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All right, y'all.
Introducing Mae Young.
She wrote this great piece for In These Times.
It's called The U.S. Trained Warlords Committing Atrocities in Afghanistan.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
All right.
So a very deeply reported piece that you have here.
Can you tell us how much time you spent there and talking with these people?
I first started looking into the story in March of 2015.
And I made my first trip to Uzgun that May.
And then I kept going back over the next, I guess, yeah, two, almost two and a half years.
I stayed in touch with one of the main characters, Hanif Hanifi, the senator who's sort of leading the charge, trying to bring justice on to Abdul Hakim Shijai, the militia commander who's accused of, you know, killing over 100 villagers from this particular village in a remote part of Afghanistan.
And yeah, I mean, the story has been a part of my life for the past two years, two, three years.
Well, it's a very well done piece of work here.
So I guess to overly simplify it, it's a group of Pashtuns saying that they're being persecuted by the local Hazara warlord.
Is that right?
That's correct.
That's exactly right.
And this sort of this, the pattern has been repeated throughout Afghanistan where, I mean, things are operating on multiple levels.
But I think one sort of mistake that we repeatedly made is conflating the Pashtun ethnic group with the Taliban, who are predominantly Pashtun, but not necessarily.
And that sort of conflating really sort of inspired a lot of egregious civil rights abuse and violations.
And the people who were most affected by it were obviously ones furthest away from the center of power.
And so if you, you know, the further away you go from Kabul, I think the less understanding there is and less maybe even like room for empathy.
Well, you know, I guess I've read some things that said that, you know, over the course of the entire war, all of the worst violence has really taken place in the southern and eastern part of the country, where it's the predominantly Pashtun areas.
And that's where the Americans have been stationed and hunting for bad guys and finding them.
Whereas in the north, even though there are lots of different factions, there are fewer USGIs for people to use against each other.
So yes, the violence there has been, you know, even though there are some Pashtun tribes up in the north, but the violence there has been less worse, I guess, if that's how you'd put it.
But still, you know, that is an oversimplification.
As you show in here, there's plenty of violence, even if it's not sending in the Marines to do their dirty work, that it is warlord on civilian violence up there in the north of the country as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, everything on American taxpayer dollars, right?
We now have this thing called the Leahy Amendment, which, you know, bars American taxpayer dollars from supporting militia groups, vigilante groups, paramilitary groups from, you know, committing acts of torture and other human rights violations, extrajudicial killings and whatnot.
But the Leahy Amendment actually has never even been put to use.
And it's just so rampant, the level of abuse in Afghanistan, that it is one of those things that everybody knows about.
But, you know, people maybe won't even bother writing about it because it is so common.
And as you said earlier, the thing that I find really sort of fascinating about Afghanistan intellectually is that we keep forgetting that, you know, what we called the Afghanistan War, the war in Afghanistan, is, you know, obviously to Afghans, it's called the American War or the NATO invasion.
And to them, it's not, the narrative isn't about, you know, pitting the foreign military against the Taliban insurgency.
The story for ordinary Afghans is often, you know, the story of one local strongman versus the other.
And the story is about these two centers of power really jostling over, you know, the American military might, which is yet another resource that they, you know, try to appropriate.
And I think that sort of basic fact is often lost on people, which is obviously a real shame.
And that has also resulted in a lot of suffering for ordinary Afghans who are just really like caught, you know, caught in the middle.
That's the story of these villagers, right?
I mean, they're caught in between to, you know, the American military, the Taliban, the Hazaras initially, they were, you know, traditionally the persecuted minority under the Taliban and even before then.
And by the virtue of the fact that they were already against the Taliban meant that they were very much welcomed as our allies.
The American military recruited a lot of people from, you know, a lot of men in the ranks of, you know, American funded programs often come from the Hazara minority group.
And the dynamic that we see in Afghanistan is something that we also see in Iraq, where, as you know, you know, after de-Baathification, there was a lot of empowering of the Shia minority, which, you know, sounded good at the time.
But as a result, what we see is that, you know, some people might say that the American military going in and siding with the Shias, which then led to a lot of abuse of power by, you know, Shias in power, then, you know, maybe later contributed to the Sunni insurgency, which is, you know, a dynamic that we see in Afghanistan as well.
Well, yeah, I was just reading not long ago about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar now back in the capital and his target, and I don't know what his specific arguments were, how valid they were, but it almost didn't matter.
The point was, he was demonizing the Hazaras and saying they are taking advantage and they have special privileges that the rest of us don't get and drumming up that kind of division and resentment.
And it's a classic dynamic of, you know, colonialism back in the day and then neocolonialism now where an outside power comes in, sides with a certain faction, empowers them, that inspires, you know, even more animus towards the already two, you know, competing factions and on and on it goes.
Well, and before we get too deep in the story, I want to go ahead and mention this fun irony now, just because it's recently in the news, that there are Afghan Hazaras who are being recruited by Iran to go and fight with Hezbollah in Syria against American-backed jihadi forces and American-backed Kurds in Syria.
So, as we have, well, that's a whole other, I almost went off on a tangent, all the different sides we're backing fighting each other there, but let's not do that.
Anyway, Afghan, and there's actually been Afghan Mujahideen, Pashtun Mujahideen, who've gone to fight on the side of the CIA-backed Nusra guys there too.
Of course, of course.
I mean, the people that we are now fighting, at some point, we also funded.
I mean, that's just a recurring, yeah, you're our enemies here and our useful tools there.
Absolutely.
And I know that the region is replete with conspiracy theories, and Afghans are often, you know, they're great at it, and they're also mocked for it.
But actually, it is not unreasonable for them to believe in what they believe in.
I mean, you know, they believe that ISIS is a CIA creation, the Taliban are funded by the Americans.
I mean, obviously, those things are not true, but they reveal a certain psychological truth about why they believe in the things they believe in, because there's always been precedent for things that otherwise seem insane, you know?
Well, and especially when there's a real kernel of truth there, when, well, America doesn't back the Taliban, but our allies, the Pakistanis and the Saudis do, and no, we don't back ISIS, but we do back the El Nusra Front that turned into ISIS, so, you know, want to split hairs.
Exactly, that's exactly right.
There was a great Dexter Filgin's article in the New Yorker many years ago about financing.
I think the story was actually about the Kabul Bank, but it talked about how a lot of the local, you know, men like Shujaei, actually, you know, local sort of partners that we had against the Taliban, when they were securing the roads, what they actually just ended up doing was paying off the local Taliban to ensure that the roads would be safe, and these are money that was obviously being funneled through as American funding, American dollars, and so money technically was ending up with the Taliban, so it's not actually unreasonable for, like, an illiterate villager to believe, you know, cut out the middleman and say, you know, hey, the Taliban is being funded by the Americans, because in some ways they were, you know?
Yeah, in fact, it's been reported that you had not just the Taliban allowing the Americans to pass through being, you know, paid taxes for that kind of protection, but literally are driving trucks in front and behind and leading the convoys and directly paying them for direct protection on the battlefield, which is insane and hilarious and belongs in a Joseph Heller novel, but there you go.
Hey, listen, so tell me about the Kataba massacre here.
Let's get into this.
Kataba massacre.
Kataba is an area that is part of Khasurizgan, which is a district in the east of Uruzgan province, which is in central Afghanistan, just north of Kandahar, basically between Kabul and Kandahar, and Uruzgan has played almost an oversized role in Afghan politics, because that's where a lot of, you know, prominent leaders of the Taliban are from.
That's also where Hamid Karzai, you know, made his sort of first and most sort of effective stance against the Taliban, and so it's always been a, you know, recurring motif in contemporary Afghan history, and this little town called Kataba village, about 10 years ago, there were farmers farming and tilling the field, and as it had been the case for the past couple of years, there would be these occasional raids that were led by Afghan militia men, but with assistance from American advisors, and they would often come hunting in these villages for potential suspects or, you know, maybe Taliban fighters that they believed that had run away into these villages, and again, this is the, it goes back to that initial thing that we talked about, where there's this dangerous conflating of villagers from areas where many Taliban fighters have come from, and then conflating them with actual militants, which is a very dangerous thing to do, and so while these farmers were tilling the land, sources say, I mean, I've spoken with over 60 villagers at this point, and every one of them, these illiterate villagers were, you know, their accounts were very consistent in saying that the Afghan militia men, with a unit that's run by Abdul Hakeem Shijai, Hazara militia leader, militia leader, funded by the Americans, came and summarily executed all the farmers in the field, and they said that they, you know, witnesses were hiding nearby, saw this happen, they were so terrified, they waited until the sun would set, so they could rush over and grab the bodies and prepare for them for burial.
They did not say the American advisors were within eyesight, but they believe that they must have heard the shots ringing through, reverberating through the field, it's a very sort of small, tucked away, you know, the field where they were shot is in the foothill of this mountain range, and they believe that acoustically it would have been impossible for the Americans who were standing guard at the mouth of the village not to hear what had happened.
And so, after the farmers were killed, it turns out that one of their relatives was a so-called pro-American ally of the government, Hanif Hanifi, who is a senator, he was working as a government advisor at the time, he hears of this, and then, you know, starts the lobbying campaign to bring Shijai to justice.
And the thing that is important to note about this is that, had he not been a senator, we wouldn't even have heard of this, the only reason why we're talking about the Khataban massacre today is because the people who were killed happened, luckily for them, to be connected to someone who has access to people who speak English like myself.
And I just want to highlight once again that these things happen constantly, all the time, everywhere, all across the country, and we just don't hear about them, because, you know, the war is being fought in these parallel universes, and sometimes we catch glimpses of them, the way we did about the Khataban killings, but oftentimes we don't.
All right, hang on just one second for me.
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Well, and this is a problem with trying to figure out even the levels of violence in the country, when so many parts of it are so isolated that there's just no one to even keep records of who's been killed or who hasn't.
That's right.
And now, so as far as U.S. Special Operations Forces or CIA or whichever advisors being there nearby, were you able to try to get records or were you denied or given any records to verify that they were at least nearby, even if they didn't really admit what happened there?
Yeah.
Did they have any version of a story about what happened there?
So I had sort of, I caught glimpses, you know, for example, you know, the captain of the base where Shujaei was trained and later protected, I heard, I was told that the captain was called Captain Ray, but as you can imagine, that's really not enough to go by.
And, you know, the military cited, special forces cited multiple reasons why they simply did not have access.
I mean, by the time that I started looking into it, the mission had changed from, you know, ISAF to RS to, there's been a lot of rotation and the military almost by design, there's a lot of division of labor, multiple levels.
And it was simply not possible for me to confirm the response that they gave was basically a glomer response.
They can neither confirm nor deny that, you know, such and such person was, you know, observing at such and such place at such and such time.
And the problem with the frustrating part about reporting on these stories is that you really never know what happens because, I mean, if anything, I think in the way that we, you know, we learned about what happened in Vietnam 30 years later, you know, by the time I'm, I don't know, whatever, how old would I be, whatever, in 30 years, I mean, we'll learn about them.
But I guess this is sort of the frustrating thing about reporting in general that even after you have, you know, accounts of 60 villagers, they don't account for much, you still need, you know, like a white guy with an email address confirming things for you.
And that's what I find frustrating about reporting on a country like Afghanistan.
Well, you know, oftentimes, even if the documents are incorrect, they more or less confirm that, yeah, they were there.
And, you know, they admit that they committed this much violence, but not that.
And yet we can see the aftermath.
And so a little bit of confirmation can go a long way, really, when it comes to that.
Sure.
I'm not, I'm not trying to cast doubt on the rest of your reporting.
I hope you don't get me wrong.
You say 60 illiterate witnesses who all say the same thing.
That's pretty good.
And it's, I mean, I also need to mention, it's not even just the illiterate villagers, right?
I mean, the fact that it, I mean, the shijia antics of him is rigorously reported by local media.
I mean, it, the senator made sure that he had meetings with the interior minister, defense minister, even Karzai got involved.
I mean, what he's done is very well documented among the Afghan media.
It's just that the very nature of someone like Shujaei, who is like on the books, but also off the books, and it's very unclear what his title is, even the very fact that in the early years when the CIA were training militias like this, and then later the special operation forces, they really, they, they fought the war off the public record.
And the result of fighting the war off the public record is that sometimes over a hundred people die and there's no one who can account for, for the dead.
Yeah.
Well, and part of this is, it seems like the public relations for the American people that, well, see, we're creating a modern nation state and a rule of law.
And look, these are our Afghan national police in reality is never anything but arming up one faction or another.
In fact, there's a, as you say, in the article here, that the ALP, it's really nothing like a police force.
I just want to add real quick that there's this daily mail article from just the other day that, well, you know, honestly, the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police are really just falling apart.
So now plan E or F or whatever on the list is we're just going to pass out AKs to whoever even more and hope that, well, I guess an armed society is a polite society and maybe, you know, just these regular people will be able to stand as their own militias, even where the militias have actually turned and run away.
What's worrisome is that because, you know, the likes of ALP is a cheap alternative to having American forces on the ground, they will become more relevant and will depend on them more, which means there will be more probably, it's safe to say, more human rights violations to the likes of what we've seen in Uruzgan.
Well, and I know this is a little bit off of the beaten path of your piece, but I'll go ahead and add it here is that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a new piece out and the UN and others have been reporting this all year long, as Trump bragged actually in his United Nations speech yesterday, that he changed the rules of engagement to military guys do whatever you want, bomb whatever you want, under whichever circumstances you deem appropriate, basically.
So we've seen a huge increase in civilian casualties already.
And then who's calling in those airstrikes, right?
I mean, it's probably Americans, but on information provided to them by, they don't know who any more than you or I, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Not a lot of visibility on these battlefield decisions.
And as you're saying, hey, out in the countryside, if a bomb goes off and destroys a house or a village and nobody's around to hear it, then does it ever even make the paper wants to?
Well, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If a bomb falls, right?
Yeah.
If a tree falls.
Yeah.
Crazy thing.
All right.
So now, as far as the guy who was in charge, it's Shujai.
So where's he now?
He actually went into hiding.
He took all the gear that was paid for by the Americans and some of his men, and he disappeared.
He's been spotted a few times in Kabul and other places.
So obviously he is enjoying a certain measure of impunity.
And he sort of started his own militia group in his native hometown area, Nikazni, which borders Uzbekistan province where the crimes were committed.
But I checked in with the people that I've been talking to recently, and apparently the guy, his successor is really not much better.
He too is being accused of horrible human rights violations and whatnot.
And so, yeah, oppression is self-regulating, I guess.
Well, now, does this guy or the group that still exists there, do they have very tight alliances with, say, an Uzbek warlord like Dostum or the different Tajik groups?
Or everybody's pretty much on their own as long as you have your own militia and your own fiefdom?
Yeah.
So Shujai, I mean, the Balkanization of Afghan society is ever-increasing as insecurity arises.
I mean, it's human nature to want to gravitate towards people who are like you.
And Shujai, for example, the rumor is that he enjoys the protection of certain Hazara strongmen and that affords him some amount of, I don't know what, I guess impunity again.
All right.
And now, so I guess when you're contacting the army and asking them if they have any information about this thing, and they answer, no, we have no idea what you're talking about, I guess that would preclude the idea that anybody would be investigating it or attempting to really do anything about it on the American side.
But as you say, you have prominent Afghans pushing the issue.
So what's the American response to them?
Well, they'll say, they've told me, well, that mission is over now.
You need to contact the archives in Belgium, the NATO archives.
You contact the archivists there.
They say, actually, this is a special forces operations.
You need to talk to SOCOM. You talk to SOCOM.
They say you have to file a FOIA.
You file a FOIA.
You never hear from them again.
And that kind of, I mean, it's a very sort of tautological emailing experience.
You sort of go in a circle.
That's basically the same rep that they give the local Pashtun victims who are complaining about this and trying to have something done about it too.
I mean, it's immensely frustrating for them because every time they eventually get to a point where they're talking to a Chris or a Mark or whatever, these people rotate out within the first three or six months.
And their emails, as you know, it's different in country versus whichever mission they're on.
And so there's just no continuity to these conversations, which means obviously that they're not taking seriously.
The American military is extremely powerful.
They really want to take something seriously.
They can make it happen.
The fact that nothing has come of these efforts by Afghans mean that they don't care about, I just don't care.
It's not worth anything to them, the lives of people who have no connections or last names even sometimes.
Well, and so then, as you're saying, the resentments and the consequences and the reverberations continue, the less security there is, the more resentment, the more resentment, the more fighting and downward spiral this whole time, I guess.
It just keeps getting worse and worse.
And then, you know what though?
So, of course, all along there has, well, from very early years anyway, there has been really a Taliban-based insurgency from the core of the old government there.
But there's been a lot of other insurgency as well.
I wonder in your experience, how much of what they call the Taliban is really the Taliban versus, Lord knows what, local insurgent groups.
It's just if they're Pashtuns, they basically get called the Taliban.
Is that basically what you're writing in here?
Yeah.
I mean, the factionalization of the insurgencies is much more complicated and more prominent in the east and the north.
I think in the south, it is predominantly the Taliban.
But of course, I mean, it kind of works as a, it's almost like a franchise, right?
What does it mean to be a Taliban?
I mean, you can be a Taliban running the diplomatic office in Qatar, which is different from, you know, if you're a member of the Quetta Shura in Pakistan, which is very different from, you know, if you are a hired gun fighting for the Taliban in Farah province.
You know what I mean?
It's just very, very different depending on context and where you are and everything.
So there's no monolithic, the Taliban movement per se.
And I think that sort of the nuance of what the movement represents for people, I think is lost in analysis that we do.
And I think that is also just, you know, contributes to the conflict, the fact that we can't really understand our so-called enemy.
I mean, in the early years of war, people forget this now, but in the very early years of war, there was, we confused the Al Qaeda with the Taliban.
They're totally two different organizations with not much in common, actually, apart from the fact that bin Laden, you know, happened to be in Afghanistan and, you know, being hosted by Mullah Omar, who felt bound by the Pashtun code to, you know, respect their guests, even if the guest is Osama bin Laden.
Yeah, well, and they certainly conflated those things deliberately as well, but...
Of course, it was useful, for sure.
Not as you know, happening in Syria too, but anyway.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's not, that's a whole other interview.
That's for later.
Now here's sort of to skip way ahead to the end of the argument, maybe about the occupation, is that if we leave, what are your bets?
Do you think the Taliban will march on Kabul and then maybe even try to take over the entire country as they were attempting to do at the time we intervened?
Or do you think they'll just take Pashtunistan and...
No, I mean, they've publicly indicated that, you know, they don't have any ambitions to take over the country, they don't have the capacity to do so anyways, at this point.
The old guard, the people who are in power in the 90s, or, you know, a lot of them are, have passed away, or, you know, they have assimilated, they don't want to, you know, be part of the, you know, the Taliban anymore.
I don't, I mean, I don't think that's probably not going to happen.
But what is going to happen, however, is that they're not going to trust, they're not going to believe, I don't believe President Trump's statement that we're not going to set a timeline, because that's going to indicate to them that, you know, we're here to stay forever.
I mean, they, that's not a real thing.
I mean, we can't convince the Taliban that we're going to stay there longer than they are, because they're from there.
And so I think there is just fundamental, it's faulty logic on Trump's part.
And probably, the other thing that is not going to happen is that American military strategy has at its core this fundamental misunderstanding of how the war is going to go.
The generals still believe that a strategic victory is possible.
But every, there's all the evidence points to the contrary.
I mean, we've been fighting this war for the past 16 years.
We haven't won.
I just don't understand what an additional couple thousand troops, you know, what that, what difference that's going to make.
And so, if you say that, okay, we are going to make peace, but we want to have a strategic victory in the battlefield first, and then we're going to go into a negotiating position on the table with a stronger position.
I mean, that's fantasy.
All right.
Well, everybody, that is Mae Young, and she wrote this incredible piece.
I really hope you'll go and read it.
It's at inthestimes.com.
The U.S. Trained Warlords Committing Atrocities in Afghanistan.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you.
All right, y'all, that's Scott Horton Show.
Find my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and Full Radio Archives, 4,500-something interviews are all at scotthorton.org for you.
Thanks.
