Episode 25: On Peace (and Pandemic) in Afghanistan
Peter Bergen and Kiana Hayeri on America’s Longest War
In February, the Taliban and U.S. government signed a peace deal. The U.S. would draw down its troop presence and persuade the Afghan government to release Taliban prisoners in exchange for a ceasefire. However, since the agreement was signed, the Afghan government’s release of prisoners has stalled and Taliban attacks on Afghan forces have surged. Now, coronavirus spreads from neighboring Iran to the war-torn country just as the prospects for peace dim. How and when will the longest war in American history finally end?
Peter Bergen and Kiana Hayeri weigh in on the U.S.’ inconclusive and four-decade-long involvement in Afghanistan. They discuss whether the war was worth fighting and whether people in Afghanistan are better off today than they were before the U.S. invasion in 2001. What impact has American intervention had, and what new challenges does this country face as the coronavirus spreads across the region and world?
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Peter Bergen is vice president at New America, a CNN national security analyst, professor, author, and documentary film producer. His latest film The Longest War is streaming now on Showtime. Twitter: @peterbergencnn
Kiana Hayeri is an Iranian-Canadian photographer, focusing on migration, identity, and sexuality in societies dealing with oppression or conflict. View her latest work “Afghanistan’s Next War” in New York Times Magazine. Instagram: @kianahayeri
This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.
Transcript:
May 7, 2020
PETER BERGEN: What the Taliban don't really understand is just how much Afghanistan has just moved on.
KIANA HAYERI: The country's so unstable that you don't know what happens a week from now. It is engraved in your day-to-day life.
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MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of The Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today's episode is about Afghanistan and how the coronavirus and decades of war are impacting the country and its people. I’m really grateful to be joined by two guests who know Afghanistan intimately, who have spent years working in the country and covering the conflict which engulfs it. Peter Bergen joins us from Washington. Peter wears many hats. He's a journalist, a CNN national security analyst, a professor, and a bestselling author, as well as being the vice president of New America. I would encourage you all to sign up for his daily newsletter, the Coronavirus Daily Brief, which you can do at newamerica.org/subscribe.
The reason we've invited Peter here is because he's one of the leading experts on the evolution of al-Qaeda and its former leader, Osama bin Laden. One of Peter's incredible books, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-Qaeda, was adapted into a sobering film about America's war in Afghanistan and premiered just a couple weeks ago. And to help make sense of America's longest war on the people of Afghanistan is photojournalist Kiana Hayeri. She joins us today from Kabul, where she's based. You've seen Kiana’s incredible photographs in the Sunday New York Times magazine. There was a cover story she did just a couple weeks ago, as well as the Washington Post and many other newspapers and magazines.
Very glad to have Peter and Kiana with us today. Let's dive right in.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: What we just heard there was the first few seconds of a trailer from Peter's new film, The Longest War, and one of the really eye-opening things about your film, Peter, was how you take us back in American history and actually go much further than you might expect. As it's mentioned in the film, Afghanistan has long been called the graveyard of empires. America is not the first country to go to war in Afghanistan and struggled to get out. So, Peter, can you just set the stage here on how Afghanistan got to where it is today?
BERGEN: What's interesting to me in a lot of ways is Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries, some of the more obscure countries in the world. And yet it has played an outsized role in American history. Fast forward to when the CIA, through proxies, basically defeated the Soviets.
Interlude featuring archival audio
BERGEN: And I think that was incredibly important because if the Soviets could be defeated in a country on their own border by a lightly armed guerilla force that obviously had a lot of American backing, what did that say to all the countries of Eastern Europe? I think it said a lot. And I think it said to the countries of Eastern Europe, it’s not a coincidence, in my mind, that February 15th, 1989, Soviets withdrew. And very quickly thereafter, you start seeing the Eastern European countries pull away from the Soviet orbit, because the Russians and the Soviets only had one card to play ultimately, which was force. And a force wasn't going to work. And I think that was very important.
And then, of course, 9/11 was incubated in Afghanistan. For a country that is a long way from the United States and is very poor and in many ways not that significant, except in terms of its position between Central Asia and the Middle Eastern and the Indian subcontinent, it's had a big role in American history.
HANNAH: when people talk about the Cold War, they often have a misperception that the Cold War was a bloodless war between the United States and the Soviet Union. But that's not the case, and it's certainly not the case in Afghanistan.
BERGEN: Yeah, a lot of blood in Afghanistan. And that’s the proxy wars around the world. But Afghanistan was particularly brutal because the Soviets inflicted a totalitarian war on the population. The population during the Soviet war was fifty million. Now it's thirty million. But the Soviets killed at least one million, possibly two million Afghans. They forced a third of the population out of their homes. Massive refugee populations in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Now there's still refugee populations in Pakistan, third generation as of this at this point. So the Soviets really inflicted a total war on the Afghan population.
They faced a determined resistance. And I think it's one of those wars in which often, wars are very ambiguous. In this case, our supporting the Afghan regime was the right thing to do. What was not the right thing to do was when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, we just ignored the problem and essentially closed our embassy there in ‘89 and left.
HANNAH: Peter, I want to ask you about Osama bin Laden. You interviewed him back in 1997, four years before the attacks of September 11.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: And this was before people really knew who he was. This was the first televised interview with bin Laden. What were your impressions of him personally when you were sitting face to face?
BERGEN: When we met with bin Laden, we had no idea. All you knew was that there was this guy with a lot of money who, according to the State Department, was financing Islamic extremist movements and who I thought might have been behind the first Trade Center attack in ‘93, in which they were trying to kill as many people as possible. Luckily they only killed six. And that was the frame that we had. We knew very little about him. I didn’t even know what he was going to look like. And then in this interview, he'd made some bellicose statements in Arab language, but he hadn't done an interview with a Western, English-speaking network, or he'd never done a TV interview. And so in that interview, he declared war on the United States. And he said it was about American foreign policy in the Middle East.
That was really the first time he made those points to a Western audience. And the interview didn't get any attention, really, relatively speaking, until the embassies were attacked in ‘98. Then it was clear these guys had no compunction about killing as many civilians as possible. They had the capacity to reach out thousands miles from Afghanistan. Blowing up one American embassy is hard; blowing up two simultaneously is really hard. And from that point forward, it was clear these guys were really a threat.
HANNAH: You mentioned your interview didn't get a lot of attention at the time, but did you take him seriously as a threat? Were you shaken at all by the substance of that interview?
BERGEN: The guy seemed very serious, and the people around him seemed very serious. My question, sitting in a mud hut in the middle of the night in March ‘97 in Afghanistan, was, “OK. How do you launch an attack on the United States, six thousand miles away in this kind of quasi-medieval country ruled by the Taliban?” And the answer came in a little over a year later with the embassy attacks.
HANNAH: Now the U.S. has been in Afghanistan for nearly twenty years with a government that is essentially a kleptocracy. There are very few clear signs of stability to show for our involvement there. Was this inevitable? Were we doomed from the start thinking we could bring democracy to Afghanistan? Or are there things the U.S. could have done differently to prevent what we're seeing now?
BERGEN: I think we could put a lot less money into it. That turns out to really be a problem. By the way, much of the money we spent there was spent on ourselves. So when you hear all these conversations about all the money we've spent, the money wasn't spent on Afghans. The money was spent on contractors and paying our salaries and alike the vast majority of the money.
But I'll tell you one thing I think we always got wrong. We overvalued the idea of doing a deal with the Taliban and undervalued the idea of creating a functioning election, really a functional election structure. And we put a lot of eggs in the basket of “let's do a deal with the Taliban” as opposed to putting a lot of eggs in the basket of “let's try to make the strongest possible government that is capable of mounting the fairest elections feasible,” understanding that they're not going to be completely free and fair. But I think if we put some of the energy into that, as opposed to the Taliban peace negotiations—which we put a lot of energy into—we would have had a better outcome. And the Taliban peace negotiations have really gone nowhere. But the idea that somehow we're going to flip a switch and the peace will happen—none of that made any sense.
And I think really, it came out of President Trump's desire to wash his hands of the place. By the way, he's been telling his top team now we should pull all American troops out because of Covid, which is obviously going to hit Afghanistan very badly because they have a terrible public health system. I had a car accident in Afghanistan and went into a hospital, and they didn't have Tylenol. These hospitals have nothing. And so, you've got this very bad public health system, and you've got this long border with Iran. So, Afghanistan is going to be hit hard.
HANNAH: This brings us to our second guest, Kiana. Kiana's work helps illustrate the lives of people, particularly women and youth living in conflict zones in war torn countries.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: Herat sits right at the border of Afghanistan and Iran. Iran is, of course, going through this terrible outbreak of coronavirus.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: What's going on with Iran and Afghanistan right now in this pandemic?
HAYERI: Because of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, there was an estimated three million Afghans in Iran, of which about a million were legally in Iran, and the rest were undocumented migrants. Most of them have gone with hopes of finding work so they can send money back since the beginning of the year. But a quarter million of Afghans have returned from Iran. And Iran is going through a phase where the economy is crumbling, and basically for Iranians themselves, so a lot of Afghans are coming back.
In the early days, in March alone, over 150,000 Afghans returned. The first week, or maybe even two, most of them came back because they weren't able to make money. The job sites have shut down. Right at the border, which is March 18, by that time, people were coming back in fear of corona. They were escaping corona, without knowing that they're actually bringing corona into the country.
HANNAH: What has the reception been like for those coming back to Afghanistan? Has there been a lot of dread or fear and suspicion?
HAYERI: Yes, one family I met at the border—we talked to them for the next two weeks, all the way to their home village in Pabon, which is north of Kabul. The sons of the family were war veterans, so they escaped the war. They left to run to do labor, basic work, to just have a peaceful life. And they, because of things going on, were forced to come back to their home after seven years being away, even though their children were born and raised in Iran.
They had no understanding of the fact that they won't be going back to what they call home. But talking to them—it was really heartbreaking because Hollett, who was their older son, wasn't sad about having come back to the war. He choked up when he started talking about relatives or people from their village running away from them when they see them on the street and literally hiding from them in shops or around the corner, not even saying hello, and he found hard to deal with.
HANNAH: Afghanistan is going to have to deal with a health pandemic in the midst of armed conflict, and that's going to be difficult to do for a hundred different reasons. But what are some of the ways you've seen that play out?
HAYERI: I think it's the most obvious reality that is casting a shadow on efforts to tackle over nineteen years of war because it's sucking up all their resources. In the two weeks that we were following the story—like the people, the two weeks—the Taliban carried out about 500 attacks in the nine provinces that were first hit with Covid-19. At the same time, one of the units we were following were pulled off of the frontline to come and guard the Covid-19 hospital in Tehran.
The New York Times had an amazing article about the medical worker. There's a story about the north in Kunduz province, which several times have fallen into the hands of Taliban, and in 2015, one of the hospitals was bombed. That was a very controversial bombing, by the way. Throughout all this time, they kept their doors open, and they brought in people injured. And now they get about a dozen to twenty victims of war every day. While, out of their 300-something, 360 medical workers, seventy of them—I can’t remember the exact number—have Covid-19. They can’t turn people away when you're bleeding to death. They can't turn you away. They would bring them in, treat them, and send them away, hoping they're not sending the virus away with them.
HANNAH: Can we get into that a bit more? Given the delicate position the Afghan government is in now, how has the pandemic affected their ability to govern?
HAYERI: This may be a little bit radical, but I think one of the negative impacts the past twenty years has had on Afghanistan is that it has turned the government into a corrupt, dependent, and somehow self-congratulating system that is now totally overwhelmed.
I think the foreign aid—the foreign countries have been lending a hand, pouring money, millions of dollars into this country for the past twenty years. And then right around the time—nobody knew panic would arise here, but they pulled out just like that. And now that they have pulled out and cut the funding, a pandemic has arrived. The Afghan government is dealing with several voids: the void of funding, the void of support and security support, and the void of skills to treat and handle the pandemic.
HANNAH: Peter is also wary of the consequences of America pulling out of Afghanistan.
BERGEN: And I think, unlike Iraq in 2005, twenty-five percent of—the vast majority of Iraqis wanted us gone. That is not necessarily the case in Afghanistan. If you look at the Asia Foundation polling, which they've done every year—it's a very systematic nationwide poll—you tend to find a high level of desire for some form of international presence to continue because they see it as a guarantor against the Taliban.
The Taliban typically get a ten percent favorable rating, which is not particularly big. The people that were most opposed to the Taliban negotiations were, not surprisingly, educated women, particularly educated younger women. They were using words like betrayal.
HANNAH: Especially in the cities.
BERGEN: You're right. In the rural areas, particularly rural Pashtun areas, Taliban is a domestic local force. So the question is how do you integrate them into society? Do they get provincial governorships to some degree? Do they get this district, governorships, in which there are many districts? Do they get a couple of government ministries?
Look, if they engaged in normal politics, you could have a discussion with them. But if their actual goal is to rewrite and to embed their version of Sharia into the Afghan constitution, that's a very different matter. And I still don't think we really know. It's not clear what their long term goal is. I think their long term goal is to return the country to Taliban rule, as I understand it. I don't think it's going to happen. I think in the film, Saad Mohseni, who's the owner and founder of ToloTV, says the Taliban don't really understand just how much Afghanistan has moved on. These young people are always very wired up to the outside world. There’s just very little constituency for the Taliban's ideas.
HANNAH: Kiana didn't exactly share that same view. Do you think people in Afghanistan think America on the whole has made things better or worse?
HAYERI: No. They've made things worse. Where in the world have Americans succeeded by invading a country or trying to set up democracy, whether directly by invading it, like in Iraq or Afghanistan, or through other tools trying to interfere with the politics? When did they succeed?
The reason I moved—and I’ll say this quickly—the reason I moved to Afghanistan quickly in the first place, was because when I came here in 2014, I was doing a story about young people. And when we were talking to them I was amazed to see how this generation of youth, despite the war going on, were so positive, so optimistic. They were hoping for a better future. They were going to build their country. Some of those guys I was photographing eventually became my friends. By now, six years later, unfortunately, some of them have been killed over the years, and the rest have all left, even the ones that told me they will never leave Afghanistan. But it's a struggle because the country's so unstable that you really don't know what happens a week from now. It is engraved in your day-to-day life. People lose people. People lose friends and relatives on a daily basis. And then the next morning they go back to work, and they start life. That sense of instability defines your lifestyle. A lot of my young Afghan friends who are my type, who are progressive, who are open-minded, live day-to-day life. If you ask them, “How do you imagine this beyond just having your family and kids? How do you imagine life in ten years?” Nobody really knows.
HANNAH: So, Peter, you've talked about this as the longest war the CIA has ever been involved in going back to the Cold War. But the nature of the CIA's involvement has changed dramatically as well, from a ground war to a drone war. Can you talk about how that happened?
BERGEN: Probably the biggest shift in CIA history was the shift away from essentially stealing other people's secrets and providing strategic warning to policymakers to essentially becoming a more paramilitary organization that killed thousands of people. I work at New America, where we track CIA drone strikes and, of course, it was President Obama who dramatically ramped this up, particularly in Pakistan. But it also took things like this in Yemen, which was also dramatically ramped up by Obama, and also in Somalia, where Trump has dramatically ramped up drone strikes and all sorts of special operations strikes.
HANNAH: What do you think this portends for American national interests and the goodwill that we have—
BERGEN: What is fascinating about it is presidents, as Bush, Obama, and Trump, will basically have followed the same playbook. It was incubated by President Bush because the drone program only really took off the last six months of his second term. It was greatly expanded under President Obama, and it is being continued to some degree under President Trump. Now, the drone strikes in Pakistan were more or less stopped. But that's partly, I think, because the target side was all in the tribal areas, and they've either gone underground or disappeared or have all been killed.
And if you map the numbers of strikes in Pakistan over time, in 2010, there was a huge spike—122 strikes. Now we're down to, I think, nine last year under Trump. And it really maps the numbers of American troops. So there was a force protection element to this. And correlation is not causation, but I think there was an element of that. And then there's also the fact that al-Qaeda was regrouping in Pakistan, and there was really an effort. Whoever wins the next election, whether it's Joe Biden or President Trump, I would be deeply surprised if suddenly there was a new playbook on this issue.
HANNAH: Does that indicate informed consensus because it makes sense or is it sort of an inertial status quo that comes from a failure to see long term consequences or an inability to make change?
BERGEN: One person's inertial status quo can be another person's. Well, this makes sense. And I think it makes sense because it limits the number of U.S. casualties. It had some success on the problem. If you look at the other part of our documents, bin Laden was really freaking out about the drone program. It's a very consistent theme. You knew his top managers were getting picked off, and he was very concerned about it. So, it's not a perfect answer, but it is the least bad answer. So given the options, you're going to send an 82nd airborne into Waziristan? No. Are you going to send the 82nd airborne into Yemen? No. And cyberwarfare, special operations, Special Forces, and drones is the toolkit. I think there is a lot of bipartisan consensus that this is kind of the least bad approach.
HANNAH: Both of our guests have spent large portions of their lives in Afghanistan over different periods. Before we left these discussions, I wanted to understand how they'd seen the places they've lived change and what they thought about Afghanistan's future. Peter, you've had firsthand experience in Afghanistan since the 1990s. You've seen it change through many different periods, and now you've gone back again for this film on the ground there. How have things changed?
BERGEN: In 1993, Kabul was like Mogadishu in 1993. It was block-to-block fighting. The place was a very, very nasty civil war. The Afghans destroyed Kabul. Hundreds of thousands people died. It was badly covered because it was so dangerous, and no one cared. That's ‘93. In ‘97 under the Taliban, Kabul was a ghost town of only 500,000 people, probably six million today. So very different. And the Taliban ruled like the Khmer Rouge minus the prison camps. They imposed a draconian order. You basically sacrificed your freedom for having order, and its people were willing to make that exchange. But over time, the Taliban, I think, were out there welcomed by a lot of Afghans. Initially, they were welcomed.
And today, the big difference in Afghanistan is seventy percent of the population is under thirty. It's one of the youngest countries in the world. Everybody has a cell phone. There is a pretty vibrant economy compared to what there was under the Taliban. What's dangerous now in Kabul, if you're a Westerner, is just that the Taliban have mounted a pretty successful campaign of attacking Westerners anywhere they congregate. And on that level, there's a lot more dangers than there used to be. In 2007, Kabul was actually one of the more fun places in the world with a lot of bars and restaurants and a vibrant sort of expat scene. And that all completely dematerialized.
HANNAH: And yet, despite all of this, your film ends on an uplifting note. As a storyteller, did you feel the need to have that kind of uplift toward the end of the film, or do you think there really is cause for optimism?
BERGEN: Look, it's not even as a storyteller. I'm in the news business. The news business is by definition about bad news. We don't focus on hurricanes that didn't happen. We focus on hurricanes that did happen. When you absorb the news about Afghanistan, it's easy to overlook the fact that there has been a lot of hope. And that's not my view. This is the Afghans we talk to, that we have in the film. I just think it would have been an incomplete picture to end on the note that this was all a giant failure, because it's just not true.
HANNAH: Kiana, you moved to Afghanistan in the midst of the U.S. war there, and you've seen it go from its midpoint to the late stages we're in now. What has changed since you moved to Afghanistan?
HAYERI: Well, the change has been huge. In 2013 when I came, it was a different life, honestly. You could walk around as much as you wanted on the street. When I arrived, when I moved here, it was at the peak of the violence at the end of 2014. I moved here in November, and in December, NATO pulled out. And ever since then, the situation has been getting worse and worse. Safety, but also because of the insecurity, a lot of people are going behind the summit's walls and checkpoints there.
The city has become much more populated. With that, crime has increased. Back in the days, one of the biggest threats to us as foreigners was kidnaping by the Taliban. Now, what happens is because of poverty, ordinary people may kidnap you and try to negotiate a fee, and if that doesn't work out, they will pass on to insurgency. None of the changes have been good. I think the only positive impact this American invasion had—one of the only ones to be honest—has been the free press in Afghanistan, but aside from that, everything has gone back to what it was before or perhaps even worse.
HANNAH: When you came to Kabul in 2013 versus today, can you just compare what your outlook or prognosis was for the prospects of democracy in Afghanistan? Are you more or less hopeful today than you were when you first arrived?
HAYERI: I am much less hopeful about the state of democracy in Afghanistan, partially because the situation has gotten worse. And a lot of the good people I've known have left the country because they don't see a future here, but also because it got under the skin of Afghans, as I learn a lot more about it, about the culture, about how things function here. But overall, I unfortunately lost all of my hope. And I'm lucky I can leave anytime I want. But I sometimes wonder how it feels to lose hope in a place like this.
HANNAH: I want to thank both of our guests, Peter Bergen and Kiana Hayeri, for joining us this week and for shedding light on what is going on now in Afghanistan. If this topic has grabbed your interest like it has ours, please consider watching the new documentary Peter produced called The Longest War, which is streaming now on Showtime, and view Kiana’s latest work in the New York Times magazine on how the coronavirus is impacting Afghanistan.
I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. If you enjoyed what you heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Google Play, iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.
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