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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
You can find ten years' worth of interviews, more than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003 there.
Next up on the show today is Anne Jones.
She's the author of Cobble in Winter, Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, and more recently, War Is Not Over When It's Over.
She's got this great piece at tomdispatch.com.
Of course, everything foreign policy-wise from Tom Dispatch also runs at antiwar.com under Tom's name.
Tom Graham, Anne Jones, the Afghan endgame, with a question mark at the end.
Welcome to the show, Anne.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks, and thanks for inviting me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I think this is a really important story.
I really wanted people to have a chance to hear you tell it.
First of all, can you tell us about your experience in Afghanistan and your journalism there?
Well, I started going to Afghanistan in 2002, and actually after 9-11 and Bush's war, I was so annoyed by the whole thing.
It was so counter to everything I believed that I decided I would quit this writing business and go try to be useful to women in Afghanistan.
So I went and volunteered with a couple of nongovernmental organizations or NGOs that were trying to assist women, and I did that for most of each of the next four or five years.
But, of course, after I'd been there for two or three years, you could see perfectly clearly which way the wind was blowing, and I was so outraged by the way everything was being mismanaged with complete disregard for what Afghans thought that, of course, I took up writing again, the only skill I have, and wrote a book about what I saw happening in Afghanistan.
And actually, even though that book came out seven years ago now, if you read it, you can sort of understand why nothing ever came right in Afghanistan.
And I've gone back every year since to work again with the women, my women colleagues there, and also to do some reporting for Tom Dispatch and for The Nation.
And things have sort of gone from bad to worse, but I finally decided I needed to know what this U.S. military was doing.
So I've also embedded with the military to try to see how they were looking at things and what that experience was like.
And I'm afraid I've gone right back to reporting from the civilian point of view.
And I just spent January there talking again with my old colleagues, helping them out with some things, but mostly just talking to Afghans about how they see what's going on and what they think the future holds in store for them, now that the U.S. and NATO forces are going to be leaving.
Well, now, when it comes to the core of the failure, is it the Americans or is it just Afghanistan?
They don't want to be fixed or taken over or helped or made right or whatever else.
Oh, dear.
Oh, no.
No.
After the American invasion, I was amazed when I first went there, thinking, boy, nobody's going to want to see an American after we've killed about 4,000 civilians in Kabul with those initial bombings.
But everyone was so glad to see the back of the Taliban and so hopeful and so eager to get to work, despite the fact that their city had just been completely destroyed, because they thought that America really meant it when they said they wanted to give Afghanistan a fresh start.
So the optimism and the willingness to work, the eagerness to get right at it in those first two years was amazing.
Just amazing.
Now, does that count for Kandahar, too, or that's just in the capital?
No, it was true in Kandahar as well.
Communication was so bad in the country at that point that there were parts of the country that for years still believed that these soldiers running around were the Russians.
So it's hard to say exactly what the viewpoint was in many different parts of the country, but I think that was the general feeling, and it was certainly pervasive in Kabul, which was also full of refugees at the time.
But, of course, the first thing that the U.S. and the so-called international community did was to call that bond conference of their good pals and put in place a government that was the same old government.
It was the people that were the same old suspects.
It was the people, the men, who had fought with the Mujahideen, who were the Mujahideen warlords that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had funded to fight against the Soviets during that proxy war against the Soviet Union.
And these men were universally people that the Afghan citizens wanted to be tried for war crimes, and they certainly thought that even if that was not going to happen, they should never be allowed to have any place in government.
Well, of course, they were all put right back in place governing the country, and they've been there ever since.
And Afghans usually refer to that and to the meetings and constitutional convention and so on that went on just after that.
We're talking now about the years 2003, 2004, even a little bit into 2005.
They refer to that as the great mistake.
And if the international community had had the courage of its convictions to really kick these old fighters out of there and side with the Afghan people that they weren't qualified to lead them, if they really had tried to bring in new leaders by a more democratic conference, including all sides in that conference, maybe it would not have worked.
But Afghans believe that it would have.
If they had been able to choose new leaders, make a fresh start with the international community behind what they wanted, which is a democracy, then things would have been very different.
You know what I don't understand, though, is why the Americans did it the way they did it, because it's not like General Dostum and the rest of these guys are very reliable.
Hamid Karzai, like you say in your article, which I swear we're going to get to here before too long, is that they're done.
Hamid Karzai, without the Americans to back him and his government, they wouldn't be the government.
Simple as that, right?
So why wouldn't they want to back the creation of a government that actually has a little bit of its own legitimate authority?
Well, as you know, Scott, the U.S. has a long and unfortunate history of backing the wrong guys in a lot of countries, and we usually pick somebody we think we can have control over.
We're concerned about how the people in the country might feel about that person's leadership or the leadership of that group.
And these are the old familiar faces, you know?
It's that old saying, the devil you know is better than the one you don't know.
And we certainly knew a bunch of devils, the guys that we funded in that war against the Soviets.
And we picked them precisely because they were very religious.
The head of the CIA at that time, Bill Casey, was a very devout Catholic, and he thought, who better to side with in defeating those godless communists than these super-religious Muslims?
So we picked them because they were as religious as we are.
And we were warned at the time by the Soviets, by Afghans themselves, by many Europeans who knew the country better than we did, and even by Americans who had spent time in the country and knew it quite well.
We were warned that we were siding with the people who were going to turn around and get us, and that, of course, is exactly what has happened.
I remember it was Anand Gopal from the Christian Science Monitor had published this thing, and it was from all the warlords that they sided against, basically.
The Haqqanis, the different so-called Taliban, but also different groups allied with the Taliban.
I think it was a good maybe ten or a dozen different of these warlord guys saying, hey, listen, you win, Americans, you sack Kabul, you're the ones in charge, but we'll work with you.
If you'll only just work with us, we can make a deal.
And the Americans told them all to go to hell, and they're the ones who, you know, reading your article, it sounds like they're going to be the ones who really take up the power when the Americans go, because even though it makes sense to bat Karzai because he needs us for, say, 2004 through, I don't know, 2012, we got to go.
And so now the country's going to be turned over to our enemies, and it's going to be like the fall of Saigon and a giant catastrophe.
Well, guess what?
I mean, the great elephant in the middle of the room is all the Taliban and Taliban sympathizers and former members of the Taliban government who have been in this Karzai government all along.
And the High Peace Council that he appointed to make peace has 12 members of the former Taliban government and many, many sympathizers.
I mean, these people have never left.
They are, in many respects, on the same side of things.
They're battling each other for power.
But in a great many things, and one that particularly concerns me is their views of women, they think just alike.
So, you know, I hate to keep harping on something that happened in the very beginning, because people always want to know, well, what can we do about it now?
How can we do things now?
The point is that when you make such a disastrous, humongous mistake in the beginning that people who know better have warned you against, you go ahead with it in all your arrogance and power, then you're stuck trying to work things out, and that's essentially what we've done ever since.
We've thrown more money, more soldiers, more weapons, more allies, everything we could think of at this problem.
But we were never, we were just looking then to try to dominate it by force.
And it doesn't work when you've set things up in the wrong way in the first place.
So, well, I guess I am horribly ignorant about this war I've been covering for a dozen years here.
If there are so many Taliban guys inside the Karzai government as it is, then they ought to really be able to make a deal when the Americans have to leave, if they ever leave.
I mean, I know they signed a deal with the states until 2024, but it doesn't seem like you're buying that in your article.
I don't know.
But can't they make a deal with Mullah Omar and actually not have a fall of Saigon here?
Just Dostum and Omar will have to shake hands, and then they'll go about waging war together against the people of the country.
I mean, that's what a government is, right?
Well, they're working to make this kind of power-sharing agreement.
They're working on this from many different angles, the U.S. and other countries, trying to get some sort of agreement that can look like peace.
The problem is that whenever you make a power-sharing agreement among militia leaders or, you know, militants who've been fighting for years, and I'm talking now about worldwide, wherever that kind of agreement is made to end a civil war, it always falls apart in the next year or two, because the people who are sitting down at the table and making the peace agreement are the guys who've been making war all these years.
They don't know how to make peace.
They're war makers.
They're all after power.
So they may make a temporary agreement, but it's not going to last very long.
And Afghans realize that, which is why so many already of those who can afford it are leaving the country on legitimate passports that take them out of the country.
And so many others, the poorer people, are leaving with smugglers.
They say 36,000 people left legitimately last year, and the estimate is at least 50,000 who left with smugglers trying to find their way to Europe.
Many of them have died already along the way.
So, you know, people are abandoning the country because they recognize that any kind of peace agreement that's made between these old warriors is not going to last, and things are going to go from bad to worse.
The other factor, of course, is just the economic collapse that is already occurring with the removal of troops and members of the international community and then the more substantial citizens and business people of Kabul who are leaving and taking their money and their investments elsewhere.
Yeah, well, and then now you're on the slippery slope, right, where the place just becomes a worse and worse place to live, and more and more people who have the means to be able to leave, leave, and those are the very same people who could be helping put things back together, particularly running businesses, getting goods and services to people who need them.
That's exactly right.
It's such a shame that anybody should have to be so poor in the 21st century.
It just makes no sense, but that's it.
Well, you know, this has really been a historic tragedy for Afghanistan because they've had, in the last century, they had several turnovers of government, starting with the communist coup, well, the Republican coup first, and then a communist coup, and then the Russian invasion, and then the Civil War, and then the Americans, and after every one of those dramatic changes in the government, there was this kind of exodus of the best qualified people.
So Afghans today, you know, it's not a big country.
It's a little smaller than Texas, and it has probably maybe 25 million people at most, but Afghans worldwide are the largest population of refugees from a single country.
So the people who've left that country over the years since the 1970s are now, you know, very successful citizens and business people and so on.
One in Australia, in several different parts of the U.S., there are substantial populations in Canada, and in all the major European countries.
They try to come back always when they think there's going to be a change for the better.
A lot of them came back after the American invasion thinking they would be part of this new start for Afghanistan, but when they saw who the international community was putting into power, they kept trying for a while, but then most of them left and went back to the countries in which they've made new lives for themselves earlier.
So this continues to happen over and over, and it's a very sad thing for all of them.
All right, now, in Iraq, when they really fought that war the whole time for the Shiite parties, who have the majority of the population backing them, they helped them take Baghdad, and by the end of it all, they said, all right, thanks, now get the hell out, because they didn't need us, right?
But that whole time they were saying things like, well, we're going to stay on the Korean model, about 50 years, something like that.
They were in real denial.
Bush was pushing for, what, 54 Iraqi bases even in 2008, before he signed the thing saying, okay, I guess we'll just go ahead and go.
But now, so the reason I say all that is to try to make the parallel or see if you can take apart the parallel to Afghanistan, where they've been saying things like, we want to stay until 2024.
We'll call it 2014, but we really mean 10 years after that at least, and I just wonder, what does that mean?
How many soldiers do you think that they plan on leaving there, or any at all, or what is that?
I can't answer for the military, Scott.
I have no idea.
The numbers keep going up and down and sideways, but we started talking very early on after the invasion.
Donald Rumsfeld was already talking about permanent bases in Afghanistan.
That didn't make the papers much in the U.S., but it certainly made the papers in Afghanistan.
So Afghans have actually thought all along that the U.S. was planning to stay forever, and finally they have gotten pretty tired of it.
But at least the people who live in Kabul wouldn't mind having Americans stay around to do whatever it is.
They want to do in smaller numbers, because the international forces, the International Security Assistance Force, which was taken over then by NATO, has actually protected Kabul all this time throughout the wars.
So that apart from occasional attacks and IEDs and so on, Kabul has been relatively peaceful, even though it's so heavily fortified.
So people in Kabul are worried, if all forces are withdrawn, then what happens to them?
Because then they think the Taliban really will overrun the city.
So people in the capital don't mind the U.S. keeping some forces there, and they believe the U.S. wants to stay there, because it would be so convenient for the U.S. then to bring pressure to bear on Iran and on China.
It's a convenient place for the U.S. to have bases, and it's okay with them.
The people in the countryside in Afghanistan feel a lot differently, because they've suffered the most getting caught in the crossfire between NATO and the Americans and the Taliban, and they just don't want any foreign forces around, period.
It's been a few years now, but when I talked with Mala Lajoria, she was just saying, stop helping me, just get out.
And she knew that the women of Afghanistan are up against a real conflict.
They know that they have their problems.
But she was just saying, nothing you can do can help me.
So all you're doing really is putting off the day when the people of Afghanistan finally have a chance to reckon with Dostum and with Mullah Omar and the rest of these guys and pick someone else.
But really, you keep saying that you're trying to help the women of Afghanistan, but really you're just making things worse, and you're putting off the time when we can finally try to make things right ourselves.
Well, I think that's exactly right, and of course it was Mala Lajoria who so famously stood up and said those things at the first Loya Jirga in 2003, the first meeting.
And she stood up and said, why are all these war criminals sitting in the front row?
Why aren't they on trial somewhere?
Why aren't they in Pulicharki, the prison?
And she had to be put under U.N. protection because, of course, her opinions didn't sit well with those warlords.
And people at the time, the men in power, really denounced her as this hothead, and she was then elected by a very wide margin to parliament, and they got her thrown out of the parliament too, and she's been under death threats ever since.
And the word that goes around about her is, oh, she's such an extremist.
In fact, she was expressing a point of view that was very commonly held in Afghanistan at the time, and still is.
But the people she was denouncing, those warlords who are still there in the government, have so much power and are so unscrupulous that it's not only very dangerous to be Mala Lajoria, but it's very dangerous to be a person who stands up beside her and says, you know, she's right.
Yeah, it's got to be really hard.
And, of course, with a future coming that doesn't look very bright, really, either.
I mean, one way or the other, like you're saying, they made all these worse mistakes way back then, whether the Americans leave in 2014 or 2024.
They still are stuck with the Dostums and Mullahs of Afghanistan, at least for the medium term, right?
Yes, exactly.
And also, I mean, we've been talking here as though when the U.S. leaves, then maybe bad things are going to start to happen.
So I think we need to get this in perspective.
I don't mean it like that.
I mean, it's more like the bad things that will be happening then will no longer be distorted by the American presence, and it'll be more like, you know, the results will be more like natural power where it belongs, rather than who gets paid off and armed by the Americans.
You know what I mean?
Yes, I understand that point of view.
But what I need to say is that things have already turned around for Afghan women, and that is very little publicized.
But from about 2004, 2005, there were a series of assassinations of women who were leaders for women in one way or another.
Some were women who violated the Taliban's rules.
So women who became presenters on TV, women who were police officers, women who worked with NGOs that assisted women.
And no one was ever arrested for any of those assassinations.
And not only was nobody ever arrested, but neither Karzai nor anybody in his government spoke out about this at all.
So, of course, once it was clear that, hey, nobody's going to pay a penalty for this, then this really got to be routine.
And those assassinations of women who stand up for women in any capacity continue month after month after month, along with the assassinations and other punishments of schoolgirls, schoolteachers.
Now the girls who are working in the polio vaccination campaign.
One was just shot and killed while I was there.
And this happens on a weekly or monthly basis, over and over again.
It's been happening now for, what, eight years on a steady basis.
And no one in the government has ever said a word against it.
And no one has ever paid any price for it.
So that tells you already where women stand in this country.
I knew that there was horrible violence and even political assassinations and all that.
But I've got to admit, I'm pretty astounded that nobody says a word about it.
And no male politician will stick his neck out whatsoever on this.
No, no, never, never.
And, you know, when we have these other crimes, like the green-on-blue crimes, where Afghan police or soldiers kill their trainers or other members of the NATO or U.S. military, boy, that is big news.
That is a terrible crime.
But you can, if the Taliban shoots down a woman who's on the provincial council in Parwan province and kills her and her husband and wounds their children severely, not a word is said.
Well, I'm sorry that we have to end it here.
I hope I can get you back on the show and learn much more about Afghanistan.
Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Scott.
I'm sorry I'm such a bringer of bad news.
Well, it's not your war, you know.
You're doing your best.
We don't hold you responsible.
Okay, thank you.
Everybody, that is Ann Jones, and she's writing over at Tom Dispatch.
This piece is called The Afghan Endgame.
Her books are Kabul in Winter, Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, and the most recent one from 2010 is War Is Not Over When It's Over, and that's about women in the war zone there.
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