Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. This week, no story is more pressing
Speaker 1: in the United States and elsewhere than the fall of
Speaker 1: Kabul in the aftermath of the US announcement that it
Speaker 1: is imminently withdrawing from Afghanistan. As this story broke, I
Speaker 1: knew that the person I wanted most to hear from
Speaker 1: about it was doctor Emil Simpson. Emil is a former
Speaker 1: British Army officer who served three tours of duty in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan with the Royal Gurkha Rifles. He is a scholar
Speaker 1: who wrote an extraordinary book, War from the Ground Up,
Speaker 1: twenty first Century Combat as Politics, that described new forms
Speaker 1: of war fair both from the standpoint of the soldiers
Speaker 1: on the ground and from the big picture perspective of
Speaker 1: military strategy. He's also a scholar of international law and
Speaker 1: international relations, and currently is a barrister in London working
Speaker 1: on international and commercial matters. Emil, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining me, especially on short notice. Emil. Let's start
Speaker 1: with the immediate question of the evacuation, which we're all
Speaker 1: watching in real time. How is it going, and how
Speaker 1: would you compare it to other instances of evacuation from Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: since eventually, it seems any power that decides that it
Speaker 1: wants to govern Afghanistan ends up evacuating inner hurry. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: from what I understand the evacuation, the plan is to
Speaker 1: complete it in two or three days. The Nazi evacuation
Speaker 1: of our forces, it's a question mark as to how
Speaker 1: we're going to get out inter as others who helped
Speaker 1: us who are not part of that evacuation. And that's
Speaker 1: clearly a severe problem in terms of the kind of
Speaker 1: very near term situation. The basic problem is that because
Speaker 1: the US evacuated Background air Base sometime ago, there's only
Speaker 1: one airfield effectively in Afghanistan that we can use, and
Speaker 1: that's that's the Comble Airport, which only has one runaway
Speaker 1: and is overlooked by high ground. So it's clearly very vulnerable.
Speaker 1: So you could have, you know, an accident. So regards
Speaker 1: to what Taliban leaderships say, a kind of unit on
Speaker 1: the ground that doesn't follow them might decide to take
Speaker 1: a pot shot at a plane that clearly would be disastrous.
Speaker 1: That that's the kind of flash point that could happen,
Speaker 1: but short of that, it looks like we're just going
Speaker 1: to get out without further do really, as long as
Speaker 1: there's no accident, you know, for me personally, I do
Speaker 1: remember vividly the expect not just the interpreters but of
Speaker 1: cause them too, but also just the ordinary Afghan soldiers
Speaker 1: and especially you know, their officers who are basically the
Speaker 1: people I was working with on a daily basis. Who
Speaker 1: are my age. These aren't the kind of high level
Speaker 1: officials in Kabul who are cr up. These are guys
Speaker 1: who and women too, who were very brave and very hopeful,
Speaker 1: very idealistic. They'd grown up really with this new government
Speaker 1: or at these they didn't remember the had a bands,
Speaker 1: they're too young, wanted a sort of better Afghanistan, and
Speaker 1: they really were putting their lives on the line for
Speaker 1: this project. And those are the people who have basically
Speaker 1: been abandoned, you know, unlike US, I mean, Western Force
Speaker 1: is obviously for extremely hard too. These guys were deployed
Speaker 1: constantly on the ground. You know, they were in Hell
Speaker 1: Mount for ten years without relief. I mean maybe a
Speaker 1: week back in Kabul or whatever, but basically they were
Speaker 1: just constantly there. This was their life. This wasn't at all,
Speaker 1: This was their life, and they didn't have the option
Speaker 1: to leave Afghanistan. I don't know whether it crossed their
Speaker 1: mind that day they might have to evacuate, but that's
Speaker 1: the position we're in now, and we absolutely have a
Speaker 1: moral obligation to evacuate these people. You know, regardless of
Speaker 1: whether we leave Ghanistan, we should be ashamed of banding
Speaker 1: these people because this isn't These aren't kind of numbers.
Speaker 1: These are real people. And personally, I think it's not
Speaker 1: good enough just to evacuate the interpreters, because yes, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't evacuate those people, but there's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: very brave Afghan junior officers and you know, equivalent in
Speaker 1: the government who have served us, and we should evacuated
Speaker 1: them and their families too. That that is absolutely moral responsibility.
Speaker 1: The West bears at the moment in terms of historical comparisons,
Speaker 1: the evacuation of Kabal in eighteen forty two after the
Speaker 1: First Afghan War, when the entire British army was destroyed,
Speaker 1: so that that clearly is an instant of an evacuation
Speaker 1: that went far worse. But you know, an example that
Speaker 1: evacuation that went better is that would be the Soviet experience,
Speaker 1: in which the Soviet main force left Afghanistan in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine having trained a Naska forces of roughly the
Speaker 1: same size, about three hundred thousand, and those Afghan forces
Speaker 1: fought on for another two years until the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: itself collapsed in nineteen ninety one. And the Soviet force
Speaker 1: also counterattacked critically. So when the Mujadin massed immediately after
Speaker 1: the Soviet withdrawal, the Soviet main force withdraw the Mujadin
Speaker 1: tried to attack Jaulalabad in a conventional kind of attack.
Speaker 1: The Afghan Soviet Army, with Soviet air support and some
Speaker 1: artillery support, counterattacks and severely defeated the Mujadin, who basically fragmented,
Speaker 1: and that brought them more time. So there are important
Speaker 1: comparisons being made in terms of the historical analogies. Another
Speaker 1: analogy that's foremost in the minds of Americans, of course,
Speaker 1: is the American withdrawal from South Vietnam in the wake
Speaker 1: of the fall of Saigan. As we know, in that instance,
Speaker 1: some people who had been allied with the United States
Speaker 1: and have helped the United States were able to get out,
Speaker 1: but the great majority were essentially left to their fates,
Speaker 1: some to be oppressed or even killed by the North Vietnamese,
Speaker 1: others to desperately get onto boats and hope that the
Speaker 1: rafts or barely see where the vessels they were on,
Speaker 1: would take them somewhere. And certainly from news reports, it
Speaker 1: sounds as though there may be a significant number of
Speaker 1: people who worked with the Allies in Afghanistan who don't
Speaker 1: manage to get out. I was wondering whether when you
Speaker 1: were on the ground now a bit more than a
Speaker 1: decade ago as an officer, whether the locals who worked
Speaker 1: with you were already thinking about what would happen if
Speaker 1: the war were lost and they were left to their fates.
Speaker 1: Was that on their minds? Was it something you discussed
Speaker 1: with them, or was it something that nobody wants to
Speaker 1: talk about because it was too terrible a prospect. It
Speaker 1: depended on where you were in the country. I think
Speaker 1: in southern Afghanistan people did not think that the army
Speaker 1: would hold out in the country side, at least not
Speaker 1: in the whole countryside. Because the Taliban is predominantly a
Speaker 1: Christian movement from the south and east to Afghanistan. People
Speaker 1: did not think that the north to Afghanistan, or the
Speaker 1: center or the big cities would fall to the Taliban,
Speaker 1: because that's that's the Soviet analogy in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: that the Majudin took the countryside, especially in the south
Speaker 1: and east, they did not take the north, or the
Speaker 1: center or the big cities. It is heartrap heart rendering
Speaker 1: seeing or hearing about the experience of those who worked
Speaker 1: with us who couldn't get out, And indeed it's particularly
Speaker 1: poignant when one has oneself given those assurances, not necessarily
Speaker 1: in absolute terms, but certainly implied. You know, when you're
Speaker 1: leading to platoon of soldiers and you go to from
Speaker 1: Afghan village you're based there for six months, and the
Speaker 1: local elder or you know that their people are trying
Speaker 1: to make decisions about whether to support you or not,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to encourage them. You are implicitly giving assurances.
Speaker 1: And sure you're not giving insurances and your personally, it's
Speaker 1: not you're personally making the promise. You're a you're acting
Speaker 1: as a representative channeling national policy. But they are nonetheless
Speaker 1: real promises, and there are real life and death. Effectually
Speaker 1: decisions and risk calculations made on the base of those assurances,
Speaker 1: and so when those people are sold out, which they
Speaker 1: absolutely have been, you know, you can say, well, that's
Speaker 1: not a national interest. That doesn't change the fact that
Speaker 1: promises have been given. And if you're the one who
Speaker 1: actually gave the promises, as you know thousands of Western
Speaker 1: military personnel and diplomats and aid workers would have done,
Speaker 1: that's a very different moral proposition. That's very tough, and
Speaker 1: I can imagine what you're feeling around it. What went
Speaker 1: wrong in the most recent period of time, I mean,
Speaker 1: the US, the UK, other actors spent upwards of a
Speaker 1: trillion dollars on trying to shore up, train and essentially
Speaker 1: buck up an Afghan military, and yet it seemed that
Speaker 1: once the final withdrawal was announced, the response of the
Speaker 1: Afghan military effectively was to lose more. I think that
Speaker 1: it couldn't win and give up the ghost relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: Why what's happening here? The first thing to say, I
Speaker 1: think this is not a story that's really cut through
Speaker 1: in the last couple of days, but even in the
Speaker 1: last five years, frankly is the number of Afghan casualties.
Speaker 1: So the basic message from President Biden is the Afghans
Speaker 1: won't fight for themselves, therefore Western soldiers should not fight
Speaker 1: for them when they won't fight for themselves. Were that true,
Speaker 1: that would be a good argument. But that's not the case,
Speaker 1: at least in a five year time frame. So although
Speaker 1: the country numbers are estimates, it's roughly a ballpark figure.
Speaker 1: So if you look at the Brookings Institution Afghan Index,
Speaker 1: which is most reliable source, they've estimated forty five thousands,
Speaker 1: so that's forty five thousand Afghan security forces. That's police
Speaker 1: an army deaths between two thousand and fourteen and two twenty,
Speaker 1: so just over five six years. So you compare that
Speaker 1: to US forces which are just under two thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred deaths, and then coalition deaths of another two thousand
Speaker 1: and another two roughly contractors, So about five or six
Speaker 1: thousand Western death if you liked, the Afghan forces have
Speaker 1: taken about eight times more dead and then you're going
Speaker 1: to have a factor of about three in terms of
Speaker 1: wounded from that. So the idea that the Afghan army
Speaker 1: have not fought is it is not right. Forty five
Speaker 1: thousand of them if that estimate is right, or even
Speaker 1: close to being right have for and died doing exactly that.
Speaker 1: Were they fighting for their government? No, their government is
Speaker 1: crupt and rotten, and everyone knows that they're fighting for
Speaker 1: their families, who, unlike their leadership, don't have the option
Speaker 1: of leaving Afghanistan. They were fighting in remote provinces with
Speaker 1: their backs to the wall for the last five years,
Speaker 1: basically getting hammered and taking a lot of Catholics. Granted
Speaker 1: they weren't fighting completely independently. They had crucially Western logistical
Speaker 1: support the Afghan army mainly because of massive corruption at
Speaker 1: the higher levels of government, and the army was unable
Speaker 1: to do logistics. You put to you put those two
Speaker 1: factors together, and you've got an army that's basically being
Speaker 1: hammered in terms of catalties and has fought bravely, but
Speaker 1: it's morale's very low. The Taliban attack right at the
Speaker 1: very moment at which that Afghan force has to adapt
Speaker 1: to having no logistics support, so they can't get their
Speaker 1: couches out, they can't get ammunition and other supplies forward,
Speaker 1: and at the same time they see various members of
Speaker 1: their government at the cabinet level basically tweeting oh, I've resigned,
Speaker 1: I'm leaving my leaving combolts Jordan, my family in Dubai
Speaker 1: or whatever, and finally enough morale collapses. You know, query
Speaker 1: whether a Western force would be an indifferent You know,
Speaker 1: it's entirely understandable why the Afghan regular forces, isolated and
Speaker 1: abandoned in these provinces basically gave up. It is also
Speaker 1: clever as the final point of the Taliban to attack
Speaker 1: the southern towns first, because they basically attacks and the
Speaker 1: southern the big southern towns, and that triggered the Afghan
Speaker 1: government to deploy its reserves special forces kind of the
Speaker 1: unit they went south, and then the Taliban switched they
Speaker 1: main effort and sat the north. In conjunction with clever
Speaker 1: political tactics from negotiating strends and stuff, and you put
Speaker 1: that together, it's not surprising that the whole thing fell
Speaker 1: apart emil. A question that's really very pressing for a
Speaker 1: lot of listeners, myself included, is do you think this
Speaker 1: withdrawal was correct? Was it the right thing to do?
Speaker 1: Because part of what you're saying in terms of the
Speaker 1: directionality of the war suggests that there wasn't really a
Speaker 1: viable way either for the security forces to beat the
Speaker 1: Taliban or even to just hold them off indefinitely. And
Speaker 1: that starts to contribute to the idea that withdrawal was
Speaker 1: the right thing to do. But of course the alternative
Speaker 1: picture would be one in which there were ways to
Speaker 1: withdraw eventually, but to do it in a different way
Speaker 1: that would have a chance of stopping the country from
Speaker 1: falling into the hands of the Taliban in this way.
Speaker 1: So what is your view on that was the withdrawal
Speaker 1: the right thing to do? Now well as the military side,
Speaker 1: on the political side. On the military side, the US
Speaker 1: could in theory have stayed there indefinitely. Had a force
Speaker 1: of roughly two thousand, five hundreds by the end, spending
Speaker 1: roughly three billion dollars a month on a military budget
Speaker 1: of around just under eight hundred billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1: That's a significant but it's not a huge cost objectively,
Speaker 1: so you could just carried on. I should mention that
Speaker 1: eight US soldiers died in twenty twenty, so that's a
Speaker 1: serious number, but it's pals a comparison to the Afghan
Speaker 1: categies at numb As I mentioned. Politically, clearly, there was
Speaker 1: an appetite for that, So how do you square that.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, you've got this fact that when
Speaker 1: the US is there as a backstop, providing sport, providing logistics, crucially,
Speaker 1: the Afghan forces can carry on. You could have maintained
Speaker 1: the stalemate indefinitely, but there's no political wealth of the
Speaker 1: indefinite presence. Answer. You have to get a peace deal,
Speaker 1: So you have to use the stalemate as leverage to
Speaker 1: get a pace deal with the Taliban. That PCAL wasn't coming.
Speaker 1: I think a mistake was not to counterattack in the
Speaker 1: last two weeks. The Taliban attack kind of paralyzed us.
Speaker 1: They too fast. We appeared unable to move almost I mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, in nineteen eighty nine the Soviets did counter
Speaker 1: attack at Lalabad. And when a gorilla force changes from
Speaker 1: being a gorilla force to being a conventional force, as
Speaker 1: they must do to take a country, that's their most
Speaker 1: vable moment. That's when you can really fight them for
Speaker 1: once conventionally, and it wouldn't have been very hard to
Speaker 1: inflict serious losses on them and basically forced them into
Speaker 1: you know, at least at least give the peace deal
Speaker 1: a chance. That's how Aban I think will surprised themselves
Speaker 1: are how easily they took Kaba, And indeed, you know
Speaker 1: you're talking about Sigon earlier. Note how in seventy two
Speaker 1: in the East to seventy two the North Vietnamese also
Speaker 1: tried to attack the Easter Offensive, and the Americans did
Speaker 1: counter attack. And I'm surprised North Etnams with their political
Speaker 1: will and bought more time, and he bought time for
Speaker 1: the peace deal. And I mean, obviously it collapsed in
Speaker 1: the end, but bought more time. So you know, a
Speaker 1: counter attack would have helped to get that peace deal.
Speaker 1: What it happened, who knows. It's impossible to be certain
Speaker 1: about these things. But I think we should have counter
Speaker 1: attack in terms of the wider decision. You know, it's
Speaker 1: for the US president's judge, US natural interest. I'm not American.
Speaker 1: It's not made to say that the Americans should or
Speaker 1: shouldn't bear that cost. That's President Biden. And if he
Speaker 1: thinks that that cost is too much, it I mean,
Speaker 1: I think people in the Biden administration would probably respond
Speaker 1: to that by saying that there was effectively a counter
Speaker 1: attack in the second term of the Obama administration, and
Speaker 1: that that was the effort that they hoped would be
Speaker 1: able to turn the tide, but that it failed. That
Speaker 1: then the Trump administration was just in a holding pattern,
Speaker 1: and that Biden had already decided himself. And this is
Speaker 1: pretty clear he had already decided, now seven years ago
Speaker 1: or eight years ago, that this wasn't worth continuing. And
Speaker 1: once he had that view, the possibility of motivating a
Speaker 1: counter attack would have been pretty difficult because the Talbin
Speaker 1: would have just tried to wait it out. You know,
Speaker 1: they would have said, listen, you don't really mean it.
Speaker 1: So if he had said, listen, we're just counterattacking in
Speaker 1: order to change the strategic calculus and make the Taliband negotiate,
Speaker 1: which was a version of what the United States had
Speaker 1: already said between twenty twelve and twenty fifteen, it just
Speaker 1: wouldn't have worked. Yeah, you put your finger on the
Speaker 1: pulse of the master. If you like, the key is surprised.
Speaker 1: You've got to make the Taliban think it's in the
Speaker 1: minds of the enemy. That's where victory lies. It's psychological state,
Speaker 1: if you like, and surprised works in Afghanstan. The surgery
Speaker 1: was not surprised. It was telegraphed the idea was we'll
Speaker 1: search for three years and then we'll draw down. So
Speaker 1: it was all very predictable, very telegraphed, no surprise, and
Speaker 1: indeed this points to a broader failing in the West
Speaker 1: approach strategy, at least in my view, whereby we think
Speaker 1: strategy is a kind of form of project management. It's
Speaker 1: a kind of strategy taught in business scopes where you know,
Speaker 1: if you want to build a house or something, you
Speaker 1: get your workers, your money, and your materials and you
Speaker 1: put put them in a spreadsheet, and you know, things
Speaker 1: might go wrong, like you might get some bad weather
Speaker 1: or something for a month, but and that might delay you.
Speaker 1: But ultimately you can get from A to B through
Speaker 1: the pretty kind of techno crash approach where you just
Speaker 1: put resources on a spreadsheet and your project manage with
Speaker 1: no account of the enemy, no account of the enemy whatsoever,
Speaker 1: as if wres some kind of scientific endeavor, and that's
Speaker 1: just completely wrong. War is all about getting into the
Speaker 1: mind of the enemies, about initiative, seizing the initiative, and
Speaker 1: holding the initiative, and it's much more psychological than that.
Speaker 1: And in Afghanistan, actually, you know, in retrospect, maybe we
Speaker 1: shouldn't urge in two thousand and nine, maybe we should
Speaker 1: actually have researched and actually put some pressure on n
Speaker 1: Fan government to do more themselves. But ultimately, if you
Speaker 1: step away from all this, it's not about these kind
Speaker 1: of set template approaches. You know, does a surge work
Speaker 1: in the abstract? You can't tell. The question is can
Speaker 1: you use surprise to regain the initiative so doubt in
Speaker 1: the minds of your opponent, such as to get them
Speaker 1: to at least think, oh, maybe it is my interest
Speaker 1: to do a PCE deal because I don't know what
Speaker 1: the outcome is going to be. That wasn't the case here.
Speaker 1: The Taliban could totally plan around the US and Western
Speaker 1: plan and then hit the forces Afghanic horses extremely hard
Speaker 1: when we took the justic support away and basically with
Speaker 1: we'll be back in a moment. I mean, I'm really
Speaker 1: fascinated by what you've just said, the idea that somehow
Speaker 1: the US in particular maybe Western forces more generally tended
Speaker 1: to think about Afghanistan as though it were a war
Speaker 1: without an enemy, you know, a war you're fighting in
Speaker 1: your own head, where you think that logistics are really
Speaker 1: about what you're going to do. Seems to fit into
Speaker 1: a kind of systemic failure throughout this war, maybe deriving
Speaker 1: from the fact that in the early invasion the Taliban
Speaker 1: ran away relatively quickly and were then not treated as
Speaker 1: a serious opponent, a serious enemy who had to be
Speaker 1: surprised and engaged, but were rather thought of almost as
Speaker 1: though they were the drip drip drip of a body
Speaker 1: of water, and the question was could we hold out
Speaker 1: against that drip, drip drip, rather than could we actually
Speaker 1: conceptualize the enemy as a set of human beings, as
Speaker 1: another who needed to be engaged, which, as you say,
Speaker 1: is crucial to warfare. Why do you think, I mean,
Speaker 1: when we turn to lessons learned here, one of the
Speaker 1: crucial ones is surely that's no way to fight a war.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're going to fight a war, you
Speaker 1: have to conceptualize the enemy. You have to put your
Speaker 1: mind inside the mind of the enemy, and you have
Speaker 1: to do the things that will defeat the enemy. And why,
Speaker 1: why why did the United States approach war in this way?
Speaker 1: Is it something about our training? Is it's something about
Speaker 1: how we conceptualize war. Is it's something about the tremendous
Speaker 1: disparity between our resources and the resources of the enemy.
Speaker 1: What what put us in a position to make these
Speaker 1: mistakes which to me as you depict them, sound rather fundamental. Yes,
Speaker 1: well it's I mean, the term war is a good
Speaker 1: place to start. I mean, clearly, Afghana stands war in
Speaker 1: a sense that there is at a high level of
Speaker 1: violence going on on the ground, and that the kind
Speaker 1: of combat tactics are not this similar across different kinds
Speaker 1: of wars. But really there is a fundamental difference between
Speaker 1: interstate war, which our finite in the sense that that
Speaker 1: there are two governments with whom you can negotiate a pcedal.
Speaker 1: So effectively you've got two kind of hierarchies fighting each other.
Speaker 1: You know, you use military force against the base of
Speaker 1: the hierarchy of the army, and that sort of tingles
Speaker 1: up the nerve system of the state the other side
Speaker 1: to a government, and that government kind of gets the
Speaker 1: message and it is defeated. That's completely different when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with a network. A network is flat and loose,
Speaker 1: there's no real leadship structure. So how are you going
Speaker 1: to how are you going to win? In the kind
Speaker 1: of political sense, you can't. Actually you're managing an ongoing
Speaker 1: security problem without trying to escalate and without getting sucked
Speaker 1: into things like nation building. Really just trying to deal
Speaker 1: with the security side of things, and war is not
Speaker 1: often that even that appropriate label. So it's much more
Speaker 1: often sometimes akin to policing operations, where you know, in
Speaker 1: a western city, no one expects the police to defeat
Speaker 1: crime in a decisive sense. Rather you manage it. Now,
Speaker 1: clearly it's not exactly policing, but there is a spectrum
Speaker 1: of activity and treating these conflicts as war with these
Speaker 1: kind of expectations of decisive outcomes where you have surgies
Speaker 1: for like three years and somehow expect the military to
Speaker 1: deliver you a decisive outcome in three years. That's that's
Speaker 1: not helpful. Actually, you need to have lower intensity but
Speaker 1: longer term presence with lower expectations of what you can
Speaker 1: achieve in order to manage risk over longer time frames,
Speaker 1: without these kind of fantastic expectations of decisive victories. And
Speaker 1: so there's a spectrum in terms of political outcomes. Is
Speaker 1: there even an enemy or are you dealing with a
Speaker 1: kind of kaleidoscopic bunch of factions who can change depending
Speaker 1: on how you define the enemy. I think in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: that was an issue. You know, we started off defining
Speaker 1: an enemy narrowly as aar Qaida, and that was broadly
Speaker 1: even the position still two thousand and five, and then
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five we went into the South
Speaker 1: and the east in bulk. There are already some forces,
Speaker 1: but really very few forces before that, especially in the South,
Speaker 1: and we started sort of treating everyone who short at
Speaker 1: us as you know, the enemy and attributing to the
Speaker 1: single corporate identity are either Taliban, and actually that wasn't
Speaker 1: the case. There was lots of lots of different factions
Speaker 1: on the ground, and by tlicely disaggregating a network, franchise
Speaker 1: movement into its constituent parts, you can use much less
Speaker 1: force as little false as possible, so you're only using
Speaker 1: force against the really hardcore. And that's absolutely not what
Speaker 1: we did. We use force much too broadly against far
Speaker 1: too many factions because we didn't have that political, low
Speaker 1: level political insight, which is so crucial, and thus we
Speaker 1: very quickly found ourselves swimming upstream against an ever expanding insurgency.
Speaker 1: So a lesson here, you know, not to the tactical level,
Speaker 1: but at the kind of global level too, is always
Speaker 1: a disaggregate to try to not group everyone in the
Speaker 1: same brush, owise you end up fighting kind of everyone really,
Speaker 1: and you know, that's that goes to basically back this
Speaker 1: concept of war, not treating everything through this binary paradigm
Speaker 1: of war in which as a clear line between military
Speaker 1: and political activity. That's not the case, especially in says
Speaker 1: context with the information revolution, whereby you know, you get
Speaker 1: a lot more networks. What was your experience of that
Speaker 1: when you were on the ground, I mean, when did
Speaker 1: you find yourself able to try to do that kind
Speaker 1: of disaggregation at the local level and not just treat
Speaker 1: anybody who might be shooting at you and your soldiers
Speaker 1: as definitively at the Taliban Or was it simply the
Speaker 1: case that the lack of differentiation at the higher level
Speaker 1: of command made it all but impossible for you, you know,
Speaker 1: to do differently on a day and in day out
Speaker 1: basis very much so. I mean on my first one,
Speaker 1: not so much because I was a protune commander, but
Speaker 1: on my second tour, when I was actually working on
Speaker 1: planning operations, and my third tour, I was very much
Speaker 1: able to do that, and it's totally possible. You need
Speaker 1: to think about things differently. You need to be doing
Speaker 1: networking hours on the grounds understanding who's who. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is almost obvious, you know, if you're the British
Speaker 1: Army in Northern Ireland, it's like going in there and saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: what's a Catholic, what's a Protestant? You know, these are
Speaker 1: the fundamental kind of cultural drivers of this conflict. And
Speaker 1: we just went in southern Afghanistan thinking everyone's either Afghan
Speaker 1: Government or Taliban, and actually it's much more sophisticated than that,
Speaker 1: and it's not particularly hard to kind of find out
Speaker 1: who these tribes are as the barracks, alazai Ishize Popalzi,
Speaker 1: and they all have different motivations. And then there's the
Speaker 1: narco dealers as well, and you can quite easily find
Speaker 1: out what these different cultural kind of groups are just
Speaker 1: by asking people. It is absolutely doable. But a problem.
Speaker 1: A further problem is that the nature of civil military relations,
Speaker 1: the paradigm we have is a very much one way model.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that there's this very hard division between
Speaker 1: the political side and the military side. Neither side Shoor trespass.
Speaker 1: I mean that comes from a really post Korean War
Speaker 1: model where you didn't want to get the military with
Speaker 1: their things on the nuclear trigger because then you can
Speaker 1: have a nuclear war. And that makes sense. So it
Speaker 1: absolutely makes sense that the military should stay out of
Speaker 1: politics in a kind of political sense, and indeed in
Speaker 1: that context and the nuclear context, which should stay out
Speaker 1: that those kindcisions too. But in a counterinsurgency, you absolutely
Speaker 1: need people on the ground to be able to say this, actually,
Speaker 1: at a political level, that's not working. We shouldn't be
Speaker 1: pushing this policy lining to it doesn't work with this tribe.
Speaker 1: We should be doing that, we shouldn't be doing this.
Speaker 1: So for example, the classic example in southern Afkanastan was narcotics.
Speaker 1: The anti narcomission pretty much alienated everybody. You know, query
Speaker 1: why we're doing it? Well, were there to fight terrorism
Speaker 1: or drugs? I mean, we could fight drugs, that's a
Speaker 1: political decision. But would we would cut about nine percent
Speaker 1: of the enemy out if we didn't fight drugs. No
Speaker 1: one would listen to the military on the ground. That's
Speaker 1: not our job. We're not allowed to talk about politics.
Speaker 1: You just fight the enemy. We'll do the politics. This
Speaker 1: idea that politics is. It's something that's some like higher up.
Speaker 1: It's not the right approach, and it challenges and requires
Speaker 1: us to reconfigure this paradigm of civil military relations. It
Speaker 1: needs to be much more fluid and dynamic and flatter.
Speaker 1: What I hear you saying there, and I think this
Speaker 1: is also as I read it, one of the themes
Speaker 1: if You're a Terrific book is that it would be
Speaker 1: a mistake to think that in a world where the
Speaker 1: enemy is networked and flat, that the way to fight
Speaker 1: it is in some hierarchical sense where the decisions about
Speaker 1: quote unquote politics are made somewhere up to chain and
Speaker 1: then the decisions about military tactics are made down on
Speaker 1: the ground. In fact, to fight a war against a flat,
Speaker 1: networked enemy, you have to be flatter, you have to
Speaker 1: be more networked, and we have to break down the
Speaker 1: artificial distinction between a political judgment and a tactical judgment,
Speaker 1: especially in an operation that has certain features of trying
Speaker 1: to keep the peace, namely a counterinsurgency. No exactly, there's
Speaker 1: this expression out gorilla. The gorilla. You know, if you're
Speaker 1: a Western, big heavy Western falls you're basically a kind
Speaker 1: of elephant trying to catch a kind of mouse, And
Speaker 1: so obviously when the mouse hears the elephant going through
Speaker 1: the jungle, hears it from miles away and runs away,
Speaker 1: and it's impossible to catch the mouse email. I want
Speaker 1: to turn now in our concluding moments of our conversation
Speaker 1: to the question of how much it matters for the
Speaker 1: US role in the international order that the US managed
Speaker 1: to lose this war. Now, one could say, as was
Speaker 1: the takeaway from the Vietnam War, where the US learned
Speaker 1: that it couldn't defeat an enemy like South Vietnam. Here
Speaker 1: the takeaway is that the US couldn't defeat a persistent
Speaker 1: insurgent force like the Taliban, but that that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean that the position of the US visavi China with
Speaker 1: respect to Taiwan, for example, or visa its position in
Speaker 1: other places in the world where its geostrategic power remains crucial,
Speaker 1: has really fundamentally changed. Or you could say, listen, there
Speaker 1: must be a bigger takeaway of a failure like this
Speaker 1: twenty years, a trillion dollars, failure to achieve its goals,
Speaker 1: failure to learn the lessons of counterinsurgency that should have
Speaker 1: been learned from Vietnam surely has consequences, And I'm wondering
Speaker 1: where you come down in that grand debate, which is
Speaker 1: really just beginning now. Yeah, in terms of international order, Noah,
Speaker 1: the key is what happens next in Afghanistan. So question one,
Speaker 1: who really are the Taliban? Their pr is all very
Speaker 1: rosy and glossy. They say they're can happen inclusive government,
Speaker 1: including women, for example, and have an amnesty for government
Speaker 1: officials and everyone in fact, and if that were really
Speaker 1: worthy case, then the West could live with that and
Speaker 1: that won't badly damage US press, if you like. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, if one their pr is not true
Speaker 1: to reality, then that wouldn't be the case. But the
Speaker 1: real issue is that can the Taliban even maintain control
Speaker 1: of the country. They've been united through a common enemy
Speaker 1: for the past twenty years and now actually the Taliban
Speaker 1: being a franchise movement, the question is whether those different
Speaker 1: factions will start to come apart. So you've got some
Speaker 1: more moderate, some more extreme, and the whole country could
Speaker 1: send in civil war, creating a haven for terrorists. That
Speaker 1: would clearly be extremely damaging for US credibility in terms
Speaker 1: of having to potentially go back in there and deal
Speaker 1: with that, or just take it on risk and accept
Speaker 1: the consequences. Neither of those good options. Beyond Afghanistan and
Speaker 1: beyond the kind of terrorism question, I don't think that
Speaker 1: this is going to undermine US alliances in East Asia
Speaker 1: on the country. The whole point of this move was
Speaker 1: to reinforce alliances in Asia, So I don't think that's
Speaker 1: going to be undermined. But perhaps the contrarian answer is
Speaker 1: that is the West being repeating the mistake of not
Speaker 1: using surprise, not being imaginative here. If the West and
Speaker 1: semicly United States starts just putting all its effort into
Speaker 1: focusing on Taiwan really and the defense in the Far
Speaker 1: East in a very conventional sense, is that not going
Speaker 1: to open the door for states that basically want to
Speaker 1: undermine US and Western interests across the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: So China and Russia primarily using all kinds of means,
Speaker 1: not just military means, but also geoeconomic means and informational means,
Speaker 1: and all kinds of sort of grazoon tactics we've seen
Speaker 1: in the past ten years or so to undermine interests
Speaker 1: Western interests in the rest of the world while we're
Speaker 1: focused on on the Far East. In a very conventional sense,
Speaker 1: that's the actual risk, and there could be a a
Speaker 1: kind of ironic outcome where the worst there's all this
Speaker 1: effort to kind of shift pivot to Asia if you like,
Speaker 1: and telegraphics intentions in a very unimaginative way, and the
Speaker 1: other countries just plan around that. And actually there isn't
Speaker 1: any big fight over Taiwan. But there's no sort of
Speaker 1: decisive moment which US power ends. Rather, there's kind of
Speaker 1: death by a thousand cuts, which indeed is how the
Speaker 1: British Empire basically ended, and how most empires end in
Speaker 1: that if indeed empires the right analogy. But the point is,
Speaker 1: in terms of the kind of superpower, is that really
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. I think actually that's more likely
Speaker 1: to happen than any kind of decisive battle. And really,
Speaker 1: if we want to stand by our values and Western values,
Speaker 1: which I think personally how worth fighting for or at
Speaker 1: least worth sounding up for. Not I don't mean fighting
Speaker 1: necessarily ligial sense. It requires us to be more agile
Speaker 1: and to think about strategy in a way that actually
Speaker 1: uses the values of surprise and flexibility of means not
Speaker 1: always focusing on the military side of things, but at
Speaker 1: the same time where there is a need to intervene,
Speaker 1: not to do regime change, but on the contrary regime support.
Speaker 1: You know, I gave the example of France and Marley earlier.
Speaker 1: Then we should do that and not always be completely predictable.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, Emil. I want to thank you
Speaker 1: for this fascinating account of events on the ground and
Speaker 1: they're deeper, meaning in Afghanistan, and also of course for
Speaker 1: your combination of being a soldier on the ground and
Speaker 1: then a scholar explaining things to the world and to
Speaker 1: all of us. For me talking to you, I was
Speaker 1: just deeply struck by the reality of the number of
Speaker 1: Afghan dead. Forty five thousand Afghan dead soldiers is close
Speaker 1: to the total number that the US lost in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: It's a very significant cost. And very struck by your
Speaker 1: observation that it wasn't just that the US and the
Speaker 1: Afghan security forces lost the ward, but that the Taliban
Speaker 1: really want it. I was also very very struck by
Speaker 1: your observation that we failed to think about this war
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of the enemy and therefore failed to
Speaker 1: have the advantage of surprise. I was really struck by
Speaker 1: your point that in a networked world where the enemy
Speaker 1: is flat and networked, we need to do the same.
Speaker 1: And then if you want to catch a mouse, you
Speaker 1: can't be an elephant, maybe you actually need to be
Speaker 1: something closer to a cat. And last, but not least,
Speaker 1: just very struck by your point that the deep failure
Speaker 1: of the US here does have broader geopolitical consequences that
Speaker 1: we're going to be grappling with in the future. So
Speaker 1: I want to again thank you for your analysis and
Speaker 1: for your commentary, for your service, and for coming on
Speaker 1: Deep Background to explain this to us on short notice.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Amil, Thank you very much. Deep Background is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board,
Speaker 1: our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie
Speaker 1: Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by
Speaker 1: Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Lydia Gencott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column from Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.
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Speaker 1: This is deep background