Lessons from Afghanistan

Transcript:

MICHAEL COHEN: We believed for a long time, well after the point when it was clear that we could not do these things, that we could not rebuild Afghanistan, we continued to believe that we could.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Institute for Global Affairs at the Eurasia Group. My name is Mark Hannah.

Recently, the world has largely been tuned into two ongoing conflicts: the one between Israel and Palestine, and the one between Russia and Ukraine. But is it possible we’re a little too focused on the present conflicts and perhaps not enough on the past?

COHEN: Well, I think the sort of obvious answer is we spent 20 years in Afghanistan – it's the longest war in US history, it's the most expensive war in US history – and we lost. Unambiguously, we lost. So, when that happens you would think that it would be worth your while to understand why the US lost that war and to perhaps not make the same mistake again in a future conflict.

MONICA TOFT: You could make the argument that, yeah, we prevailed over Al Qaeda, Bin Laden is done, he's gone. But the manner in which we did it, what we left in our wake, is pretty traumatic.

HANNAH: That’s Michael Cohen. To be sure, it’s not the Michael Cohen who is an expert witness against Donald Trump and Trump’s former fixer, as Michael is quick to point out on Twitter. Michael is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Tufts University. He’s a columnist for MSNBC and the Daily Beast. We also heard from Monica Duffy Toft, the academic dean of the Fletcher School of Tufts. She’s also a professor of international politics and director of its Center for Strategic Studies.

The two of them helped pen the Afghanistan Assumptions Project, a series of papers looking back at that war which Michael calls “greatest failures arguably in American foreign policy history” and some big assumptions underpinning the entire conflict, such as…

TOFT: The United States, we just didn't care. The administration didn't care. We didn't appreciate the culture, the history, and the politics of the place. So when we went in, we tried to remake a centralized government when that sort of government is not characteristic of Afghanistan, the way in which it's been run historically. And when September 11th, when the attacks occurred, the US national security bureaucracy was actually bereft of any useful intelligence or information about Afghanistan. Yet they knew Al Qaeda was there, right? And then the State Department, it was led – policy planning under Richard Haass, he was the Director of Policy Planning – it was cobbled together from different bureaucrats with issues and regional expertise elsewhere. So, we didn't even have people on the ground who understood from the US perspective, what was happening in Afghanistan and how to deal with it. And Richard Haass at one point said that people have more prejudices than knowledge when it came to Afghanistan.

HANNAH: Those assumptions were destructive. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, more than 7,000 allied service members and contractors were killed, along with 47,000 Afghan civilians. And the totla price tag was more than $2 trillion dollars.

But, if nothing else, that destruction should at least create some opportunity for learning and reflection.

COHEN: So, the lesson here is that we, and I think this analogizes to the situation probably best in Ukraine but to some extent also in Gaza, is that we don't know how to end wars. To put that as simply as possible. We prevailed in Afghanistan, we defeated the Taliban, and we did not know how to end the war in a way that ensured the war would be over and there would not be an insurgency. We resisted in Afghanistan a political settlement with the Taliban. We defeated them, they tried to surrender in December of 2001. They came to the new president, Hamid Karzai, asking to surrender and we rejected it. We pressured Karzai not to accept that surrender. We then, after that, militarily fought a very aggressive counterterrorism campaign against the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and turned a group that really at that point was defeated and wanted to make peace, we turned them into an enemy. In large part because we were unwilling to accept the idea that the Taliban had any role to play in Afghanistan's future. And I think that comes from a mindset that views the way wars end as via unconditional surrender. You defeat your enemy completely, they surrender, they prostrate themselves before you, they have no interest in fighting anymore, they are roundly, soundly defeated.

HANNAH: This is clearly an important conversation for the United States to have in general, but perhaps especially so in this moment where leaders are having to ask how long a war can go on, how to understand culture and history in international conflicts, and how to find clear endings in situations which are far from clear.

So, in the interest of finding paths to ending the current wars we’re involved in — or perhaps just supporting from afar — we turn back to understanding Afghanistan.

And we begin with Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban.

COHEN: I'm obsessed with the role of personality in decision making and how big a factor that plays. And I think this probably goes against what Monica spent her whole life working on, which is political science tends to focus on, tends to minimize the importance of personality a little bit.

And I think in this particular situation, you had a leader in Omar who didn't understand the US, who didn't believe they were going to go to war, who unlike basically his entire cabinet, his entire top lieutenants, all of them wanted the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden. And by the way, this predated September 11th. You have to remember that for at least two years before 9/11, the US was pushing Omar to turn over Bin Laden, who had been indicted in federal court in the United States. And he resisted this constantly. And there were those among his leadership who kept pushing him to do this, and he refused. And after 9/11, he continued to refuse to turn over Bin Laden. And what's interesting about the surrender we’re talking about is that Omar opposed a surrender. Every other one of his lieutenants supported it and wanted to give up and wanted to stop the fight. They felt they’d lost the war, the game was up, and they were going to submit to this new rule of Hamid Karzai. And so, personality played an enormous role, played an enormous role on the American side as well. I mean, George Bush presented this war, the war on terrorism, as this black and white struggle, compared Al Qaeda to imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and communist Russia. I mean, this was presented as an existential conflict between good and evil.

And that is a simplistic way to view the world and a simplistic way to understand the situation in Afghanistan, and I think really clouded our understanding of what was possible in Afghanistan. We basically assumed these two groups were conflated when they were not, and we treated them the same. And had we treated the Taliban differently than Al Qaeda, had we acknowledged and recognized their different interests – they had different interests than Al Qaeda – we could have found a way to work with them. And I'll just make one last thing. I think it's a really important point. I love asking this question. Do you know, by any chance Mark, where Hamid Karzai lives today, the former president of Afghanistan?

HANNAH: I wouldn't be surprised if it's the suburbs of Washington, DC.

COHEN: Nope. He lives in Kabul, unmolested by the Taliban. There's some limitations to what he can do, but he lives there. The reason I bring this up is because there is a very long tradition in Afghanistan that when you lose a war, you jump to the front of the parade.

And that's why you had, for example, former communists who ended up joining the Taliban. And then people who allied with the Taliban joining the Karzai government. Afghans are very, very good at putting their finger up to the wind and seeing where the political winds blow and then going in that direction. So, the point I'm making here is that the Taliban, the tradition would have been that they lost the war and they get on board with the new guys, Karzai. That's what's happened to some extent. Not completely, but obviously the fact that Karzai is able to be in Afghanistan and the Taliban basically leave him alone for the most part, suggests that there is this tradition of acknowledging you lost, submitting to the new ruler, and then you move on. We didn't understand that or recognize that. And as Monica points out, we viewed Afghanistan as a distraction. Had we understood that, I think we would have treated the Taliban a little differently, understood that they were not a threat to us after the war was over.

HANNAH: Right. And this is the distinction that Bush failed to make between, or explicitly rejected making, between terrorists and people who give safe haven to terrorists. But Monica, when Michael mentioned personalities of different people and we could have brought in the personality of George Bush, as well as that of Mullah Omar, but what are the kind of political systemic drivers of the miscalculation on both sides?

TOFT: Well, it's really interesting. If we think about the power and the might of the United States coming out of the 1990s, we prevailed. We are basically a hegemonic power and we are pushing our weight around. And so we had this tendency to use force, to use the pointy end of the spear first. And you have a President Bush, who's inexperienced in foreign policy, very strong team behind him with strong personalities – Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld – kind of saying, “we've got to do something boss.”

And interestingly, one of the first questions we asked ourselves – Chris, Michael, and I – was well, let's do the mind game of if the United States had chosen not to use force, right? If the United States hadn't said we need a vengeful, just sort of turn the other cheek, a very Christian way of thinking, how differently this may have gone? And demanded, and by the way, said we're not going to attack if it's the case that you hand over Bin Laden and no longer harbor terrorists that can attack the United States. That never, ever was discussed as a possibility. It was immediately right to the use of force under this Bush administration.

HANNAH: You've written about the dangerous rise of kinetic diplomacy. Is this an example of that? And what is the definition of kinetic diplomacy?

TOFT: So kinetic diplomacy, so I published a piece in War on the Rocks about four or five years ago, and the idea there is basically resorting to the use of force without thinking about other tools of statecraft. So, you can think about trade, you can think about commerce in the old days, and also diplomacy. And if you look at the United States for the last 30, 40 years, we've been much more willing to use force, to ramp up the military, threaten the use of force, and then actually use force first.

And you can look at the State Department and how that's been staffed, how it's been denuded. The fact that ambassadors have less authority, less legitimacy in some circles, in most circles now, than CinCs, the commanders in chiefs around the regional operational commands. And so the idea is that the United States, because we could get away with it for so long, it would rely on the use of force to kind of push its way and get its way.

And what we're finding is, first of all, a lack of consideration for what happened in Afghanistan, that it didn't work there. And again, looking at the Soviet Union, it didn't work for them either. And the arrogance and the hubris that we thought as a country that we could defeat the Taliban and elements in Afghanistan when the Soviets couldn't.

And then now, going in Afghanistan and similarly, you could make the argument, this knee jerk impulse by the Bush administration to go into Iraq. And I think we had too much power, too much history of the use of force without anybody pushing back. Although, I can tell you both Russian President Putin, he basically said when we went into Kosovo without a UN mandate, that we're going to pay for that, in 1999.

And he still talks about that. When he went in and invaded Ukraine in 2022 he was asked by German leader Scholz, what's going to happen if he goes into Ukraine? It will mean war in Europe. And Putin actually harkened back to 1999 and he says, “what are you talking about Prime Minister? There's already been war in Europe.” And he pointed to Kosovo, right before the invasion of Ukraine. So, it's cost us a lot, this idea of kinetic diplomacy. And I would hope under President Biden, who by the way didn't want to go into Afghanistan, didn't want to do the search under Obama when he was vice president.

And I think it's one of the reasons why, back to the personalities issue, it took President Biden to say, “we're not going to win this one in Afghanistan. It's time to pull out.” So, personalities do matter. But I think power, we have to think about power and the fact that the United States has not paid the costs of all of these misadventures, particularly in Afghanistan.

HANNAH: Let’s talk about the turning points of the different wars because I think there’s a conventional wisdom that the US was justified in retaliating against the country of Afghanistan. But what are the different decision points here where our assumptions lead us astray? Was it only after Bin Laden was killed and then the remaining ten years? And then also, to play devil's advocate, you say one of the assumptions is that lack of US action will create a political vacuum, and somehow that is a kind of assumption that we are afraid of political vacuums and we need to act or else we enable the conditions that allow terrorists to seek safe havens and plans attacks on the US. Is there not any merit to that?

TOFT: I think what you could do, one way to look at the periodization of this war or this conflict, is you look at the different administrations. So, the Bush administration basically turned their eyes away from Afghanistan and sort of just let it go its merry way, handed over tons and tons of funding, worked with NATO, worked with the UN to try to rebuild, but became much more focused on Iraq, but was aligning itself in peculiar sort of ways with warlords funding them. And we point out in the second and the third paper about how this ended up creating the insurgency. Because by December 2001, it was quiet. And actually when we interviewed a bunch of people very high up in the military and also the administration, they could freely travel around Afghanistan. They didn’t need escorts, the helicopters could freely fly, get them from one spot to another.

But what was happening in the background is there's tons and tons of cash being pumped into this country and huge levels of corruption and a lot of agenda vendettas, right? That were being settled basically with our cash and our support, because what they would do is they would sell us the wrong intelligence and we would go after and we would settle scores for many of these leaders in Afghanistan, to the point where locals on the ground, that good faith that Michael talked about, was lost. Such that by 2003, 2004, the insurgency was really bubbling up to the point where Americans were getting killed, you start seeing IEDs coming into the country, really serious conflict. But where were we? We are in Iraq, right? Thinking about the Iraqi situation. And so, we sort of have to shift gears and look back into Afghanistan. And then it was ‘07, ‘08, you have Obama come in, and what was Obama's sort of mantra?

There's the good war and there was the bad war. The good war was Afghanistan. We need to do a surge there. American troops are getting killed. There's now humanitarian issues. We are seeing some elements of democracy. We're seeing women's rights. And so Obama does this surge. But again, very cynically in the sense that he thought if he could give the military 18 months, and that's all they wanted under Petraeus, was 18 months to demonstrate that they could turn this thing around, that maybe we could pull out. Didn't work and then you get to 2012, 2013, where it's like, okay, maybe we're gonna have to negotiate with this Taliban because they're gonna be staying there. And indeed, guess what? They're going to stay there because this is their homeland that they are fighting for.

And so politically, the Obama administration and then the Trump administration – the Trump administration, they were willing to negotiate but nothing really came of it. And it comes back to a fundamental point, is that none of them wanted to accept defeat. We had no end game, right? If you look at the academic literature on war fighting, there's tons on how wars start. There's tons on the engagements and how they go over time, very little on end games. It's sort of a mystery and it's because nobody wants to accept the possibility of defeat and they don't think about it ahead of time, about what's gonna happen and how are we gonna extricate ourselves. So it took the Biden administration after Bush, Obama, Trump, to say enough.

And in my opinion, it was courageous on his part to say, “this isn’t working.” And so, it took a new administration, the Biden administration, to say, “okay, we've got to do something differently here.”

HANNAH: We haven't talked about Biden, so let's discuss the political dimensions here. Going into the 2024 campaign, do you see that the American voter will share Monica's view that this was a politically courageous and necessary thing for him to do?

COHEN: No. And I will say one thing that's interesting. I mean, I give the Trump administration credit. They did negotiate the end of the war. I mean, the Doha Agreement basically was what led to American troops being withdrawn. Of course, they disavowed that agreement once it actually ended up being implemented by Biden.

I think the withdrawal in 2021 is greatly underappreciated as to what an enormous success it was. And I know that's an counterintuitive thing to say. We brought 130,000 people out of the country in a two week period, which is an extraordinary achievement. And we had to do that because the Afghan army and the Afghan government collapsed at a speed that I think nobody expected.

And basically from the point that we left the Bagram Air Force Base, which was the major US military hub in the country, it was about two weeks later when the Taliban took over the country in Kabul. And the Afghan army didn't fight. The Afghan leader, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. I love the story that people in the presidential palace went to lunch the day that the war ended, and they came back and they found that Ghani had fled the country. So, this was a situation in which things collapsed pretty quickly, and I think the Biden administration does not get enough credit for being prepared for this possibility.

They pre-positioned troops across the region to be able to evacuate, for not just Americans but the Afghans who worked alongside us, and we were very successful at doing so. We got out 130,000 people. Everyone focuses on those images from the first day, those horrible images of people falling off of airplanes trying to flee the country. And I get that, but I think that there is a weird kind of misunderstanding of how actually successful that withdrawal was. But again, and I think Monica makes the point exactly right, this was always going to be ugly. And I think the swift collapse of the Afghan government, what it shows you is just how ineffective that government was. How a government we spent 20 years and we gave billions of dollars to had not engendered any loyalty among the Afghan people, had not really been able to establish any roots of support within the country. And within a couple of days or weeks collapsed. And to me, the bigger story here is not what happened in August 2021, it's what happened the 19 Augusts before that, that led to this outcome. And I think that story has not been well understood.

Having said that, from a political standpoint, I think this is actually one of the lowest moments for the Biden administration, and it's one that continues to be viewed negatively among most Americans. And I get it, you know, it's ignominious defeat. It looks bad. And it makes sense, I guess, that the guy who's in charge when we end up withdrawing and we end up losing the war, gets blamed for it. But I don't think Biden deserves any of the blame. I think Monica's right, he deserves credit. Credit for following through on the agreement that Trump had signed and for recognizing that this war had to come to an end.

And I'll tell you one last thing, I think this is really important. A couple of months ago, the US intelligence agency, the DNI, the Department of National Intelligence, put out this threat assessment. And they concluded that even though Afghanistan is now under Taliban control, that there was no significant Al Qaeda presence in the country.

Now, why is that important? Because for 20 years, we have been told by leader after leader that if we left Afghanistan, the Taliban would come back into power and they would create an Al Qaeda safe haven that would threaten the United States. And guess what? That didn't happen at all. And some of us said, no, the Taliban are not going to let Al Qaeda back into the country, they have no reason to do so. That would be to their disadvantage to do it. And they did not.

HANNAH: And they were ambivalent about doing it in the first place, right? Before 9/11.

COHEN: They were. There was many among Taliban leadership who felt that Bin Laden was a liability and that he needed to go. But I think this is important. We spent 20 years being lied to by presidents, by generals, by political pundits, what have you, who warned of this outcome and it didn't happen, and now nobody cares. It isn't even a conversation that Al Qaeda has no safe haven in Afghanistan with the Taliban takeover. In other words, the Taliban took over the country, an event we spent billions of dollars and thousands of American lives were lost to prevent from happening. And guess what? It has had zero impact on the United States. It hasn't affected us negatively. It hasn't put us in more danger.

HANNAH: But it has devastated the lives of many Afghans and this is something Monica was talking about earlier. And I know this isn't necessarily, narrowly within the area of your expertise, Monica, but the sort of famine or famine-like conditions in Afghanistan right now. It's never been in recent memory anything but a poor country, but the lives of Afghan people are made miserable by the legacy of war there and 20 years of war. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Taliban hasn't necessarily let Al Qaeda or organizations like it gain a stronghold or exist within their borders, to the extent they’re able to police their borders.

TOFT: No Mark, it's a good point. We did make headway on humanitarian issues. That's clear. Women's rights, allowing people to have a vote, a say in their government to some extent, but it was largely within Kabul and those areas. Most people would make the argument, the development and those sorts of things. But the question is, is the use of force and is the United States as the lead on this, the best solution.

So now that the Taliban are in control, they need legitimacy. They have the authority to govern the country, right, they're the last one standing. But they're going to need some legitimacy because the Afghans have shown themselves to be extraordinarily resilient people.

Before we were there, there was a civil war. They've had revolutions. And so we can use, back to kinetic diplomacy, we can use other tools to try to impress upon the Taliban that they need to take care of their population. Otherwise their population is going to take care of them. And so the use of force by the United States is not necessarily going to do that.

And also, does it necessarily have to be the United States always in the lead? And if you look at data, you can look at Gallup or Pew data, Americans want the United States to be active in the international system. We are not an isolationist country. We believe that we're doing good around the world. But we don't have to always be in the lead, that it's okay to take second seat or to follow others or to work in coordination with others.

So my point would be that, yes, right now the situation is pretty dire. It may have to get a little bit even more dire. I can't imagine what it would be like there. But then we can put pressure on the Taliban and maybe ease up on sanctions and open up some of the bank accounts as a way to sort of curry good favor on their part, so they can better treat their population.

But Mark, I wanted to go back to the question about, there's two things that were really interesting that you asked about. Because Michael, Chris, and I have had to grapple with this, that what if Bin Laden had been killed immediately? That's a tough one to answer. And we believe – I think, Michael, we are in agreement here – that we probably would have realized we had victory, but because we came so focused on Bin Laden as a leader of Al Qaeda, perhaps on the other hand, when you read about Rumsfeld in particular, but also Cheney, the inability to negotiate with the Taliban, it's a really good question.

But I want to go back to 9/11. This was an intelligence failure, right? And we know that Al Qaeda is no longer there. We know how to now collect intelligence on this place. We're keeping a very close eye on it. And we know once there's an issue or potential plot that we uncover, we know how to attack and go after them. We know how to blow things up. And as Michael pointed out correctly, we haven't had serious, I mean maybe there's classified ones, but generally speaking the Taliban have been relatively well behaved and Al Qaeda has been sort of cut off at the knees, at least temporarily. And so, we want to keep an eye on the intelligence and not necessarily thinking about, okay, how can we go get them with the use of force in every instance.

COHEN: I think this is a really interesting question, had we killed Bin Laden, for example. We had him surrounded at the cave complex in eastern Afghanistan called Tora Bora. We basically let him slip through our fingers. Had we killed him, would we have stayed, would we have handled the Taliban differently? And I kind of think, there's two things I'll say about that. I'm not so sure we would have. It's a really hard question. I sort of go back and forth. I've heard a lot of people we talked to say that if we'd killed Bin Laden then, we would have left Afghanistan and we wouldn't have cared what came next.

Maybe. But there's a flip side too, which is that we had this desire to punish the Taliban to make an example out of them. So it's really a hard question to answer, but what I can say with some degree of certainty, and it's really striking about this, is how little we seem to care about Al Qaeda after the war in Afghanistan ended. This is the part that I find sort of shocking. We didn't really make a concerted effort to wipe out remnants of Al Qaeda in, for example, Pakistan. Many of them went to Pakistan. They basically had a safe haven there for, I don't know, seven years until we started droning them, which probably did more to reduce Al Qaeda's presence or their capabilities than anything that we'd done previously, except for kicking them out of Afghanistan. But in seven years in between, we basically didn't do much to Al Qaeda in Pakistan at all.

HANNAH: So, if there were three takeaways, three main assumptions that a reader of these working papers walked away with from these papers, having read them, thinking these are the three most underappreciated or the three most important assumptions, the things that the US got wrong. What would they be?

COHEN: Well, the first thing, so basically this began in August 2021 when Chris Preble, who's our co-investigator, he and I were having a conversation about the press coverage of the withdrawal, and we were bemoaning the fact that the focus was on the collapse of the government, the Afghan government, and the takeover of the Taliban, and not a focus on what had happened the 20 years previously, which was a cascading failure of US policy over and over again on a number of different issues, in a number of different ways. So I think that that's what kind of got this started. And then we kind of pushed this idea. And then we hooked up with Monica and Tufts, and we began researching this. And what we have been struck by is how so many of the pathologies that really animated our policy in Afghanistan began in those first few weeks and months and were never tested.

This project is about assumptions, assumptions that went largely untested for 20 years of the conflict. And those assumptions began in that period. And what is really striking and is really kind of shocking is how those assumptions were just never tested. Even by people who were skeptical of what we were doing there. The assumption of an Al Qaeda safe haven, the idea of that being a threat to the US, I remember in ‘09 and ‘10, when I was writing about this issue, saying this doesn't seem like a major threat. This seems like a thing we can deal with, we can handle. But it was amazing to see President Obama at the time, who is a relatively savvy foreign policy thinker, I think, making the public argument that a potential Al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan represented a significant threat to the US, and it was in the vital national security interest of the US to prevent that from happening. I think that is an assumption that had it been tested, I think we would have realized that in fact, no, this wasn't a threat.

And I think that mindset, that belief, this ridiculous belief that a safe haven was some, that somehow it's like this belief that Al Qaeda is not a threat unless they're actually in the geographical area of Afghanistan. It's an absurd notion and it went untested for 20 years. So that's one.

I think conflating the Taliban with Al Qaeda is another assumption that we got wrong. Had we not made that assumption early on, had we understood the Taliban wanted to and needed to play a political role in Afghanistan's future, we would have allowed for that to happen. We should have allowed for that to happen. And we would not have conflated them with Al Qaeda, which we did.

And I think the third one, we haven't talked much about, but I think it's really important, is the belief, I would say arrogant belief, that we could go into Afghanistan, we could help rebuild that country. That we could turn it into a functioning democracy that provided for its citizens. I still remember, and some of your listeners may remember this, but back in 2010 when we began this counterinsurgency strategy that we employ in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who was a commander of US operations there and NATO operations there, he said that they were going to go into these communities in southern Afghanistan and they were going to provide government in a box. That's not how this works. It's not how the provisional government services works. It's not how governments engender loyalty from their citizens. It is a completely simplistic understanding of allegiance and loyalty in a nation state. And also, what any government, particularly a dysfunctional government, the Afghan government, can provide to its citizens.

But we believed for a long time, well after the point when it was clear that we could not do these things, that we could not rebuild Afghanistan, we continued to believe that we could. And that's why we sent a hundred thousand troops in 2009 and 2010. It's why a lot of American soldiers did not come home from Afghanistan. It's why many who did come home came back with significant injuries, both physical and mental. This was an arrogance and a misunderstanding that a lot of Americans paid a price for. Several thousand Americans died in Afghanistan. Many more came back with permanent injuries. And also of course, we killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Afghan civilians during the war as well. You mentioned this earlier about how awful it is to be under Taliban rule now, and it is, but a lot of Afghans, especially those outside of Kabul, will tell you that they would prefer the Taliban than to the war that was going on. And right now, Afghanistan, for all of its failures, for its mistreatment of women, for the economic deprivation, is at peace. There is not a war right now in Afghanistan. And that actually does matter.

HANNAH: Thank you so much to Monica and Michael for joining us for this important conversation. We hope you found it as useful and eye opening as I did.

Special thanks to our None Of The Above team: Olivia Chilkoti, Sarah Leeson, and Lucas Robinson, who make all of this possible.

We’ve got one more great episode coming up later this month and then None Of The Above will go on hiatus for the summer! Fear not, however. We will be back in the fall with a brand new slate of episodes around a special theme, so stay tuned for more announcements and previews for that.

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