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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of its for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of bombs in the world today, my own government.
Aren't you guys introducing Mei Zhang?
She's a fellow at the Cary Institute, a visiting scholar at NYU and reporter for The Intercept where she has this really important article, a four-year-old girl was the sole survivor of a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan.
Then she disappeared.
Losing sight is actually what's called losing sight.
Welcome back to the show, Mei.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
Great reporting.
Very important story.
And I guess, am I right, take us back to September 2013 here.
September 2013, early afternoon, there was a pickup truck that picked up a bunch of people who were mostly related, part of an extended family and a few other stragglers.
And they set off from a city called Asadabad, which is the provincial capital of Kunar province, which is in eastern Afghanistan.
Listeners may remember Kunar from the documentary Restrepo or the documentary Lone Survivor, the Hollywood movie about an American soldier who gets stranded in Pesh Valley.
And so from here, from Asadabad, the truck takes off and it's headed for a tiny village called Gambir, which is in the Pesh Valley.
And that drive is meant to be about three hours.
But because the road conditions are so terrible, it takes some extra hours.
And along the way, it's hit by a drone strike or what the U.S. military likes to call a precision strike and everybody dies.
All passengers die more or less immediately.
But while the villagers are moving the bodies back to Gambir to prepare them for burial, they realize that actually one of the passengers, a four-year-old girl named Aisha is alive.
And she is, you know, the villagers really should ask for water.
And that's how they realized that she was alive.
And so the family members take her back to Asadabad, to the hospital there.
And hospitals in these far flung areas are not the best equipped.
And so then she was hurried to Jalalabad, which is the nearest city.
Jalalabad is a city that's between Asadabad and Kabul.
And then again, from there, they realize that there isn't much they can do.
She at that point had, you know, lost her vision.
You know, there was sign of life, but really barely.
And so then with the help of various people who are involved, she is then taken to a military hospital just by the airport.
It had been run by the French at the time.
And she's treated there for about a week.
And during that week, the reason why she kind of comes to fame within the Afghan local media is because she is visited by then President Hamid Karzai, who had been growing upset for the past couple years at the civilian casualties that the foreign forces had been incurring in Afghanistan, which, you know, he felt that was just an unconscionable sin.
And yet there was nothing that had been done about this.
And he sort of, when he was asked why he was dragging his feet on signing the bilateral security agreement, the BSA is the legal framework that allows for foreign troops to remain in country.
Of course, you know, the big majority of them being Americans.
And when he was asked, you know, why would you not sign the BSA, he would often talk about civilian casualties.
And one of the reasons, the examples that he gave was this case of this young girl, Aisha.
When I spoke with President Karzai, he also talked about many other cases.
And I think that's really something very, very important to remember.
We know about the story of Aisha because, you know, many reporters heard about her.
It was reported in local media.
A lot of foreign reporters picked it up as well.
But really, there are many cases like this that we won't even, we will never really hear of because a lot of their strikes and drone strikes happen in areas that I certainly don't have access to, let alone Afghans who don't live in those areas.
And so going back to Karzai, he had spoken about Aisha publicly.
But what had happened to her is that after about a week of her being treated at this French hospital, from the perspective of the surviving family members, I mean, in the airstrike, the drone pardon me, Aisha loses her eyes, her nose, her lower lip, her left arm, you know, degrees burn on her torso.
And she also loses her mother, her father, her grandmother, her younger brother.
But unbeknownst to, you know, people at the hospital, she has, you know, surviving maternal uncle, paternal uncle, you know, grandmother, grandfather on the other side of the family, and, you know, a whole host of extended family members.
And from their perspective, you know, one day they go to visit her at the hospital and she's gone, she disappears.
And months later, she's located, she's found at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.
And the NGO that helped her bring her there is an NGO called Solace for the Children that operates out of their offices in North Carolina.
And, you know, in the investigation, I found that they had strong and also tenuous ties to the U.S. military, but also various local churches.
And they were in the business of bringing young children, war victims from Afghanistan for treatment in America.
And Aisha had come, you know, through this program, but had not been, you know, her, you know, existing family, the surviving family members had not been informed or aware about.
And so from their perspective, she had basically effectively gone missing.
One of the rules or laws that Karzai passed when he was head of state was to ban adoption of Afghan children.
I think it was like an anti-trafficking measure.
And so she wasn't allowed to, you know, there was no way for anyone to adopt her.
But, you know, now she has a guardian, an American guardian, lives with a family, and is receiving reconstructive surgery on her face.
And I guess what I try to do is to illustrate what happens in just one of many.
I mean, there's been hundreds and hundreds of these drone strikes in Afghanistan for the past 17 years.
And we never really know the human cost of any of them because in part logistically it's very difficult.
But in this case, you know, it's a case study of what happens to just one of the many, many airstrikes and, sorry, drone strikes that we hear about being reported.
Yeah.
Well, there's so much to go back over there already.
So first of all, I think just on that point, how important it is to emphasize, I guess, the sort of out of sight, out of mind nature of this, that first of all, drone strikes, even compared to airstrikes, as you say, it's important to separate those out because at least in the common understanding, not that this is necessarily true, a drone strike is that much more precise than a F-18 flying by and dropping a bomb because the drones can loiter for a long period of time and do such a better job of surveilling their targets and making sure that they're only killing women and children.
And they call them surgical strikes.
And so the idea is that, hey, compared to shock and awe, that means comparatively few collateral casualties.
And so, you know, I think mostly we don't hear too much about the strikes, even if we know they're going on.
Well, we meaning just Americans in general.
And then we assume that, hey, they're taking out bad guys.
The story is almost never brought to us that, hey, look what happened to this little girl.
I mean, when they say injured, they mean maimed beyond your imagination.
That's what they're really talking about.
The level of violence that was brought to this small child.
And as you said, she was the only survivor.
Everybody else got it worse than her.
Yeah.
And her story really illustrates how we live in a culture and society that really demand perfection out of our victims.
I mean, the reason why I was able to write about her and the reason why readers are so sympathetic is because it's very clear that a four-year-old girl has to be innocent.
I mean, God forbid had the sole survivor been a fighting age male.
I mean, I don't know if I would have done this investigation because I wouldn't even have heard of him.
And that's something that's really, it's a point that is lost on people, but an important one nonetheless.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the idea is, and we know this from the documents and all that, right?
Some of the documents leaked to Jeremy Scahill, also at The Intercept there and The Assassination Complex in that book, where they talk about where, yeah, any fighting age male is considered an enemy killed in action unless they're disproven.
Unless somebody comes with, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, they prove that, no, really, this guy was just a farmer, you know, something like that.
Then they might mark it down as, oh, whoops.
But otherwise, they get labeled enemy killed in action just for being, and fighting age means what, over 12?
You know, like any teenage boy's life or any 20-year-old man or 30 or 40-year-old man's life is forfeit just for being a man and being in Afghanistan, you know?
That's crazy.
And then, yeah, like you're right, the perfection we demand as a society of our victims, right?
Like, what if the victim was a fighting age male who had been a former fighter for the Taliban, but he left all that behind years ago?
What about that?
No, forget him, right?
We don't care about that.
But a four-year-old, well, she's just an angel no matter where she's from.
What can you say about her, you know?
How can you slander a four-year-old?
And so, yeah, you're right.
It's horrible that you're sort of forced to resort to covering stories in this way, kind of.
In the first place, as you said, you'd have never heard of the fighting age male out there who got killed.
But then, secondly, you know, people would be that much more skeptical and look at your article that much more sideways if it was about somebody who, gee, I don't know, might have had a rifle or something, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
How many people died in the original drone strike here?
Well, so that's the point of contention.
I actually don't remember exactly how many.
I'm sorry.
That's terrible of me.
But, you know, the UN and, yeah, the United Nations Office in Afghanistan, the NATO investigative unit all did research investigations into this particular drone strike and couldn't figure out how many had died.
And the list that they came up with were, I would run these names by, you know, by all the villagers, and they told me that they just never, ever heard of any of them before.
And so how is it possible that these names got on the list?
I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, obfuscation, but also just the, like, uncaring, you know, way in which a lot of these investigations were conducted.
In the example that I talk about in particular with the UN human rights officer calling up an NDS officer who's responsible for the region.
NDS is the spy agency, the Afghan spy agency.
And he, as I just have in the story, so the human rights officer who's in charge of the investigation calls up the spy guy who's in charge of, you know, and asks him, hey, did you hear about this drone strike?
And the spy agency guy relays information to the human rights officer who then writes up his report, which becomes a kind of a truth, right?
That's the number that is referenced in various reports and successive, you know, conversations within the UN and then, you know, in the larger international community.
But then what I did was I not only went to, you know, talk to the UN's human rights officer, I went to his source who was this NDS operative.
And when I met with him in Asadabad, it was quickly clear that he himself had received second or even third hand information because he hadn't even been in the country.
He had actually been away when the drone strike happened in India receiving treatment to go see like an ENT doctor.
And I mean, it's really that's another incredible thing, the ways in which information travels from rural areas into urban areas and how it's so easy for mistakes to be made at that level, the local level.
And then, you know, as it gets related, metastasizes into a kind of a truth.
Yeah, well, such as reporting from a war zone, I guess.
You do have a picture here of the red pickup truck decimated by the drone strike here.
An article at the Intercept.
All right, so go ahead.
No, no, I was just gonna say the thing that was incredible to me was that, I mean, I would have imagined that if something so horrific happened, they would want to just get rid of it.
But it's somehow clung on to this weird memento.
And I asked why.
And they said something like, you know, because we never want to forget.
And what was really jarring for me, and I don't think it made it into the copy, is that when I was when I went to go check out the carcass, the what remained of the truck, it had really nothing had been changed, it just kind of remained there.
And incredibly enough, I found little bits of the blue burka that the woman wear that were still kind of clinging on to, you know, the various scrap metals around.
And yeah, they just wanted to sort of, you know, hold on to it as like a memory of this, this horrifying thing that had happened to them.
And the other thing that I was really struck by in reporting the story was how we have since erected all these recourses for justice when things like this happen, right?
We have these Salacia payment programs that are, you know, condolence payments, pardon me, that you're meant to give out to victims and survivors.
But as I as I mentioned in the story, according to internal NATO documents, the Salacia payment, the condolence payment had been given to a gentleman named Ghulam Dastigar.
But when I spoke with for this story, I must have spoken with over 50 villagers, and none of them had heard of him.
It's clearly a, you know, like a fictional character made up name.
And that's the kind of accounting that NATO relies on for accountability.
Right.
And now you say in here, I think this is important for getting to the mindset of the people on the receiving end here, and what this is like for them.
Life under drones, as one university report a few years ago put it about the drone war in Pakistan.
No living under drones.
That's it living under.
Just three months earlier, you write, according to villagers, a drone had killed a woman and her cow in a neighboring village.
When the drones flew overhead, the laborers knew to spread out away from one another to diffuse the chances of being targeted.
It was as routine as a smoke break.
This is just something they've incorporated to their into their lives is that this is just how it is all the time.
Oh, you hear that buzz?
Everybody spread out.
So that way, if they kill one of us, hopefully they won't kill all of us.
But meanwhile, they're, they're spreading out what in the fields.
They're laborers.
They're not fighters.
They're not doing anything.
It's a work out there, you know, sowing and reaping crops as best they can.
And given the circumstances.
So anyway, I just think, you know, stop for one minute, or it's not even a minute, give it 10 seconds to pretend that that's what life is like.
That you live in a place where the Americans are constantly flying remote control planes above you that and dropping 500 pound bombs on you and your neighbors.
Sometimes it happens.
Sometimes it doesn't.
You know, it's just, it's it's completely unreal.
And of course, the mythology is that like, yeah, those Afghans would be flying drones over Austin, Texas if it wasn't for the war.
But who really believes that other than like elementary school kid?
The other thing that we talk about in Afghanistan, the unseen consequence of these drones, drone strikes and airstrikes is that they all have they often happen in rural areas.
But what that's done to the conflict is that it is driven insurgent groups to seek revenge in urban areas where air power has, you know, no purpose really.
And there is a direct causal link between the drone strikes and the airstrikes that the American military has not moved on to because there's obviously zero public appetite for boots on the ground type action.
There's a direct causal link between that pivot.
And then the spectacular attacks we see in close knit quarters in urban urban areas.
And I don't know if you've, you've seen but you know, in the past week, it's been it's one of the bloodiest weeks in Afghanistan.
I have but maybe the audience is not.
Can you catch us up on a little of the news?
Um, in the past couple weeks, really, it's been there's just been an onslaught of attacks in the Save the Children office here in Afghanistan, an army garrison, a international hotel on the road, the largest one happened a couple days ago, on a road that is traditionally blocked, even for UN vehicles near the Ministry of Interior, the old area where that used to be.
And it was an ambulance that, you know, was allowed to enter, and it blew up.
And the death toll, I think the latest one that I saw was a little over 100, which is always suspect, because the government here has a tendency of underplaying as to how many people would have actually been killed.
And there's a real sense of helplessness among Afghans, and also a lot of resentment against the government.
Because, you know, this means that the government has failed in certain ways.
And that's exactly what that's exactly the message that the insurgent groups want to send, you know, they do these things, because the message that they want to send to the people is to tell them that your government can't protect you.
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And you know, I wonder, actually, the last time we spoke, it was about militias belonging to what?
Oh, it was a Hazara group, right?
That had been going around persecuting posh tunes.
That makes me wonder then, whether you know of reprisal type attacks after these maskers were then innocent postures, because that's another big point of doing terrorist attacks like that is to provoke reprisals in order to drive more people into your camp too, as a two step process.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, the attacks in Afghanistan have been, I mean, the Hazara militia group was, I mean, that's sort of almost in a different category.
I'm not really sure how to loop that back in.
But a lot of these spectacular attacks have been categorically, you know, it's been, you know, insurgent groups attacking Shia shrines, Shia otherwise places of worship.
And there's just been a long, you know, tradition of that, which is deeply unfortunate.
I mean, more or less every other Shia holiday, you can assume that, expect that something like that will happen.
And yeah, I'm sure there are reprisals on much, much sort of local regional levels.
But again, I mean, the frustration about reporting in Afghanistan in 2018, is that so much of the country is just not accessible to so many people.
I mean, it's not really even a, because I'm a foreigner, I can't go, it's, you know, I was talking to a friend the other day, who's from Jaws, in the north, doesn't matter where exactly, northern Afghanistan.
And he told me that he himself can't, you know, go three kilometers out of the Sheberghan, which is the provincial capital there.
There's a real sort of balkanizing that happens where, which happens, you know, it's, that's the thing that happens, you know, throughout history, right?
No, is he talking about the Taliban, or he's just talking about, because that's not, that's not really Taliban country up there, right?
That's ISIS.
It's ISIS.
It's Daesh up there.
Oh, I see.
And then, so let me ask you this, and because I wanted to ask you about this, and we're going to get back to your news story here in a minute, too.
But I wanted to ask you also about the Islamic State.
And, you know, I had read some really great articles at Afghan Analysts about how these guys were really Tariqi Taliban from Pakistan, who had fled from the Obama drone war and the Pakistani assaults on the Swat Valley back in 2010, and were Pakistani refugees in Afghanistan, and then decided to declare themselves the rulers in this, you know, small province, this little county out there, I guess, in Nangarhar.
And once they took that over and took the name of the Islamic State, then, in fact, they said that the US, pardon me, not the US, although that may be implied, but that the Afghan government even backed them for a while, because they were hoping to use them in a tit-for-tat way against the Pakistani government, the way the Pakistani government backs the Afghan Taliban against the Afghan government.
And they were going to try to use them like that, although it didn't really work out.
But so, and I actually saw something the other day that was saying that the, and it was actually a very mainstream type report, I can't remember what it was, that was saying that the Islamic State in Afghanistan is almost entirely this one Pakistani tribe, and that it seems incredibly important to American audiences that they call themselves ISIS, but in fact, it seems like they're a lot more like local Taliban insurgent fighters than international terrorists.
But then you're in Kabul, so you tell me.
Yeah, the ISIS, the, you know, Afghanistan chapter of ISIS is very local.
And so, as you say, regional dynamics, what's happening in Iran and Pakistan play in way more than what's happening, you know, in Iraq and Syria, certainly.
And the concern, I guess, you know, why should an American audience care really is this question of how does the war end?
And I mean, it was impossible when we just had the Taliban as an insurgent group to negotiate with, and now it's been, it's fractured into, you know, the Taliban, we talk about the Haqqani network, as well as ISIS.
And there's obviously no cohesion within those groups either.
And so, it's going to be very, very difficult to, you know, arrive to add some kind of a resolution.
I mean, it doesn't help either that our President Trump has publicly made statements about not wanting to engage in any kind of a political settlement.
I mean, that is a uninformed opinion of a very short-sighted non-expert, right?
I mean...
Well, I'm telling you, that's the official plan.
There's no question about it.
I mean, McMaster and those guys' strategy, McMaster himself has said that in our plan, we will consider beginning to think about talking with them in the later stages of this four-year plan.
So, into Trump's second term is when they're going to think about starting to maybe talk with them.
But they have a lot of degrading of the enemy to do between now and then, they think.
But listen, I just don't understand what they think is different this time.
I mean, if we're just looking at sheer numbers, I know we've been talking about the mini-surge, or meant to send more troops to do what, it's unclear to me.
But we've done this before already under President Obama.
He sent 140,000 troops, and that didn't change anything.
And so, I don't understand what the Trump administration thinks is going to change this time around.
What is the definition of insanity?
It's doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Yeah.
Hey, what's the definition of murder?
Killing people when it's just politics.
And that's the real answer, is they just need to keep fighting.
They know they're not going to win anything, and they say they know they're not going to win anything.
They admit that all the time.
They even call it the victory problem.
Yeah.
And then in the new book, Fire and Fury, and this part sounds completely credible to me, I don't know how well-sourced it is, but he quotes Dina Powell, who is McMaster's deputy on the National Security Council, saying, well, look, I mean, pulling out means losing a war.
And obviously, President Trump can't lose a war, politically speaking, that would be bad.
So, that's the way they think, just as the same as LBJ saying, well, I'm not going to be the first president to lose a war.
Let Nixon lose it after I'm gone.
And if millions of people have to die between now and then, screw them.
And that's the attitude.
This is the same with Obama.
Obama knew that it wasn't going to work when he launched the surge in 2009.
And he did it anyway, because otherwise, they would have called him weak.
And he was weak.
So, he gave in and did what they wanted.
And that's the kind of honest accounting that needs to happen.
I mean, the American policy in Afghanistan does not, it's not for the Afghan people.
It's for it's for, you know, the American empire.
And frankly, as you say, it's to ensure that they win the next election.
And I think it's intellectually dishonest to make this argument to say otherwise, really, which is what the public messaging has been.
Well, and you know, the role of the military and all this has changed, too, where, you know, under Bush, I don't think they felt like they needed to or anything.
But under Obama and Trump, both the military have done full court presses to force the next surge.
And, you know, they basically blackmailed Obama, it was going to be, you know, Petraeus, McChrystal and Gates, we're going to all resign and say that he was unfit to be the commander in chief if he didn't give into the surge.
I mean, that's pretty much just simple extortion there on the part of the deep state as they people are finally now caught.
So glad that term is caught on the real power, the fourth branch, the spies and the generals and the admirals.
And we want to talk about, as William S. Lynn says, the Pentagon budget is the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
It's a trillion dollars a year.
You try to turn that off.
Good luck.
They're not going to let you turn it off.
That's the deal.
Just like in the movie Nixon.
You ever see the movie Nixon, where he goes and this is this really happened, where he goes to talk to the hippie kids at the Lincoln Memorial and the girl says to him, you can't stop it, can you?
And he's like, oh, well, you know, yeah, no, he can't.
He's Nixon and he can't stop it.
All right.
Anyway, back to your awesome journalism here.
So these do-gooders have kidnapped this little girl and thank goodness, kind of because they've really helped her a lot, except that what about the rights of her kid back home?
Right.
What's going on there?
Yeah.
Well, she obviously can't come back because she needs treatment.
And so, you know, they're doing what's best for her.
But it is just very deeply unfortunate that it happened with zero consent from her family members.
And it frankly represents a lot of the paternalistic attitude that a lot of NGOs and development and humanitarian organizations in Afghanistan operate with.
I mean, that's kind of the inherent attitude that you see quite a bit and is then distilled and represented in this one particular case where they didn't bother to inform next of kin because I mean, there's a they I guess they messed up that well, you know, immediate family's dead.
And so there's no understanding of Afghan culture where extended family also plays a big role in the raising of children.
She's great.
I mean, anybody in the world is going to say, give me my second cousin before you hand them off to some strangers on the other side of the world now.
Well, so but are they even saying that once her surgeries are over, they're going to let her I mean, I think you talk about her going back home, but that was just temporary to visit and then they took her back to the US again.
Is that it?
Yeah, she she had returned to because when she first went to America for treatment, she was given a she's traveling of special visa that is an emergency one.
And so she returned to get all her paperworks organized and then she flew back out.
And I mean, it will take a long time for her to receive surgery.
And sadly, there is a bit of a tradition, a history of young victims of war in Afghanistan and elsewhere being brought to America and other places for by do-gooders for treatment.
I mean, the other famous case that I was thinking about while I was working on the story is another woman named Aisha.
I don't know if you remember, she appeared, her name's Bibi Aisha, she appeared in the cover of Time Magazine.
And she had been, her nose had been cut by, they said Taliban.
But then it turned out that actually, you know, it was actually her family member who had done this, which was an inconvenient truth, because when the story first broke, she became a kind of a symbol for the anti-Taliban resistance.
And you know, what would happen?
I think that the title was something like what happened, what would happen if we leave?
And it was an argument, you know, in favor of the surge and further military presence to say that we have to remain in Afghanistan to protect Afghan women.
But actually, it turned out that, of course, like any story, it was far more nuanced and the violence had been done onto her by her family members.
And, you know, I've actually kept in touch with her after she moved to America.
It turned out that she was given a new nose by a plastic surgeon, hated her nose, fell into deep depression, required multiple surgeries, had a very difficult relationship, now can't obviously go back to where she's from.
She's far too removed and is living a life in America.
That is, I don't know.
I mean, it's difficult to say what would have been better, but it does stem from this, you know, white savior complex that you see on display quite a bit.
This sense of, you know, we know what's best and we'll do what's best for you.
You don't really need to exercise your agency.
We're here for you.
Yeah, crazy.
Well, you know, even without all the coercion and all of that, even just the fact that so many Americans actually are do-gooders in not a cynical sense, but in a real sense, you know, I have a friend who also would, you know, do everything he could to bring Iraqi and Afghan kids to America to get surgery, war-wounded children.
Although I don't think they ever did anything like this, you know, trying to keep the kids or anything like that.
Everything they were doing was above board.
But in the end, the people you're writing about here, they're part of the war machine.
They make the war more acceptable.
You know, the relief pilots have a friend who's a relief pilot, and he knows that he's in a codependent, abusive relationship with the military, that they're dependent on him to make the destruction that they bring a little bit better, you know, to ameliorate it a little bit.
Oh, here's a condolence payment.
Oh, here's a little bit of food.
And here's how much we love you.
When without that, it would make waging the war altogether that much more difficult.
But meanwhile, in the smaller sense, they really are helping people, doing everything they can to help.
And in this case, as you say, the perfect little angel, the four-year-old girl who couldn't possibly have been guilty of a single sin.
So, it's a tough position to be in.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a really good article called The Alms Dealer in the New Yorker that was written by Philip Gurevich a while back.
And he wrote about this Dutch woman who's written quite a lot about the contradictions of aid.
I think her name is Linda Pullman, I may be wrong.
But in the story, they explore the two camps that emerged after the Battle of Silferno, which gave rise to, you know, the Red Cross.
And it's about Florence Nightingale, apparently, was very skeptical of exactly what you've described, this sense of, you know, why are we patching people up so that they can continue to be maimed?
And, sorry, Silferino was with the battle.
And her foil was a gentleman named Henri Donant, who's the one who ended up, you know, later founding the Red Cross.
And a lot of the criticisms against organizations like the Red Cross, I mean, Red Cross, as you know, was, some would argue, complicit in the Holocaust when they, you know, helped the Nazi regime relieve itself of the duties of, you know, taking care of, you know, the Jewish population under Nazi regime.
And you see that being played out quite a bit.
In countries like Afghanistan, there's a real sense of what really is the role of these humanitarian organizations when, you know, their very existence, actually, in some way, it seems to accord warring parties some kind of sick license to continue.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and so, where does it stand now?
Because the family back in Afghanistan, are they, they're trying to go through the process to regain custody of their little niece here?
What's going on?
No, no, no, not at all.
Well, they, I mean, they Skype regularly.
But I think Well, that's good, at least that they're in touch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they understand.
Yeah.
And the family who sort of took Aisha under her rings.
I mean, they're lovely people who, who, you know, didn't really ask for any of this to happen.
But they're very happy to step up and take care of her.
And after, you know, Aisha was given to them, is when the communication was allowed to commence.
And it's a sad thing, but they understand that, you know, she has no life in Afghanistan.
I mean, there isn't really, I don't even know if there's like a blind school, a school for blind children that she could go to.
I mean, she just has such a better shot at surviving and thriving in America.
And so they acknowledge that but it did, it did break my heart when I, one of the first times I met her when she, she was like really happy to be in Afghanistan.
And as I think I wrote in the piece, she had spent the past year thinking that, you know, arrested, surrounded by people who were not related to her, who were strangers in many ways.
And then, you know, she comes to this city and then later village and she's a living deity.
Everybody knows her.
She's the most popular, popular person.
And then, you know, the house that I went to visit her in, you know, there were 80, I think was the number I counted, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins.
And she really, she was really, she reveled in that sense of community.
But I mean, the shame, I guess, is that she, A, she wasn't really even given the choice, but also this idea of, you know, you having to, being forced into a situation where you have to choose between, I don't know if maybe it's like survival versus family, or I don't know what the dichotomy would be, but it was very clear that had she remained in Gambhir or Asadabad, I mean, she wouldn't have, there's no reconstructive, you know, facial reconstructive surgery there, obviously.
And the place that is better for her is the West, is the consensus now.
Well, yeah, it's kind of hard to argue with that.
But of course, that's in large part, because America has made it that way.
So over the last 40 years, in fact.
All right.
Not that the place was paradise before that or anything, but still.
Context.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your great journalism and your bravery.
You wouldn't catch me alive or dead over in Afghanistan, as much as I try to cover it here.
I think it's just great that you're over there taking the risk to bring the truth to us like this.
I really appreciate it very much, Mae.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is Mae Jong.
She is writing again for The Intercept here.
This one is Losing Sight.
Four-year-old girl was the sole survivor of a US drone strike in Afghanistan.
Then she disappeared and turns out is safe.
Okay.
Check it out at TheIntercept.com.
And you guys know me.
ScottHorton.org for the show.
AntiWar.com and LibertarianInstitute.org for the articles I want you to read.
FoolsErrand.us for my book, Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
