All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Betta Dam.
If you've read Fool's Errand, you remember her, the Dutch reporter who wrote all about the rise of so-called ISIS in Afghanistan in the Nangarhar province and all that back in 2016, and is a guest on the show from a few years back.
And she has this really important story that's out in, well, let's see, I copied and pasted the whole thing and I forgot.
Was it the Australian?
Oh, the Inquirer, the Australian Inquirer.
How Flawed Information Created a Taliban Threat.
Welcome to the show, Betta.
How are you doing?
Fine.
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show again.
And what a great piece that you wrote here.
It's about the Uruzgan province there, southwest of Kabul.
I guess a couple, skip one and then, right.
And then, and this is about how really you cover the whole history of the war from the arrival of U.S. special operations forces there, just after the war began in 2002, up through the handoff to Australian forces in 2006.
And I guess, oh, I should say at the beginning here, you're kind of building off of the major scandal in Australia of the war crimes revealed by their special forces groups there.
And you're saying, yeah, but you know what?
It's not just the special forces.
It's the entire Australian war there.
And here's why they were killing innocent people.
And you explain it all.
So go ahead and tell us, please.
It's such an interesting story.
All right.
Yeah.
So indeed, I was asked by the Australian to comment on these horrific crimes some of the Australian special forces had done in Uruzgan and in the region, basically.
And yeah, so I said most of the time I reply to journalists and say, I just write you a little bit of an email to give you an outline, because there's so many things still to explain in order to understand what happened in Afghanistan, I feel.
And so we decided then, right then, that I would basically write a piece myself.
And so I put these crimes in the bigger context, how I got to know it and yeah, how many more know by now that basically, like, it's very difficult for any government in America.
It's not one president or the other is much better.
If we look at the history of 20 years, it's extremely difficult to get this narrative across, to get the narrative across, for example, to break through the narrative of counterterrorism.
And that's what I tried to do with this article, where I say like, okay, we have this Australian special forces doing these crimes, but you need to understand that, in principle, there wasn't an enemy to begin with.
There was not the counterterrorism enemy after 9-11 in Afghanistan.
And that has been, there's almost common sense now, Scott, it's almost common sense that many of the Taliban surrendered, went home, Mullah Brother, for example, I was talking to a guy in Doha, in the Taliban delegation this week, and I said, do you actually remember, he's a young guy, he's maybe 25, do you remember that actually, Mullah Brother, your main negotiator with the Americans, who was very tough, there's no solution for peace at the moment, he went home after 9-11.
He went to his house in Beirut, I went to his house to see his house, to basically talk with people there.
He lived there for two years, until the moment the American troops came and bombed his house.
After two bombings, he left.
That doesn't mean Mullah Brother is ideologically against the West, or that he hates us.
That wasn't the intent in these two years he lived in Deir el-Hud.
In Deir el-Hud, he, in this village in Uruzgan, he basically gave the Americans and Hamid Karzai, the then African president, a chance, and many, many, many others did.
Of course there were here and there fighters on the fence, and of course there were rogue elements, like media have made tremendous mistakes by making Mullah Dadula, basically a crazy guy, very angry, linking him, constantly associating him to the Taliban leadership.
He did attacks, he did terrible attacks, but it wasn't Taliban, it wasn't rogue elements that had to be dealt with in a different way.
So yeah, that's what I'm basically trying to explain.
And you know, you're right that, I guess this story is, well, certainly among people who really take an interest in Afghanistan, this story is kind of widely understood now, I hope.
It's a major theme of Anand Gopal's book, No Good Men Left Among the Living, and many of his writings over the years too, that yeah, in the first few years, the Taliban gave up the field, and the Americans just completely obliterated their infantry within a few days, with a few airstrikes, and they went, you know what, there just is no fight to be had here, and they just gave up.
Even Haqqani just gave up.
And I can tell you from an American news recipient's point of view, that because the attack was equivalent to Pearl Harbor, then the idea was, we have to pretend that the enemy out there is somehow equivalent to the Japanese empire.
And so it just can't be that there were only 400 Al-Qaeda guys, and they're all already either dead or gone, and that our guys, our rangers are simply just hiking mountains for no reason, and shooting strangers for no reason.
Just a few weeks, just a couple of months after the attack, the war was already over, but they couldn't accept that.
They had to pretend that anybody with a rifle in Afghanistan who wants some, they're a terrorist, let's get some, you know?
Yeah, a couple of things.
When I spoke to people from the Rumsfeld team, because Donald Rumsfeld has been very destructive in this, mostly by deciding not to want to listen, basically.
That's what I would say if I would have to write about him.
And it was incredible how much information that has reached him that he just pushed aside, blinded by just what happened at 9-11.
And one of his team members told me, he's like, Beta, how can you expect from us that we, basically in the beginning of 2002, with the towers and New York still smoking, how can we negotiate with these guys?
So what is the point?
More and more, like I left the field, Scott, I'm in Europe now studying basically war reporting, because I'm extremely disappointed in how we covered the war.
There's only five, six, seven freelancers who consistently have stayed close to their sources, have stayed close to a cross-check of the counter-narrative.
But the majority has just embraced it.
If you read the New York Times, or the Washington Post, it's all the same in these years of 2001, two, three, four, five, when there's still no Taliban organization.
That's all Taliban.
They all blame it to the Taliban.
They all write, they associate, they connect.
There's not even a claim of the Taliban.
Oh, wait, they didn't even call with any Taliban that was basically sitting at home.
And so I think that is, for any future, a very big concern.
Because you can have an American government that is so emotional, that wins so much votes by being emotional about 9-11, having these very long speeches.
George Bush has never been so popular, as we all know.
We can have that.
In principle, that's a government, it can do what it wants, but we have a press.
We need to reconsider this free press idea, where actually I feel we are way too close in embracing basically the narrative of Washington, D.C.
We are way too close.
And that has prevented us from knowing.
And that makes that we are still on the phone, Scott.
And people are still surprised by my article, where I write this down.
And that's the sad news.
Right.
You know, in another context, they were talking about the American right in the Capitol and stuff.
But it was Robert Grenier, who had been the CIA station chief in Islamabad right at the beginning of the war, and who later became the head of the Counterterrorism Center.
He let this slip out while he was making an analogy about the American right, which was a stupid analogy anyway.
But anyway, he said, you know, at the time of September 11th, there were actually really very few al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
And then he said, he goes, and yes, we did target them, like almost just as a disclaimer, right?
Oh, yes, we did go after al-Qaeda.
But we realized that what you really have to do is you have to go after the broader environment in which they flourish.
And that meant the Taliban.
And he uses the word primarily.
That meant primarily we had to fight the Taliban.
And there he just is admitting right there that what we did was the bait and switch.
We had a few dozen men, a couple of hundred men who could have been called legitimately responsible and even deserve to die, fine, drop a bomb on them.
But it wasn't the Taliban that did the attack.
They just didn't do it.
And somehow, it's funny to hear the way that they rationalize it.
Well, you know, we didn't want to be too specific and get the guilty.
We had to get the environment.
When everybody knows that the Bill Clinton government cooperated with the Saudis and the Pakistanis in helping to support the Taliban's rise to power in 1996, in the first place, just five years before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting that you mentioned the CIA, of course, a very important player in this in this war on terror, as they call it, which is not a war on terror.
And I met Grenier a couple of times.
He was also a lecturer in my class at Sciences Po in Paris.
I find him, when I speak directly to him, he's much more nuanced.
He, for example, he knows people like the foreign affairs minister of the Taliban had surrendered and he calls it a blunder in his book.
He sees that.
Also, he mentions that the nuance in the field that he saw from Islamabad, though he was very biased because his sources were not in Afghanistan, but always sort of like people who have fled the Taliban that influences and colors your information.
But he did have an understanding.
And immediately after 9-11, he told me it was so difficult to get any nuance across to D.C. as well.
And yeah, I think.
It's important.
Also, I don't know.
I don't know if you can simply see this from a perspective of coverage because media coverage, because this is the only power we have to control this or at least to to make it accountable or to make it transparent.
I don't know what the right word is, but I do think when I lived in Kabul with this very nice crowd of all international correspondents and we had a beautiful community, but also I saw with sort of like agenda setting media, a very reliant on, for example, the CIA.
Somebody would be proud if you would get a little source from the CIA that he would talk to you.
And I think overall, I wrote this biography on Mullah Omar, their main enemy, where I found out that Mullah Omar was never in Pakistan hiding and where, you know, CIA pointed him, but also the American government positioned him.
And he's been always hiding a non active in in Afghanistan.
And it was clear that the CIA did not notice the CIA was looking at Pakistan all the time with a very strong tunnel vision.
So, yeah, I think I think we think too highly of these institutes and especially of of the capacity of the of the American government.
And yeah, that's a big problem.
In fact, it's funny because when it came out that he had died two years before and that actually he was living down the road from a military base that got a little bit of coverage from, you know, reporters like you and people who are really interested.
But in the broader political conversation, that was not a black mark.
Nobody looked at that.
There was not a headline in The New York Times that says in another major CIA failing.
Can you believe this one boy?
You know, nothing like that.
There was just no shame in it.
Just like when they had no idea the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist right before their eyes because they were too busy lying and pretending it was 12 feet tall.
They're just OK.
No scandal there.
We just move on to them being right about the next thing they're lying about or completely wrong about.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
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But now let me get back to the Uruzgan province here in this great article that you wrote in The Australian here because this is the same story over and over and over again in the Afghan war about American soldiers showing up and finding a friend and saying, OK, who are the bad guys?
And then going off and just making everything so much worse.
And as we were talking about the beginning here, the Taliban had retired from the field.
There was no enemy to fight.
And as you say, in Uruzgan province, there just were no Taliban at all.
They were gone.
They were they'd retired from the field.
And that meant down to the Helmand province or Kandahar or something, they weren't even around at all.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this was a very peaceful situation for a couple of years.
And it's very important to understand that basically, if you would go and read about the explosions you read about in 2001, two, three, four, that you need to be very aware that this has been probably internal fighting between the allies of the Americans, the governors and the police commanders.
They basically went in, slapped their ally on the shoulder and said, give me the Taliban.
And that's very important to understand that we pretend then that this Afghan will follow us.
We give him a little money.
We sort of like think, oh, he's now our buddy.
He's our ally.
He would do whatever we want.
He surely shares our ideology.
It's super colonial to think that, as if the Afghan has no agenda, no background, no history, as if there is no history before 9-11 in Afghanistan, a massive mistake.
Because the Afghans do, the Afghans do have long histories in a country where there has hardly have been any government.
So you rely on other structures.
You rely on family structures, on tribe structures.
You rely on other incomes like opium.
You rely on transport tax.
You rely on whatever you can get to stay alive.
And from that perspective, that pragmatic perspective, which has nothing to do with ideology, these ideologues come in from America and say to them, give me the Taliban.
And so there is a dynamic where, for example, Jan Mohammad Khan, the governor, who is not alive anymore, just sends them to valleys where he thinks they need to go.
And so there's valleys where he has long-term conflict with.
Has nothing to do with the Taliban.
There was no resistance in Mirabad Valley, for example, where there have been many, many operations from the American side, from NATO side also later on.
So yeah, that is basically how you need to understand the dynamics.
So whatever explosion or attack happens, you can, I'm reading that again now in the New York Times, for example, in Helmand, where they report on two special forces from the Americans in 2003 in Sangin were killed.
The New York Times writes, oh, there was another attack last week.
And so they assume that this attack is also from the Taliban.
And that's that's journalism based on mainly the police commander, Mir Wali, his name is.
And Mir Wali says to the New York Times, you know, this is all Taliban and Al-Qaeda here.
And basically, what is the backstory, which you can find in an amazing book, I would say maybe one of the best books on Afghanistan is Mike Martin, An Intimate War.
And it's an intimate war because he also says there's no ideology.
It's an intimate war between actors.
And so these two American special forces die because of an internal conflict about drugs, about opium, about transport of opium.
And he really beautifully describes how the local police commander is involved, how the local, Sher Mohammad Aghunzadeh, the big governor of Helmand is involved, how his deputy, Daat Mohammad, is probably the real perpetrator and who gives up a local guy who has nothing to do with this whole feud, but he gives him up to to the Americans and the guy ends up in Guantanamo Bay.
So this is the complexity.
And and as yeah, this we did not know.
And what is very important, the Americans have not been wanting to notice.
And that's fine.
I find very problematic.
There has been very good, neutral, independent experts talking to them.
And it's very troublesome to realize that in this democracy, which the U.S. is, which the Netherlands is and France, where basically knowledge is not important anymore.
And that's why we are in this forever war in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so let me ask you this.
The Trump administration had signed this withdrawal deal with the Taliban.
And they're making kind of some progress, it seems like, in negotiating with the Afghan government in fits and starts there.
But the the Biden group has already made it clear that they're going to break the deal and stay.
And I wonder what you think will be the reaction to that from the Taliban and whoever else to.
So basically, the Taliban has become a strong movement because the American forces had made these tremendous mistakes.
It's very important to understand.
In the first years after 9-11, they were welcomed.
The Americans were seen and still by many Afghans are seen as this very powerful, rich country that can bring prosperity.
Now, that has not turned out to be true for many families who lost their nephews or sons or daughters.
And they are all simply set with the Taliban now.
Now, is that does that make the Taliban an ideological, very anti-Western movement?
I don't think so.
So I wonder if the Americans actually know who they're talking to.
They have been going to Doha, basically empowering the Taliban by basically sitting directly with him, with the Taliban at the table.
And that has hijacked the conversation.
I think the Taliban, when I speak to them now, they feel extremely powerful, Scott.
They feel they are winning.
They have won.
They will return and they can share a government.
But they can only share as they did before 9-11 if, for example, the Uzbeks or the Tajiks or the Hazaras are basically under their command.
And that is not sharing.
So that's where it's sort of like strands now.
The Afghan government is the same.
They do not want to share.
There's also on both sides, many people who make money, who make thousands and thousands of dollars a month because of this war.
So yeah, the focus is on the troop withdrawal, of course.
The Americans still have a couple of thousand troops in Afghanistan.
And yeah, it is keeping things a little bit together at the moment.
It's very violent.
There's a lot of attacks.
There's a lot of assassinations in Kabul.
It looks like a civil war to me, with many groups involved, especially in Kabul, mafia groups.
Yeah, you can say the Americans are needed now.
The Americans have made themselves needed in this situation.
Yeah.
In other words, if they'd withdrawn a few years ago or many, then the Taliban would have been in a much weaker position and had much more of a reason to compromise.
Whereas now it sounds like you're saying they don't see why they should really have to compromise with the people who now rule Kabul at all.
So does that mean that you expect a replay of 96, where they invade and sack Kabul and drive their enemies out and a return to the fight with the Northern Alliance and all of that old paradigm?
It's possible.
Yeah, it's possible.
I hope that's not going to happen.
I also learned with my work in this conflict that predicting is very difficult.
But I must say the Taliban is acting exactly like it did before 9-11.
And the attitude is similar.
So they do have a narrative, Scott.
I mean, the Afghan government is, of course, very corrupt.
They sent me articles like comparing President Ghani to Assad in Syria, or even to Hitler.
It's a very toxic situation between the two groups.
So they are very far apart.
I also wonder, Scott, sometimes if it would not have been better, and it's unfortunately in the power politics impossible, but to get America out of the game as the main negotiator.
I feel the Americans are very deeply in partner in the conflict.
They have a history, they have done things, they have a reputation.
And I feel ideally, they should be just a party in the conflict next to the Afghan government, next to the Taliban.
And there should be a third party leading this for the best of people in Afghanistan, not for America's interest.
But that's not happening, unfortunately.
Well, the one great invention of the Trump administration here was he dropped the Bush and Obama governments demands that the Taliban negotiate with the Afghan government at the same time as us and all of this stuff.
And he said, no, we can make a withdrawal deal.
And then the one condition was, but you have to talk to Kabul, but not you have to finish talking to Kabul and come to a peaceful settlement before our end of the deal is fulfilled and we leave.
You just have to keep Al-Qaeda down and out and that kind of thing.
So a couple of questions there, I guess, you know, well, I guess I wonder, first of all, now that America's breaking the deal and staying, are the Taliban going to go after the Americans and going to, you know, go full scale back to war, or I guess they're going to try to keep negotiating for a while.
And secondly, Beta, do you know of any evidence or reason, indication, reason to believe anything that there are Al-Qaeda guys with the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Yeah, that last question is super important.
I think that the first one I don't know, Scott, what the Taliban is going to do if this, it can go any way.
It can go indeed to attacking the Americans again, in order to stay powerful in the negotiations in Doha, or they find another way.
I don't know.
I've been fascinated by the claim of the Americans for Al-Qaeda.
There is, that's a whole other episode, I feel, to talk about this relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
And you know what?
In order to say something useful in 2020 about this situation of like, how many Al-Qaeda are there?
What is Al-Qaeda?
Al-Qaeda is a Pakistani guy who's smuggling drugs, but also is, I don't know, linked to a group in Pakistan that's against the both African government and the Pakistani government who claims to be related to Al-Qaeda.
Is he that?
Do we know?
And the point I want to make is that despite the UN, for example, who comes again and again with reports connecting Al-Qaeda to the Taliban, there is no proof, Scott, of how many people of the Al-Qaeda group are in Afghanistan.
There is no substantial information.
There's no thorough journalistic information.
There's no UN that is able to do this research.
So the Americans are basically, they are demanding also something based on not a lot of knowledge.
They just want them to say like, if there is Al-Qaeda, do you want to say, please do not work with us?
Blah, blah, blah.
And the Americans are super, super afraid in general, but also specifically about this point that they will be attacked again.
And it's paralyzing the negotiations.
Because they firstly, before demanding anything, the U.S. should get their facts together and find out what is the reality of these Arabs, if it's Arabs, in Afghanistan.
What is it really about?
And I find it super disappointing that the CIA doesn't know this or that the UN doesn't know this.
This is very paralyzing for the negotiations.
I'm so glad that you put it that way.
You know, I read the UN reports and all they say is, well, information has been provided to us that says, yeah, right.
Often Americans.
Yeah.
Often Americans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, and I mean, this is the real sticking point, of course, is that the American military can just bring up Al-Qaeda.
And they do.
They go, well, we killed 10 guys in Herat province.
One of them was Al-Qaeda.
And then that's it.
They don't even say.
We know because he was from Egypt and he was Ayman al-Zawahiri's second cousin or something.
Right?
They don't say anything.
They just claim it.
And but it's enough that it builds a narrative here that, well, they're not living up to the conditions of the deal, as the Biden administration is saying.
And so, yeah, I guess it's already over.
They're going to stay forever.
That was our one chance to end the war.
And it's already canceled.
Yeah, I would love to think about options of how to end this, maybe just completely out of the box thinking of what is needed.
You know, Matthew Ho said something interesting to me back a few months ago or a couple of years ago or something about how, you know, as we or as I mentioned before, I don't know if you ever reported on this part of it or whatever.
Back in the 1990s, of course, the Clinton administration supported the Taliban's rise to power and quite openly so and wanted them to win the civil war and everything so that they could guarantee the security of the pipeline they wanted to build from Turkmenistan to the port of Karachi there.
And that was their goal.
And so they, you know, played a large role.
And, you know, of course, the Pakistanis and whoever in supporting them in taking over the capital city.
And he was saying that, you know, this time, maybe and maybe this is too late, because I think he said this to me a year or two ago now, but he was saying maybe they won't take the capital city.
I mean, maybe they'll be happy with essentially full sovereignty over the predominantly Pashtun areas of the east and south and whatever else more they take kind of in the middle of the country.
But maybe if the Americans and Saudis and Pakistanis are not quite deliberately backing them in their attempt to take over the capital city, maybe there could be kind of a truce and a settlement toward autonomy rather than this integration of them into the parliamentary system.
That doesn't sound like it's going to go very well.
Yeah.
Now, I think two things, Scott.
One on this rise of the Taliban and the U.S. support.
In the time, I wrote a biography on Mullah Omar, and I found that in the time 1994, 1995, when the sort of like mullahs came up because of the civil war in Afghanistan, because of total chaos, there was from both sides an interest to work together.
The Taliban and many other groups in Afghanistan still are quite thankful for what the U.S. did in the jihad against the Russians.
And the Taliban, I got to know, it's much more like willing to engage with diplomacy of the West, with aid from the West than I expected.
They really wanted to become, for example, a member of the U.N.
And they felt seriously that they would make it after such a long civil war.
And they were finally the ones who brought the Islamic State, which stands for honesty and justice.
So the U.S. went along with that.
And I think in that period of time, even the contracts with the gas transported possibly to Karachi or to Iran was also understandable in that logic.
It was also a way of finally bringing some money to the Afghan people, to the Afghan economy, which was hard, almost dead.
And the negotiations were already going on with the president before, with Rabban.
And so I don't conspiracize that so much.
I think there was a genuine interest in each other to see what could happen.
And what were the sticking points, like, of course, the women's rights and the beating of the women in a city like Kabul.
Yeah, so and on the question of like, what do the Taliban now want, Scott, I mean, out of the box thinking doesn't mean we need to direct them to something that they really don't want.
And I think not taking Kabul is very difficult.
I think you need to think out of the box in the option of how can you make, how can you come up with a shared value that both groups can see and that both groups want to give up something that will make them want to share in one way or another?
And that is, yeah, I think that's, that's on the.
It worked with Hekmatyar, right?
So I mean, in other words, could there be a situation, is it reasonable to say, figure out a way to, especially I think if America withdraws, somebody else negotiates it.
I agree with you, would be better just get the Americans out of the way.
But even if the Americans fully withdrew and then had no role other than honest broker, could they figure out a way to ask the Taliban to walk into Kabul rather than marching into Kabul?
Right.
That's the question.
Because that's what Hekmatyar did.
Hekmatyar, they even let him bring, like sprung 20,000 of his fighters out of jail or something and let him come right in.
And then he didn't fight.
He didn't take over.
He didn't kill a bunch of people.
He got a nice mansion and joined the, made a political party, right?
Yeah.
Which is insane.
I mean, I can't even believe that that happened, but it happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not so surprising to me.
The point is indeed that maybe overall in the history of like, for example, the jihad, civil war, Taliban and the war on terror, the so-called war on terror, what Mike Martin also states in detail is that there is a lot of corruption in the Taliban and there's pragmatism too.
There's a lot of drugs incoming, income, there's that.
But there is somehow, if you compare it to, for example, Gulbadin Hekmatyar or other groups, I feel there is less of a, like a history of, of deal, deal making, um, on, on that level.
Um, so yeah, that, that makes it, uh, that makes it a very difficult partner to negotiate with in this, uh, in this period of time.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate you coming on the show so much.
It's great to talk to you and great to see this article.
I hope everyone will go look at it's in the Australian.
It's called how flawed information created a quote, ironic quotes, Taliban threat.
Thank you very much for your time, Betta.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
