Key Reflections
* Zalmay Khalilzad’s Doha deal with the Taliban resulted in the drawdown of international troops and contractors who were supporting Afghan forces, contributing to the collapse of Afghanistan’s security apparatus.
* Al-Qaeda are operating openly in Afghanistan and still allied to the Taliban.
* Pakistan’s military doctrine of ‘Strategic Depth’ in Afghanistan supports the internationally proscribed Haqqani Network, who are the real authority in the Taliban.
* The Taliban have been fighting against the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). However, on occasions they have also been tactical allies.
* The Taliban are supported by money from narcotics especially heroin and methamphetamines.
* China and Russia want to treat the Taliban as the recognised authority in Afghanistan. China has enormous desires to mine rare earth metals.
* The role of women’s rights in Afghanistan has been severely curtailed by the Taliban.
* During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Taliban carried out many extrajudicial murders.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
DL: David Loyn
SG: Hello, and welcome to DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. Each episode, we speak to experts and practitioners in international security and defence, counter-terrorism, and geo-political current events to gain insight into the most pressing matters of global affairs.
In this episode, we speak to David Loyn who was an award-winning foreign correspondent for thirty years for the BBC. He is an authority on Afghanistan, a country he has visited regularly. In 2017, David worked for a year as an adviser in the office of the Afghan president. His book The Long War uncovers the political and military strategies that tried to defeat the Taliban across two decades.
David Loyn, thank you so much for joining us on NATO DEEP Dive.
DL: It’s very good to be with you, Sajjan, thanks for the invitation.
SG: It’s our pleasure.
Let’s begin by talking about the collapse of the Afghan government. There’s going to be many post-mortems, but in your opinion, was this inevitable? Did its sudden collapse explain what went wrong due to the Western withdrawal, or other factors at play?
DL: I think you have to go back to 2019 and the very swift decision that President Trump made and the conditions that he put on it. The American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, was told by President Trump effectively that he wanted to pull troops out of Afghanistan. That’s what he went to try and negotiate. And so what we had in Doha wasn’t any kind of conditional withdrawal set on the Taliban, it was really just a withdrawal deal for the Americans to pull out, leaving behind some very vague assurances that the Taliban made on severing their links with al-Qaeda and making demands of the Afghan government that they should release Taliban prisoners. So, there was this quite swift timetable and then, of course, the American election happened, a new administration came in and wanted to keep to that timetable during the summer of 2021.
And so we saw this swift drawdown of international troops and a consequence, and really what was missed at the time, was that as American troops were drawing down and, of course, NATO support was pulling out at the same time, but the American troops were the ones doing the more of the fighting more than the muscle end, NATO by that point, were only doing train, advise, and assist. As the American troops were actually drawing down and pulling out, they also pulled out thousands of contractors who were doing the key implementing of the Afghan Air Force, they were providing software support for Afghan forces, they were providing all of the logistics and enablers for what we’d set up in Afghanistan, which is a relatively sophisticated modern force. So, when all those enablers were pulled out, in the spring and summer of 2021, Afghan forces effectively collapsed, and the country fell ahead of them.
I think the other key thing to remember in all this, alongside that political decision to withdraw, was a contested election, a weak Afghan government off the back of that contested election, and a strong sense in Afghanistan that as the Taliban moved forward, perhaps this government that had run its course, that was seen as potentially corrupt, was something that people were willing to see the back office. So, the Taliban effectively negotiated their way to power across the spring and summer of 2021.
And the other key thing that happened in those two years was the secret annexes to the Doha deal that Zalmay Khalilzad did with the Taliban, which meant that American forces could no longer attack the Taliban if they were moving across the countryside. Providing the Taliban didn’t attack Afghan cities and didn’t attack certain key infrastructure nodes and road networks, they were given effectively carte blanche to move across the Afghan countryside. And the Afghan government didn’t see those secret annexes until after the government fell. So, they were operating blind if you like, in terms of trying to protect their own country, and American forces were frustrated watching Taliban troops moving into countryside areas and not being able to prevent them from moving in. So, as America pulled out the Taliban took over the country.
SG: There are so many key factors that you’ve been talking about. The name Zalmay Khalilzad came up several times in what you were saying. How much of the blame does he have to bear when it comes to what has now taken place in Afghanistan?
DL: He’s an extraordinary character when the history of Afghanistan is written. I’ve written two books on it, but perhaps I should write another one just about him. He’s written his own autobiography on his story. But his Afghan experience, of course, he was born there, he went to school there, he knew Ashraf Ghani, the President, very well, they were just a couple of years apart in school, and then went to American university abroad, and then, of course, became an American citizen. And in 1988-1989, he was part of the American negotiating team, negotiating the end of the Russian war. So, he had very long experience in Afghanistan, as well as then-being ambassador in the years after 9/11. He was very close to President Bush’s administration, very much a sort of Neocon hawk, somebody who thought that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were things that America ought to fight. And I think when it came to actually drawing down in Afghanistan, perhaps he wasn’t the best man to choose for the job.
But as I said, at the beginning, he was given an impossible task, because the alternative, which many people were pushing, certainly in the United Kingdom, and in some other NATO countries, was for a much longer period of drawing down, and much more of a sense of a conditional withdrawal, longer peace talks, bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table, with the Afghan government, giving the Afghan government every capacity that it had to do those negotiations. But instead of that, we pulled the rug from under the feet of the Afghan government, with this withdrawal deal, and effectively handed the country over to the Taliban.
So, would another individual have been able to do a different sort of deal? I think at the end of the day, President Trump wanted the troops out, there was always a danger that he might just announce an even more precipitous withdrawal, as he did in some other conflicts. Very swift, abrupt, military decisions made that would have destabilised Afghanistan even more. So, I think you could argue that Zalmay Khalilzad played a really, really difficult hand. But it didn’t play out that well.
SG: It also seems that he wanted to be at the centre of what was transpiring in Afghanistan. It’s almost as if this was the other end of the book that he had, in itself written, because he was key to the Bonn Summit, in which the creation of the post-Taliban Afghanistan had been created, which in itself had a number of inherent flaws. And then he has overseen the end of that very system that he helped create. And yes, I think history will probably judge him, over all of this.
DL: Yeah, and not very well, I suppose is the conclusion that you’re drawing. You’re right about the Bonn Summit and his importance in bringing together some of the old warlords, putting the old warlords back into power, right in 2002 and 2003. And that was the fundamental failure right at the beginning of the war, which is one of the reasons I argue in my new book, The Long War.
It’s one of the reasons why it made the Afghan conflict such a long conflict and such a difficult conflict for the NATO allies and partner nations who went into Afghanistan, because from the very beginning, the old warlords who the Taliban had defeated in the mid-90s, when they came to power, were re-enfranchised by the Bonn deal, and by what America did in 2002, by giving them lots of money for effectively exchanging information about al-Qaeda[‘s whereabouts]. Those individuals came back into power. And for many Afghans, it looked as if the international community had effectively taken a side in a civil war. That we had supported people who had not been very popular back in the mid-1990s, before the Taliban came to power, people who were bandits, who fought among themselves, and those individuals came back into power in 2001-2002. Zalmay Khalilzad was one of the people who re-enfranchised them.
And that always made the intervention in Afghanistan far harder to achieve a success out of. Because all of the time, you were working against this system of these bandits and warlords who had returned to power, who entrenched corruption really from the very beginning of the years of the post 9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.
SG: Absolutely. And in your book, The Long War, which is a very important contribution to the whole Afghanistan dynamic, and will stand the test of time, there was another important aspect that you covered, and one that in many ways we can’t talk about Afghanistan without bringing this factor in, which is the role of Pakistan. Pakistan-Afghanistan, their ties are perpetually intertwined. What has been the role of Pakistan in the Taliban’s return to power, both in terms of the takeover of Afghanistan, but also helping the Taliban form its own government? I’m reminded of that incident where the then-head of the ISI in 2021, Faiz Hameed, happened to turn up at the lobby of the Serena hotel in Kabul, sipping tea. And it looked like a somewhat orchestrated visual for the world. But it’s no coincidence that within a couple of days of him being there that the Taliban formed their regime. So, how intrinsic is Pakistan’s role?
DL: Yes, we can come back in a minute, perhaps, to talk about the Taliban and how they formed their government. But no, absolutely central, and Pakistan has been wanting, really for the last 40 or 50 years going back even before the Russian War, to, if not have a government in Afghanistan that was completely on their side, at least have a government that wasn’t going to knife them in the back. Pakistan has this, I think very flawed, military doctrine called Strategic Depth, which give gives them the sense that because they’re a relatively narrow country, facing this huge, in their mind, Hindu Raj to their East, in India, with the constant friction of the disputes in Kashmir threatening to turn into a shooting war, they want to have a compliant Afghanistan to their rear.
Now, if you look at the map, there isn’t any military value in having a compliant Afghanistan because there’s a huge mountain range across the North-West Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the ability to manoeuvre across that frontier remains as limited today as it did when the British tried to cross it and try to pacify it during three wars in the 19th and early 20th century. There are only three navigable military passes across that mountain range, the Khyber Pass, of course, being the most famous.
So, I think Pakistan has a rather flawed sense of, you know, the need to have a compliant government in Afghanistan, but it’s one that they’ve been, as a matter of national statecraft, they’ve been wanting to control what goes on there for a very long time. And of course, you have got to remember that all this goes back to the war against the Russians in the 1980s, when America and Saudi Arabia in particular, of the donor nations, put a huge amount of money and weapons into Afghanistan, but through Pakistan, and it went through, the ISI insisted that it went through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. And that was the beginning, if you like of this sense of the Pakistani military state, which got very bloated, frankly, on the corruption in the 1980s. And then had a very strong sense of its ability to, having used the mujahideen to defeat the Russians, of its ability to manage things in Afghanistan, and wanting to continue to manage things over the next 20 or 30 years after that.
I think you mentioned general Faiz’s visit a couple of weeks after the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021. And that sense of him bringing Taliban heads together and forcing, effectively, the government that Pakistan wanted, significantly led by Haqqani Network (HQN) figures, and the Haqqani Network are an insurgent group who have been allied with the Taliban since 9/11, but they go back to the mujahideen days in the 1980s, and the leaders of the Haqqani Network are very much based in the frontier region of Pakistan in North and South Waziristan in particular. So, they’re absolutely clients of the Pakistani government. But increasingly, people are beginning to think, “well, does Pakistan really control these people?” And after all these years of Pakistan wanting a client state in Afghanistan, wanting its own government in power, there’s a certain sense of ‘buyer’s remorse.’ Now they’ve got it, they’re not completely sure what to do with it.
SG: So, there’s a couple of things I want to ask you about that aspect. One thing we were briefly discussing is this formation of the Taliban regime. And you wrote this very interesting article in The Spectator “Punch Up at The Palace,” which was about the squabble between Mullah Baradar, whom the West had hoped would be able to lead a somewhat moderate Taliban regime, and the Haqqani Network, whom you were also talking about. In which it actually turned into a physical fight between their two factions and ultimately, it was the Haqqanis that came out on top. So, is Afghanistan now effectively run by the Haqqani Network, whom we should actually point out are also a proscribed terrorist group?
DL: Yes, I mean, it’s an extraordinary situation that the interior minister of Afghanistan [Sirajuddin Haqqani] is someone who’s on an American wanted list, and almost certainly the person most responsible for the largest suicide bombings of the last 15 years in particular. And I remember in 2017, there was an enormous, I think one of the biggest ones, when I was in Kabul, about 150 people were killed, and that absolutely rocked the centre of town, in the middle of the morning, while people were going to school, children were going to school, people were going to work. And that individual who, we believe, carried out that attack, masterminded that attack, is now the interior minister of the country. And you do have to kind of scratch your head a bit to wonder if the Taliban really do want international legitimacy.
They’ve also recently held a parade of the families of suicide bombers and have sort of promoted themselves as being the most successful country in the world that is used suicide bombing as a military tactic. Again, not something that’s designed to endear them with the international community. So, I think there has been something of a shock for the American negotiators, who had worked with Baradar, you mentioned, Muttaqi, Stanikzai, and others in those long negotiations in Doha to deliver a deal. And those individuals have spent a long time living in Doha, their families are there, and there was a sense, as you say, that perhaps the West could deal with them.
But as we understand at the moment, and it’s hard to say, watching what’s going on inside the Taliban administration, it’s very difficult to work out exactly who’s in control. But certainly, the Haqqani Network came out on top last summer and autumn. They still call it an interim government, there’s still some sense that they’re looking for something more inclusive. But all of the inclusivity that the Taliban have brought in is only among other Taliban groups. So, they’re dispensing power among their own people, not moving it more widely into Afghan society. And it began, as you say, with that extraordinary incident in the Afghan palace where there was a brawl between people, including as I heard, people throwing thermos flasks at each other of green tea, spilling green tea all over the place. And after that, Mullah Baradar went down to Kandahar for a few weeks, to sort of lick his wounds and to regroup for the Kandahari, so called, Taliban. And for international analysts, it’s very difficult to work out who we might be able to best do business with, between these two groups. Because there is one argument to say that the Kandaharis are actually more socially conservative. So, things like girls’ schools, things like the other social and civil aspects of society that people want, there’s an argument for saying that perhaps the Haqqani Network wouldn’t be so tough on those, although they want to be tough in terms of their sort of international jihadi credibility in order to be able to continue to recruit young men to their corps.
SG: There are so many different factions and compulsions here, which is what is coming clearly across in our discussion and then to throw a further dynamic into the mix, to make it even more complicated, is that you have the Taliban ‘cousin,’ I guess, which is the TTP, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [Pakistan Taliban], which seem to be operating and growing in the ascendancy following the Afghan Taliban return in Afghanistan.
You mentioned earlier about Pakistan’s buyer’s remorse. One thing the Pakistanis kept talking about was that if there was an Afghan Taliban regime in Afghanistan, it would limit and control the activities of the TTP. On the contrary, what we’ve seen is that the TTP have actually become much stronger. And it’s one of these very odd paradoxes that defines Afghanistan-Pakistan, where you’ve got the Pakistani military that are sympathetic and supportive to the Afghan Taliban, but the Pakistani military are at odds with the Pakistan Taliban. And yet the Pakistan Taliban and the Afghan Taliban end up cooperating, because they have that tribal connection. So, how does one somehow demystify this dynamic?
DL: Yeah, it was a real surprise, again, as it was a surprise that the Taliban haven’t really attempted to have a more inclusive government or do any of the things that the international community might have thought would try and win them more acceptance, such as a nod to girls’ education, etc. It’s also been a surprise that they haven’t reined back other terrorist groups who operate in Afghanistan, the TTP, you mentioned, the most prominent of them. And this really raises questions about how much power the Pakistani state and Pakistani ISI really has over the Taliban because Pakistan asked the Taliban to broker a peace deal with the TTP and it didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened, there was an upsurge of TTP violent activity. And there’s been clashes between the Taliban and Pakistani forces along the disputed border line, which Afghanistan has never recognised, that the Durand Line is an international border. Pakistan has been fencing it and the Taliban have been ripping down some of the border fencing.
So, there’s a sense in which this is a pretty difficult client for Pakistan to have. And I think some other countries who were also willing to have the Taliban in power, are also looking at this and saying, “well, we’re not getting the guarantees that we wanted on security.” And in particular, I’m thinking of China. China, who have a border, a very narrow border right up in the northeast of the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, with Afghanistan, have been wanting guarantees from the Taliban that they would not support Uyghur separatists who have been operating from Afghanistan in the past and the Taliban have not given that assurance.
SG: One of the other aspects, then, David, that’s very important to Afghanistan, and it also is an aspect of the Doha deal and relevant to the annexes that you were talking about earlier is al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda has this relationship with the Taliban, and even though the Taliban has made many comments and commitments that they will not allow Afghanistan to be a cesspool for terrorism, they have never actually outrightly condemned al-Qaeda, nor have they tried to hand over al-Qaeda figures to the NATO alliance or to the United States. The other aspect is that there were al-Qaeda fighters that were embedded with the Taliban during the conquest of Afghanistan. Where do you believe this relationship is between al-Qaeda and the Taliban?
DL: Yeah, again, it’s a deeply worrying aspect of the Taliban. There’s a belief among analysts that al-Qaeda, who have been very quiet in recent months, are operating a policy of strategic silence, in order to allow the Taliban to try and secure the—as good as they can get, in terms of international recognition—to secure the unfreezing of aid money, etc. But it’s not worked, because there’s been very clear analysis—the most recent was the UN sanctions committee, who in their six-monthly report, which they do for Afghanistan, only recently came out and said al-Qaeda are operating openly and effectively in Afghanistan. They’re still allied to the Taliban; there’s been no real severance of links. Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard has returned to Afghanistan to live, and he lives openly in the country, and other senior al Qaeda figures have been openly visiting the Taliban. And there’s a strong sense in this sanctions committee report that it’s very much business as usual and no change in terms of the Taliban’s continued links with al-Qaeda.
And they also mentioned in this report that during the summer last year, during the fighting last year, there were tactical alliances between the Taliban and Islamic State, even, against America. Now, on the whole, the Taliban have been fighting against the Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISKP, in the east and the north of Afghanistan. But at least last summer, they were tactical allies. So I think you’re seeing the Taliban not really moving in the directions that the international community hoped they might move in order to win recognition and acceptance and become a more normal government, but instead needing to continue to promote violence, as a way of both suppressing the population and of recruiting young men, so they don’t lose young fighters to these other potentially more extremist jihadi groups.
SG: You said there are these concerns about the fact that the Taliban are not moving in the direction that the West has been hoping for. In relationship to that, you’ve also got the narcotics factor, because we know that the Taliban and, for example, the Haqqani Network, have invested very heavily in criminal enterprise, which Afghanistan has unfortunately been succumbed to by the narcotics, especially heroin, and increasingly methamphetamines seems to be a new product that is being produced inside the country. Do you have concerns that we will see a proliferation of narcotics now that the Taliban are back, even though publicly they may condemn it? Privately, they seem to do other things, just like as you mentioned the relationship between the Taliban and ISKP—which doesn’t get enough attention—the narcotics aspect also doesn’t seem to get enough focus.
DL: I think it’s one of the most fundamental challenges that the Taliban face. They’ve clearly been supported by poppy money and money from other drugs, as you mentioned, some very clever ways of processing the ephedra plant for methamphetamines in recent months. So there’s a sense in which the Taliban are buoyed by this criminal enterprise, and while in principle, as you say, they’d like to end the drugs trade, they’d like to end drugs growing in Afghanistan, it’s going to be very difficult to see how they can do it without losing support of very significant people, who support them up to now. And again, that’s going to be one of the real challenges for the international community if they’re going to try and engage with the Taliban and try to unfreeze assets, move towards something, if not recognition, at least a pragmatic acceptance that they’re the government, some World Bank programmes to fund schooling and to fund clinics, etc., so that the Afghan people are not damaged by the fact that they’ve got this, effectively, a tyrannical government in Afghanistan. I think it’s going to be very difficult for the international community to do that if the Taliban remain buoyed by pocket money.
SG: That is going to be a huge challenge indeed. There are two other countries I wanted to bring into this discussion: one is Russia, and the other is China. Let’s talk about China first. How important is China now for Afghanistan? Because we are increasingly seeing contact between the Chinese embassy in Kabul; there have been meetings with the Haqqani Network. What does China want from the Taliban regime? And is it going to be possible to achieve what China wants?
DL: With China and Russia, the embassies never closed, and although they haven’t recognised the Taliban, they have a de facto diplomatic exchange because their ambassadors are still there, and their embassies are still staffed, and there’s a sense in which they want to treat Afghanistan like any other country. China has enormous desires to mine rare earth metals from Afghanistan with huge untapped resources in terms of various other rare metals and precious stones. There’s also the world’s largest un-excavated copper mine in Afghanistan at Mes Aynak, not very far south of Kabul in Logar province, which China has the concession on but have never been able to extract the copper because of the insecurity. Well, now Afghanistan is secure. Is China going to be able to move in? And I think we’re still seeing quite a lot of reservations on the part of China. There have been reports of some Chinese citizens being arrested by the Taliban, there have been arbitrary detentions of Western businessmen who’ve tried to do business with the Taliban and others in Afghanistan. So, it’s a very mixed picture for people who are beginning to try to do business in the country. And I think China is looking in a pretty worried way at what’s happening.
You’ve got to remember that China’s so-called all-weather friendship is with Pakistan, their closest ally in the region. And so, China and Pakistan will be operating as one. And as we’ve seen, Pakistan is finding it much more difficult to manage the Taliban than it was before. I think Russia, you mentioned, also has some sort of sense of buyer’s remorse. They were willing to let the Taliban continue to fight against the Americans. It was a wonderful, beautiful symmetry, if you like, for Russia, that the Americans were defeated in Afghanistan, taking twice as long to be defeated as the Russians were a generation before. And so that sense of defeating the Russians in the very backyard where America had funded the mujahideen to defeat the Russians before—the Americans being defeated this time was very sweet for them. But again, we understand that they’re finding it difficult to work with the Taliban, to relate to them, and to do the kind of business that they want to do, and to stop terrorism coming across the frontier to the Central Asian states whom Russia see as very much within their security orbit.
SG: I don’t know if you saw, David, the recent Taliban message that was released by their foreign ministry, in which they spoke about peace between Russia and Ukraine. It seemed very bizarre as to how the Taliban now are talking about global peace.
DL: Well, they’re operating—they’re trying to operate like a government. I thought that there was a certain amount of overextension of their ability to operate internationally. I think they’re trying to show to the international community that if they were properly recognised, then they could engage on some of these issues. But I have to say, people who’ve been talking to them…they’re not very successfully running a central administration yet. They’re collecting revenue, collecting a lot of revenue considering the collapse of the economy. Their revenue collection is at a higher proportion than the previous government’s. And they’re not corrupt, so the money is going into a central fund, but it’s very unclear what they’re doing with it. They’re not managing the state. So, they’re certainly not managing foreign affairs with any of the professionalism that you would expect from a modern state. And I think that’s the challenge that the international community now face, the West in particular.
We lost the war—it’s very clear—but…we shouldn’t lose the peace now. And I think I would urge NATO countries to not necessarily to recognise the Taliban, but certainly to try to support some of the people whom we left behind. It’s a completely different generation in Afghanistan from the generation who came before. And I think, in many ways, the Taliban are finding Afghanistan an alien country. It’s a very different country to when I was with the Taliban when they took Kabul in 1996. And I was there in 2001 when they were pushed out. And it’s a very different country then to what it is now. Younger people with high expectations of a different kind of life, who’ve been educated, who look at women rights as an expectation, not just in the cities, but in the countryside.
And I think that the international community would do well to support media organisations, to support women’s networks, in order to enable Afghan society itself to recover from the shocks of this enormous disruption that happened when the Taliban took over last summer. And for people to be able to withstand that pressure and to have the confidence to be able to decide their own futures, because clearly there’s not going to be another international military intervention in Afghanistan, certainly in the lifetime of any of the people who were involved in this one, because I think it was such a difficult operation. The Afghans are on their own in those terms, but the least we can do is to give them the confidence and the ability to be able to withstand some of the propaganda from the Taliban, which means supporting media organisations, women’s organisations, etc. And that feels like a fairly simple thing to be able to continue to do.
SG: The role of women’s rights and civil liberties that you have been talking about is so fundamentally important to Afghanistan’s future. But the problem also seems to be that the Taliban are very reluctant to recognise women’s rights and, in many ways, still have that mindset from the 1990s, where women were to play no role whatsoever in society. How does one get the Taliban to try and make changes to their very stiff doctrine that has been the cornerstone of their belief system? Because without women in Afghanistan having a right to live, function, teach, be educated, Afghanistan will never recover whatsoever. And it seems the Taliban are always very reluctant to make any tangible changes for women’s rights. And the international community seems to be trying to convince them, there’s some talk that goes on, but then we don’t see anything on the ground that is effective. What more can we do?
DL: I don’t think it’s going to come from international pressure. I think it’s going to come from within, which is why I say I think we need to support Afghan women and men to be able to take those issues on for themselves. And I think the changes that were made over the last 20 years were not just in the cities. For people who fought the war or were involved in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, people in NATO, it was a profound shock last summer. Many people were really upset because they’d served, they’d given a lot of their time, attention, watched good friends die, to try and actually build a better society in Afghanistan, at the heart of what was going on there. And I think it’s been very difficult for people who were fighting there before from NATO countries. But I think it’ll be even more difficult if we don’t preserve and build resilience in the society that we did build. So, I think it wasn’t a complete failure. The war was lost; but it wasn’t a failure in terms of leaving behind a society with different expectations. And as I say, I mean not just in the cities.
If I can give you one very quick anecdote: I was working on a programme last year to support communications around the peace process, an American-funded programme. And one of the projects that we were doing was quite a simple piece of research, going into villages and asking people what they thought about the peace process and what they wanted to get out of it. And we said to this local NGO who was doing the work, “We need to have 50% men and 50% women.” And in the cities, of course, they were running joint meetings, but expecting that in rural Pashtun areas, they would be separate meetings. And so that happened in Kandahar. And then they went down to Nimroz province, way down in the southwest in the desert, very remote, Pashtun area, fundamentalist, sort of Taliban-supporting population in the past. And they went into the district centre and were expecting to run these separate meetings, and the women of Nimroz province said, “No, no, no. We want to be in a joint meeting with the men. In fact, we want the men to hear what we have to say.” And that was new; that wasn’t a Western organisation coming in and saying, “women here need to be able to do this.” This was women demanding for themselves. And it’s preserving that capacity that I think the international community would do well to support in the coming months and years.
SG: Well, that’s a really important story about the tangible results that have been achieved in Afghanistan, the hard-earned gains that are so important to keep and not to lose. One last question, David, is that during the middle of this crisis that’s taking place with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been talk about the fact that the Taliban have been conducting activities, where they’ve been taking people away and carrying out extrajudicial murders, in order to deal with those people they deemed as their enemies, in the hope that the world’s attention is not on Afghanistan, so they can get away with a lot of things. Does that worry you?
DL: Yeah, one of the things—and I argue this very strongly in The Long War, my book on the war—I should just say one thing about that book, one of the key aspects of it is that I interviewed all of the commanding officers during the key combat years of ISAF and Resolute Support. And it’s a book about military leadership, as much as it’s a book about Afghanistan, and the challenges that individual soldiers faced, but magnified by the challenges of their commanders. And I think in doing that and trying to understand Afghanistan, I saw the distractions of other parts of the international community. So, when the Iraq War happened, and there was an immediate change of focus from Afghanistan, it was a real problem for what people were trying to do in terms of both of countering terrorism and then ultimately this nation-building project that emerged from the beginning of the Afghan war.
And I think there’s a danger that Ukraine now is of course going to suck all of the oxygen out internationally from Afghanistan and from a number of other places, and I think it’s a real shame. Whether the Taliban have used that as a cover for what is a new campaign of repression, I’m not sure that’s true, because these house-to-house searches that they’ve been doing, particularly in Kabul, street by street, every single house in the city, was quite a methodical campaign that must have taken quite a few weeks to organise and to plan. So, I’m not sure whether that was the reason for it. But I certainly worry going forward that now we’re really focused, and quite rightly, on the magnitude of what’s going on in Ukraine, on war in Europe, which is of course fundamental NATO business, that Afghanistan is forgotten again. And for those of us who spend a lot of time and effort working in Afghanistan, writing about Afghanistan, and for the Afghan people, I think that’s a shame.
SG: Absolutely. And it’s an important reminder as to what is still there to save. And there’s a lot to save in Afghanistan, because it’s not just for the Afghans, it has global ramifications, as you’ve been outlining throughout our discussion. But David, once again, thank you so much for spending the time with us on NATO DEEP Dive and talking to us about your experiences and your book, The Long War, is certainly something that I very strongly recommend people to read if they want to understand about Afghanistan. So, thank you, David, again, for joining us.
DL: Sajjan, thanks for the recommendation. And thanks very much, it’s been very good to talk to you.
SG: It’s been our pleasure.
Thank you for listening to this episode of DEEP Dive. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. DEEP Dive is brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. The production and research team are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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