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, introducing Andrew Quilty.
You might remember he is an Australian journalist.
He did the show, what, I don't know, half a year ago or something like that, a year ago about CIA death squads killing innocent people, including children, in Afghanistan, and he has stayed in, I hope you guys are following him on Twitter, he has stayed in Kabul after the regime change by the Taliban there over the last few months, and also he has this new piece at the Intercept, so I just gotta click the right button here, the CIA's Afghan proxies will get fresh start in the U.S., oh man, welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Thanks for having me, Scott, good to be back.
Very happy to have you here, and I should say, by way of disclaimer, I think it is important to say, and I'm sorry, because I don't want to get you in any trouble, but I don't think this should get you in any trouble, but your co-author on this story, Matthew Cole, one, I'll give credit to him, and I quote him in my book, because he's done great work on war crimes in Afghanistan in the past, particularly by SEAL Team 6, and for the Intercept, and that's good stuff, on the other hand, he's the guy that got John Kiriakou locked in prison, and he's the guy that got Reality Winner locked in prison, and so there are people, and maybe another one too, I'm sorry, I forget, there are people who credibly suspect him of being some kind of rat, you know, not even really being a journalist, but being here to get other people in trouble, and so that's worth bringing up, I mean, John Kiriakou went to the penitentiary because of him.
So anyway, great piece though, and I know that you must have been doing the lion's share of this work here from the position you're in there in Afghanistan, but before we talk about the CIA death squads here, and there's so much, but I think people really want to know what is Kabul like now, what is Afghanistan like now, in terms of just how totalitarian are these Taliban?
Are they throwing women down the well, and are they, you know, going completely crazy with power and acting like ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, or, you know, just how bad are the restrictions against women and girls going to school and having jobs and being out in public compared to before, and all, and journalists, I know you've been covering on Twitter the kidnapping and beating and persecuting of journalists, I don't know if, maybe they've murdered some too, I think you said, so let us have it, let us know what it's like there now, please, if you could, sir.
Well, where to begin?
Look, the short answer is no, they're not the Khmer Rouge yet.
They have, however, started to, or I should say their actions are starting to veer away from the words that they were purporting to plan to rule by before they came into power, and in the very early days that they gained power from the former Ashraf Ghani government.
They ran a very, very successful public relations campaign, which was partly the reason why they were able to take the country back from the American-backed Ashraf Ghani government so quickly, and I should also add, with so little bloodshed.
That's not to say there was no...
You mean in terms of promising amnesty?
Exactly, exactly.
They had this commission, the Commission for Invitation and Guidance, for a long time, but it had been more or less dormant for years until very soon after the Doha agreement was signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban on February 29, 2020.
The Taliban leadership really got that commission up and running and dusted it off and put it into full effect, and from the very beginning, in fact, I remember reporting from the provinces early on, following the Doha agreement, and hearing from low-level Taliban commanders how effective this strategy they had to try and bring members of the Afghan National Security Forces over to their side.
Actually, I misspoke there.
They weren't intending to bring them across to their side.
They were merely wanting them to desert from the government security forces, so they weren't taking them on.
They weren't defectors, as such.
They were just putting down their weapons in exchange for a letter that guaranteed their safety going forward, and this gathered momentum in the weeks and months before the final takeover, and it's, to a large extent, what saw the government forces collapse so calamitously in the final weeks, because so many of them just laid down their weapons.
When they saw the writing on the wall, they realised they were not going to get the support they needed from the government and from the Ministry of Defence.
They'd also run out of morale.
I think there was a sense what is worth fighting for anymore?
Why are we fighting for this government?
They were proven right in the end, with Ashraf Ghani skipping off on a helicopter without notifying anyone else outside his very immediate circle.
All's to say is that there was some initial hope that the types of people that one might have expected to be targeted might get through this transition period without, in fact, being targeted.
That, since the takeover and since the very early days of the takeover, has started to fall away a bit.
You've seen isolated incidents where former members of the government security forces have been searched for and pulled out of homes.
In some cases, they have disappeared or turned up dead.
There hasn't, however, been any kind of systematic implementation of this policy.
It's really hard to know whether these are lone wolves acting on personal grievances or family grievances or land disputes or tribal disputes and using the Taliban as cover to take sick revenge.
I'm not sure exactly where this was.
I think they said it was in the Ghazni province, where my understanding is the Hazaras are the dominant.
That's their area.
A bunch of people essentially forebeing Hazaras or at least, I don't know if it was like the Taliban was claiming a religious basis or just like a tribal basis, but that they were just kicking people out of their homes and occupying them.
There certainly has been some reports of that.
There were some possibly in Ghazni province, as you mentioned, also in Daikundi.
They're all in central Afghanistan, where the Hazaras are mostly situated.
They are still, however, minorities in most of these places.
They have small concentrations of their population living basically in a sea of predominantly Pashtun areas.
A lot of these places have had histories of contention over land.
Look, I haven't done any reporting on this, so I'm hesitant to comment, but I do expect that these land grabs are kind of complicated and perhaps more than just Taliban persecuting Hazaras because they are Hazara.
I wouldn't, however, rule out the fact that, again, as I was saying, has been, may have been the case with some of these reprisal killings, individual reprisal killings, that the people doing these, pushing people out of their homes, may be using this new environment with the Pashtun dominant Taliban now in power and using them as enforcers when in the past they haven't had the ability to do that.
But now overall, you're saying it feels like the PR campaign that, hey, we're nice guys, that that's over now that they've really finished seizing their monopoly on power, that they're starting to get more heavy handed, or are they still trying to?
I mean, because the thing is, we talked about this all along, the war was to foist a coalition of approximately 20% minorities on the 40% plurality, which is never going to work.
But now we're talking about a 40% plurality, trying to lord it over, essentially, a majority that ain't them, even if that majority is not all, you know, one united, you know, ethnicity and tribe, you see what I mean?
So they've bitten off a lot, right?
So in order to chew it, I guess the question is, are they just going to be absolutely ruthless and terrifying?
Or are they really trying to broker deals and get along with Hazaras and Uzbeks and Taji chiefs that they need to be able to win over, right?
Yeah, I mean, it really looks like they're falling into the same trap that the Americans and British fell into in the beginning by siding with the Tajiks and the other minorities that you mentioned, who made up the bulk of the Northern Alliance who the Americans had partnered with to overrun the Taliban in 2001, early 2002.
And it looks like the Taliban are making the same mistake.
I mean, there was never any doubt that that was going to be the case, but it doesn't bode well for the future when you do not have an inclusive government.
And, you know, they've made very little attempt to try and portray this as, you know, anything other than what it is.
I mean, there's no getting around it.
Not only are they by and large Pashtuns, they are old guard Taliban.
And so there's, you know, there's very few of these sort of young reformers who have, you know, may have studied in the West and had a broader view on the world.
These are very much the old guard Talibs who are running the show again.
All right.
And then, so what about women and girls?
I know there's been, well, I guess I wouldn't say conflicting reports, but, you know, over time the reports have changed about, well, first they closed some schools, then they reopened them, or they said that they did, but they didn't really reopen these, I guess that is conflicting reports.
Go ahead.
Yeah, look, if any issue was given the most, or more air time than others by the Taliban early on, and it was an issue that they were drawn on most of all by international actors and foreign and national media alike.
It was the issue of women's rights and one of the real lightning rod issues, focal points there is obviously the ability of girls to go to school.
All along the Taliban had said they will, I mean, before they came to power, the Taliban said they will give women the rights that they, that the Quran gives them, they will give them the rights insofar as Sharia law allows it.
When they came to power, all schools from the beginning were closed.
And I think that was as much a measure taken by the schools themselves because of the uncertainty and the upheaval at the time.
When schools went back, both boys and girls in grades one to six went back, only boys from grade seven to 12 went back.
So, to date, countrywide, aside from three provinces in the north, which in the last week or so have sent girls from seven to 12 back to school, that age group is not in school.
Spokespeople for the Taliban, and you can add as big or small grain of salt as you want to this, are saying that the plan is for them to be allowed back and that they are just working out security arrangements to allow it to happen in a safe and orderly fashion.
Security arrangements in terms of sending girls back to school, I think what the Taliban are referring to here is, it's not security in terms of, are they going to get blown up by a suicide bomb on their way to school?
They're talking about more logistical things about how they are going to get to school safely without crossing paths with any more males than they need to, and how are they going to be taught by teachers, by female teachers?
One answer to that is that they won't be because there are not enough female teachers to go around, and for that matter, there are probably not enough male teachers to teach all the male students.
I mean, you essentially need twice the number of students to teach classes that were once mixed and are now split.
Again, having said that, I should caveat that by saying that some schools did already segregate classes from 7 to 12.
And then you have the universities which bring in the same measures, segregating classes, many of which already were segregated.
But yeah, look, at the current moment, you've got the majority of girls in the country between ages, between grades 7 and 12, are not in school at the moment.
Yeah.
And then, so as far as the amnesty for former government employees and all that, they're really sticking with that?
They're not rounding up these people and charging them with whatever crimes and locking them all away?
Well, they're not doing it on a systematic level from anything I can understand, but it certainly looks like it's happening on a small scale and on an individual basis.
It's just, you know, they're doing it, whoever's doing it, they're doing it carefully.
It's not, you know, there's not some kind of big purge that's going to put them in the headlines.
It's happening piecemeal.
And so it's not enough to make the headlines, but it is enough to send shivers around anyone who did used to work in the security forces.
There's no doubt about it.
I've met with a number of these guys, former commandos and so on, who are renting houses away from their former family homes where it's assumed that it was known they lived.
So yeah, they've gone to ground, they're hiding out.
And many of them are hoping to get out of the country still after having missed that first evacuation.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean, and no quarter will leave his mark on you.
No question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
And then I wonder about the average guy and his relationship with the police now and how different the Taliban local cops are for the regular people there compared to the previous era.
Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, for one thing, the new Taliban, quote unquote, police, I don't believe they've had any training in policing.
So it's very ad hoc.
Some have uniforms, some don't.
One of the bizarre things to see is all these Talibs walking around in the uniforms of the former national security forces.
And it's not as though the new police are wearing the old police uniforms.
These guys are just using whichever uniforms they came upon in the takeover.
So you'll see someone manning a security checkpoint, wearing a beret of the Afghan National Army and the clothes of a policeman or the former national directorate of security, the intelligence agency.
So it's all very ad hoc.
I mean, the Taliban were relative.
I mean, it was one of the things that the Taliban were given some credit for by the populations that they controlled before they took control of the entire country, that being their application of justice.
It was in comparison to that which the government presided over.
It was swift and it was less prone to corruption.
I'm not saying it wasn't prone to corruption.
And I think that's a misnomer that the Taliban are not corrupt.
I think it's probably hard to say that there's any ruling government in the world that is not corrupt.
And I don't think the Taliban are immune from that as pious as they may be.
But although it's ad hoc, I think they do get things done in a less Byzantine fashion than the old Byzantine and riddled with corruption than the old than the old government did.
All right.
Now, so this is sort of a two parter, if I can figure out how to put it together here.
As I'm sure you're aware, when they came to power in 1994 through 1996, that they really got their start by murdering child kidnappers and rapists, you know, started off down there, I think, in Spin Boldak and then went on to Kandahar City and, you know, ended up taking the whole country.
And at the time they walked into Kabul in 1996, which I don't know.
Do you know offhand, even like a ballpark of what percentage of the population of Kabul is ethnic Pashtun back then or now, or if it's changed much?
I don't know the proportion.
I know that.
Oh, look, I wouldn't say it's small.
I would say it's probably slightly less than the national average across the board.
But it's still I would say it's still probably a plurality.
Okay, excuse me.
Well, and so in any case, when they walked into Kabul in 1996, they were greeted with flowers and candy like Dick Cheney predicted for us in Iraq.
Because just because how bad Masood was, right, it wasn't that everybody was really happy to be taken over by a bunch of hillbillies from the south.
It was just that, thank God, they're getting rid of the last guy.
And we saw a little bit of that here, at least when they came in.
So I just wonder, I guess what I'm curious about is whether they have a reputation among regular people that well, at least these guys are law and order and just not blatant kleptocrats and kidnappers.
And you know, the worst kind of warlords like America has propped up in power there for the last 20 years, and in many cases, anyway.
I don't think they've entered Kabul this time with the open arms that they were last time.
First of all, when they came last time, they were an unknown quantity.
And the circumstances in Kabul had been far, far, far worse than they were when the Taliban arrived this time.
I mean, they'd been through several years of civil war with indiscriminate shelling on a daily basis.
I mean, it was hellish.
And then there was the warlordism and the checkpoints shaking people down and dragging women out of houses and cars and raping and murdering.
I mean, it was hellish.
And it's, you know, the Ashraf Ghani government and the Karzai government before him, certainly far from perfect, but they did, you know, hold together some kind of functioning state in Kabul for the past 15 or more years.
And a lot of people in Kabul did benefit in those years.
And I think I would say the majority of people were not welcoming the Taliban this time in the way that they did last time.
I think, you know, Afghanistan is a broadly, extremely conservative nation with a, you know, conservative cultural basis.
And although there has been a lot of modernising the past 20 years, that it's hard to wipe that cultural basis out.
And so there are a lot of people, I would say, mostly men, mostly older generations who are happy to have this back, happy to have the Taliban back and, you know, running the show and putting men back in the seat of power, you know, not only at the presidential palace, but in the homes and on the streets.
You know, as we saw with the election of President Trump in the US, it enabled a portion of the population to, you know, act out the kind of fantasies that had always been lying dormant in years prior, because it was given some kind of legitimacy.
And I think the same is happening here in Kabul, where you have these latent feelings and ideology and culture that, you know, didn't disappear in the last 20 years, and will be readily brought back by a lot of people, not just the Taliban themselves.
I mean, Kabul has had a very different experience in the last 20 years, in comparison to the rural areas.
And Kabul, there is no doubt, and Kabul's citizens are the ones who benefited most.
So they are the ones who stand to lose the most in terms of the rights that they won and the freedoms that they enjoyed in the past 20 years, whereas a lot of those freedoms didn't really come to the rural areas.
And certainly a lot of the benefits didn't come to the rural areas.
So the change will be hardest felt in Kabul, there's no doubt about that.
Yeah.
And just as a parentheses here, I'm sure you know this anyway, but it's just the great new piece from just a few weeks ago in the New Yorker called The Other Afghan Women by Anand Gopal, who of course is the author of the book No Good Men Among the Living, which is one of the very best books I've ever written about the Afghan war there.
And boy, is that thing eye-opening.
You got to read that thing through the end, everybody, seriously.
But now, so...
Yeah, just to interrupt, I mean, that's exactly the kind of dynamic that I'm referring to there, the urban versus rural dynamic, which Anand pulls apart incredibly well.
And you know what, as long as we're at it, right at the same time that that came out, there's a piece by Jack Murphy in Concerned Veterans?
You can find it.
Anyway, I interviewed him all about it, and it was all about the drone war in Helmand and in Kanhar, but I think particularly in Helmand in the Trump years.
And he had, all his sources were from the drone warriors themselves.
And they were telling their side of the story of, man, they had us killing innocent people there so badly.
And it's just the exact, you know, it's the same story as Anand Gopal is telling, but from the robot's point of view.
And it's madness.
And the way anybody with something that looks like it might be a walkie-talkie antenna, zap.
And anyway, so this stuff's coming out more and more, you know, people are telling stories, you know, kind of recapping and bad things around it, but have happened and those stories are being told.
But now, so here's a question real quick before I get to your awesome story about these CIA death squad murderer guys who are soon to be my local sheriff's deputy here in Williamson County.
I wonder about, yeah, this great expert journalist, think tank lady.
I don't know exactly who she is, but her name is Ashley Jackson and I never could get her on my show.
I don't know why, but she had written this great study about three years ago where she'd been all over the place, you know, North, Southeast, and West all over Afghanistan.
And she said that after the CIA zapped, um, the previous Mullah, uh, who was it?
Mansour, Mullah Mansour.
I'm sorry.
I haven't had enough coffee today.
Once they zapped him and Hakanzada took over, Hakanzada is a lot smarter guy.
And that they decided that instead of just blowing everything up, they would just co-opt it and instead of waging such an ethnic chauvinist war that they would, you know, starting back then that they would try to win over as many influential, um, Tajiks and Uzbeks, I don't know, Hazaras, I think even, you know, at least making friends with some Hazaras, but bringing Tajiks and Uzbeks actually into the Taliban and giving them official positions as leaders of the Taliban and this kind of thing in order to prepare the ground for what we saw happen in August, right?
So I just wonder like whether any of that stuck, you know?
Um, well, I mean, I, I think the, um, it, it's undeniable the, I mean, it was, it was the, the North of the country where you have most of these minorities, um, particularly the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, um, that, that fell to the Taliban first, um, uh, after, uh, beginning in around May when, um, um, when the, uh, after soon after Biden first announced the, um, the revised withdrawal time of, well, first it was September 11th and then August 31, it was, I mean, these, these provinces, provinces that were, uh, you know, um, they were the strongholds of, of Masood and the Northern Alliance back in the day, we're talking about like Badakhshan and, um, Takhar and I mean, these were the Northern Alliance strongholds and they were the first to go.
I mean, it's incredible.
Um, and, and you saw, um, Kandahar and Helmand, the former Taliban strongholds, they were among the last to go and the ones that were, um, fought over the most, um, that, that, you know, actually put up a fight.
Um, whereas a lot of these, a lot of the, um, the provinces in the North, you know, fell over without a, with, with a few bullets fired.
Um, so yeah, that's, that's certainly, um, uh, paid dividends in the end.
I mean, they were, they, they were never gonna, I guess, and, and that was probably part of the reason that they, they started in the North.
So there were, there was, um, uh, the, the, the dregs of the Northern Alliance and, you know, what became the, uh, Northern resistance front led by the, um, Amin Shah Massoud's son, um, weren't given time to rally their forces and, um, you know, uh, prepare, uh, uh, uh, a resistance of any, um, uh, kind of efficacy and yeah.
And look where it's led.
Yeah.
Bruce strategy on their part.
I think, you know, I was calling at the time, I'll see what they're doing.
They're heading them off at the pass, go ahead and seize, conduce first, huh?
These guys got their act together.
You know, they saw this thing coming.
And I guess, would it be fair to say from your point of view that when Biden kicked the can down the road from May to September, that they just didn't, they stayed on the same timeline of what they were going to do this summer anyway, whether the Americans had already pulled out or whether they were really just starting to and going to over the next couple of months, it was the same difference to them.
And they just went on ahead.
It looked that way.
Yeah.
I mean, look, they, I mean, they beat, they beat the Americans to Kabul.
Like the Americans was still in Kabul when the Taliban arrived.
I mean, it's insane.
And it could have been, it could have been so much worse for the Americans getting out, you know, tens of thousands of, uh, American citizens crammed in the airport.
I mean, it could have been an absolute bloodbath if the Taliban had wanted it to be, um, that, I mean, I don't want to be called the Taliban apologist, but they, they disciplined, um, around the airport when they had this mortal enemy of 20 years, um, literally surrounded on all sides.
Um, yes, granted with a lot of firepower and a lot of air power overhead, but they could have made an absolute mess of that evacuation if they'd wanted to.
Yeah.
I mean, where the Americans are relying on them for security.
Hey, do you know about this?
The Washington post, the Washington post for what it's worth, I, you know, they may or may not be speaking for the CIA at any given time or whatever.
I don't know what it is, but, uh, you know, they claimed that in fact, maybe the Taliban were their source for this, you know, and said that, you know, we offered to the Americans that we'll stay out of Kabul.
You guys keep responsibility for the city of Kabul until you're done with your evacuation.
And then we'll come in then.
And the American said, no, we already don't have enough men for that.
So essentially come on in.
I mean, it was certainly the arrangement the Taliban had wanted with the Afghan government.
Um, and when it became clear on that day, August 15th, that, um, while that had been negotiated, um, in reality, the, the security forces and, you know, all the way up to the president, they were shedding their uniforms and, um, hitting the road.
And it got to the point where, um, there was no one in control of the streets and, um, looting began.
And it was at that point that the Taliban were ordered into the city to take, to take control.
So they actually, um, you know, again, I'm going to get called a Taliban apologist here, but they, they, um, they could have made this takeover a lot worse for everyone than they did.
Even that, I mean, I have to say as a resident here, um, when I saw that, uh, all the police shedding their uniforms and abandoning their posts, I thought, look, the best thing that can happen now is that the Taliban comes in before this becomes, you know, like a, a lawless zone for, um, until they do.
And, and they did, they, they were very reactive.
They, um, they saw what was happening and they, they came in and it, you know, it wasn't perfect in the beginning by any means.
And they, um, admit as much, but, um, look, I just, I can't get over how much, um, uh, how smoothly this transition of power went in comparison to your country, Andrew.
I mean, there's nothing that you said that is an apology for them there to say that somebody is not Pol Pot.
It's not to say that they're a perfect gentleman to say that they're wise enough to be, you know, that they're, you have to say that they're clever enough to play it cool instead of going completely berserk is, you know, I don't know.
That's like just describing the color of the sky, man.
That's, that's not praise, you know, that's just saying it is what it is.
And yes, you're absent and there's just no question about it.
Right.
Who could argue that this looked just like when ISIS rolled into Western Iraq?
It just didn't.
Thank God it didn't, you know, but it didn't.
And, and as we've always said, as everybody who knows anything about this thing has always said that the Taliban are not Al Qaeda, they're conservatives, not radicals.
And there's a big difference there in this case, you know, but anyway, um, speaking of radicals, I mean, let's talk about radicals.
Listen, I'm sure the next time I have to get a driver's license test, the guy giving it to me and deciding whether I'm allowed to drive a car in my own town where I was born and raised is going to be a former member of a CIA death squad.
Is that right?
Down at the DMV.
That's who decides, because this is how people assimilate in America.
When America uses people for, to run their death squads in foreign countries, and then they have to hightail it out of there.
How they assimilate is they get government jobs, which means they become overlords of everybody who's actually from here.
So the next time I get pulled over, it's going to be by a member of, uh, what are they calling them now?
Zero units.
Is that the same thing as a counterterrorism pursuit team or that's a different distinction of CIA?
Same thing.
Okay.
And these zero teams you've done the show about, you know, uh, one time before about these death squads, killing kids in their, um, in their, uh, school barracks essentially.
Um, and all of this and help the CIA death squads and their war crimes are legendary in this war.
So we don't have to redo all of that, but that's why they call them death squads.
I think people get it.
So, but then your story, it's unbelievable that the CIA, they put all these guys on planes and brought them straight here.
They didn't try to get them a place to live, like a little village somewhere in Uzbekistan or something.
They brought them to the United States of America.
Yeah.
I mean, look, there's actually been a lot of, um, praise as we mentioned in the article for, for the way the CIA, um, dealt with their, uh, you know, proxies or partners as they would refer to them.
Um, and, you know, I suppose as far as, as, uh, loyalty goes that they have, um, and that, um, has not been the case with a lot of the other, uh, Afghan units that were not, um, sort of run by the CIA and funded and trained by the CIA and, um, you know, with the relationships that those, that organization had built up with their proxies over the years.
Um, there were a lot more, um, or a lot less shadowy, um, uh, units on the special units under the Afghan national army that, um, have felt very much abandoned.
And I've spoken to a number of, um, American, you know, former, uh, uh, American veterans, Afghanistan veterans who are really angry about the way that, um, you know, their former partners here have been treated and, and left behind.
Um, when, when in comparison to the CIA, you know, they, they really got, um, you know, they rolled out the red carpet for them.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck.
And to give to your friends too, that say libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to libertasbella.com and look at all the great libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at libertarianinstitute.org libertasbella.com.
You guys check it out.
This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called why the Vietnam war nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say 1964 through 1974.
But how do we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in why the Vietnam war by the great Mike Swanson available now.
Yeah.
All right.
So actually, you know what, I'm sorry, man, let me go back one step.
When there's the Taliban are providing security at the airport, their counterparts are the CIA counterterrorism pursuit teams.
These are units.
They're also there providing security at the airports.
They're on the American side, obviously there, but they're sort of working together to vet everyone.
But then there's a story I'm sure you heard about this, at least from reading, you know, watching the BBC on Twitter.
At the very least, you must be familiar with the accusation that after the suicide attack, that somebody on the wall and some said the CIA death squads, their mercenaries opened fire on the crowd.
And one doctor described a bunch of people had, you know, downward sloping gunshot wounds to their upper chest area and their heads and this kind of thing.
And so I wonder if you know anything more about that, if you ever heard anyone confirm that and say that, yes, I saw that happen, that because, you know, originally they even said it was two suicide bombs because 175 killed.
That's a lot.
And then they said, oh, no, what it was, was after a suicide bomb.
Then the bad guys also broke out in machine gun fire.
But then there were no bad guys with machine guns to point out.
So then the question was like, was it the good guys with machine gun fire?
Yeah, look, the jury's definitely still out.
It's bizarre, actually, how little reporting has been done on this.
And I think it just, there was so much going on at the time that and all the news agencies here, I mean, myself included, were so overwhelmed with what was going on.
But yeah, it's definitely a gap in the reporting there.
My understanding is that the zero units were not anywhere near this particular gate at the time, that they were controlled by conventional forces from the US and other coalition countries.
And look, the anecdotal evidence would certainly suggest that there were at least some people who were killed by coalition forces.
Yes.
And that may have been these same guys?
No, I don't think it was.
I don't think the zero units were anywhere near that gate.
Oh, okay.
They were on, as far as I know, they were on a diagonally opposite gate, you know, a couple of miles away.
I'm sorry.
I get you.
And you know what?
I heard you say that, but then I got an email and it broke my brain, apparently, and I forgot that you said that.
Okay.
So, all right.
Well, hopefully, we'll get some more journalism on that aspect right there.
I mean, that's an important story in itself.
But now, so, could you tell me, where did you get the number 7,000 from?
Did they admit that?
They said, yeah, we brought 7,000 CIA guys, you know, assets.
That was Matthew Cole's reporting.
Okay.
So, I don't know where he got that.
All right.
And then?
But it doesn't surprise me at all from, I mean, what I saw, again, anecdotally, I spent a bit of time over near that gate, and there were, you know, there were hundreds, if not thousands of people queued up outside that gate, many of whom looked to be in a posture that suggested that they were actually going to end up inside the airport.
And a number of them were, that I spoke to on one day, were from Khost province, which is home, of course, of the Khost Protection Force, which is one of these counterterrorism pursuit teams that doesn't fall under the same designation as the zero units, but is akin to them.
And then he also just links to the Post and the Hill in their reporting that as the Post puts it, there were 20,000 Afghan quote-unquote partners and their relatives brought here, which he points out would be a third of the 60,000 Afghans that they've taken in overall.
So, two-thirds of them, I guess, would just be random civilians, they're saying.
But, yeah.
Man, and now, did you guys get much reaction from this article that, hey, this is alarming because we don't want Afghan death squad CIA guys to be our deputy sheriffs, you know?
Look, it won't surprise you that most of the attention it did get was from people like yourselves, people like yourself, who is on the lookout for it, and not from the people who like to view the work that the American government does as noble and infallible.
Yeah.
In fact, you're really kind of reigning all over the parade of their one little silver lining in their absolute catastrophic failure here, which is that at least we were able to rescue all of these poor, helpless civilians and get them to safety, and now you're saying, nope, you don't even get that, and they don't want to hear that.
Yeah, I mean, every major newspaper and network, as far as I've seen, has been reporting these very laudatory stories about saving children from the clutches of the CIA.
And, you know, stories about the, you know, saving children from the clutches of death and, you know, barely mentioning the history of these units.
And, you know, it's certainly, I guess it's certainly something that the CIA is not going to want to broadcast too much.
And, you know, I get the feeling that some of these, some of the stories that have come out have been, you know, pushed along by the agency.
They certainly, some of them certainly have that flavor.
And look, I'm not nativist here.
I mean, grab the average Afghan and put him in an American county, he'll be just fine.
I'm not saying that.
I'm only saying guys who are members of CIA death squads.
You know, I got a problem with that.
Warlords and kleptocrats and murderers.
And there are some people America's worked with in Afghanistan with some very bad reputations for very good reason.
And to think that they get to just come and all of a sudden become American naturalized citizens and everything's just fine and, you know, in no time at all, just essentially for public relations purposes at our expense is pretty outrageous, you know?
Yeah, I mean, look, they were on the right team, weren't they?
They threw in a lot with the right side.
And I mean, for once, you know, in one of the very rare occasions you've seen the losers in the war, at least a small portion of them, come out better off as the result.
Yeah.
By the way, this is just a parentheses.
It's just a coincidence, but it's a new thing I learned today.
I'm always learning new things.
The Taliban has a group that they call the Bata Brigade, which has no relation to the uranium-backed group and the George W. Bush-backed group that rules Iraq now.
Entirely separate group, but named after the Battle of Bata, surely, as they are.
So that's just a fun little fact, I guess, for me.
Yeah.
Yeah, these guys are definitely pretty visible around Kabul.
And they're all from the Haqqani side of the Taliban, so they've certainly got a bit of a reputation behind them as well.
I bet they do then, yeah.
God dang.
All right.
Well, there's another tangent there from Anand Gopal's reporting about how the CIA hired Haqqani to be on a counterterrorism pursuit team for a little while there, when he was begging to come in from the cold early in the war.
But then the military kidnapped and tortured his brother at Bagram, and the CIA kicked him out.
Maybe they grabbed him.
I think the military grabbed him, and then the CIA didn't stick up for him.
The CIA let the military have him and abuse him, and then finally let him go, and then made an enemy out of him at that point, where he'd been begging to come in from the cold right then.
And they could have, as bad as he is, he could have been on their side this whole time instead of their deadly enemy this whole time.
And now here he is sitting right in the catbird seat anyway, for God's sake.
Well, at least you won't run into him at the ice cream shop.
I'm sorry?
At least you won't run into him down the gas station, along with the Zero One guys.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
And now, I'm sorry, one last question I wanted to ask you about Afghan society nowadays.
I know this is already a desperately poor country, but it occurs to me that there must be some kind of massive economic crash and recession now, with this massive flow of foreign money now halted, right?
And so there's got to be market corrections of every description going on right now.
And I wonder just how bad of a crisis people are feeling there.
They're already so poor it doesn't make a damn difference, or what?
Yeah, it's definitely being felt.
On many of the main streets in Kabul now, you see dozens if not hundreds of makeshift stalls being set up where people are selling their household goods, not only so they can afford to try and get out of the country, but some tell me that they're doing it just so they can feed themselves, feed their families.
Because yeah, as you say, 75% of the Afghan budget with the former government was foreign funded.
That has now been seized.
And sorry, when I say seized, I mean stifled, as you say, not taken.
But so you've got, yeah, there's not only is salaries not being paid to civil servants, the cash that used to be delivered, physical cash that used to be delivered on a weekly or monthly basis into Afghanistan from the US has stopped.
So you've got a situation where the banks have a major cash shortage, and they are only allowing account holders to withdraw a maximum of $200 per week.
And on top of that, you have, you know, all this divestment across the country where, you know, although it had been declining for the last five or six years after the majority of international forces departed, you've also had a lot of international aid organisations leave in recent months.
Businesses are getting their money or did get their money out of the country.
No one is hiring anymore.
People are laying off staff.
So and the, as I said, the civil servants of the country, and there are, you know, hundreds of thousands of them in Kabul.
I mean, not only have they not been paid since the Taliban came to power, but the lower level ones amongst them, I'm talking about the traffic police and the, I mean, the former police who are, you know, not really, very few of them are in their jobs anymore.
But the street sweepers and municipal workers, they had not been paid for two months from the start of the Taliban regime.
So they're now into their fourth month without a paycheck.
So, yeah, it's pretty desperate.
And coming into winter, we're looking at Kabul being entirely without power because the majority of electricity is imported from the former Soviet republics to the north.
And like the civil servants, those electricity bills have not been paid in the last two months.
And Kabul suffers from massive electricity shortfalls in the winter anyway.
In this case, it's going to be pretty dire, I suspect.
And then are you keeping your eye on this whole ISIS and ETIM?
See, I'm afraid that the, you know, ISIS was sort of kind of, ISIS in Afghanistan was sort of kind of groomed by the NDS and the CIA in the first place back, you know, in the early 2000 teens before they hoisted the black flag and declared loyalty to ISIS and all that.
But it seems like if you rewind further, the Americans have had a relationship with the Uyghurs in the past to use against China back in the Bill Clinton era, for example.
And of course, there's all the hype about China and all the hype about the Uyghurs now.
And I'm not sure if you know this, it's an obscure little detail that the U.S. bombed an ETIM, that's the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, bombed a training camp of theirs that was, you know, hosted by the Taliban up in, what do you call that little weird corridor that sticks off the very little walk on corridor?
Yeah, exactly.
So it's way up there in that weird little thingy that borders China and the Americans bombed it.
But then Pompeo took them off the terrorist list in 2020.
And you would think they'd just leave them on that and break the law.
I mean, what the hell?
It's covert action, right?
Why would they even do that?
But it seemed like such an obvious signal that, you know, when Muslim terrorists who Islamist terrorists are pointed east toward China, maybe they ain't so bad after all again.
And it seems like, you know, I don't know.
There's like two choices, right?
Is the CIA going to try to work with the Taliban to kill these guys?
Or is the CIA going to try to back them and turn them east?
And I just wonder, and you can call me a kook if you want to.
I don't mind.
You don't have feelings.
So just tell me what you think of all those crazy things I just said.
Look, the ETIM is a little bit out of my zone of, my limited zone of knowledge.
But look, I mean, speaking geographically, the border that Afghanistan shares with China is, I think it's about, I think it's 20 miles or 50 miles or something.
And it is through the most inhospitable terrain.
I mean, you certainly can't drive a vehicle through there.
To say that a lot of the routes that the Taliban have used over the years into the tribal areas in Pakistan are passable by vehicle.
But I think geography will curtail the possibilities there to a certain extent.
You did see that there was a really horrific suicide bombing in a Shia mosque in the northern city of Kunduz over the weekend.
And the Islamic State, Khorasan province, claimed that the guy who carried it out was a Uyghur.
So look, they're certainly, they're not, they're playing all these politics to their own benefit.
Throwing fuel on the fire, for sure.
As far as what the CIA plans to do with them, yeah, as I say, I'm not really qualified to say, I'm afraid.
Well, you keep your eye pointed that direction anyway.
One thing I could have added there was one year ago, the Post had it that JSOC was helping the Taliban kill ISIS guys.
That was their priority, their own little kind of mini awakening movement there.
Something we can work with the Taliban on is getting rid of these guys who actually are dangerous to American and Western interests in a way that the Taliban really just aren't, and never were.
Yeah, they definitely, I mean, the Taliban always denied that.
But Wesley Morgan, the guy who reported it, is an excellent journalist, especially in that part of the country.
And look, there are some shared interests there.
We've seen the Zero One guys being resettled into American suburbs.
We'd be fools to write off US supporting the Taliban to eradicate ISIS.
You got that right.
Yeah, or, you know what, I think even aligning with ISIS and ETIM to do something else, you know, I don't think, there's really nothing you could put past the CIA that they don't think is a good idea, no matter how bad of an idea it is, that they'll just do it.
You come across some crazy thing, you're like, man, I can't believe it's that way.
And then you find out the CIA was behind it.
And you go, okay, I guess that makes sense, kind of, you know.
Of course, ISIS-K used to be backed by the CIA.
How could they not have been, right, at the end of the day?
Come on.
All right.
Anyway, I'll let you off the hook.
Thank you so much for your great work and for your bravery staying in Kabul.
You will catch me alive or dead there, buddy.
So you be careful out there, and I hope we talk soon.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks, man.
All the best.
All right, you guys, that's Andrew Quilty.
He's reporting from Kabul, and he's writing at The Intercept.
Hey, there's a reason to look at The Intercept.
This one is with Matthew Cole, but it's good and important, and it's called The CIA's Afghan Proxies.
Accused of war crimes will get a fresh start in the US.
Man.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
