All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the Independent, independent.co.uk, and author of a great many books about all the Middle East wars.
The latest is War in the Age of Trump.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thank you.
Good to be back.
Yeah, great to talk to you again.
So you've got this great piece here.
The forever war in Afghanistan is far from over, and I'm afraid that must be right here, but I guess first of all, for people who've been tuned out, what's the latest on the ground there as America's forces finally give up, at least for the most part, and withdraw?
Well, the Taliban are advancing, they've taken a lot of the country, but they haven't taken the big cities, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat.
They were said a few days ago to be surrounding Kandahar and preparing to attack, that used to be their old capital at one point, but it hasn't happened yet.
The Taliban would clearly like to build up momentum to give the impression in Afghanistan and in the world that they're the sure winner, and that they can then take over easily in Kabul.
But it might happen, but it hasn't happened yet.
Another thing to bear in mind about Afghanistan is, it's a very fragmented place, as the Taliban themselves show, the central government isn't necessarily that powerful.
So will when the Taliban, if they advance, will they be able to take all parts of Afghanistan?
Will they be, they come from the Pashtun community, which is about 40% of Afghans, but what about the other communities?
Are they going to accept them?
So I'm pretty doubtful that they'll win a decisive victory.
Yeah.
So which means that the fighting could go on kind of for many years if it really comes down to it, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, they spent an awful long time last time around trying to capture the whole of Afghanistan.
But they hadn't done it in 2001, when after 9-11, the US backed the Northern Alliance and sort of drove the Taliban back.
They thought they'd decisively completely defeated the Taliban.
That wasn't true.
The Taliban really got home, and came out again a few years later.
So, you know, will they be able to do it this time?
You know, it's possible, but it's going to be very difficult for them.
So I had read this thing back a couple of years ago, I never could succeed in getting her on the show, but you must have read something or another by her, this scholar named Ashley Jackson, who had traveled all around the country.
She was saying that after the death of Mansoor, and this guy, Haqqanzada, taking over, that they had adapted this policy where instead of just trying to destroy every institution the Americans had built, that they just co-opted them all.
So they just took over all the schools and put a Taliban principal in charge, and they just took over the police station, rather than just waging war on the thing and just tried to co-opt everything.
And this would have been, let's see, I'm going to guess like 2018, I think I read this big study that she had done, and where she said one of the major, you know, important improvements in strategy by the Taliban was in not really being Pashtun exclusive and really trying their best to integrate others into their movement and trying to make it much broader of a base for, you know, in preparation for someday when they try to take over the country, as you're saying here, trying to make it look just inevitable so that they don't have to fight all the way, you know, for years like they did before to try to take over the country.
But I wonder if you have a good read on how much that policy might have succeeded or not.
I mean, I think they'll try and make nice, you know, more than they did before.
But will that really change?
You know, some things are kind of easy to do.
Maybe you put in a new headmaster at the local school, you know, but what happens then?
Do they send all the girls home?
The you know, it's been a very long war.
A lot of people will have had relatives killed by the Taliban or people, members of the Taliban have feuds with people.
What happens when it comes to jobs?
Very high unemployment in Afghanistan.
You know, that sort of sounds nice.
It sounds sort of even sounds easy and the smart thing to do.
But actually, on the ground, when you think about it, it's pretty difficult.
Yeah.
I don't know if you saw this, but there was a video on Twitter going around on YouTube, I guess, where it's a Taliban, you know, commander, I guess.
He's sitting under a tree surrounded by, I don't know, a couple of score of defeated Hazaras.
And he's basically telling him, welcome to the new world order, boys.
Here's how it's going to be.
And he says, we don't care that you're Shiites, we're not mad at you for being Shiites.
He's being very conciliatory.
In fact, that one part he at the beginning, he says, hey, listen, us Taliban, we've always been really nice to you guys, you know, something like that.
And they all just groan and shift in their seats like, oh, man.
And then he's very redundant and just goes on and on about how, you know, this is how it's going to be now for quite a while.
And at the very end, some of the elders say, yeah, that's right.
We always liked you to remember that time we fed you and this kind of thing.
And just, you know, at least for that group, and I guess they're in Ghazni province somewhere, they were, you know, far outmatched.
And and the Taliban was going to move on from there, I think, you know.
So things are changing on the ground pretty fast there.
Yeah, but, you know, there are about four million Hazara, you know, what are the Iranians going to think of this?
So you the Iranians have always sort of as fellow Shia have always held out assistance to the Hazara.
You know, there are just all these other groups.
I think when they sort of make films about it, everybody's very nice to each other.
You know, it kind of reminds me of Northern Ireland.
You'd see sort of Catholics and Protestants saying really nice things to each other and, you know, being very conciliatory.
And if you didn't know Northern Ireland, you'd think it meant something.
But actually, it usually doesn't.
The, you know, the the hostility is too deep seated.
The interests involved are too great.
So I'd be kind of dubious about this.
I mean, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
The in Iraq, you have the same thing, you know, Shia and Sunni and Kurds were all going to get together and so forth.
But, you know, just the divisions are so deep.
I can't quite see them ending like that.
Yeah.
You know, let me ask you this.
I have a theory, I'm willing to call it that at least there's a distinct possibility that Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former CIA asset, who was the leader of Hizb Islami, who made a deal with the Taliban government, I mean, the Afghan government in Kabul to come in from the cold in 2016, that he's actually just kind of a Trojan horse and waiting and that he's got his militia, a very powerful militia, inside the gates in Kabul and that I would expect his old alliance with the Taliban to kick right back in again, right at the opportune moment here coming up pretty soon.
What do you think?
It could happen, you know, I mean, one could see this in 2001, you know, when the Northern Alliance advanced under sort of this Aram umbrella from the US.
You know, lots of people change sides, you know, it's an old saying, Afghans will never lose a war and the reason is that they change sides before the end of the war.
So the key thing is not to be on the losing side, you know, but I remember and I think this is a crucial thing that went wrong for the US in 2001 or something they didn't understand was that they thought they'd defeated the Taliban.
In fact, the Taliban went home.
I remember being in, I was north during the war, I was north of Kabul and they, you know, you could see American missiles and bombs pounding the front line of the Taliban front line when you actually looked at it afterwards, there weren't any bodies, there wasn't anybody there because they could see what's going to happen then they'd gone home.
Now they're very closely allied to Pakistan.
Quite likely they were told by the Pakistanis, Pakistani intelligence to go home.
But they weren't there.
Later, after the fall of Kabul, I went from Kabul down to Kandahar and actually you mentioned Ghazni, I got to a city in Ghazni, which is a few hours south of Kabul and the Taliban had just changed sides, you know, I went to the governor's office and his courtyard was full of these people who were very obviously Taliban, but they fortunately for me changed sides about an hour before, you know, on the road, all these guys were going back to their villages or over the border into Pakistan.
It's kind of the sort of Afghan way of war and I remember going to Kandahar, there was a guy there who wanted a job with me as a sort of guide and I had somebody else working with me, so I didn't want to employ him, but he also wouldn't go away and eventually to get rid of him, I said, okay, well, you know, why don't you just find me some local Taliban commanders and some opium producers?
And he said, right.
And I said, well, when we do that, he said, we'll do it right now.
So I was a bit surprised, went to his village, we talked to the opium farmers who'd, as soon as they thought the Taliban was going to go, they rooted up all the cauliflowers and vegetables the Taliban forced them to grow and started planting poppies again.
And then an hour later, all the local Taliban commanders are tripped into the sort of village meeting house, very undefeated, saying, you know, they'd gone home, you know, unless they were treated right, they'd come out and fight again, which is exactly what happened six years later.
So it's sort of, you know, there can be big changes.
You see these big changes on the sort of battlefield of, you know, capital district capitals falling and Taliban advancing everywhere and lots of people changing sides, they'll try and get, as we said before, make sure that, you know, they get momentum behind them.
But people who've changed side once will change side again, it may not be quite as dramatic as it's been presented in the last few weeks.
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I guess, you know, oh, here's the point I wanted to ask you about what you thought of this.
This is something that we've been speculating about this for the last few years, of course, what it's going to look like when it comes to the fall of Kabul and this kind of thing.
And the great Afghan war whistleblower Matthew Ho, who tried to stop the surge in 2009 by coming out against it that summer, he was saying, you know, the last time the Taliban took Kabul, they had the support of the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
And so in this case, maybe the Americans could lean on Pakistan to lead on to lean on the Taliban or to not give them the support that would be required to actually take the capital city, but maybe to settle for the territory they have.
I mean, I guess the Taliban have been very insistent on one central government as much as Colin Powell.
But what do you think about that?
It could be, but I'm not sure I really believe it.
You know, the Taliban have fought for a long time.
They're not going to sit out in the mountaintops, you know.
And you know, they're very dependent on Pakistan.
But at the end of the day, they're not pawns, you know.
They have their own agenda.
They'll want to take Kabul.
They'll want to take the other big capitals.
Also compared to 2001, all these cities are bigger.
You know, this Afghanistan's urbanized quite a lot because that's where the jobs were and they'll be moving into the city.
So I don't think they'll sit in the countryside, but they won't want to.
They won't want to fight their way into Kabul either.
It also depends, you know, what sort of reaction there is.
You know, when the Soviets pulled out in the 1980s, I mean, the Russian Soviet army, people thought that Kabul will fall immediately.
In fact, you know, the post-Soviet communist government did quite well.
It didn't lose Kabul.
It didn't lose Jalalabad.
It fought pretty hard.
And it was only when the sort of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when they lost money and fuel and other things they needed, that the government, the communist government eventually went down.
So you know, when I've been in Kabul and Afghanistan, what's always struck me is the Taliban aren't that popular.
The government is deeply unpopular.
But often, you know, if you're in Kabul, Taliban is quite a long way away.
If the Taliban is coming, and that's the alternative to the government, then I wonder if the resistance isn't going to stiffen, if there are an awful lot of Afghans who don't like the Taliban.
Yeah.
Do I have it right that in 96, when they took Kabul, that they were welcomed as long as they were kicking Massoud and his guys out?
Well, that was their big, you know, their big card at that time, not just in Kabul and elsewhere, was that they kicked out or dealt with, you know, these sort of bandit warlords, you know, who control the roads, they famously hanged one of them on the from the muzzle of a tank who was accused of raping local girls, you know, so the stuff like that went down very well, you know, on the roads, under the warlords, you know, that everybody was terrified of the next checkpoint where they'd, they'd want your money, but they, you know, almost might kidnap you almost anything might happen.
So there was a sort of rough and ready law and order.
That's not quite what they're replacing at the moment.
I suppose if Kabul fell into anarchy, that might be the situation, but it isn't the situation now.
So you also but of course, you have a sort of chronically corrupt and incontinent government.
The I was reading just this afternoon account of somebody who some years back, but would have been embedded with Afghan troops, you know, with holes in their shoes with, you know, not enough ammunition with, you know, weapons that, you know, were old and rusty and didn't work.
You know, the money had all been stolen.
So, you know, could they could the Afghan government or some central authority put together an armed force, which could really fight to stop the Taliban, you know, that may happen.
You know, while the Americans were there, American bombing, etc.
Maybe a lot of people in the army thought, you know, we can get the Americans to our fighting for us, let's let them do it, you know, let them go and bomb the Taliban.
So, so we'll see in the next sort of few weeks, how this is going to pan out.
But this idea that it's all going to be a kind of love fest, the Taliban have changed.
I just don't really believe it.
I don't think they really have.
I think even if they wanted to pretty difficult to do.
And nobody, you know, a lot of these places, the Taliban will be an occupying army.
Nobody loves occupying armies, you know, as the U.S. found out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is Rashid Dostum still the most powerful Uzbek warlord?
I don't know.
You know, the warlords aren't quite what they were, because they don't have, you know, they used to run pretty well their own private states.
The ones I knew after the fall of Kabul were also setting up construction companies and getting large contracts to supply U.S. forces and making money.
These guys are also a lot older.
How far do they still effectively have effective armed forces?
This is a different question, not in the way they did back in 2001.
Um, and OK, so.
Now, so what about the actual Afghan national security forces?
I mean, obviously, the Taliban have been just walking right into military bases here and there and taking whatever they want.
That's actually another facet of this is they really have access to a lot of trucks and weapons and new equipment, which they already had plenty of anyway, I guess.
But the more they win, the more armed to the teeth they are as they advance with everything the ANA leaves behind.
And you're probably better than anybody over the last 20 years, Patrick, on documenting the phenomenon of the ghost soldiers in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, where there's entire army divisions that don't really exist, but for paycheck purposes for their commander and that kind of thing.
But are they just going to devolve into local sectarian militias and just give up the pretext altogether here?
Or is there kind of a rump state that you think can kind of hang together to stay around?
I think that might well be a rump state.
I think a big communities who want to defend themselves, too.
I mean, they also don't want to find out the hard way what the Taliban are really like, you know.
And as I said, you know, they may be pretending to be nice guys now.
But once they're in the driving seat, what's it going to be like, you know, they have an incentive to do that to sort of disarm the other side, prevent them resisting.
I doubt if they'll be able to do that.
I mean, this is a country where pretty well everybody is armed.
So, you know, the strategy has been pretty sophisticated.
They've been sort of capturing the entry points into Afghanistan.
So, as it were, they haven't necessarily taken the cities, but they're surrounding them.
And they're also they're taking the sort of crossing points from Uzbekistan in the north and Tajikistan on the Amu Darya River.
It's a river that runs along the north of Afghanistan, the entry points west of Herat toward Iran, and then the south to Pakistan.
So, they're grabbing all these sort of very strategic points, crossing points on the frontier.
So, they clearly have a pretty careful plan.
Will they try and fight their way into the cities?
Do they have enough people to do that?
We'll see, you know, it might be, you know, as with the communists after the Russians, after the Soviets pulled out, that just the warlords, the anti-communist Mojahedin just didn't win the victories that people expected.
And once there's a perception that the Taliban aren't the inevitable rulers of Afghanistan, then things could change quite quickly.
I guess we could presume that the CIA would be giving full support to the resistance on that side too, at this point.
Well, yeah, they will, but you know, it's sort of up in all sides.
All the neighbors will be thinking, what do they do?
You know, what's in the interests of Iran has been having talks with the Taliban.
But the Iranians tend to do that.
They tend to sort of talk to everybody.
But also, you know, how far will they support anti-Taliban organizations?
How far will they support the Hazara, this community that's in sort of Central Afghanistan?
You know, but they have a pretty bloody history with the Taliban, who after all blew up the famous sort of Buddhist statues.
You know, this sort of stuff isn't going to go away.
You know, I saw the other day, there was a comedian.
They said he was a comedian in Kandahar province, who the Taliban arrested and then murdered.
And, you know, same old Taliban, right?
But yeah, we've had a long civil war.
A lot of people have got a lot of grudges, you know.
You know, Afghanistan is a pretty violent place anyway.
You know, so people will, their relatives were shot by some policemen, they're not going to sort of get all this, or vice versa, for that matter.
You know, and also Afghanistan's pretty big place, you know, do they have the men to hold these places?
Are they going to garrison them?
You know, how strong is that fighting force?
How much support does Pakistan give them?
Is Pakistan going to go, you know, this is the point we take the whole of Afghanistan?
What do they think?
You know, these things are still up in the air.
Okay, hang on just one second.
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Well, I mean, we know what the Saudis want.
Maybe America can just switch sides again and go back to supporting the Taliban as long as they'll help us train Uyghurs for use against China.
What do you think?
Well, yeah, there's all these sort of, you know, the sort of games in the Middle East.
You know, what do the Iranians think?
You know, the Russians and Tajikistan used to support Northern Alliance, which was, you know, it's sort of heartlands of Tajik up in the Hindu Kush mountains, you know.
These are not easy places to conquer.
I mentioned that before the fall of Kabul, I was sort of about 60 miles north of Kabul in the Panjshir Valley, which is a great sort of stronghold of the Northern Alliance and of the Tajiks.
And although it was quite close to Kabul, the Taliban couldn't take it and the communists and the Russian and Soviets before them weren't able to take it.
So, you know, Afghanistan is full of natural fortresses.
So, you know, how far, you know, will the, also there are other military questions, will the U.S. give air support?
Still, that makes it difficult for the Taliban to, you know, have large convoys on the roads.
The local communities will begin to defend themselves.
And so I don't think that Afghanistan as a Taliban state, which people have been sort of talking about as something inevitable, I don't think there's anything inevitable about it at all.
An awful lot of things could happen, most of them pretty nasty things, but it's not the only alternative.
It's really too bad too, that everybody is so insistent on having a strong central government here when it seems like they could pretty much call a truce and call for strong autonomy and kind of federalism where the Taliban rule the South and the East and maybe a little up north there near Kunduz, where they have a natural constituency.
And then everybody else could be part of the Kabul Allegiance Alliance or whatever the hell, and then, but leave each other alone and accept that.
That works for a bit, but it doesn't work, you know, there's natural friction, you know, that's where the Russians used to, or the Soviets used to work.
After 82, they'd go to a district and say, look, we know you're, what you're doing here, we know you've got weapons from Pakistan.
That's okay by us.
In fact, we'll give you more weapons and more money.
But you mustn't, you know, you rule this place, but you don't move out of it.
You don't let other sort of hostile elements to the state move through your area.
And if you do, you know, we'll flatten you, we'll open up with all our artillery, we'll bomb the hell out of you.
And that worked pretty well.
You know, single districts, you know, can sign, can agree to sort of be neutral.
And you can sort of see this might work for a bit, but it never works for that long, because there are too many interests involved, who controls this road, who controls that road, what happens to the opium crop.
And just groups don't trust or like each other, you know, in a place like Herat, you know, Tajiks, this is this city in the west of Afghanistan, pretty battered by warfare with the Taliban, not so far around about it.
You know, they're not going to, they're terrified of the Taliban coming in.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, I was criticized for this in my book, the subtitle is Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And people make me admit, time to end our part of the war in Afghanistan, because yeah, it is going to continue on.
And definitely, if you look at the competing interest between the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, and the boy who could ever sort that out, especially not Uncle Sam.
But even if all those, you know, leading powers were all locked in a room together for a week, could they ever hash it out?
Or this thing is just going to go on forever and ever and ever?
Well, they could reach some agreement, but will they do so?
You know, that once this war has gone on so long, there are so many sort of players, the same is true in Syria, the same is true in Iraq.
You know, you can reduce the level of violence, but it's very difficult to completely suppress it, certainly not at speed.
And, you know, as the US pull out, the US is less of a player, but is still a player.
And, you know, the thing is about this whole region, you should look at, you know, Afghanistan, there's a whole sort of band of countries really from, if you go from Kabul, right across the Middle East, across North Africa to Tunis, where you may have seen there's been a kind of constitutional coup on last Sunday, which, you know, Tunisia was the last sort of remnant of the Arab Spring.
And the President has just closed down Parliament and sacked the Prime Minister and appointed himself Prosecutor General and done all these things to sort of turn it into a dictatorship.
Go all the way from Kabul to Tunis, you know, that's country after country is either ravaged by war is run by a toxic and corrupt dictatorship like Egypt, or, you know, is like Iraq is sort of teetering on the edge, you know, the price of oil is up a bit.
So that's good news for them.
A lot of these places are oil states, but there's a whole sort of part of the earth's surface really from, go from Afghanistan to Tunisia, go from Syria to Somalia, you know, which is full of, you know, weak states, corrupt states, you know, people living in misery.
This is going to produce something last time around, it produced Islamic State, you know, it also produced millions of refugees.
You know, this is not a static situation in Afghanistan or in these other countries.
Yeah, certainly not.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
We'll stop right here.
But it's great to talk to you again.
Really appreciate it.
All the best.
All right, you guys, that is Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
His latest book is War in the Age of Trump.
And this piece is at The Independent.
It's called The Forever War in Afghanistan is Far from Over.
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.
