8/17/21 Eric Margolis: This is Not the Worst Case Scenario in Afghanistan

by | Aug 20, 2021 | Interviews

Eric Margolis talks with Scott about the situation in Afghanistan as American forces continue to withdraw. Of course, the last few days have seen nonstop headlines proclaiming an utter disaster in the country, many of them excoriating President Biden for having screwed things up so badly. But Scott and Margolis remind us just how much worse things could be. Margolis points out that for one thing, some Afghan government officials seem to have been quietly preparing for a transfer of power far in advance, such that when U.S. forces pulled out, they were prepared to more or less let the Taliban take over. You don’t have to be a fan of the Taliban to realize that this relatively peaceful transfer of power is far better than the alternative: months of bloody and destructive fighting followed by victory for the Taliban anyway. Even in areas like women’s rights, Margolis explains that the current generation of Taliban leadership isn’t as harsh as their fathers and grandfathers—Taliban spokesmen have been quick to reassure the West that they want women to play a bigger role in society. The last thing Americans should do is let war hawks use the chaos in Afghanistan as an excuse for us to go back into the country and stay forever.

Discussed on the show:

Eric Margolis is a foreign affairs correspondent and author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj. Follow him on Twitter @EricMargolis and visit his website, ericmargolis.com.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio.

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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.
Hey, you guys, check it out.
I got Eric Margulies on the line.
I know, you're as excited as I am.
Eric, of course, he wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, both of them absolute masterpieces, and I mean that.
I mean everything, and I mean that.
And also, he's written 10 million wonderful columns at ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm glad to be back with you.
Long live Texas.
Yeah, man.
And Toronto.
And New York State!
Don't forget New York.
New York.
Yeah.
And them too, yeah.
Listen, so, how the hell have you been, man?
Well, I've been watching the events overseas.
I've been watching our new government under Biden, and I'm absolutely amazed and dazzled by what's going on in Afghanistan, because we have events that few could have predicted.
I did long ago, but nobody else was listening, and now the so-called bad guys have won.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, man.
There's a few reasons that I'm so good on this, and you're one of them.
And I've been talking to you since I think 04, if I'd have to go back and check, possibly 05.
And you've been setting me straight on who's who and why it matters, and to what degree, all over that country this whole time.
And you know, I saw a guy on Twitter very rightfully said, why should I read a book by some white cracker boy who never even been over there?
And I thought, that's a great question.
I never claimed to be the world's greatest expert on this thing.
I know just enough to confidently say we shouldn't be over there.
I would never claim enough to say who should live or die over there, only that we should stop killing them.
You know the right white cracker.
That's me.
Well, that's the whole thing.
I know you, and you might be as white as me, but you've been over there and spent, what, how many years in the 1980s covering the Mujahideen war against the Russians, Eric?
Oh, probably.
Well, I went there back and forth, so probably a good part of a year, but I followed it every day.
And of course, spent a lot of time in Pakistan right next door.
Yeah.
So why don't you tell us all about your friend, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the rest of what we need to know here.
I don't know where Gulbuddin is.
I don't know what he's doing.
He's obviously lying low.
He's going to make some kind of political move now.
He's sort of the real bad boy of the drama, and he was known as a big troublemaker in Afghanistan, but he didn't agree with the Taliban, and the U.S. was trying to kill him, he said.
So he's a tricky character.
You'll see him surface in the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, things are very fluid, as diplomats would say in Afghanistan, and it's quite fascinating because the U.S. has a yak do all over its face as a result of this.
Yeah, man, I'll tell you what about that.
So as far as Hekmatyar, you know, I saw a thing where it was from two weeks ago he was interviewed and said, hey, we should not fight everything.
Everybody needs to just compromise and come to the new reality and this kind of thing.
He sounded like he was pushing for a role and kind of greasing the skids for the Taliban.
But now, oh, and I don't know if you saw this, but he's announced a council with Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah.
That's supposed to be some kind of transitional thing.
I don't know.
I guess it's like they're desperate bid to not become, I guess, to be brought in by the Taliban rather than thrown out by it.
So I don't know.
Well, you know, they've been called those people calling for working with the Taliban for a long time.
Karzai, not a bad man.
He is a good puppet and he would make a good member of any new ruling council that's put into place.
Even Abdullah Abdullah, who's the Tajik guy, would be a good person to give a more moderate collegial tone to any new government.
So I don't think we'll have another Mullah Omar popping out of the shadows.
You're going to the Taliban and learn hard lessons that they have to adopt a more moderate policy.
Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the case.
I don't know enough about the guy they say is the leader now, Haqqanzada.
There's this guy, Baradar, who is sort of sitting in the chair in the palace for now.
But I think that might be just because the rest of the leadership are still relaxing in their five star hotel in Doha.
So they haven't started fighting yet either.
Yeah.
But yeah, you know, I don't know if you saw this, but they and I don't know how seriously to take this.
You know, who knows about these guys?
But they said, first of all, a Taliban spokesman did an interview with a female presenter on TV with, you know, her head covered, but not her face and certainly not in a burqa.
And she interviewed him.
And then I'm not sure if this I think this was in the same interview.
I'm sorry.
I'm just catching up on a few tweets here.
But I know The New York Times had a piece about this that he explained that their new policy is they want women to be part of civic life and including joining the government.
It says so in the Koran.
So that's a whole new order of Taliban rule from the last time around, if that's true.
And they really mean that, don't you think?
Scott, what's happening is we're we're dealing with a younger generation of Taliban.
If you look at the TV shots of these guys swanning around Kabul with their AK-47s, they're young, they're in their 20s.
They're not your grandfather's Taliban, where they used to be around 2011 to even 2001.
These guys, the original guys, were ferocious mountaineers straight out of the Dark Ages.
Now, these are their sons that we're dealing with, who've learned a lot in 20 years.
Well, the main thing is, is don't be so beastly to women or don't give the impression of doing that, even though it is the time-honored social way of behaving.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, they have been absolute ruthless bastards in this war when it comes down to it, slaughtering civilians and all kinds of things over the years.
Not that they're alone in that or anything, but I'm just talking about them right now.
But now, yeah, it seems like they find themselves in this position where they won way too easily.
This Baradar guy said, we were surprised at how swiftly we were able to take over the whole country.
And they had this great strategy of conquering the north first and kind of heading them off at the pass and all this stuff, and just kind of consolidated, walked right into Kabul.
As I have been saying, it was a distinct possibility for a very long time, rather than even laying siege or invading, but just walking right in and taking over the thing.
And so, yeah, it seems like they have a real challenge now of how they want to play this, right?
Like they've just got the whole country right in their hands.
And so, you know, especially as you were alluding to before, they are dominant now over the minority Tajik and Uzbek and Hazara populations.
And so there's a huge question about what they're going to do about that.
Well, you know, for the last few years now, and in fact, I did see one thing about this just the other day, but for a few years now, they have been bringing non-Pashtuns into the Taliban and into positions of leadership, attempting to just co-opt them rather than defeat everybody, kind of bribe everybody off.
You know, call it the Taliban's awakening movement.
Maybe they read David Petraeus's counterinsurgency manual for people's war, you know, and just...
There's a successful general for you.
All these guys should be demoted.
And they put out so much BS and misinformation.
It makes me angry every time I see them on air.
Yeah, I saw H.R. McMaster say, you know, we had it figured out just perfect.
We had it all calibrated exactly what to do right around 2017 when he was national security advisor.
But then Trump ruined it.
In fact, I saw Bill Roggio and Thomas Jocelyn from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy saying the same thing that, yeah, once Donald Trump made a ceasefire and started negotiating with the Taliban, that's when everything started going to hell.
Well, there is a lot to that argument.
But Trump was right.
You know, it was one of the few things that he's ever been right about was that the war had to end there.
He was looking at it as a businessman because of the titanic expense that was gaining absolutely nothing from a country in which America had no strategic interest.
But Trump was right.
At least he had the courage to say it.
I think he did it more as a poison chalice for the next Republican administration that came in.
I mean, Democrats under the Biden administration.
But he was right.
He said here he finally said the emperor has no clothes.
Yeah.
Now, were you surprised about the lack of resistance by, say, General Dostum's forces or or, you know, even if the ANA dissolved, I thought some of the militias might fight.
And I guess they're saying that Dostum and some of his guys are trying to dig in near Panjshir to resist.
So maybe that is that.
But they didn't fight for Kabul at all.
You know, they just know through they just gave over the Bagram air base without a shot being fired.
Eric, I know our mother Sharif up in the north, which is a key Dostum stronghold, right?
They just walked in.
In fact, the Taliban walked in everywhere.
There was almost no fighting.
There was less fighting than during the regular war.
Which is amazing.
But when it happened, but, you know, I know I was there during the when the Soviets pulled out and I saw the process.
Everybody in Afghanistan is related to everybody else through tribes, clans, regions, religion.
Everybody is kind of under the cover connections.
And everybody has been talking for weeks and months.
I think ever since Trump announced that they were going to end this foolish war, that everybody was trying to make deals and the deals was that we're going to let Taliban take over and let them run things for a while.
We're not going to fight it.
And that happened.
So that the total collapse of resistance, there was no resistance.
Everybody shook hands, which is a nice way to end the war.
Yeah, it's funny.
Everybody's talking about what an absolute debacle it is, which I mean, yeah, if they were trying to preserve power and influence over the country or they just want to feel sorry for some lady who's going to live in the new Taliban future or something like that.
However, as far as the end of the war goes, I would say a massive surprise attack, kind of a coup de main, sort of a deal where they just conquer the whole country with only a few shots being fired.
And very little fighting like this, including the capital city.
I mean, when they announced, yeah, both sides have agreed on a peaceful transfer of power in Kabul.
It's like, really?
What's that going to look like?
Oh, there goes Ghani and none of his forces are anywhere to be found.
And the Taliban just walk right in.
And then that sure looks like a peaceful transfer of power to me.
People are acting as though it's when Western Iraq fell to the to ISIS and they started butchering everybody and massacring guys in the field and, you know, prisoners and, you know, all this stuff.
And the Taliban haven't been playing it like that so far, at least.
They're just kind of.
Yeah, I was watching Matthew Aikens, this reporter who's in Kabul right now.
He goes, well, there's these as you were talking about these young Taliban, basically traffic cops.
They're just walking around with their rifles pointed at the ground.
They're not going house to house and harassing people and being big jerks.
They're basically just being the local security force in the most minimal sense, at least so far.
That's what they're portraying themselves as.
It's the best possible ending to this war, if it is an end, it may pick up and resume again.
There are, as you mentioned, there are these other ethnic groups, the Tajiks particularly and the Uzbeks, who will be troublemakers for sure.
They'll be used by outside powers to make trouble and create instability and thwart Taliban from having complete control.
Nevertheless, you know, these poor people have been at war for 20 years.
And imagine if we only had four years of war in World War II, they've had 20 years and huge casualties.
It makes me sick when I watch these people, particularly on TV, lamenting the fate of Afghan women because their beauty parlors were closed by the wicked Taliban.
But what about the Afghan women who were under the carpet bombing by our B-52s, the most recent of which was a week ago?
We were blowing up whole villages, drone attacks, we're wiping out entire weddings.
We probably killed a million Afghans and among them a lot of women.
So these were the women who suffered the most, not the beauty parlors owners in Kabul.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right about them bombing civilians in Helmand Province just last week.
Yeah.
To what end?
To save Lashkar Gah for another 10 hours or something?
To express our righteous anger.
Yeah.
Well, not so righteous, but anger.
Yeah.
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Might change a friend's mind.
Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism at enoughalreadybook.net.
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All right, well, so what do you think about the future of Taliban relations with the United States?
I mean, I think the obvious fear is that we're going to go right back to aligning with them against China.
Right?
Yeah.
Well, you know, take Vietnam.
We, once the war was over there, I remember I was in the army at the time.
Everybody just forgot about it for a while until they started doing business deals with them.
I think the same thing will happen.
Afghanistan will be blanked out of the news while we worry about some other trivial issues.
And we will eventually come back.
And I didn't realize there were 400,000 Americans in Afghanistan.
I think that's the right number.
That's a hell of a lot.
We're really imprinted on the national psyche there.
And we'll still remain involved in Afghanistan.
I can't believe we're going to just go blank on it.
Yeah.
So there's this new group that I don't know how new they are, really.
Maybe it's an old group, but just now the initials are getting out.
But apparently the U.S. bombed them back in 2018 in what's that tiny little panhandle of Afghanistan that reaches up borders on China?
The Wakan Corridor.
Yeah, the Wakan Corridor.
So I forgot the Marines, maybe anybody, somebody, the Americans bombed the Taliban and this group ETIM, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
And they're, you know, separatists.
I read your piece about the Uyghurs and about how recently it was that China had conquered that or at least reconquered it, whatever it was after World War Two.
But so there's this giant separatist movement there in Xinjiang.
And as we've spoken about on before on the show over the years, and this has been written up and it's in the book and everything, you've talked about how you witnessed American supported Taliban and or al-Qaeda training camps where Uyghurs were being trained for use or at least potential use, I think you said, against China.
And this would have been in the summer of 2001.
And so I wonder and then I always presume that some of these very same men must have been the ones, the Uyghurs who were rounded up and then tortured in Guantanamo Bay for being terrorists when America switched sides in the war just a couple of months later.
And then and then there's been a bunch of reporting, I think probably even by you, I forget now at the top of my head, but certainly by Seymour Hersh and others about Uyghur fighters by the tens of thousands who went and fought on the CIA and al-Qaeda's side in the Syrian war.
And then there's the big question of them all coming home and the Americans finding them useful for destabilizing China or at least potentially using them.
And now I can't remember.
I got to look this up again.
I can't remember what it was that I read that talked about how they're being kept safe in Uzbekistan right now and presumably, you know, with American help, something like that.
But I don't know.
Anyway, I wonder what you think about all of those things.
And in fact, rehash that memory for us, if you could, and tell the people what you saw there back then.
Well, when I went into what is Pakistan or Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, I saw, well, the Pakistanis call it Azad Kashmir.
That's the portion that's not controlled by India.
I found these military training camps, the rough and ready places, but filled with bunches of wild men running around with burp guns and being trained by Pakistani army officers and run by Pakistani intelligence, ISI servants.
And they were being trained by CIA through Pakistan to go to war against China in the event that the U.S. did to be attacked from the back door.
The Chinese were very nervous about this, so eventually it died down, the Americans lost interest in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Uzbekistan.
I'm starting to remember, remember, do you remember there was a revolutionary figure there named Juma, Juma something or other, who was the head of the Popular Front there and was very much tied to the Americans.
I think we're going to see these groups revitalized.
And as U.S.-China relations worsen, it's an obvious step for the U.S. to needle the Chinese.
Yeah.
No, but I mean, you told me before on the show that you saw these camps in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001.
I did indeed.
They were being run by Pakistani ISI officers.
And what was interesting is that when the Americans invaded Afghanistan, there was a great hue and cry about terrorist training camps all over the place.
Well, yeah, there were our terrorists, not their terrorists.
And we were training them for mischief and mayhem in Chinese-controlled areas.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the question almost answers itself, right?
Should the Democrats be so bold and or stupid to try to go right back to that policy right now?
I think they will.
You know, it's the path of least resistance.
And as U.S.-China relations continue to worsen, it's an obvious sore spot at which the U.S. can start poking at the Chinese.
Well, and they can say that they're cooperating with the Taliban against ISIS there.
And that'll be the basis for the relationship with the Taliban would be kind of like that awakening thing.
We'll back you locals as long as you keep the internationalists out, you know.
ISIS has just about disappeared, but only a handful of guys calling themselves ISIS fanatics coming from out of Syria, too.
But that will go.
But they're a bit players.
They won't make any decisive difference.
Yeah.
Well, and it's the Taliban that's defeated them.
Yes.
And, you know, I was just I found this again yesterday because I had to put it in my antiwar.com article that a year ago, the Washington Post reported that JSOC was flying drones as air support for the Taliban against ISIS.
And they were calling themselves it's even the headline, the Taliban Air Force.
And they even had a plaque on the wall at their office back at the camp or whatever, back at Bagram, wherever it was.
It's a twisted tale we weave in trying to mix up with all these dubious groups, nobody knows who's who or behind the scenes who's pulling the strings.
And we have been blundered, we keep blundering into the military men who are leading some of these operations like U.S. military men are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
And they really have no concept of what's going on in the deep background.
Yeah, I think that's really right.
You know, I saw an interview, Jake Tapper, interviewing H.R. McMaster yesterday afternoon after Biden's speech.
And I think that's right, that he's a big dummy.
And they go, oh, no, he's the smart one.
He wrote a book one time about how the generals owed the truth to the Pentagon, to the president about Vietnam.
That truth being that we needed a lot more force in there if this is ever going to work.
And wow, what a brave, truth telling book writing, brilliant genius McMaster is supposed to be now.
Or we're all supposed to think of him.
And he's up there going, these guys are terrorists.
They're the enemies of all of mankind.
I'm thinking, yeah, boy, don't anybody ever show this guy a map of the world and show him where this country where he has been is on it?
Well, I'm sure he got some private first class to write the book and based on my own army experiences.
So we don't expect much intellectual vivacity out of America's generals.
We really have not seen anyone who fits that role yet.
Maybe it's better we don't.
You might end up with another Caesar on our hands.
Well, tell me this, how different is this from Vietnam in terms of accountability for the generals, at least after the fact?
I know that Westmoreland kind of went down in shame kind of thing.
I don't really see too much attacks on Petraeus.
These guys seem to have dominance in the media still, that everything is everybody else's fault but theirs.
Well, yeah, it's thanks to CNN, we hear from every general that there has been American general and these guys don't know much and they've been wrong about nearly everything.
It's so ironic that we are sending training missions to train the Afghans, allegedly, and the Iraqis when we are the ones who've been kicked in the butt by all these people and lost the last three wars we fought.
What kind of PR is that?
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing of it, right?
It's sort of like no matter what they say on TV, don't we all kind of have Afghanistan syndrome now?
Who wants to go and do this again more?
And I see, you know, right wingers, too, are saying, hey, these Democrats are sacrificing our blood for nothing.
And, you know, good right wing takes on why not to do this, you know, which is great.
You don't have to move left or even move libertarian to be antiwar.
You could be as right wing as you want and still be sick and tired of this crap.
Doesn't make any sense to keep doing this anymore.
I think everybody feels that way.
And it's not because anything you or me or Ron Paul said convinced them, right?
It's just because of the calendar.
So how can it be 2021 and we're still fighting the same stupid thing?
You know, Scott, I was invited by Ron Paul to come to Washington some years ago to address his subcommittee on foreign affairs and talk about Afghanistan.
And I laid out this whole thing.
But he seems to veered away from the strong antiwar stance, too.
I don't understand.
Oh, no, Ron, maybe the boy doesn't say much.
No, Ron is on the Liberty Report.
I mean, he's been hardcore antiwar this whole time.
Him and Dan McAdams.
Yeah, well, I know Dan McAdams, yeah.
Uh, yeah.
No, I mean, we still have to work.
Yeah, yeah.
We still reprint Ron Paul articles at antiwar dot com all the time.
And he's still good on everything.
I mean, maybe over the last year he's focused more on the germ and the lockdowns and stuff like that.
But certainly before that, foreign policy would have been, you know, absolutely ranked as number one topic.
Even more than gold money or anything, you know.
Glad to hear that.
Yeah, you're more up to date than I am.
Yeah, well, I kind of worship the guy as a demigod.
So I pay a lot of close attention, which which so there's a selection bias and a confirmation bias or whatever there.
But also I'm just paying attention.
And yeah, he's still solid.
No question.
Well, he's the only guy who told the truth in Washington.
It's that's quite an accolade for me.
And I hope we hear a lot more from him.
Yeah, yeah, he's great.
So he still does a show five days a week, really with four days with Dan McAdams and then on Fridays with Chris Rossini and they talk economics on Fridays and really good live on YouTube every day, I think at 11.
I'm glad you're staying on top of that.
Yeah, I bet they're on right now.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to find Gulbadin Hekmatyar.
I know.
You know what?
He's like surprisingly in Google News.
There's I found a few things, including, you know, this whole thing.
In fact, I think we have a piece at Antiwar dot com that mentions this new committee they're trying to put together there with.
I don't know.
I don't know what.
Well, I don't know.
I guess we'll see what the Taliban does with Karzai.
And I mean, Hekmatyar was the leader of Hizb Islami, who was an ally of theirs in war against us for years.
And then even when he came in from the cold, he didn't really betray them or anything.
He just made a separate peace deal.
But he didn't really screw them over in any way.
It's funny.
Listen, this guy used to skin people alive, sit there and talk about, oh, yeah, you know, we just want to get along like a bunch of California hippies in the 1960s.
Well, you know, I remember when I was due to meet him, I was in just to go to the border in in Afghanistan and I was put into a room to wait for him.
And I was completely alone, just me in the room.
I turned away for a minute.
I looked and there he was.
He just materialized.
It was spooky.
I was really I gave me the willies, completely silent.
And suddenly there he was.
Maybe the same thing will happen again.
Now, guys, a ninja, man.
So, yeah, I mean, I wrote in the book, I thought that he might be a Trojan horse, but it doesn't even seem like he needed to be.
He was just there and, you know, if anything, he might have helped keep the peace that like maybe he helped convince Ghani that you should just give it up, pal.
So he didn't even really need to act as a Trojan horse.
He was just like, listen, there's nothing here for you, you know?
Well, in in true Afghan style, I'm sure they will be fighting with each other very soon.
Yeah.
You think so?
I mean, yeah.
The map doesn't look exactly like it did in 2001.
But as as I did bring up there, yeah, they are.
Dostum says he's digging in up north in Panjshir.
So.
And the Afghans, as we know, as you know very well, are very combative and they use their AK-47s first and second, and they're very ferocious fighters.
And it's you know, when I used to live in Switzerland, I learned this, that in mountain countries, when you live in every valley hates the next valley and they won't even marry into the people from the next valley.
So and it's the same thing in Afghanistan.
The only people you trust are the people from your valley.
I suppose we have that West Virginia, too, and Kentucky.
And fighting will start again because the outside forces, particularly the Indians, will be stirring the pot there and trying to gain influence.
So expect trouble.
Yeah, you know, I was I was here.
Yeah, I was talking with Patrick Coburn about this the other day, and he was saying I was telling him about this video I saw where a Taliban leader is sitting under the tree with a bunch of Hazaras and he's saying, welcome to the new world order, boys, you know, and they're they're quite uncomfortable in this scene.
But what are they going to do about it, man?
You know, but then so I mentioned that to Patrick Coburn and he says, yeah, but there's like five million Hazaras.
So we'll see how it goes, you know, so we put we paid off so many different groups in Afghanistan.
How do you think we spend a trillion dollars or two trillion dollars?
Yeah, it's a small country.
It's it's just staggering.
I don't know what we're going to do when the CIA pay pay will cease.
Yeah, well, you know, I wonder what the Taliban is going to do with these people.
You know, part of what was going on in that scene was the Taliban guy was saying to the Hazaras, hey, listen, you know us.
We've always been very nice to you.
And they're all like, oh, God, really?
And that in the way we remember it, pal.
But yeah, OK.
But, you know, that was the Tony was take.
It was like, listen, we're just the new security force in town.
And yes, we insist that we're going to be your security force.
But don't worry, we're not out to get you.
It's going to be fine.
And I mean, I'm not saying again, you know, they necessarily believe that.
But it seems like that's not just PR, but that seems to be their strategy that they just and the way he was saying to them, he goes, we don't care that you're Shiites, man, so long as you're Muslims, you're cool with us.
That was the way he was.
And on that particular issue, that's pretty important.
You know, you know, I kept echoing in my head the old Afghan, the old Indian prayer bearers from the vengeance of the Afghans and Afghans are notoriously vengeful.
So I think there will be a certain amount of vengeance there should be.
Yeah.
Which raised the question, too, of when Iran takes the Hazara side, is America going to back the Ayatollah?
Probably we we have to enact backing the wrong side, wandering into things that could very well happen.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I already kept you too long here, but I like talking to you.
Always a joy to talk to you.
OK, you're the only person who is so well informed.
Well, yeah, I've just been doing it about half as long as you have, not quite.
And and to my delight, you used exactly the right term, limoges, as the French would say, which is a coup d'etat.
For taking over Afghanistan, exactly what we just saw, Taliban staged brilliant coup d'etat.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, wait.
So teach me some more French coup words, because I know there's the coup d'etat, which is the right wing pushed by the military thing, you know, kind of mostly and then not always.
And then there's the coup d'amain like you have here or in, say, Russia and Crimea in 2014.
But so give us some more coup d'etat things.
Do you know?
I'm thinking, but nothing comes pop forth.
There's got to be at least a couple of more kinds of coups I want to know.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Coup de blitzkrieg.
Coup de.
Coup de shock and awe.
Oh, I'll email you when I think of them.
All right, great.
Well, I don't speak any languages at all, not even English.
So you're off the hook.
Don't worry, pal.
You do well with your Texan.
Yeah, I'm trying.
All right.
OK, thanks, Eric.
Great to talk to you again, my friend.
All right.
Eric Margolis, Eric Margolis dot com.
Oh, spell it like Margolis.
Eric Margolis dot com.
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