Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Bette Dam.
She is the author of the brand new book, Searching for an Enemy, about former Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
Welcome back to the show, Bette.
How are you?
Fine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing really good.
Hey, did you ever get a copy of the book?
I tried to send you one.
Fool's errand?
No, I never got that in Amsterdam.
Oh, you never got it.
I blame the post office.
I'll make sure after this interview, we got to talk mailing address again, because I'll send it FedEx this time.
But yeah, you're in it.
And so I wanted to know what you thought of what I wrote about what you wrote and what I had learned from you in there.
Oh, lovely.
Yeah, please try again.
I would love to read it.
Great.
So you got a new book.
It's all about the old days.
And ever since really, Mullah Omar, we found out in 2015 that he had died back in 2013.
And all the conventional wisdom, I guess, has been that he was living in Pakistan, probably in Quetta with the rest of the Shura Council and this and that.
And you say that, no, looks to you like he was in Afghanistan all along.
And actually, even within walking distance from an American base.
And you had talked about this a bit on the show last time we spoke as well.
But now the book is done and you have all this out.
And so what's been the reality?
Well, first of all, I guess, tell us essentially the story and then the reaction to your book coming up.
Yeah.
So I also started off for a long time thinking that Mullah Omar was in Pakistan.
In the last time we spoke to each other, I mainly spoke about finding out that Mullah Omar was not very active and not very much in charge for a long time.
There were not many cassettes, though the Taliban wanted me to believe there were.
But I came closer and closer to the high level people from Mullah Yacoub, for example, sitting down with them.
And I just didn't get any any proof that he was basically leading the insurgency something I expected him to do.
And then I what I describe in the book as well, is that Mullah Omar in his time before 9-11 was much more apprehensive towards Pakistan than I expected him to be.
You know, the narrative was that he was a puppet of the Pakistani secret service.
But the Mullah Omar I describe is more of an Afghan leader with an Afghan national, a national Afghan agenda.
And especially specifically after the jihad against the cold, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, where so many countries got involved in Afghan politics and the end result was civil war.
It was very much Mullah Omar saying, now we are going to do it ourselves.
Now, that was his plan.
Not always managed, not always managed.
He never, not always succeeded.
But especially to Pakistan, I found him quite stubborn.
If they wanted to politically advise him or intervene or say, don't destroy the Buddhas, for example, or whatever, fight first in Kabul and don't go to Herat.
I did not find Mullah Omar very receptive to that.
And plus the fact that Pakistan, yeah, after 9-11 also sort of Islamabad supported the American army in their operation Enduring Freedom.
And that also made a lot of Taliban hesitant to cross the border.
So, yeah.
And along the way, I found some names of the men who were with Mullah Omar.
You have to know that in this research, I also knew that there were not many who knew where Mullah Omar was.
Also not very high level Taliban.
They'd never had spoken to him again.
So I knew it was a very, very tiny circle that was in contact with him.
And yeah, I managed to reach them and speak to them.
Yeah.
And then, so how close, I guess, give us the timeline of what year was it when you started getting really close?
This was after you found out that he was dead or before?
After.
Because, you know, before his death, Scott, it was very, very much so that the Taliban interviews I did were always very much conditional.
Like, you can ask us everything, but don't ask us where Mullah Omar is.
That's too sensitive.
We can't speak about it.
Now, I know that they were basically hiding his death because I was doing this research while he was dead after 2013.
And after they declared him dead, I found that there was a bit more freedom to speak.
For example, asking about the messenger who was then going back and forth to Mullah Omar.
Those names were, they were more flexible in answering these questions.
Yeah.
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All right, now, so the current Afghan government has denounced your book and this narrative and said that's not true.
He was in Pakistan all along, but why?
What's the big deal to them?
Yeah, you have to ask them, of course.
But over the years, Kabul has been very much pointing to Pakistan for the problems in Afghanistan.
Also, the U.S. government is pointing a lot to Pakistan now.
There is indeed, there are many Taliban leaders in Pakistan.
Not all the Taliban leaders have direct protection from Islamabad.
Some have protection from local leaders that are not controlled by Islamabad.
It's a very complex picture.
For example, in all my high-level interviews with the Taliban, I never spoke to anybody in Pakistan, because they did not feel safe to do that.
They don't feel comfortable there.
They need to, in a way, take lots of things into account and so on.
But the fact is that they can stay there.
Now, last year it changed a little bit.
Many did not feel well in Pakistan and they moved to Helmand.
You see that movement last year.
You see some people crossing into Afghanistan because it's not safe for them for a certain amount of time.
But yeah, there are a lot of Taliban in Pakistan.
Haqqani are also in Pakistan.
So the Kabul government does have a point that there is something to discuss, that there is a problem that is created by Pakistan.
And Mullah Omar, according to their information, was leading this insurgency very actively and also was more or less in the hands of the Pakistani security, the ISI, the intelligence service.
When I published this story, the Kabul government got very emotional about this and reacted with words like it's delusional, for example.
I have to say that I asked publicly also to have a debate on television or whatever.
I'm very transparent about the sources I spoke to.
It's almost chronologically my research in that report, what I did, when and how.
So there's nothing I have to hide.
And I would not mind to discuss also what they have.
But the Kabul government does not share anything, for example, that he was in the Karachi hospital or that he was traveling between Quetta and Karachi.
So in that sense, I don't know what to say.
Then I got a lot of criticism from them without them coming with their own story.
And it makes sense that they have their narrative about Pakistani intervention on behalf of the Afghan Taliban, which, as you say, we already know is true somewhat.
And it doesn't seem like, to whatever degree at whichever time, it doesn't seem like your story necessarily negates that.
If Mullah Omar lived in Afghanistan and wasn't running the Shura council and the Afghan Taliban leadership inside Pakistan, then that doesn't mean that they weren't inside Pakistan necessarily.
It just means he wasn't.
Or are you casting doubt in your book on kind of the whole idea that the leadership of the Afghan Taliban were really ensconced in Quetta, as in the CIA's claims?
No, I don't.
I don't touch that.
The book is only about Mullah Omar.
That was difficult enough.
I don't talk about Mansoor, where he lived, though we know he was in Iran sometimes, also escaping Pakistan when he needed to.
I do think in general that I'm fascinated by the role of Pakistan.
And I think there's also still some good journalism necessary, cross-checking claims from Kabul and cross-checking claims from the U.S. government, not only because they're potentially factually wrong, but also because of the understanding of how the Pakistani state works.
And that would also create more understanding, because when I am speaking to the U.S. officials, they are very linear in pointing at Pakistan as the wrong enemy, as the sole wrong enemy who is behind so many things.
And I think that is not the right diagnosis of the problem.
So if you want to address the problem, you need to be better informed or have a more nuanced approach towards that.
I think many Taliban, for example in Pakistan, do not mind to come back to Afghanistan if they have a safe place to live.
But that has not been discussed.
Locally, between the police commander of Kandahar, before he was murdered, that was on the table for some Taliban leaders to come back and to now trust the protection the Afghan government would give you.
But now there is so much distrust between the two parties that, yeah.
And also I think from the American perspective, this is also not encouraged enough to have local deals again, where these people find each other and sit and make phone calls and talk about the possibility to come back to Afghanistan.
I think there is much more to it, to that story.
Now, in the work of Anand Gopal especially, but some other authors and reporters and others as well, they talk about, and I think especially in his work, they talk about how Omar, and I think you and I may have discussed this last time, although I didn't go back and listen to it, I'm sorry, but what Gopal says essentially is that quite unlike Saddam Hussein or somebody like that, Mullah Omar did not declare that this will be the mother of all battles and will destroy you and all these kinds of things, that instead he essentially left the battlefield and his government surrendered.
That he authorized his entire cabinet to surrender to the Karzai government in early 2002, because Karzai was the son of a former deceased, I think murdered, but still anyway, a prominent tribal chief from Kandahar province.
And so he was seen as poshtoon enough and Islamic enough to be the legitimate government, according to Mullah Omar, and then authorized everyone in his government to go ahead and try to surrender to the new government and work out a deal with them.
And you know what, I'm probably oversimplifying it, and maybe that makes it sound way too easy, but what's your take on that overall narrative there?
Yeah, I think this story we discovered in 2008, we were, Anand and I were living together in Kabul at the time.
And yeah, I was also extremely surprised to find out, not only from the Taliban side, but also from direct conversations I had with Karzai about this.
You're saying you and Anand were learning this together back then, as he was writing his book?
We were learning this at the same time, yeah.
Wow, that's great.
Okay.
Yeah, I wrote in Dutch at the time, and Anand was writing in English.
But yeah, it was for us, I clearly remember that I came across this, and went to Anand in our house, and said, yeah, I'm also hearing this.
And this is field research, you know, you speak to one, it's not enough.
You speak to two, it's not enough.
So you keep on going.
And I remember every time from the field, I came back to Karzai, because I was writing the book on Karzai at that time.
And in the end, at some point, I said to him, you know, what happened in that area, which is called Sawalikot?
And yeah, Karzai told me his side of the story.
He wanted to make himself a little bit more important than he really was, I think.
For example, the letter he was talking about in the first place, I don't think he still has that letter.
I don't even know if that letter was there.
But there was definitely a clear outreach from the toppled Taliban leaders.
Their regime was toppled by the intervention of the British and the Americans, to surrender, yeah, to give up.
Amnesty is the word they also use.
There's been many delegations coming from Kandahar, going to Karzai and back and forth.
And yeah, in the Mullah Omar book, I tell much more about this, also from Mullah Omar, his perspective.
I think Mullah Omar himself personally was one of the only ones who still wanted to fight until the last day.
He was extremely angry about what had happened.
I explain in the book why, but he was very much still wanting to resist until the meeting was, they organized the meeting in a cellar, closed the couple of windows that were in the cellar, closed them off.
Mullah Omar came there and a couple of his top leadership, and there they discussed like, what are we going to do?
And that's where they decided to surrender.
In the context of other Taliban leaders who had already surrendered, for example, who had already sent private letters to Karzai or to Ahmad Wali Karzai or to anyone of the family of Karzai.
So, you know what, Scott?
If I look at my work now, which is since 2006, I work on this subject.
For me, the importance of journalistic importance, also for the development of the war, this story is for me so much more, much more than important finding that could have changed so much for the human beings involved in this war than finding Mullah Omar being on walking distance from the U.S. base.
That's exciting news, but it doesn't do anything, doesn't do much anymore to the conflict.
But when we discovered in 2008-9 that basically the Taliban had surrendered, and even in 2008-9, I don't know for Anand, but I was also looking at those attacks, like what is really Taliban and what is really not.
But I knew at that time that I was reporting on an unnecessary war.
The surrender, that deal-making between Karzai and Mullah Omar, his people, who Mullah Omar gave the authority to his deputy, Mullah Baidullah, to surrender.
It's very clear.
There's no light between that now in this new research.
I also described that Mullah Omar actually in these couple of days that Donald Rumsfeld had not blocked this peace deal, was planning to stay in Kandahar for a couple of days.
And then the news broke that Donald Rumsfeld had intervened, asked Karzai to go on the media again after he had announced his surrender internationally to say, no, the Taliban, you should bring them to court.
They are our enemy.
And he was basically not talking about the surrender anymore on the request of the Americans.
And that story, and that is fascinating on how the major media work, that story is never embedded in how you have to tell the story of Afghanistan post 9-11.
And I find it very problematic that the New York Times is not incorporating sentences of Taliban who surrendered after 2001, but are now again in full force taking over Afghanistan.
These details are important to understand that at that time they were a group to talk to already, and that they wanted to reach out to the new leadership of Afghanistan.
At the same time, the intervention of Donald Rumsfeld, I find is a historical missed opportunity, is an action of the US that prevented peace in Afghanistan, that created the war.
Difficult to say this about US government.
I still find it difficult to say that it was an unnecessary war because I know so many people died.
But we do have to, as media mainly, because that is the only mechanism that can correct governments, that can come up with stories that tell another narrative and come a little bit more to the reality in Afghanistan than the only narrative from the US government.
Just to recap that point you're saying that when they were trying to surrender, Rumsfeld had Karzai publicly refuse their surrenders and know they'll be brought to justice instead, which meant in many cases being hauled off to Guantanamo Bay and that kind of thing, which of course gave them every reason to rescind that surrender and at least run and hide and maybe go to regroup for insurgency later, right there at that point.
And then of course we can see, here we are 17 years later having this conversation, and in the news this week, is that the American negotiators are meeting with men who had been held in Guantanamo Bay and were traded for Bowe Bergdahl, which was mildly scandalous when Obama did that to get Bowe Bergdahl back from the Taliban a few years ago.
And some of the guys from Guantanamo that he released, they're now leading the Taliban side in the negotiations with the Americans.
So in other words, if we just taken them for what they were and negotiated with them on face value at the time, as you're saying, this whole thing never really had to happen at all.
Yeah.
I think, for example, to explain a little bit for the listener what you said, that after the surrender the Taliban probably quickly regrouped again and climbed in the mountains to sort of attack the entering American Marines, for example, that were sent to the south.
No, that's also not the case.
You have to understand that in 2001, basically, the Taliban went home.
They were finding their home.
Some went to Derawood, for example.
Mullah Brother, the main negotiator at the moment in Doha, was home for one year until a rival managed to convince the U.S. to bomb his house two times.
Then he also managed, had to leave Afghanistan and went to Pakistan, for example.
And there's many other examples.
Mullah Muttasim Aghajan, for example, the very important friend of Mullah Omar, even in 2002, contacted Gullah Hashirzai, the governor of Kandahar at the time, to see if he could leave Pakistan and come back to Afghanistan in an amnesty deal that was blocked.
Because Gullah Hashirzai was very much a power-driven governor who now had so much power with the U.S. Army next to him.
He was directing fighting jets wherever he wanted them.
He had no idea what was happening to him.
He was now Superman.
Now, that did not encourage a lot of amnesty or surrender.
So, what I also described a little bit in the Karzai book and also now again in the Mullah Omar book is that, according to me, until 2004, you have two things.
You have a doubling of foreign troops, mainly U.S.
Every year, it doubles.
But you do not have really a Taliban.
They needed more time to reorganize themselves.
The first meetings, some meet in Pakistan in mosques or in guest rooms of important businessmen, their houses, but nothing really like of an organized insurgency.
There is an attack here and there, more like done by individual Taliban members.
But I think that is also a crucial thing to understand, is that who did these foreign troops fight if there was no Taliban?
And I think in 2001, 2, 3, 4, you gave, as U.S. government or NATO, you gave the new governors a lot of weapons.
And you gave them yourself as an ally.
You were tapping them on the shoulder and said, we have a similar goal.
We are going to do something together, which means we are going to fight these Taliban.
Now, try to imagine a governor of Uruzgan, for example.
Yeah, there was not much Taliban, but he did ask the U.S. soldiers or whoever nationality was in Uruzgan at the time to fight.
But who did they kill?
And I think they killed rivals of the governor.
And the rivals tried to defend themselves.
The rivals the next month managed to organize also a violent action.
And there was another explosion.
And that explosion was seen as a Taliban.
So you have the U.S. Army together with the governor responding to that.
And that's a very dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy in those early years, where also in the press, unfortunately, in the major newspapers, this was all too often seen as Taliban.
Because we were living in the narrative of the U.S. government.
That was also our narrative, our frame.
So, yeah, in 2005, you see the Taliban reorganizing.
They manage more and more to stand up again.
Yeah, one Taliban told me it was not so easy and not so difficult to reorganize.
The resistance were like they popped out of the ground as mushrooms.
Because there was so much going on with violent governors who not even are bad people in itself, but they had so much power now that they acted and they could gain more power easily.
So they did.
So more of a tribal action to improve that for the tribe members, for your family, to feed them and so on.
So that dynamic, I think, explains a lot why we are dealing with what we are dealing now.
I mean, now we are back.
We have full Taliban leadership again.
We have shadow governors everywhere.
The Taliban tries very hard to set up their parallel government with all sort of commissions they see as the future ministries.
So, yeah, that's where we are now.
But I think I found it the first four years also fascinating to understand the conflict better.
And then I'm not sure what you said or not, if you mentioned specifically Haqqani or if you're referring to someone else.
But certainly Haqqani and Hekmatyar, both former CIA favorites from the 1980s, both became unnecessary enemies in exactly the manner you describe.
And that's in Inan's book, too, No Good Men Among the Living, about how they just bombed Haqqani and bombed Haqqani.
At one point, the CIA hired his brother to run a counterterrorism pursuit team.
But then the military arrested him and tortured him at Bagram anyway.
And finally, Haqqani had had enough and essentially joined up in a full scale insurgency as partners with the Afghan Taliban that his son helps run right now.
And of course, Hekmatyar, they had the same problem with his be Islami all this time.
And yet he came in from the cold a couple of years ago and is living in Kabul and is getting along better than anyone could have anticipated anyway, I think.
And so maybe that could have been the case all along as well.
Yeah.
You know, Rory Fanning, the former Army Ranger, I quote him in the book, and he's written this for Tom Dispatch over and over that as Army Rangers, you know, they got there and there was nobody to fight.
And this was from, you know, the beginning of 2002 on.
Essentially, Al Qaeda was gone.
The Taliban had mostly left the field.
And so here they were building bases here and there, but they didn't really have anything to do.
But if you're an Army Ranger, your job is to find something to do.
And then so, like you say, it was a matter of just teaming up with the new police chief against the last police chief and his family.
And the Americans have no idea who it is that they're killing.
They're really going after the last governor that their previous team had helped empower.
And, you know, this kind of chaos is what led to the insurgency, just like you say.
Yeah, but, you know, I mean, we can unfortunately go on and on with examples like this.
We can talk about who was in Guantanamo Bay and why.
For example, we can talk about other Taliban leaders, what happened to them in unknown prisons.
But I feel what makes me, what fascinates me is that over we are now in our 18th year of the war.
And I mean, the U.S. government was very, very emotional after 9-11.
The attack on their territory was reason for George Bush to respond, create, paint a very big picture of terrorism all over the world, announcing that he would kill all the terrorists wherever they were.
I think he was talking about 60 countries or George Bennett was talking about 16 countries, six zero countries of terrorism at that time.
But what I find, what I would like to discuss much more is like, if you have governments like that, then how can you give, how can you, like, how come that this could go on and on and on?
And for me, the outcome of the research for me here is that I think journalism has to more or less maybe even rethink how do we report on this war, not only in Afghanistan.
Now, maybe you've seen it, Scott, you see a lot of stories about the Sahel.
The Sahel is now also included in the global war on terror.
Because of the war in Libya.
Yeah, but there's not a lot of journalists on the ground.
If you look at the sources, and I'm doing that now at my university where I teach at Sciences Po here in Paris, I ask the students just to look at the sources that are used for articles that are about an increasing threat of terrorism in the Sahel, for example.
And you see predominantly that it is U.S. officials, anonymous Western officials, and we are talking about the Sahel.
We are not talking with the people who live there.
We have no capacity, despite the fact that we are a major media, we do not have the capacity to cross-check this properly.
And I think that needs to change.
And I'm really, yeah, I'm thinking of how to do that, how to sit down with reporters to make them see this.
Because I also didn't see it when I started in 2006.
And then I think we can have, who knows, then there is at least another, there is some cross-checking of what the U.S. government is telling us.
And I think we can, the war in Afghanistan needed this.
For example, we did the research on terrorist camps.
We more or less searched the word terrorist camps in the four big media in the U.S.
And 90% of the sources that are talking about terrorist camps are coming from either the U.S. slash NATO or their allied governors in the capitals, for example, in Afghanistan.
And that is a big problem.
And that is why stories of Mullah Omar in Zabul are now seen as so weird and so unusual and so not expected and heavily criticized.
Just because we are only hearing the more Western narrative.
And I think, yeah, there's a big responsibility for journalists to see that and to learn about this.
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So, another perfect example.
Thank you for bringing it back to Omar here.
Because it's curious, when you talk about how close he lived to the base there under everybody's nose, especially the U.S. Army's nose.
I think you say it's an Army base within walking distance there.
And this is something we talked about before on the show.
But I think I read in a piece, a news story about your book last week that you really emphasize, I think, right?
That he really had no part in running the insurgency after, you know, his overthrow.
That he essentially went home to study.
And is it right he had his own language?
He was taking notes on the Koran in his own little pigeon markings of some kind or another there?
What's that about?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's extremely strange for us.
But Mullah Omar was before 9-11 already very much a person who was meditating in the Islam of Afghanistan.
It is a Sufism Islam, so to say.
So there's a lot of that in Afghanistan about meditation.
But also going to your religious master, which is called a Pir.
Mullah Omar did that a lot.
Mullah Omar also went to grave sites a lot to pray for the dead people.
Very in himself.
And you see that after 9-11, I did speak to my mentor.
I have a mentor with this writing.
And we sort of like sometimes sat in the Netherlands and were looking at the material.
And then I remember he said, is it possible that he just went back to complete meditation?
Just to only have a direct connection with Allah, so to say.
With his belief.
Yeah, and that was his main task for himself.
And Scott, there is definitely still some work to do on this story.
For example, there was a messenger, Mullah Aziz Ulaan, whose name is doing the rounds in Kandahar.
People talk a lot about him.
I felt I could share his name.
I was not able to see him.
He disappeared after Mullah Omar was declared dead.
Probably afraid.
But he, Mullah Aziz Ulaan, has still a fascinating story, I think, that I don't know.
And that only sometimes, maybe three times a year, he drove from this man in and around Quetta, who were in the leadership of the Taliban, to Mullah Omar.
Only on the moments when they were stuck in a decision-making.
And then he drove to Mullah Omar to discuss this.
And that is, I do not know about every decision he made.
But I have no indication that it is big.
I have no indication that Mullah Omar was, for example, directing the bigger strategy of how the battlefield should look.
Or who should be in the leadership and who should not be.
I don't have indications for that.
But still, that story of Aziz Ulaan is important to hear at some point.
Okay, so you mentioned there about the shadow government.
This is something that I tried to get this lady on the show, I don't know if you know her, Ashley Jackson.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with her?
Yeah.
So she wrote this great study last summer.
And then a follow-up article, I think, at Foreign Policy about this.
Where after the killing of Mansoor and the rise of, I'll probably say, Hakunzada, the latest Mullah leader of the Taliban, that he really changed his strategy and really adopted coin.
And really adopted that Maoist people's war strategy where he said, for one apparently very important distinction, instead of trying to tear down everything the Americans and their allies have built for the Kabul government, we will just take them all over.
And so you can have your schools, but the Taliban are the ones who really appoint the principal of the school.
And you can have your police chief and your governorship and the structure of the government the Americans built for you, but at the end of the day, it's going to be the Taliban who are essentially behind the scenes, doing all the real appointing and just taking over the government that the U.S. has created.
So at least in some major percentage of the country, maybe as much as half or more of the country, they really are the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan.
The Americans maybe are the shadow government and they really are the actual government in so much of the country now.
And so now here we are at a point where even the U.S. president says we've got to get out of here.
He apparently has given very strict orders to Zalmay Khalilzad that he really wants a deal.
These talks could have broken and stopped over and over again.
The fact that they're still meeting means that Khalilzad must have a real mandate to see this thing through and figure out a way to extricate American troops from there.
But I wonder, what do you think?
If you think it's possible that we could really have a deal on the most minimalist terms for an American withdrawal in exchange for the Taliban doing this, that, or the other thing, or refraining from doing something or whatever those kinds of things are?
And do you think it's really possible that they could work out a deal when, of course, Kabul and that entire alliance of the North is still a major third wheel and player in this discussion as well?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think it is important from that research of, for example, of Ashley Jackson, that we need to know much more about, now, who was the Taliban before 9-11?
What were they doing in education?
What were they doing on their justice system with the harsh, harsh punishments we know about?
And how do they do that now?
The sensitive issues of their regime that might be big obstacles for, for example, the U.S. to deal with.
I think it's important to know where the Taliban stands.
If they will be part of the future Afghanistan, what about lashing women in the street, for example?
What about that?
How will the justice part look like?
Those discussions we have to have.
Also, knowing the Taliban as a movement better.
And I think that's also something that Ashley also tried to do in her research.
And I think it would be best to have many more people describe this movement.
Not by describing them, you are with them.
I got a lot of accusations of being an apologist of the Taliban.
But I think we are dealing with them now.
We have to understand them.
We know from before 9-11, for example, that Mullah Omar did see the Kabul government at that time, that came out of the civil war, as really almost non-Muslims.
He did not want to share the power with them because it would definitely make his movement more corrupt.
It would hurt the movement he saw himself as a very clean movement, as the one that would bring a new Afghanistan soon.
And he offered the guys indeed from the north, like Ahmad Shah Massoud at that time, or Rabbani positions in the government, but only when he was still the Amir.
So that is also telling for now.
Is the Taliban now again shows the same pattern?
We are not going to talk to Kabul because they are corrupt.
And we don't see them as potential governors because they failed so tremendously.
And before 9-11, they never managed.
The UN tried, others tried via many ways to get them together and to have them talk.
But that failed.
I hope it's now that Khalilzad finds a way to get them at the table and to have them talk.
But that's really the most difficult thing, I think, in this negotiation.
And I really hope that the leadership in Washington, D.C. does have the time for this, to make this happen.
And I don't know if they have.
There are many Afghans who are afraid that Trump is very much in a hurry and that Khalilzad will make a quick, quick deal.
And we'll forget about many things like women's rights, for example, or justice or these sort of things.
Well, and, you know, I mean, those are all important.
But the thing that's kind of distracted me the most about all of this.
And look, obviously, I'm the first one to say I'm happy to say that I wrote my book about Afghanistan from a much further distance than you did.
And my book is based on yours and a lot of others and this kind of thing, the work of a lot of others.
So I know much less about this than you do and a lot of other people.
But it seems to me just kind of obviously built in that the most destructive thing that they could do would be to try to bring the Taliban in and make them a political party.
And somehow get them to, what, disarm or join the Afghan national unity government and then just have a bloc in the parliament and deal in the so-called democracy with everybody else that America has created there in Kabul for them.
When, you know, this is what causes real civil wars, right, is control over the central government to lord it over the people who lose.
Whereas, you know, essentially they already rule greater Pashtunistan and the Tajik Uzbek and Hazara alliance.
Basically, they have, you know, I don't know if they can really maintain a government without the U.S. support, but it doesn't seem like the Taliban without the Pakistani support.
Matthew Ho pointed out on the show, without the Pakistani policy being help them conquer the whole country like it was in the 90s with Bill Clinton's permission and acquiescence there.
Without that dynamic, it just makes sense that they should just have autonomy like federal states in the union.
And you guys have Pashtunistan and we'll have Hazara stand here and the northern alliance areas.
And then that way there's much less to fight about if they can they can still stay Afghanistan, but, you know, remain kind of autonomous regions from each other, respect each other's independence in that way.
And I think I just don't hear anyone saying that.
I don't think I think maybe I've read one thing where someone was proposing, you know, thinking along my same lines, at least.
And and I wonder, is that just because everyone over there agrees that that's a nonstarter?
The Taliban are absolutely hell bent and determined on taking control of the capital city and the rest of the country or or what is it?
Yeah, I think that's that's that's idea of federalism.
I don't see it's about Kabul for the Taliban.
And I don't see that.
You don't see that they're motivated to take Kabul, you're saying?
I don't see that they would be accepting less than Kabul.
Oh, I see.
That's exactly the opposite take.
I got you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, I understand.
Yeah.
No, I think that that is they see themselves as the new, the new, better government, the good one, the one that will come with transparency, with honesty.
That's how they see that.
That's how they see themselves.
And and that's that's now nine, 18 to 19 years later, they have indeed a lot of leverage in Afghanistan.
And though I have to say, Scott, we are entering new territory in the sense that all the options are open.
We have never in recent history had this.
We only had the government, the creation of a government after the jihad, where they decided to almost have every year a new leader.
So they would share the power.
Right.
Right.
Between the Mujahideen leaders.
That was the end of the Cold War in Afghanistan.
Now, and you see the Taliban time after that saying, no, that is not going to happen anymore.
That is one leader.
There's no internal differences.
We are done with that.
We are coming from a civil war.
We are the leaders.
And you do whatever we want.
You can be part of us.
That's fine.
Towards the Hazara, towards the Uzbek.
And there's definitely also Hazara commanders who joined the Taliban and Uzbeks and Tajiks.
But they are all under the command of the Taliban.
That is the version of 1994 to 1996 when the Taliban came out.
We are now in 2001.
Of course, we had another one where the Taliban said, OK, we lost.
We will we have nothing anymore.
We will just go home.
We will wait and see what you are offering us Karzai.
This is the surrender moment.
Now, that failed.
And now they are in 2019.
They are fully armed and very powerful.
And I think we are back in the 1996 moment where they say, we will bring a better Afghanistan.
We don't want to have this disagreement in Kabul anymore, this corruption.
And we will offer something else.
And everybody who wants to join can join, but they are under our command.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we'll see how it shakes out.
I mean, so much of the Kabul government's power is dependent on the United States that without it, I just wonder how much of a correction is due because they've staked out so much territory and so much claim on so much authority that they really can't seem to back up themselves.
So, wouldn't it be the worst thing in the world if America finally got out and then all that happened was the worst case scenario where it becomes a war to the death, a war to total victory and unconditional surrender by these groups or those either way.
And that really is a risk here, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
And I'm very worried about that.
Absolutely.
And also, I think the Taliban version you get after, for example, a heavy civil war, which are based now on history, because we are on who knows what's going to happen.
But if there is indeed a longer unrest, definitely a civil war situation in Kabul, the version of the Taliban you get is also, it's possible that that version is also going to be more harsh because they need to control the country that's gone out of hand.
And I think if the country is more quiet, then there is more of an other version of Taliban that is also possible.
Then maybe the men who are in the leadership who also have learned, for example, there's quite some Taliban who do not want to see ever again that female are lashed in the street.
For example, that happened in the 90s.
That is also not that is against the Sharia.
So anyway, that has that many hope that that is not going to happen again.
But yeah, there's different voices in the Taliban.
And I think in general, from what I learned from Mullah Omar, we don't know enough about them.
We are still talking to Taliban, to an enemy.
There's so many things we don't know.
And there's at the same time, a lot of people who talk about them, who have agendas, who are biased and so on.
That is, I think, not that I'm apologizing for the Taliban, but I think knowing them better is also related to how you how you're going to think about the solution.
Yeah.
So I think in general, Scott, that the Taliban has been a negotiating partner in the 90s, after 2001, over the years of the war on terror.
And now they are also a negotiating partner, but now they are so powerful.
But they were, as we talked about before, they have never had a very international jihad agenda.
They have never had any anti-Western narrative under Mullah Omar, for example.
Their attacks on the US Army started after 9-11 with the history they went through after 9-11.
And I think that they, despite the fact that they had harsh rules, Mullah Omar always said, yes, we do have the harsh rules in Afghanistan, but so does Saudi Arabia, for example.
And then he told the US diplomats, like, why are you dealing with Saudi Arabia?
Why are you so harsh on me, for example.
But even the, there needs to be much more information on that regime.
And I think I tried a little bit with this biography on Mullah Omar, and I hope it will be out in English soon as a sort of new handheld of what we are, what we are dealing with together with research like of Ashley Jackson, the book of Anand Gopal.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, listen, I've learned so much from you and your time on the show here today and previously and articles in the past.
I'm sorry, I have not read your books.
What a pile of books I have to read, but they are A Man and a Motorcycle.
That's about Hamid Karzai.
And then The Secret Life of Mullah Omar, which we spoke about a bit last time.
And then the latest is Searching for an Enemy.
As you say, it's out in the Netherlands now in Dutch, but it'll be out in English at some point soon.
Do you know for sure?
No, I don't know for sure, Scott.
I really, I really hope we can make a deal soon with the US publisher.
Okay, well, I sure hope that too.
And I hope you'll keep me at the top of your email list when it becomes reality as well there.
Yeah, I will.
Definitely.
Okay, well, thank you very much for your time again on the show, everybody.
That is Betta Dam, B-E-T-T-E.
Let's put that in your Google News.
And you can find all kinds of stuff there, written recently, reviewing her new book and previous journalism and all the rest of that.
Thank you so much for your time again.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
