Afghanistan and the Taliban
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This year marks 20 years since 9/11 and the start of the war in Afghanistan. A war which right now is reaching an extraordinary and tragic finale. Many of you have asked us for our take on what's been going on in Afghanistan. And so, before we properly come back for series 3 later this year, and yes we are coming back, we agreed that we had to talk about it. Let me tell the listener something here. In this story,

So, Eamon, dear listener, let's get into it. ♪

Hello, Eamon. Hello, Thomas. How are you? I'm fine. How are you doing? It's been a while. It's been a while. Once again, it's been too long. Indeed. I was so glad to see you along with my family in last Eid. It was amazing. And by the way, you are an amazing cook. Oh.

Ha! That's so kind of you to say that. It was great having you and your family for Eid. You surprised me the day before. You said, "Thomas, are you busy tomorrow? Because I'm coming with my family and we'd like to celebrate Eid with you." Which made me jump out of my seat and say, "Yes, please come!" But I also had to quickly learn how to cook.

what turned out to be a favorite dish of yours from when you were a kid, maklouba. Yes, absolutely. What a wonderful cook. I mean, the experience was amazing. And by the way, like, I mean, my daughter all the time is asking, like, when can we see Uncle Thomas, you know, in, you know, the city that you live in? Like, I mean, and so basically, I want to see Uncle Thomas. I want to see Uncle Thomas. Oh, that's sweet of her. So here we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

And once again, all eyes are on Afghanistan. In a way, conflicted has come full circle. We started with Afghanistan in 9-11 three years ago. And now in the run up to our third season, there's been a return to the Afghan issue as America and its coalition partners withdraw their troops and their personnel from Afghanistan, and the country falls back

under the control of the Taliban. It's the status quo ante, 20 years for nothing. These are the questions that we will eventually get to. I have to say, Eamon, I don't know how you're feeling about this episode. I am a little bit overwhelmed because the question of Afghanistan, its history, its politics,

recent history and all of the shenanigans that are going on. This is an enormous topic, far bigger than any one episode can really do justice to. But we will do our best. We'll try to do what we do best, which is provide the deep historical context for these current events and also draw on your personal experiences in Afghanistan. Because, of course, you do know Afghanistan quite well, don't you? Well, I spent three years of my life there before and after the Taliban.

And I was one of those basically who experienced what does it mean to run away from the Taliban and then eventually surrender to them. So don't don't don't get we'll get there. We'll get there. I can't wait for the listener to hear these amazing stories. I mean, did you travel widely across the country throughout the country? It's a very diverse.

country? Oh, I've been to at least 21 provinces. Some of them I went there because there was training. You mean there were training camps, jihadist training camps, and you were taking advantage of the schooling that they were offering. Absolutely. Afghanistan used to be the university of jihad, you know, with many campuses dotted all over the valleys and the mountains there. Yeah.

Now, what about being able to talk to Afghans? Do you speak Dari, which is their version of Persian, of Farsi there? Do you speak a bit of Dari? Oh, yeah, I do speak a bit of Dari. And actually, that landed me in trouble at some point, because in future years after I left Afghanistan and after I left my work for

you know, the UK intelligence services, I didn't know how much the Dari dialect of Farsi, you know, the Persian language was so distinguishable. So I would be in a meeting, let's say Iranians in Canada or Iranians in France or whatever, and I would be, I want to practice my Farsi with them. And so I start like, you know, basically by asking about them and their health and greeting them and everything. And then when they look at me and they say,

Did you learn Farsi in Afghanistan? You know, and I was like, oh my God, like, you know, I gave the game away. I'm not supposed to let anyone beat Afghanistan. So since then, I decided I will never, ever, ever, like, speak Dari ever again.

So I'm glad that you mentioned or reminded the listener that you had this career as a double agent working for MI6 inside Al-Qaeda. Because in 2006, I believe in November 2006, you were invited to give a lecture to the British Secret Services on Afghanistan. And it's safe to say that what's happening now there, you saw it coming. Is that right? Yes. Yes.

It was 27th of November of 2006. I remember that date very well because it was the most important lecture I've ever given in my career inside the government circles. It was the last lecture I ever given to a government agency before I left the services of the UK intelligence. And I remember it was, you know, there was a committee called JTAC at that time.

JTAC, for those who don't understand UK government structure, it's a committee made up of several important decision-making bodies in the UK, the Foreign Office, the Home Office. All the bigwigs, all the great and the good of UK foreign policy were there listening to Eamon Dean tell them about Afghanistan. As well as the MOD, so the Ministry of Defence. So you have the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office, which is basically what advises the Prime Minister.

So I have more than 40 people sitting there and I give that lecture in order to basically tell them the bad news that you are not going to win in Afghanistan and that all you will be doing over the next years is just, you know, damage control. That's it.

And of course, it wasn't something that they were anticipating to hear or willing to listen even. But nonetheless, I mean, they've listened to everything I have to say, except I don't think basically they ever thought that any of what I've said was implementable. And I will tell you why. I told them basically that already the start in Afghanistan was disastrous because first of all, the system of governance they implemented there was just not the right system of governance.

Afghanistan was never going to be a democracy. They had a shot at democracy in the 1960s and 70s when the former king, the late king, Mohammad Zahar Shah, was very magnanimous in his decision to reduce his powers and to surrender more and more of his powers to the people. But of course, I mean, there was a coup against him and he was ousted because that's Afghanistan for you.

But then the question was, what system of governance should come after that? And I said that there are two, you know, incredibly dumb mistakes that were committed that, you know, really need to be rectified as soon as possible.

The first one is not to implement Sharia. I know many listeners basically will be shocked that I'm advocating for Sharia. The infamous Sharia law, that vehicle of oppression against peoples everywhere. Look, I'm not advocating for Sharia globally or anything, but when it comes to Afghanistan, if you are going to be pragmatic and also at the same time, all you want is to achieve the objective

of pacifying the country, then you need to know what are the ingredients of peace, what are the ingredients of stability. The Afghan people did not have the Sharia imposed on them by the Taliban.

the Afghan people always wanted to have Sharia governing their lives. In fact, they were always, even prior to the Soviet invasion, resistant, especially in the rural areas. Don't forget that Afghanistan is not just only Kabul and Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. The rest of Afghanistan was rural.

Yeah, this is actually an incredibly important part of the Afghan phenomenon that people often don't quite understand. That really for a long time, and we're talking thousands of years almost, Afghanistan has been split into really two halves.

a minority who occupy cities and villages in that part of Afghanistan where agriculture was able to flourish to the extent of developing agricultural surpluses and therefore the development of everything we consider to be civilization, stratified societies, hierarchies, trading, monetary economy, etc. That was a minority of the country. The vast majority of the country remain to this day, as they have been for hundreds and hundreds of years,

farmers and semi-nomadic pastoralists. It's quite a remarkable fact about the country. Absolutely. And it's those rural populations that resisted the liberalization and the women emancipation, let's put it this way, that was the hallmark of the Dawud Khan premiership prior to the Soviet invasion.

And this is why when people basically say that, you know, Ayman, come on, like, I mean, you're saying that Afghans want Sharia. I will say basically go to all the surveys done by respectable global survey companies and you will find basically the support for Sharia within Afghanistan always at top level.

80%. Sometimes it tops 95%. By the way, Sharia isn't just only cutting off the heads of the murderers and the hands of the thieves. We're not talking about this only penal code. We're talking about marriages, divorces, inheritance, transactions. So

All of this needed to be implemented and for the court system to be based on the sharia as it is interpreted by the school of Dioband or the Diobandi school of thought, the Hanafi Diobandi school of thought. And we talked about the school of Dioband, I think, in the first two episodes of season one. So you said, first of all, you've made a mistake. You haven't

properly implemented the Sharia. What's the other problem that you said that they made? So the other problem is not collecting the Zakat and having a body within the government that will collect the Zakat.

So zakat, which is the Sharia-mandated taxation, every believer is meant to give 2.5% of their active capital. There's some kind of very specific rule about zakat. But the point is it's meant to be collected. It's then meant to be distributed charitably amongst those in need. Exactly.

Now, before we explore your views on this subject further, Eamon, and God knows you've always got views, let me just quickly present a short overview of Afghanistan because I think one of the things I realized is that often Afghanistan is in the news, it's talked about, but

It's very seldom properly defined or discussed. It's treated more like just a kind of neutral backdrop in front of which conflicts play out. But there's very little context. There's very little history. There's very little analysis of what makes up this country. And I think that's what we can do and conflict it. So the first thing I'd like to emphasize is that Afghanistan is very old. I mean, this is incredibly important. It's very old.

It comes up in our consciousness every now and then as another, you know, there's another atrocity, there's another invasion, there's another jihad, whatever.

And we sort of think, "What is this place?" as if it comes out of nowhere. It certainly doesn't come out of nowhere. It's extremely old. I mean, we're talking thousands of years old. Zoroaster, the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, is meant to have lived and prophesied in what is now Afghanistan. Alexander the Great conquered what is now Afghanistan. He founded cities there. It became a vital part of the Buddhist world at one point. It was the conduit through which Buddhism spread to China and beyond.

And of course, you know, it was eventually integrated into the Muslim world through conquest and missionary activity. And then after the Mongol invasions of the whole world in the later Middle Ages, Afghanistan became a key part of the wider sort of Mongol, Turko, Persian world.

The famous conqueror Tamerlane grabbed it, and Babor, the conqueror of India, the first Mughal emperor, launched his conquest of India from Kabul, which is, of course, the capital of Afghanistan. So it's an extremely old country. And I'd be interested to hear from you, Eamon, what can you tell me about the historical memory of the Afghans? From what I understand, from what I've read, for example, Genghis Khan might be talked about by Afghans.

As if it happened last week. I mean, they have a long memory, don't they? There was a story I told the people at JTAC and the MOD when they were congregating there in that lecture.

about how I helped a friend of mine from Al-Qaeda who was married to a Nuristani lady. And Nuristan is one of the provinces in the northeast of Afghanistan bordering the Himalayas. It's a very beautiful place. And they have all kinds of nuts there to harvest, including walnuts.

So I traveled with him along with many other friends to Nuristan in the summer of 1997 to help with the harvest there. There I noticed how the Afghans could be planting pistachio trees and walnut trees and all these trees which take decades just to grow fruits. So I was saying to the people in that who's sitting in that lecture,

You always plan your lives based on, okay, I'm going to do my A-levels two years, then a gap year, you know, before the university, and then after that, three years for a degree, and then blah, blah, blah, whatever. And our election cycles are four years. So everything is done in really small chunks of years.

Afghans plan their lives according to much longer cycles than that. If they are willing to stay in the same spot for 30 years to look after trees that will give you nuts in the end. I mean, I remember I was thinking if I stay in this place for 30 years in order to harvest nuts, I will become nuts myself. You know?

But they have such patience. And I remember why patience is important because I told them that Mullah Dadalla Mansour, you know, a leader of the Taliban, he said to us in the 1990s, what is the definition of victory? What is the definition of victory? He said is that in the Afghan sense is that your patience outlasts the enemy's patience.

I mean, I suppose if you're an Afghan and the Americans and their allies are there, you're going to be thinking, well, we know you're going to leave one day. Yes. We're still going to be here. We'll just wait for you to leave. Exactly. Now, after this ridiculously brief historical survey, I think we can already demolish two myths about Afghanistan. These are very pervasive myths, which are both false. Myth number one is Afghanistan is unconquerable.

This is absolutely not true. Afghanistan has been successfully conquered many times, and for most of its history it was ruled by non-Afghans, whether Greeks or Persians or Arabs or Mongols or Turks.

Only in the 18th century did a dynasty of native Pashtun Afghans establish a state in what is now Afghanistan. Which dynasty? Please explain which dynasty. The Durrani dynasty. And why the Durranis are relevant?

Well, there are many reasons why they're relevant now. One of the reasons is that there's essentially a kind of Durrani-anti-Durrani split within the Pashtuns at the moment, which informs the Taliban's view. Ah, but there is something more important, Thomas. Come on, I thought you knew me. I'm, according to DNA, by DNA evidence, I am a direct descendant of King Ahmad Shah Abd al-Durrani, the founder of the Durrani Empire. What?

Well, you know, Eamon, wonders never cease. You seem to be related to absolutely every illustrious forebear within the Muslim world. My ancestors were just bloody sharecroppers in the outer Hebrides, probably from me all the way back to Adam.

So myth number one is Afghanistan is unconquerable. It's not true. You can conquer it. You just gotta do it right. - Exactly. - Myth number two is, myth number two is Afghanistan is inherently ungovernable. This is certainly not true. Again, it has a long history of civilized life and a history of strong state structures, not modern state structures, but state structures

At the time of Cyrus the Great, the first Persian emperor in the 6th century BC, what was then called Bactria, it's northern Afghanistan today, what was then called Bactria was called the land of a thousand golden cities.

More recently, a strong central state was developed in the late 19th century by the notorious Afghan king, the so-called Iron Emir Abdur Rahman Khan. Absolutely. And before the communist takeover in 1978, which prompted its descent into constant warfare, Afghanistan was infamously stable. A staple way station on the hippie trail. Peaceful, hospitable.

So Afghanistan is definitely governable, though, as we hope to point out, it's governable in an Afghan way. Exactly. So...

Take us, Ayman, to your first arrival in Afghanistan in 1996. Now, 1996 was not a happy time for Afghanistan, and when you arrived there, the country probably did appear to be quite ungovernable. My understanding is you went there seeking training in camps so that you would become an even better jihadist.

So you flew to Peshawar, which is in, of course, Pakistan, though in a traditional Afghan ethnic area. And from Peshawar, you traveled the infamous Khyber Pass to the Afghan border. What was it like at the border, you know, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Well, I mean, already the travel areas are quite underdeveloped when you are traveling through the Khyber Pass. I mean, it's already underdeveloped.

But even I wasn't prepared for the shock of how really last century. And remember, it was the 1996. So the last century for me was the 19th century. So basically, like, you just go there and you think, oh, my God, am I back in the 1800s here?

You felt like very little had changed from when the British troops crossed the Khyber and fought their way into Afghanistan, only eventually to be sent packing two years later. Exactly. So what happened is, you know, you cross the Torkham Gate, which is the crossing point at the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of course, I was crossing with an Afghan doctor called Mohammed Hanif.

He belonged to the Hizb-e-Islami, which belonged to Gulbuddin Hikmatiar, one of the warlords and the leaders of the Mujahideen factions that were fighting the civil war in Afghanistan at the time.

So on paper, he was the prime minister of Afghanistan, but that's just on paper. Not the doctor. You mean Hekmatyar was on paper the prime minister. We'll get into these details. Take us back to the border. You're there. So Dr. Mohamed Hanif told me that, please remove your glasses when we are crossing the border because crossing the border is only the privilege of the tribal people.

So the Pashtuns, if you only if you are a Pashtun you can cross otherwise you know the border guards will spot you and will think you're a foreigner and they will basically catch you and think what you're doing. Why are you crossing the border illegally?

So, you know, I will be dressed like an Afghan, walk like an Afghan. I was taught how to walk and how to imitate an Afghan. If it walks like a Pashtun and talks like a Pashtun, it's a Pashtun, I guess. And then I remember like, you know, Muhammad Hanif looking at me and he said, there is some Afghan about you. Like, you know, basically you have some Afghan features.

I said to him, yeah, I'm a Durrani originally. All right, here we go. You never miss an opportunity to remind everyone that you're a Durrani. Exactly. So he looked at me and he said, never mention that here. This is an anti-Durrani area. So just keep going.

So the Pashtuns, we keep talking about the Pashtuns, and the Pashtuns are, in fact, the biggest tribal society left in the world. The Pashtuns are made up of hundreds of clans, tribes, lineages. And the borderland Pashtuns, the ones who live either side of what's called the Durand Line, which makes the

Pakistan-Afghan border, those borderland Pashtuns are really, in a way that's to make it simple, the Eastern Pashtuns. They are the infamous mountain warrior style Pashtuns that you often read about. There are different types of Pashtuns. Some are a little bit more civilized, more hierarchical.

the royal family Pashtuns, of which Eamon, you are a descendant. But the Eastern Pashtuns are much wilder. They're very egalitarian in their tribal structure. They don't like hierarchical leadership. Every man is basically an equal. You have a gun, you have a goat, and that's it. And you're going to rule yourself. So you pass through the border. Tell us, what were your first impressions of this rural part of the country?

The first thing that strikes you immediately is, okay, I came from Pakistan and there was a road. Where is the road? I'm looking for a road. And basically, Dr. Mohamed Hanif will point out, basically, a very rugged kind of, I mean, it will look like a track for a quad bike. That's what I could describe it. He said, that's the road.

And we will be taking a microbus all the way to Jalalabad from there. So imagine you are on a microbus going from the border area into Jalalabad, the nearest city, which will take about roughly three and a half hours of drive.

I remember I reached Allahabad with so much headache because by the time I've reached, already my head hit the roof of the Macro bus several times because of the bumps. So the landscape was undeveloped. It was very pastoralist. It was very wild. Yes, it's underdeveloped, not only because there was no development before. There are signs that there were some developments in the 50s and 60s and 70s.

But the road is like this because of the war, you know, because of the, you know, how it was ravaged. Really massive damage.

you know, holes and gaps in the roads from the bombs and from the destruction and from the tanks, like, you know, basically heavy 60 tons tanks basically rolling over these roads. So basically what you're saying, you know, is that the road to Jalalabad was pockmarked with the scars of already two decades of war. But there were signs that, you know, certain amount of modern development had had been

attempted or had taken place in the intervening century, let's say. And I think that's another important point to sort of make that Afghanistan did from its central state in Kabul, it did

attempt waves of modernization, even to some extent liberalization throughout the 20th century. However, in general, all of those attempts faced a lot of pushback from the rural, more traditional, more Islamically identifying regions who didn't really want this modernization and all of this change.

I think they wanted the modernization in terms of infrastructure, but not in terms of social reforms. In other words, infrastructure reforms they welcomed.

Because I've talked to many Afghans who told me basically that they welcomed the dams. Bridges. Bridges were always extremely welcome over the twisting and hard-to-ford rivers of Afghanistan. Exactly. The tunnels and the bridges, they were absolutely welcome. The roads were welcome. The hospitals, the clinics. It's just the social reforms. It's what they rejected.

This is the old story really throughout the Muslim world in the 20th century. It's not only in Afghanistan that this dynamic occurred. You want the material benefits of modernity. You don't want any of the social liberalization. It's a difficult square to circle, but in Afghanistan, it was especially acute because the Afghan people, especially in the countryside,

really identify quite strongly with Sharia law and their own ancestral traditions. Absolutely, no question about it.

But nonetheless, the first thing, you know, you asked me about the poverty in Afghanistan. And when you enter Afghanistan, when you basically like across the border and you see, first of all, you know, the non-existent roads that are, you know, littered with the scars of war. The first thing also you notice basically is how many young people are trying to sell you something, even a glass of water.

it shows immediately the poverty and what makes your heart broken even. And when you see, and this is something important, when you see some of the kids with missing limbs and you think why? Oh, that must be just terrible. There's the scars of war, right? The living scars of war. It's because of all the landmines. It's all because of the Soviets dropping and littering the countryside with landmines that looks like toys.

Well, so that period, that very dark period of Afghan history, which it does seem might return to the country very soon, really it's a legacy of the 1970s. So in 1973, there was a sort of soft coup that overthrew the king and a member of the royal family then established a republic in 1973.

In 1978, there was the so-called April Revolution, the Sauer Revolution. There was another coup, this one led by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a Marxist-Communist coup, which established a Marxist, a communist government allied to the Soviet Union. This is what started the Mujahideen revolution.

resistance and in response to the first waves of this resistance already at that time supported by the US who wanted to punch the Soviets in the eye, the Soviet Union to defend the communist government in Kabul invaded in late 1979. And over the next 10 years to repel the Soviets from their country, the Mujahideen made the state ungovernable as a strategy.

So they basically decided to destroy the capacity for any central government to rule the country, to give the Soviets a reason to leave. And indeed the Soviets did leave. The problem was when they left,

the Mujahideen themselves were then left with an ungovernable state. - Exactly. - This resulted in an absolutely tragic and brutal civil war, which is of course what you then in 1996 parachuted yourself into. So there you are, you've gone to a camp above Jalalabad

and you are with a group of Arab Mujahideen linked to the Afghan commander you mentioned, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Tell us a little bit about him. And really I stress a little bit. We don't want to get in the weeds here because Afghan politics is as crazy as you can imagine. So he founded an organization called Hizb-e-Islami which fought the Soviets. - Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in a nutshell, idealist, a student politics Islamist who rose to prominence

caught the eye of the Pakistani ISI. The Pakistani Secret Service, the intelligence of Pakistan, said, "Oh, this guy can be our man in Afghanistan." Exactly. And so from 1979, he established the first, you know, you can call it a jihadist group based on the Muslim Brotherhood branch of Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi, the Sayyid Qutb basically of the sub-Indian continent.

Launched jihad the American supported him the ISI and the Pakistani military supported him he was a Pashtun and his rival to the north was Ahmad Shah Massoud the Tajik the Tajik really military genius the great military genius of the anti-soviet jihad exactly so the even even during the jihad against the Soviets in in the 1980s

Afghanistan was split according to ethnic lines. So in the south you have Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdurraab al-Rasul Sayyaf, these and Yunus Khalis and Deraa al-Din Haqqani. All Pashtun warriors. All Pashtun. And in the north you have Tajiks, Uzbeks. Exactly. The Uzbeks were mostly aligned with the Kabul government and the Soviets because the Uzbeks tend to be more communist.

But the Tajiks, you know, were led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud.

And they were more of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, but the classical Muslim Brotherhood movement, not the more radical Sayyid Qutb school within the Muslim Brotherhood. So already there was a split between them. It's just incredible. All the players are there, all the different permutations of modern Islamism were there, contesting the ground in Afghanistan. So you have modern Islamism and its different factions,

kind of weirdly married with Pashtunwala and the local Afghan codes and their own form of Deobandi Sharia law. It must have been, it's very mixed and messy. Very messy. I can tell you that, no question about it. And that's why

The Jama'ah Islamiyah of Pakistan, led by Qazi Hussain Ahmed, another Qutbist or Muslim Brotherhood radical in Pakistan, were the supporters of Gulbuddin Hikmah Tiara and Hizb-e-Islami during the civil war that erupted

after the fall of Kabul from '92. And during the course of that civil war, Hekmatyar, this Pashtun warlord who at the time you were in a camp affiliated with him, you know, he had developed the nickname "the butcher of Kabul" because he was particularly known for shelling civilian areas of Kabul in the pursuit of power. However, at the same time that you're there, another group, a new group, a new player had begun to rise: the Taliban.

Ayman, I would like you to tell us your first experience of the Taliban. It's quite a remarkable story. Well, four months after my arrival into Afghanistan and being in that camp that belonged to Hikmat Yar near Jalalabad Dam, we were six miles northwest of Jalalabad. And one day, Dr. Muhammad Hanif, my Afghan guide, the one who took me into Afghanistan,

came running into the camp. There were about 90 of us and he was saying, you know, to arms, to arms, you know, the Taliban has taken over Jalalabad. And we were looking at him, basically, we were thinking, you know, are you joking? Are you kidding? Like, I mean, we didn't even hear anything. There is no shooting. There are no sounds of, you know, artillery or anything or missiles falling. And he said, they just took it like this.

You know, they are on their way here. You know, they are only 20 minutes right away from here. So where did you go? How did you get away? We looked at our commanders, you know, do we form a line of resistance or what? Like, you know, our commanders looked at us, what resistance?

Into the pickup cars, just gather whatever you can basically and just go. And I remember we said basically we had a tank there, a T-62. Destroy it. So we throw grenades into the tank and we destroyed it before we left. We took the armored car, we took the other pickup cars and we just sped towards Sarubi. Sarubi is three hours away, you know, to the west.

And the idea is that it is the fortress that guards Kabul. It is a natural fortress. It's an extremely sheer, narrow valley that has been dammed. And the dam now must be something like almost out of the Lord of the Rings, like an insurmountable wall protecting anyone up there. Is that right? Exactly. So it is an incredibly strong, impregnable, impregnable natural fortress.

So we thought this is where we put our resistance. So I remember the commanders of the Hizb-e-Islami, Zardad and Jarir and others, they all gathered there, 1,800 men ready to fight. And we, about 90 Arabs, basically, we decided, OK, we will fight. Why we were told to fight? Because we were told that the Taliban, if they catch us,

they will hand us over to Pakistan and then the Pakistanis will hand us over to the Americans. So we were told that we are fighting for our own survival and therefore if we fall to the Taliban it's as good as falling to the Americans.

So we decided to fight. So there, us on the dam with our weapons basically ready and we were looking almost a kilometer into the entrance of the valley and we started to see the Taliban convoy coming and how did they basically break through the fast defenses? God knows how. All we know basically is that we saw the fast defenses fleeing in front of them. Then you see a sight that you could never forget.

a site where the first line of the Taliban are unarmed. Basically, there are young students, basically religious students, wearing white turbans, carrying massive copies of the Quran, hugging it, basically like in a tight to their chest and moving forward. Behind them, green and black turbaned fighters with their weapons ready to fight.

The message is clear. Yeah, clear. Either you submit to the Quran, and you submit to the rule of the Quran, or the guys behind us, the ones who are wearing green turbans and black turbans, they mean business. They will deal with you. And of course, with it, there were the sounds of the Takbir, which is, you know, the Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Yeah, in a melody, but it was very melodic.

with the drums. You know, so the sound of the drums... This is, Ayman, this is really, you're evoking an image from the Middle Ages here. This is medieval Muslim warfare. Exactly. Men in front carrying the Quran. Submit to the Quran or else. Behind them, communists

confident warriors marching to drums. I mean, really, this is very evocative. Exactly. So I remember like, you know, and the sound of the takbir, the sound of the religious chants coming from the other side in a melodic way, according to the, you know, to the drum beat. And I was looking at my fellow jihadists there, basically, and I was telling them, I can't shoot at that.

Can you? And they all looked at me exactly in their eyes. I can see exactly the same thing. I can't shoot at that. You know, we can't. I don't have the heart to shoot at that. And we see...

The Hizb-e-Islami fighters, the Quhakmatyar fighters, All these Pashtun warriors, these hardened, battle-hardened warriors, they fought the Soviets, they fought each other for years, and they look down at the scene and what do they do? We found their mouths basically repeating the Takbir with the Taliban. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. And then we understood why everyone is running away. You know, why everyone is running away is just the fear of God.

The Taliban conquered Afghanistan wielding the fear of God. And you did run away, you ran to Kabul. We ran to Kabul and there, you know, as soon as we ran to Kabul, you know, we entered the capital and Hekmatyar was there already. He was the prime minister by then. Hekmatyar himself, the butcher of Kabul, Hekmatyar himself, yeah? Because by then, three months earlier, he entered Kabul by peace.

as an ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud and the government against the Taliban. So he was already the prime minister. I saw all these former enemies had allied in order to face a common new enemy, the Taliban. So the chessboard of Afghanistan was shifting. Exactly. So we entered Kabul in a very chaotic way. And I remember they were saying the Taliban are already in Charasiab.

Oh my God, like, you know, they are already 20, 30 minutes behind us. Like, you know, I mean, we were running as far as possible. Like, you know, basically, you know, sometime we were driving 120 kilometers on a very bad road. Like, you know, how could it be that they are behind us? You know, and then, of course, the idea is we will have a line of defense. Ahmad Shah Massoud is there. The greatest military genius of modern Afghanistan. He's there too, but... But then what I saw, I saw Ahmad Shah Massoud himself for the first and last time in my life.

I saw him out of the defense ministry because we were all in the courtyard of the defense ministry now. So he was going out of the defense ministry. His eyes looked so red, like red bloodshot, like in basically as if he didn't sleep for days. And he was angry and he was heading towards his helicopter. And we were told he is going to Salang and from there to Panjshir. Which is his valley in the north, in the northeast that he ended up defending. He was withdrawing.

In other words, Ahmad Shah Massoud is not even going to fire a bullet. He's running away. And we thought if Ahmad Shah Massoud is running away, what do we do? Then we were told, Hikmat Yar, we have to go to the prime minister's office. We went to the prime minister's palace and there we saw Hikmat Yar with a big convoy of black land cruisers. And he was telling us to come with him. He is going to Baghlan.

And from Baghlan, he will mount a defense. Of course, he will never mount a defense in Baghlan. He will run to Iran later. But we didn't know that. So some of us went with him, but 40 of us said, no, we're tired of running.

So, you know, the Afghan commanders with the Hizb Islami said, go to Balahsar Castle in Kabul. So there's a big sort of mud brick castle in southern Kabul, which is, you know, fairly well defensible. In fact, it's a royal residence. Exactly. So they said, go there, you know, basically like in the take up defensive positions and

and try to negotiate a deal. - But there you are, you're still basically terrified of the Taliban. You're convinced that if the Taliban get you, they'll hand you to Pakistan, Pakistan will hand you to America or to Saudi Arabia, you'll be banged up in a Saudi prison, be tortured, mistreated. So you're really scared.

Absolutely. So what happens actually when the Taliban get to you? You know, we fortified ourselves inside Balasar Castle in Kabul. And then the Taliban, you know, came around and they put their, you know, deployed their forces around the castle. I could at least like, you know, count about 100.

And then they, with the loudspeaker, they said that they are sending an envoy, just don't shoot. So an envoy came, a very young man, like, you know, 20, 22. And he said, you know, brothers, what are your nationalities? And so we answered him, like, I mean, many of us are Saudis, some are Kuwaitis, some are Palestinian and some are Moroccans. And he said, you are honored guests, like, you know, so basically just don't be afraid. Like, why are you, like, you know, basically nervous here?

We said, you will hand us over to Pakistan and from there to America or whatever. We have no intentions, but let me speak to my commander and I'll come back to you. So he went outside, minutes later came back and he said, my commander is telling you to come out and we give you our solemn oath of aman, of security, of safety. No one will hand you over to anyone. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

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So we looked at each other and we thought, like, you know, I mean, if someone is offering us this in the name of Allah, you know, that he is swearing it, that no one will hand this over to anywhere.

And so we came out and, you know, naturally, like, I mean, we started removing our chest rigs where we put our rifle magazines and we removed our, you know, AK-47s and we started, you know, putting them on the tarmac. You were surrendering, basically. You thought we're surrendering to an enemy, so we'll hand over our weapons. And what did they do? What happened after that was one of the most emotionally charged, you know, experiences of my life.

when the Taliban fighters rushed towards us, picking the weapons and the chest rigs from the, you know, tarmac, from the floor, shoving the weapons back at us and say, don't you dare surrender, you are not surrendering. You are our brothers and our guests. And I remember, like, you know, many of us were in tears, like, you know, when this happened, like, you know, I mean,

Really? We were told lies about you guys. We were told that you will hand us over to Pakistan. We will end up being sent to prisons in Saudi or America or whatever. And they said no. And so they asked, where were you stationed? And we said we were stationed in Dar al-Abad Dam.

So they said your camp is safe there. We found your passports and travel documents there. We found in a safe. We found money. We found in books and weapons. Everything is as it is. You go and take it back.

And it is really an experience in which basically I experienced the magnanimity of the Pashtuns when they take over. No, no, no, no. The war is over now. You know, you decided to take our offer of peace, you know, and that's it.

Let bygones be bygones. The scenes you're describing from back in 1996, I mean, honestly, they could be ripped from the front pages of today because once again, we hear about this lightning fast takeover by the Taliban of the country. Also, of course, all the while giving assurances that they will be magnanimous in victory. People shouldn't be afraid. I mean, people question how reliable

the Taliban's word is in this regard. But certainly your personal experience of the Taliban back then was that they were rather noble in victory. - Exactly, except just one teeny tiny detail.

you know, while we were then, you know, ushered back into central Kabul, we saw, you know, the hanged bodies of former Afghan President Najibullah and his brother who were snatched from inside the UN compound there and given a quick swift trial and then hanged because they were blamed for all the ills of Afghanistan. These, of course, you know, Najibullah was the... He was the communist president of Afghanistan. Yeah. So, yes, magnanimous, but...

You know, there will be exceptions. There will be exceptions.

Well, that story is obviously amazing. My goodness, you've had... and you were only, you know, dear listener, remember, Ayman was 18 years old, is that right? 18 years old at this stage? I just turned 18. You had just turned 18. So what a life you'd already led. Now, there you are, you've been captured essentially by the Taliban, but they've been very magnanimous in victory. They've returned you to your camp, allowed you to continue your training.

All sins forgiven. So at this point, you must really have started to learn about who these people were. So tell us, who were the Taliban in fact? Because, you know, I mean, and I would also like to point out that there is a lot that is not

clearly known about the rise of the Taliban, the background of its initial leaders, including Mullah Omar, the famous kind of prophetic-like inspired commander of the faithful who put the movement together. There's a lot of misinformation, a lot of myths, a lot of hagiographical material. And I think probably, Ayman, even you yourself don't know for sure, but you must have heard what was being said at the time about the Taliban. So for us, the first interaction with the Taliban in order to understand who they are

was actually from the same white turbaned young Taliban fighter who came to talk to us in the castle and to give us, you know, basically the assurances of peace and security. He was tasked with escorting us back into Deir el-Abad camp. So on the way back, we questioned him a lot.

And he said to us that he was a student in Pakistan in one of the Deobandi madrasas, an Afghan from Ghazni himself, but he was a student there in Pakistan. So he was a Pashtun Afghan who was studying in Pakistan. There are lots of madrasas on the AfPak border and the Pakistan side of that border, a lot of madrasas that train Afghans, especially around that time, because during the Soviet period, the anti-Soviet jihad, there were

many, many, many millions of refugees from Afghanistan, most of whom ended up in that part of Pakistan, which meant that these madrasas had been actually booming. Absolutely. So he said that they answered the call of the Taliban leadership who called upon all the Afghan students of these madrasas or the Taliban, as it is known in Pashtun. Yeah, the word Taliban is just the Pashtun word for students. So these seminary students

returned, according to him, in order to answer the call to cleanse Afghanistan of the Mujahideen factions who are warring among each other, as well as the warlords.

We can be a little bit more specific. So in southern Afghanistan, around the region of Kandahar and just to the north, that was particularly lawless during the Civil War. It was a particularly problematic area. Its warlords were actually infamously kidnapping young girls and, in fact, young boys and subjecting them to sexual slavery and rape, which was a very, very shocking thing for that society. And

the sort of most clear example of how law and order had broken down. Sharia law and order had broken down as a result of the civil war. And Mullah Omar, who had fought in the anti-Soviet jihad, he had also been a madrasa student in Pakistan,

He was particularly animated by saving these suffering sex slaves from their captivity. And the Taliban then rose to power really on a kind of law and order platform. They said, "Afghanistan has had enough of this.

We must return the country to basic law and order. That law will be the Sharia. But it was a law and order platform, which at that time, Afghans were really willing to listen to. Is that right? In fact, you know, it was one of Mullah Muhammad Omar's cousins who was kidnapped. Now, this story is one of the versions, and this is the version that I've heard more often from the leaders of the Taliban. So I've heard it from multiple sources, you know, that this is the story of how it all happened.

So I will narrate the story, but with the caveat that this is what we've been told by senior Taliban leaders, that this is how it all started. It was the year 1994. Mullah Mohammed Omar was studying in a school called Ar-Rahmaniyah School in Peshawar, a Diobandi madrasa.

And there, that school had many of the former Afghan veterans of the jihad who decided they don't want to take part whatsoever in the civil war between the mujahideen. They just decided to leave Afghanistan and to busy themselves with the study of religion. That's it.

He received a letter from his uncle in Urizgan province in Afghanistan. His uncle was living in a village called Akhund. North of Kandahar. North of Kandahar. The letter was distressed that one female member of the family, one of his cousins, was kidnapped by one of the local warlords and that he needs urgent help to bring her back. So Mullah Muhammad Omar spoke to his fellow students there

And there were about nine in total who decided that they will go with him, including himself. Nine in total who decided that they will go and they will try to find a solution for this. Among them, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Dabihaullah Mujahid, Muhammad Gowth, many of those future leaders of the Taliban.

So they all went to Kandahar. There, you know, the weapon dealer took pity on them and decided to lend them the weapons because he thought it was amusing that Taliban or religious students would be interested in buying weapons.

They went from Qandahar all the way to Uruzgan. There they raised 50 men from the local village and they raided the compound of that warlord and they were able to capture him, capture his associates.

freed the girls and the boys, and of course, basically, they captured all the loot that he took, cars, money, cash, whatever you can imagine. Because this warlord, I mean, just this warlord was a kind of like a medieval brigand or like something out of, I don't know, something out of American Wild West story, just a sort of lawless guy who runs into your village, he takes some of your stuff, he takes your daughter and he runs back up into the mountains.

And Mullah Omar and the students had sort of successfully raided his compound and confiscated or reconfiscated all the loot. Exactly.

Exactly. So when they returned, you know, of course, what they did is that they beheaded these warlords and his men and they crucified them. Ah, I see. So that's some tough frontier justice. Exactly. And they called upon all the neighboring tribes and villages, whoever basically had anything stolen by this warlord, come and claim it.

So the honesty, the integrity and the willingness basically to help the people and to implement Sharia in this way and to take vengeance from this warlord, something impressed everyone around. And so they decided that don't leave us, don't go back to the schools, you know, stay here with us and, you know, be our leaders and our adjudicators, be our judges.

But then, of course, you know, other tribes came with the request to help them against other warlords and other, you know, brigands and gangsters. And the whole thing became a snowball that basically just snowballed out of proportion.

Within six months, four provinces, including Kandahar, Ghazni, Helmand and Uruzgan, all of them collapsed, you know, basically, you know, because the tribes decided that this is where we can get justice. These are the people who can guarantee justice for us.

We want them. It goes to show you what a thirst there was for law and order, for security and justice in those areas. And they thought, well, these students from Pakistan, these Afghan students from Pakistan, some of whom had fought the Soviets, many of whom were too young to have done so, they seem to be the ones that are going to provide us this much needed justice. Now, as the movement spreads and then eventually as the Taliban conquer the whole country, more or less,

The idea has propagated that they were a creation, the Taliban were a creation of the Pakistani intelligence services and that they were a puppet of Pakistan. But it sounds from what you're saying that it was a much more organic movement. The Taliban grew organically in the first six months. But what happened is that when they took control of the border crossings,

between the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand with Pakistan, the Pakistani military and the Pakistani ISI immediately noticed several things happening in quick succession. The first is that the traffic of the drugs started to reduce, which was an endemic in Pakistan. It was creating a really bad situation in Pakistan, the free flow of drugs. The free flow of weapons also reduced.

the Afghan refugees in Pakistan who were in Quetta, especially in that part of Pakistan, started to return back to Kandahar and to Ghazni and to Helmand. So really the fruits of the security and the law and order that the Taliban had imposed were already being seen. And the trade, the trade picked up significantly and suddenly basically like there is more money exchanging hands and the economy of Quetta in Pakistan boomed. So they took notice.

What is this force that was able to finally, finally control this border and actually make it better for both Pakistan and Afghanistan?

So the ISI investigated, you know, the ISI kept an eye on everything. And then they prepared a report and they gave it to Benazir Bhutto, who was the prime minister at the time. Remember, Benazir Bhutto is no friend of Diobandis or the Sunni extremists because she's an Ismaili Shia. She was an Ismaili Shia. That's right. So she didn't. And liberal at the same time. She was more liberal in her worldly outlook, but she has a country to govern.

And she thought that if these people can reduce the smuggling of drugs and weapons, can actually start to bring back the refugees, which are a burden on the Pakistani economy, and if they can, you know, increase the trade and give Afghans some security so the trade and business can boom,

Why not? You know, it doesn't matter. You know, it's a classic royal politic. I will ally myself with the devil, you know, if they serve my purpose. So this is exactly what happened. Benazir Bhutto decided that the Taliban, not Hikmat Yar, who was, you know, the darling boy of Pakistan, you know, who should be assisted anymore.

because Hikmat Yar for four years was taking money but showing nothing for it. But these people organically, organically proved themselves to be worthy of governing. So this is when the Pakistani ISI, after six months of initial success by the Taliban, they went to them and they said,

We would like to work with you. So the Taliban said, and you know why this sudden expression of generosity? They said because you can control the border, you can bring the refugees, you can, you know, increase trade and you can, you know, make sure basically that our countries are not flooded with drugs and weapons. And who took notice of that immediately when the amount of heroin started to reduce in terms of flow out of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE?

So the UAE and Saudi Arabia, after being lobbied by the Pakistanis that these people could actually reduce the amount of drugs being smuggled to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which was the heroin endemic in the 90s was awful in both countries, they said fine, we will work with them. And that is how Pakistan, alongside the UAE and Saudi Arabia lobbied the United Nations

that they will fund a program for the reduction of the opium trade and the opium cultivation, the Taliban said, okay, we will work with you on this. And that was a five years program, which culminated in April 2001, with the almost total eradication of the drug trade. So the idea is that the Taliban, despite the fact they are Sunni extremists, despite the fact that they're

unbelievably harsh application of Sharia, their disregard of human rights, their medieval outlook on everything. But they served a purpose in terms of law and order and security, not only for Afghanistan, but also for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and other countries. They reduced the heroin outflow. That is why Pakistan decided to work with them. And also another strategic reason

India was using Afghanistan lawlessness to establish espionage operations against Pakistan, their traditional enemy. So the Taliban were no friends of India. So for the Pakistanis, supporting the Taliban was important in order to reduce the footprint of India in Afghanistan.

In other words, it was a win-win situation for Pakistan. So why would anyone blame the Pakistanis? You know, basically, I'm not like, you know, saying they are the good guys here. I said to you from the beginning, there are no good guys in the story. But I'm telling you why the Pakistanis felt the need that, you know, working with the Taliban will be to their advantage.

So that's very interesting, Eamon. Pakistan supported the Taliban because they created much needed law and order, as did in fact much of the Afghan people during their rise. The Taliban managed to take over most of Afghanistan, promising law and order, promising a return of security and stability. I think

Though it's safe to say that in time, that initial respect was slightly wore thin amongst a huge number of Afghans because their extremely strict application of Sharia law wasn't entirely loved. It was more and more resented to some extent. Now, internationally, the Taliban, apart from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was not recognized as the official government of Afghanistan because

mainly the maintenance by the Taliban of a large number of jihadist camps, most infamously those belonging to Al-Qaeda, of which you were by this point a member in these camps. Now, it was a very vexed question.

America put pressure on the Taliban to get rid of the camps, to expel the Arabs, an exchange of which they would recognize them. And the Taliban said, "No, they are our guests. We are Pashtuns. They are our noble guests. Also, first recognize us and then maybe we'll deal with the camp." So there was a sort of tit for tat. The Taliban wanted the official recognition in order to deal with the jihadist camps.

And the Americans said, no, no, we only recognize you if you do with the jihadist camp. So this went on for several years. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda is launching attacks in 1998, launching the East Africa Embassy bombing attacks. In 2000, the USS Cole attack in Aden. This, of course, ultimately climaxes with 9-11 20 years ago, very soon. And the Americans' invasion of Afghanistan, the quick invasion.

toppling of the Taliban and the establishment of a UN overseen new state building process in Afghanistan. So, Ayman, is that all pretty much right? A good summary of what happened? Pretty much. Pretty much. And also because, don't forget, the Taliban themselves were split down the middle.

between those who said, close the camps, but keep them, you know, keep them Arab Mujahideen, but close the camps and keep them, you know, as guests unarmed.

And those who were saying no, no, no, no, no, you know, we should like in a support the you know The jihadist aspirations of any oppressed people keep them So it is the split with it within the Taliban itself basically that doomed them in the end that split it's another manifestation of all the different varieties of Islamism that exists in the world. I mean in general the Taliban were an Afghan focused Islamist movement They were not so personally interested in global jihad of any kind. However,

It is unquestionably true that the Taliban were extremely sympathetic to the more radical ideas of people like Sayyid Qutb. They lent an ear. They were absolutely happy, more or less.

for bin Laden and fellow travelers to do what they could to spread the jihad. You know, there was a basic... everyone was sort of drunk on jihad at the time. They thought it was gonna be just the greatest thing. You know, as you always like to say, prophecy was in the air, the end times were near. It was a very heady time until following 9/11, America stamped its boot on that time and a new reality emerged in Afghanistan. Now,

In December of 2001, so that's two months after the invasion, in the city of Bonn in Germany, the UN convened a conference bringing together various members of the Afghan political world, not the Taliban, and actually, sadly, the Pashtun element in this conference was

did not widely represent the whole Pashtun people. This would be problematic down the line when the new state that emerged after the invasion did not have much legitimacy in the eyes of the rural tribal people, especially

Nonetheless, in Bonn, the UN did gather together members of the Afghan elite, including the exiled king who was there, including the different ethnicities, including Pashtuns related to that old royal dynasty that Amon is actually a member of. And they drafted what is known as the Bonn Agreement.

The Bonn Agreement led to a Pashtun from the Durrani royal lineage named Hamid Karzai becoming president after some elections. And so I think the main thing to stress here is that though these days it's spoken of as if

The Afghanistan invasion state building exercise is the equivalent of what happened in Iraq in 2003 when America invaded. That's not true. There's a lot of sort of quick and easy thinking about this. The invasion of Afghanistan was much more, let's say, legal in its execution. The UN supported it. The UN actually officially oversaw the state building exercises within Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force based in Kabul that was meant to help police

That process was a UN thing. NATO was entirely behind the movement. So it was a much broader tent sort of attempt to drag Afghanistan out of 30 years of civil war and war and create a new centralized state there.

So the question really is, Eamon, given all of that goodwill, given all of that international cooperation, what the hell happened? Why, over the last three weeks, have we seen scenes reminiscent of the fall of Vietnam and the withdrawal of America from Saigon? Scenes that are really, well, I could tell you from American friends, are making people very angry. They're extremely

extremely disillusioned. They would think, why the hell were we there at all? We never should have been there. There was no way in hell that Afghanistan was ever going to be solved. What happened? Well, there are five major reasons, and I will just narrate them very quickly. It's simple. The first one, there was no king.

There was no king to bestow grace over all the proceedings. Yes, it's actually interesting that during the Bonn Agreement, the assembled Afghans there wanted a new constitution that involved a monarch. They wanted a constitutional monarchy and they actually wanted the old exiled king, who had been exiled in 1973 but was still alive, they wanted him to come back.

This is something that the Americans actually nixed. The Americans said, "No, we will not have the king." They said because they feared that many warlords opposed that plan and they didn't want any pretext for a return to the Civil War. I feel as well that in general, America, which of course itself was founded by revolting against a king, is not a huge fan of monarchy. But you think there was no king.

There was no king acting as a figurehead really to unify the country. That's the first reason. The second reason is the lack of application of Sharia in an independent way. As you said before, in that 2006 conference with the MOD and MI6 and others in London, you'd said that Sharia hadn't been implemented properly. Because that allowed the Taliban to establish their own parallel judicial system in the countryside

where people had no faith in the state courts because they can be easily bribed and they are not exactly religious, mostly secular. That's interesting because of course the Taliban, they were toppled, sure, but they actually fled into the Afpak Mountains. Yes, they were called, you know, they fled there alongside Al-Qaeda.

where in fact, weirdly following the invasion, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda became much closer bedfellows than they had been before. But you're saying that as the official Afghan courts became corrupt, the Taliban were able to establish their own courts where once again, in the name of law and order, in the name of justice, they were able to woo the rural people to support them. Exactly, because

It became well known that if you can't get justice through the state courts, the Taliban will get you justice. They became the Don Corleones, basically, of the Afghan countryside.

The third reason is because the state did not cater for the Afghans who want to pay the zakat, the religious taxation, whether on livestock or cash or whatever, or farms or harvest. So they paid it to the Taliban. I see. And the Taliban started collecting money and food and supplies, you know, basically abundance every year.

Because they have the lists when they were actually in power. They had all the lists of the business people of the rich people of the landowners of the you know cattle herders They had all the lists. They just have to go to them and collect. That's it. So they had financing so rural Muslims then who were you know, very Interested in fulfilling their pious duties of paying the zakat paid it to the Taliban exactly. So

The fourth reason is the Iraq war. Because in 2003, you know, the Taliban were reduced to only 800 fighters. That's it. However, Bush and Cheney and Blair and everyone else decided to take their eye off the ball and basically go and chase, you know, the imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And as a result, the Iraq war, Zarqawi, who became the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq later when it became a very big jihadist movement. And long-term listeners will know we've talked about this guy Zarqawi a lot. He was the big baddie in Iraq during the anti-American insurgency there.

Exactly, and he was awashed with cash. So in mid 2004, he sent $25 million to the Taliban. And then a year later, exactly in mid 2005, he sent another $25 million to the Taliban to basically establish them as a strong, cohesive force again, so they have money as a bedrock, as a foundation for a bigger operation.

So they use that money. So it's it's no surprise then that in 2006 the Taliban were back on the march and the and they were they were beginning to really become a thorn in the side of the NATO and UN backed forces there Exactly. They're probably wanted to relieve the pressure on him in Iraq So how better to do it than to support the Taliban so they can give the Americans bigger military haddock in Afghanistan

And the fifth reason, and I can tell you that now, the fifth reason is corruption.

A nation-state can last as long as there is a semblance of transparency, honesty and integrity. But when there is corruption that is so endemic, so intrusive into every aspect of life within the nation-state, then it will become like a wood termite that will basically cause so much decay that the whole structure will collapse. Biden said, idiotically,

that there are 300,000 people serving in the Afghan army. The reality is, because of corruption, there is only 80,000.

The other 220,000 are fictitious names being put there on the payroll and their salaries are being collected by some commanders in order to basically... Commanders inflate the number of the people who serve under their command in order to collect their salaries. That's it. The reality is that the Americans presided over a rotten corpse called the Afghan nation-state.

Well, you know, I think the Bonn Agreement and the constitutional state building process that emerged from it really is to blame to some large extent. I mean, from what I've read, that agreement was trying to reconstitute what had been a very strong centralized state before the Soviet invasion with a strong executive.

based on patronage, based on paying different military commanders in order to get their buy-in. So you'd give a ministry to this commander, a ministry to that commander, but a very strong central state based on patronage. Two problems. That

That opens up the doors to corruption. As you've just said, if you've got to be paying off different clients just to buy yourself some legitimacy, it's going to open the door to corruption. Another problem was that that old centralized state, which was based on the Pashtun majority and was based in Kabul, no longer worked in a country that after 30 years of war had seen a rise in the political autonomy of its regions. They were not so interested anymore. You know, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks,

the southern Pashtuns who were looking towards Pakistan. All of these different places during the course of the Soviet war and the civil war had had to become more autonomous in order to fight those wars. And so returning to a centralized, strongly unitary executive Kabul-based state was never going to work. And in fact, as it proved, it didn't work. The state's writ was not really running very widely anyway. It was kind of a mirage. That's why they always used to say that

Ashraf Ghani was the mayor of Kabul. - This is the president, so-called president of Afghanistan, who recently fled. So here we are, the Americans have withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Taliban are back in charge, quite remarkable. It's like the last 20 years hardly ever happened.

Of course, on the ground there is going to be much tragedy. There is a huge number, millions of Afghans who live in the cities, who are quite happy with a little bit more liberalization, particularly women, many millions of whom will have been used to an education and some of the rights that a more liberal order granted them. These rights will be rolled back, there's without a doubt. It is a great tragedy. The question really, Eamon, is how could the Americans

have withdrawn better. Their withdrawal is clearly very chaotic, is it not? Or was it just inevitable that the end game for American Afghanistan was going to be chaotic? To be honest, I think it was going to always be chaotic. I mean, because how can you evacuate the people who work with you and then you go without weakening the defensive lines against the advancing Taliban?

So it was always going to be chaotic. However, you know, to give credit to the Americans, they didn't anticipate that the Taliban would actually sweep through Afghanistan in nine days. Nine days, that's all it took from the first provincial capital to fall until the whole country's capital to fall. Nine days.

It's the most astonishing. It's most like a coup, which shows basically how the Americans underestimated how the Taliban were the shadow government in waiting, you know, in the rural areas, waiting to fill the void. And how little legitimacy the Kabul government had. Very little legitimacy. So I don't think the Americans could have done anything.

the withdrawal better, but they could have at least negotiated a better deal with the Taliban in which basically Kabul remain basically an enclave for as long as the evacuation take place. However, even the security forces in Kabul melted and disappeared without trace the moment they were hearing that the Taliban were on the outskirts.

You know, that is shambolic. It just shows basically there was no loyalty to the state. There was no state to begin with. So do you think, Ayman, that America and the UN and NATO and all of that, the whole international world, shouldn't have got involved in Afghanistan in 2001 in the way they did? Should not have tried to build a new state in Afghanistan after 30 years of war? I know many people will hate me for saying this, but I've been always saying it.

We could have done much better than that. There was no need for invasion. All we needed to do is two things. First, destroy all the camps. Like, really, pound the living daylight out of the camps from the air, by missiles, everything we have.

but at the same time engage with the Taliban and say, okay, they were a headache for you too. You just couldn't get rid of them because of whatever ancient customs you have. Now we got rid of them for you. Let's engage now. And you engage with them because the price of not engaging with them was far worse than engaging with them.

Well, Eamon, it's been fascinating talking with you as always. I leave with a heavy heart, not only because Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban and in the way that it has, not only that my country of America has more than egg on its face. I don't know what it has on its face. It has the whole grocery store on its face as it flees in Afghanistan.

A whole English fry up on the Ennits case. Exactly. As it flees in late imperial ignominy. I also feel sad because, you know, there was so much more we could have talked. You know, Afghanistan is really a fascinating discussion. I mean, I would like to know more

more from you about how the Taliban governed in the 90s, their naivete in some respects, their utter unfittedness really for international relations. That's a fascinating topic. I want to talk about the 2009 military surge that Obama oversaw in Afghanistan, a renewed attempt to

to bring order to the country in the face of the Taliban's growing power there. I'd like to talk about some positive aspects of that period of American engagement with Afghanistan, because the military at that point actually, from what I understand, did engage more with local peoples in an attempt to knit the country together. But in the end, that proved futile. So much to talk about, including the future of Afghanistan. Will the Taliban last?

Is the country headed for civil war again? Will China intervene directly in Afghanistan more than it already has? And of course, the incredibly important question of all those millions of Afghan refugees, which will be fleeing, I'm afraid, in a westerly direction. There's so much we could have talked about. We don't have time in this episode, but we will return to it in season three of Conflicted, which is, we promise, coming very soon. We promise.

We hope that we managed to answer at least some of your burning questions. Of course, it's impossible to fit everything into just one episode. And so we would love it if you shared your thoughts and questions in our Facebook group. There are over 1,300 of you now. This is wonderful. You're an extraordinary community of conflicted fans. And we are so happy to have you all. We want more. So if you're not a member yet, you can join the group by going to Facebook and searching for Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group.

This group is also where you will see news about new episodes of Conflicted before anyone else. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at MHConflicted. Thank you for listening, and we can't wait to be back. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Jake Otayevich and Sandra Ferrari and edited by Jake Otayevich. Sandra Ferrari is also our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.