe and the only one who can stop it is you. Be a warrior.
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Ava DuVernay
I'll try. You know, I feel something very deep in my gut when Oprah's voice says, you know, there's a darkness in the world and the only one who can stop it. And smash cut to a black girl and she is hopping planets and flying and like saving the friggin world. She's like saving the world.
- [30:01]
David Remnick
Ava DuVernay, next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and I want to thank you for joining us today. I hope I'll see you next week.
- [30:17]
Narrator
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby Callalea, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mytha Lee Rao and Steven Valentino, with help from Terence Bernardo, Corey Schreppel, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.