Since the U.S. withdrew its final troops from Afghanistan last summer, U.S. coverage of the country has also precipitously declined, even as the country faces a dire humanitarian emergency. So we thought it was time to do a gut check with one of the most prolific reporters on the topic. Award-winning journalist and the author of “No Good Men Among The Living,” Anand Gopal, has covered global conflict and the Middle East for more than a decade. In 2021, his reporting took him to Helmand Province, the epicenter of the conflict in the war-torn country. His experiences there led him to write “The Other Afghan Women,” one of the most comprehensive reports about the plight of Afghan women. Gopal’s work has appeared in many outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harpers and in The New Yorker, where he currently covers war, revolution and democracy. He joins WITHpod to discuss his latest reporting on ground, the Taliban’s rapid rise to power, how and where the war on terror continues to be waged and the long-term prospects of the Afghan people under Taliban rule.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Anand Gopal: We, as Americans, didn’t really pay attention to Afghanistan for a long time. I think part of the reason is because we are trained in some way to think about the war in Afghanistan or Iraq when something really goes awry, when there’s a major massacre, when there’s a war crime that’s committed. In fact, most of the war in Afghanistan wasn’t war crimes.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to the 200th episode of ‘Why is this Happening?’ with me your host, Chris Hayes.
It is very hard to believe that we have published 200 episodes, that we’ve been doing this for over three years now and I have to say this podcast started a bit on a lark, a kind of side project, a way of scratching a certain kind of intellectual itch that had been developing over time and ability to kind of read deeply on topics, engage deeply on topics and I’ve just learned so much. It’s been such a delight for me for the last three years.
There’s so much more that I know now, so many topics that come up in the news that I think to myself, “Oh, right,” like I have my bearings on that, at least, a little bit, because we did a WITH pod on it. So be sure to keep an eye out on the WITH pod feed later today, because we asked you all to help us celebrate, and you certainly did, and we’re going to have a little special bonus showing up in your feed later.
We’ve talked a number of times on the show about Afghanistan. If you’ll indulge a little bit of a media critique from someone in the media for a second, there’s something kind of maddening about the coverage of Afghanistan, which is that – and I’m going to implicate myself here, because I surely have not covered it as much as I probably should have over these years – but, basically, the war ground on in the background for 20 years. It very rarely made the front pages. There were incredible reporters who were there for all the major newspapers and the major wire services doing amazing work.
It wasn’t that there weren’t journalists doing the work, there were. But in terms of like the emphasis of TV news, cable news, network news, the news cycle, it tended to be pretty remote from American discussion of politics. It was a huge source of frustration to veterans of the war, people from Afghanistan, civil society, immigrants and refugees who had come over from that country and from the journalists who were risking their lives and working very hard to bring that story over that it was very hard to grab American attention on it.
That changed in August of this past year when the U.S., under the Biden administration, finally, after 20 years, made good on a promise that they had made, that the Trump administration had made, that frankly Barack Obama had made, which was to end the war in Afghanistan, and they did. And it was the subject of round-the-clock wall-to-wall coverage about the humanitarian catastrophe that was the U.S. departure.
Now, to be clear, there were many facets of the departure were unquestionably a humanitarian catastrophe. We saw the baby being passed over the barbed wire. We saw the man falling from the plane, as he was desperate to get out. There were people who had cooperated or helped American forces who were in danger of they or their families being imprisoned or worse by the Taliban. There were reprisals that did happen. Being ruled by the Taliban is something that I would never want to choose for myself or for my loved ones, personally.
All this sort of like moral valence of that of like this is a catastrophe and bad for these people was true, and yet, there were two aspects of it, I think, that really frustrated me over the coverage. One was there was very little coverage of what folks outside of Kabul and particularly outside of the inner sanctum of foreign or adjacent Afghanistan residents thought and felt about the Taliban. I mean, there was a reason that the Taliban was able to take over the country as easily as they could and much of that lay in the sympathies that many everyday Afghans had for them or at least, their utter frustration and contempt for the 20 years of essentially American proxy rule with these incredibly corrupt and predacious forces. We’ve talked about that on the program before.
There was also the fact that once the U.S. was out, it was like, “Done.” There’s no more Afghanistan and it’s basically disappeared off front pages. Yet, right now, the country faces probably the worst humanitarian crisis in the entire world. Aid groups estimate that up to 22 million – two-thirds of the population is in danger of starvation and this is not a situation where people say, “Well, yes, the Taliban is terrible.” Yes, again, I’m not going to argue that at all.
But it’s not quite a situation like back in the day with Saddam Hussein and the question about sanctions and whether the sort of suffering of the Iraqi people was the fault of the sanctions or the faults of Saddam Hussein. In that case, I think it was a bit of both, but it was also the case that like Saddam Hussein had amassed enormous amounts of oil wealth in that site.
Afghanistan is really poor, okay, and it’s not like the Taliban are not pretending that Afghanistan is really poor, like it is actually very poor. In fact, the majority of its full GDP of the nation was coming from foreign aid sources. If you cut that off, as has done, as has happened led by the U.S. in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover, it just stands to reason that you will plunge the country into something much worse than even our depression in the 1930s, which contracted the U.S. government economy by 25% to 30%.
You contract the nation’s economy by 70%, people will starve to death. That’s just the math. It doesn’t matter if they have the best government in the world, okay. The math here is pretty unforgiving, inexorable when it comes to Afghanistan in terms of what they’re facing and so I thought that would be a good time, and we’ve been covering it a bit on the program, to bring in someone who I think has done the single best reporting on Afghanistan over the last decade.
Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker. He covers war, revolution, democracy. He’s also assistant professor for the Center on the Future of War in the School of Politics and Global Studies at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. His book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which was out in 2014 is one of the best pieces of war reporting I’ve ever read, and he wrote a piece after the fall of Kabul and the U.S.’s exit called The Other Afghan Women, which was, we’ll get into in the conversation, honestly in the top five pieces of journalism I’ve ever read in my life. I would teach it to every course I ever taught in journalism if I ever in that position. It’s a masterpiece of reporting, of clear-eyed writing, of empathetic yet analytically critical listening in synthesis and it’s an incredible piece that you should definitely check out.
I’ve been wanting to talk to Anand for a while. He has been abroad, sometimes in Afghanistan. It’s been hard for us to connect, but it’s my great pleasure to welcome Anand to the program.
Anand Gopal: Thanks, Chris. It’s great to be here.
Chris Hayes: First, let’s start when were you last in Afghanistan?
Anand Gopal: I was there in late September, early October, so that would be about six weeks after the Taliban took power.
Chris Hayes: Maybe let’s start there. We can sort of go backwards first, but I think just what Afghanistan under Taliban rule, freshly under Taliban rule looked like last fall.
Anand Gopal: Well, I had arrived in the country after spending with some of my colleagues in the media, weeks trying to extract or help extract our colleagues, Afghan colleagues, and friends and others from the country in a really sort of drastic and perilous Situation. So when I got there, I didn’t know what to expect.
When I got on the ground, though, the first thing that struck me was in Kabul, there was mostly life as usual, there was traffic, there was people clamoring outside of government offices, et cetera. Then when you started to look around, you notice that women, for the most part, were missing. At that point, this is again, mid-September, it wasn’t because of anything the Taliban had said, but because of the memory of the previous rule of the Taliban in the 1990s, all sorts of women, friends of mine, others who I had been in contact within the course of my reporting over the last decade who were just terrified, and understandably so, were staying in their homes. That was, for me, a really sobering and disheartening to see.
I spent like, I guess, a week in Kabul and then I went out to the hinterlands, Kandahar province, Helmand Province. These are the areas where, for the last two decades, the war has really been concentrated and so I went out there to see some of my friends and colleagues. What was striking to me was how different the mood was there at that time compared to Kabul, whereas all of us were glued to our television sets, I guess, in August and September and seeing people rushing to the Kabul airport and trying to get out of the country.
What was happening at the same time in Kandahar and Helmand where people were actually coming back to the country. These are people who had been displaced, because of the conflict, many of them had their homes destroyed or had loved ones disappeared or killed and they were living in camps, in tents in Pakistan or elsewhere. For the first time they looked at the situation and said, the war is finally over, and maybe I can go back to my village and rebuild my life.
So I was seeing village after village where thousands of people were coming back home. So both of these realities were true at the same time, and I think it’s important to understand that.
Chris Hayes: Yes. This is essential and in some ways, I think, it was understandable which perspective was prioritized in American coverage, partly because, to your point, I know people personally who were up 24 hours, four days in a row trying to get translators out. It would be weird and almost kind of inhuman for that not to color your coverage, obviously, like people I love, people that I care for are in peril and I need to get them out and that’s going to cover your coverage.
But the other part of that gets in something deep about the toll of the war in the ‘hinterlands’, and maybe you could talk a little bit the day-to-day reality, the level of violence and disruption, which I have to say I’ve read about for decades and hit home more in your piece in The New Yorker than it ever had before to me. Talk a bit about what life in the hinterlands was like during the American war in Afghanistan.
Anand Gopal: Well, Chris, something you mentioned earlier is how we, as Americans, didn’t really pay attention to Afghanistan for a long time. I think part of the reason is because we are trained in some way to think about the war in Afghanistan or Iraq when something really goes awry, when there’s a major massacre, when there’s a war crime that’s committed. In fact, most of the war in Afghanistan wasn’t war crimes.
By war crimes, I mean, actions committed by various military actors which violate the laws of war. Most of the killing that was happening in the last 20 years was like people who were dying in the ones and twos, somebody who just had wandered into the midst of a firefight, somebody who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This kind of thing isn’t really the sort of thing that’s usually reported, but it adds up in the aggregate.
When I went to the Helmand Province, which is where really of all the provinces – 34 provinces of the country – was where the war was most intensely fought. I interviewed a number of women to try to understand what they thought about the last two decades. What I found, again and again, is that the kind of loss, the toll that they had witnessed or suffered was extraordinary. But it wasn’t like they knew somebody who had been killed in this major airstrike on a wedding that killed a hundred people or 200 people. The sort of thing that would make the news.
Rather, they had an uncle who was working in the fields one morning and there was a patrol, the patrol saw this person, didn’t know if he was a Taliban or not because they all look the same and they shot him. Or there was a drone strike on a car and in the car it was just four civilians, and two of them died, and two of them didn’t.
This was a sort of everyday reality where people would wake up and the men in the household would go to the fields to work and the women and children did not know if they would return that night. Or there would be a function like a wedding or something, a small gathering, they would go to the mosque. Nobody knew if by going there they would come back at the end of the day.
Imagine every single day, having to wake up and wondering if – oh, my husband’s going out to work today. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see him again. That was reality for two decades.
Chris Hayes: Yes. You also tell the story of just the constant dislocation. I mean, people moving, having to uproot their lives, and their homes, and their villages, and evacuating them because a certain area becomes a hotspot for the conflict. So you have to go take everything that you want on your back and go 12 miles away and then it’s just constant war. It’s constant war and in a way that I think American civilians, particularly, not the people who were serving there, didn’t fully reckon with that this was the daily experience. It wasn’t a back of mind thing, it was constant, and one of the things that comes through in your reporting is to the extent that the Taliban had popular support in their incredibly fast takeover of the country. It was born largely out of exhaustion with war and the promise of stability whoever could deliver it.
Anand Gopal: Yes, exactly. It’s not like anybody I interviewed really supported the Taliban. Because the Taliban, as an insurgency, didn’t really offer anything to the populations that they were embedded in. They didn’t provide social services. As you said, Afghanistan is one of the, if not the poorest country on earth, and the Taliban did nothing to address that. But the one thing the Taliban were able to do and this is probably the most important thing for somebody who’s living in a village in the middle of a war is provide a semblance of protection.
Your husband goes out, maybe because there’s a Taliban in the village, they’re slightly more likely to come back home at night. That’s not really support, but that’s a kind of acquiescence saying, “Okay, there’s a lot of bad options, but this, at least, will let my family survive to the next day.”
Chris Hayes: The other thing and you talk to a lot of women, and you talk about the difficulty in these remote areas. This is before the Taliban take over and a non-family member man creating the conditions under which you can talk to a woman in these extremely traditional conservative areas of Afghanistan. One thing that came clear maybe you can talk about is the Taliban’s gender, politics, which are brutal and oppressive and extremely segregated about public space and the role of women is not so far from the general social order of gender division and patriarchal traditions that were existing, independent of the Taliban in these areas that you were reporting on.
Anand Gopal: Yes, that’s right. I think sometimes we have a simplistic understanding that Afghanistan was either a blank slate or some kind of liberal society in which the Taliban emerged from somewhere and imposed their alien beliefs on the society. But in fact, it’s the opposite where the areas that I was reporting, which again are the areas where the war was the most concentrated, are really some of the most socially conservative places on Earth and there’s all sorts of reasons why that’s the case, but that is the fact.
It is the case that there are social norms in these villages where unrelated men and women do not mix. So for me, as a man who’s not related to these women, it was extraordinarily challenging to be able to access them and this has been the case for hundreds of years. The Taliban, in many ways, are an expression of that social conservatism. Really what they represented was an attempt to try to impose that conservatism on the rest of the country, which is a very diverse country.
It would be like in our country, if you had people from Kansas, who are Southern Baptists, deciding to impose that law on the rest of us. It doesn’t mean that southern baptism isn’t sort of a kind of indigenous phenomenon in Kansas or wherever, but it means that that’s what makes it complicated in a sense. In reporting in southern Afghanistan, one had to navigate those divisions.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I think those divisions obviously like not to say that, like, here’s how the U.S. and Afghanistan are similar. It’s just useful to just introspect your own society, because that was one of the things I think that got lost and the Afghanistan coverage is like – I say this on the podcast all the time, if you ever talk to someone from another country, like if you’re traveling abroad and you’re like at a bar or something and they say like, “Well, what do Americans think about this?” It’s like, “Well, I got to tell you, we don’t agree on a lot.” Like, which Americans do you mean, like do they like Trump? Do they not? Do they like the vaccine?
Well, that’s true in every society everywhere. So what do Afghans want? Well, they want a lot of different things and these core divisions in society, which apparently according to your reporting, it seemed like the war really exacerbated those same cleavages that were there preceding the war.
Anand Gopal: Exactly, the war exacerbated and helped perpetuate them. Because if you go back to 2001, when the Taliban were defeated, and at that point they were not a popular force. Even in the conservative hinterlands, they were not a force that most individuals sided with. They actually looked to the U.S. as a source of hope. They thought that maybe the U.S. can bring economic development and a greater degree of democracy to these areas.
When the U.S. failed to do so, everyone was forced to take a side and those who lived in Kabul and some of the big cities that benefited from the American presence, of course, naturally took the side of the American presence. But those who were on the wrong end of that, the only way they saw the American presence was through night raids, and airstrikes and drone strikes, et cetera. They turned against the Americans.
Chris Hayes: Was the American project doomed from the beginning or was it a victim of its own incompetence and failures?
Anand Gopal: Well, it wasn’t doomed from the beginning. Just to look in a broad sense, I mean, the United States has occupied countries and improved them. So Germany and Japan are examples of these. But what happened after 9/11 was that we culturally and politically were in a very different moment than the U.S. in 1945 or 1946. At that point, the U.S. occupation was really built on what was called the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which is the idea that most of the American warfighting capability would be outsourced to private actors or outsourced to aircraft. The idea being that the U.S. should have a really small force on the ground so that most Americans don’t really have to deal with the fact that there’s a war going on.
So when the U.S. invaded, they defeated the Taliban. As I said, the Taliban were not a popular force whatsoever, so Afghans were welcoming the American presence. But then the U.S. allied with a set of actors and empowered a set of actors who were deeply divisive and were really oppressive and these are warlords. These are not people that existed already and the U.S. just kind of found them.
The Americans actually brought them in from outside the country. These are Afghans who have been expelled in previous rounds of violence and were delegitimized and not popular inside the country. The U.S. found them, brought them in from Pakistan or Iran and basically empowered them, gave them extraordinary amounts of money and gave them guns and said that you guys are the most important actors here and we need you to find us bad guys or terrorists.
So these people were incentivized to find terrorists even when there weren’t terrorists, because, as I said, the Taliban basically crumbled. There were no Taliban at this point and so these warlords started to arrest innocent people. They started to round up various people who had nothing to do with the Taliban and a lot of these people were tortured by the American, sent to Guantanamo, sent to Bagram prison, which is the main prison in Afghanistan. In this way, over a number of years, the Taliban, which is once a very unpopular movement, was able to reconstitute itself as an insurgency.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I mean, having read reporting on this and talked to reporters who were there and people who were there in Afghan civil society, I mean, the incentive structure that gets set up is so sick and perverse. In the context of American policing when you had stop and frisk in New York City and you had like quotas where they had to hit certain numbers and this led to this astronomical levels of sort of like petty harassment. You’ve got this situation, which is like you essentially have a bounty system to these people who are supposed to turn terrorists over to you and they want to hit those numbers both for monetary and for relational reasons, whether they’re finding any or not and so you just produce incentives to kidnap, imprison, torture, expel, immiserate whoever’s around and this just goes on and on and people are watching this happen under, essentially, a set of incentives constructed by the American occupiers.
Anand Gopal: Yes, and there’s actually a remarkable parallel between these processes. If you look at mass incarceration, you had a great migration in which millions of black Americans moved to the cities at the same time as you had cutting of the welfare state and the miseration of working-class people and the response to this was increased policing, not to increase the means for working class people to have jobs or to improve their lives, so all the bureaucratic and political effort was put towards policing.
Really the exact same thing happened in Afghanistan, where when the U.S. invaded, they could have tried to build the state that was responsive to the needs of its citizens by creating, among things are welfare state and creating a state that actually invested in its community by building roads, by building irrigation ditches, et cetera. Instead, they took the same tact, which was to privatize everything just as what’s happened in the United States in the ’70s, to outsource everything to private actors to warlords, to private security contractors. The result was complete chaos and insubordination in the form of the Taliban.
Chris Hayes: So you have the Taliban now controlling Afghanistan, they are the Afghan government. I’ve read some interesting stuff both your reporting and others about the differences between this Taliban and the last one. And also like they, like any institution or human organization, have their own self-critiques, internal debates and lessons they think they’ve learned about what happened. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how this Taliban is or is not different from the group that took over the country 25 years ago.
Anand Gopal: Yes. The Taliban in the ’90s were mostly religious students in madrassas.
Chris Hayes: That’s what talib means, right?
Anand Gopal: Exactly. Talib is a religious student and the phenomena of being a talib exists for centuries in Afghanistan. They just got politicized, militarized in the wars in the ’80s and ’90s. Yes, Taliban were mostly madrassa students. Most of them were pretty cloistered. They never really experienced the outside world and so all of a sudden, you take these people who are probably the most cloistered of any group in the world. I mean, Afghanistan is, in many ways, at least influenced by modernity, by market, et cetera, in the ’90s. So you had this group all of a sudden take power in the ’90s.
What’s different today is that most of the Taliban today aren’t necessarily just seminary students. There’s farmers, there’s businessmen, there’s people from all walks of life and they joined the movement, not because of kind of necessarily they believed in the religious sort of message of it, but because they were from communities that were excluded, for one reason or another in the post-2001 order. Some tribe was excluded from contracts, so another tribe was targeted because we backed warlords that were attacking this community. Another tribe was victim to airstrikes.
So all of these different communities, for disparate reasons kind of came together under the brand of the Taliban, and so it’s a much more diverse, less monolithic movement than it was in the ’90s. One of the consequences of that is that a lot of the sort of hard line elements that appeared in the ’90s like, for example, girls were completely banned from education, that is now in contestation.
There are those, the hardliners, that say we need to do that and there are others that say this is crazy, if we did that, we’re going to isolate ourselves from the international community. We see that kind of debate playing out across the country where from village to village the rules vary. In some places, girls are allowed to go to school, girls are even going to university. In other places, girls are completely banned.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That debate, I mean, I’ve read some reporting about the fact that part of the reason that government fell, there was the combination of popular discontent, I’m saying the first Taliban government, popular discontent, but also complete international isolation. And the international isolation born of the fact that the attitude towards girls, particularly girls schooling and women was so oppressive and so out of line with, basically, what essentially any nation in the world was doing, that that produced a real tactical disadvantage and that there are people inside the Taliban who – whether it’s a moral commitment or not – are like we probably should try to not be as isolated this time around as we were last time.
Anand Gopal: Exactly. I mean, there are people who understand real politics. They know that if they stick to the line that they had last time, they’re going to be destroyed. Then there are others who disagree, but this is a live debate inside the Taliban movement and the international community can actually have an influence on this debate. The further that this movement is isolated, I think it’s going to embolden the hardliners and it’s going to say to them, look, we were right all along, no matter what we do the international community is against us and so we have a role to play in this.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because that brings us to what I said in the intro. Again, this is not an area of particular expertise of mine, but I have followed it enough that the math here seems pretty clear that this is a country that is at the frontiers of and will go further into complete humanitarian disaster and free fall, does that line up with what you hear from the people that you are in touch with there?
Anand Gopal: Yes, not even going into, it is already in. I mean, the collapse has happened, and it is in the free fall right now. These stories that I’m hearing, I spoke to a colleague of mine in Helmand Province in the south today, and we’re seeing severe acute malnutrition among children. We’re seeing people on the streets to a degree that we’ve never seen before. There’s images coming out of the country, which was just horrific. Bring to mind stories of Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. This is a famine and like most famines, this is a human-made disaster.
Chris Hayes: As someone who has reported on this country now for decades, what’s the solution?
Anand Gopal: Well, the immediate solution is to not punish ordinary Afghans for the fact that the Taliban is taking over the country and that’s actually what’s happening now. There are sanctions on the country, sanctions on the individuals within the Taliban movement, which is making many international donors hesitant to pour money into the country, so that’s a major problem. The second problem is much deeper, which is that one could ask, why is it the case that when troops leave all of a sudden, the economy collapses.
I mean, that’s not a normal circumstance. A normal economy has its own industries, and it has a government that collects taxes, it has all of these things, which none of this happened, because going back two decades the United States set up the Afghan government to meet its counterterrorism interests, not to meet the interests of ordinary Afghans. Which means that when a road needed to be paved, normally, in our country, when a road is paved or at least used to be, the government would have paved the road and that would be done through tax revenue.
In Afghanistan that was outsourced to private actors, or it was a Pentagon contract that was given to somebody who was in Washington, D.C. which would then outsource it to another company and then on down the chain until eventually some company in Afghanistan would do probably a terrible job at it. This is kind of a libertarian nightmare situation, which is what Afghanistan’s been in for the last two decades and all of this is coming to roost now.
And so the U.S. bears a moral and political responsibility to try to address what it has caused from the very beginning, which means trying to help create the institutions supporting the regime, even if we don’t like the Taliban, we have to think about who’s going to be affected by it, which is ordinary, supporting them in sort of funding, in sort of ending the sanctions regime. If you want to have sanctions, they need to be targeted against specific individuals, not against entire classes of people, which affect all Afghans.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s striking because I’ve interviewed several people on this program and other places who have covered ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In those situations in Mosul, for instance, and in some of the parts of Syria they occupied, again, you’ve got a similar situation. I mean, I think apples and oranges, I think they’re probably a more insidious and violent movement than the Taliban even, ISIS.
But what you had were in a place like Mosul like there was some kind of functioning economy and system to kind of take over that was then brought under their control, but continued to function in so far as like there were people growing food, and then they were bringing it to market, and then they were selling it, and there was a tremendous amount of oppression and predation and deprivation, but it didn’t just collapsed as a city.
Whereas it seems to me that because of the way of, 20 years of the way that this state and economy were set up like there’s no blood flowing through the system, like the normal mechanics of an economy are just not functioning right now.
Anand Gopal: Yes. Well, we created a fictitious economy for two decades and then we decided that we’re not interested in that anymore, because the whole economy collapsed. There’s no liquidity in the country, banks don’t have money. Literally before, in the previous regime, the U.S. used to fly bills, cash every month to the country and that’s the only way that the central bank had the reserves to be able to guarantee the downstream banks to be able to lend money or people’s accounts. All of that is stopped, so the central bank has hardly any actual cash reserves. So there’s limits on how much people can withdraw.
On top of that, most of the economy for the last two decades was organized around the war, supporting contractors, supporting people paving roads or private security guards, all of that is gone. That’s where the root of the disaster is. But what the tragedy is this is a choice that the international community and United States is making. It’s not something that’s like a natural disaster. The U.S. has decided to isolate this country and effectively punish 30 million people because they have the wrong government.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be back after this quick break.
The U.S. has been at the forefront of this, I know. Where are other international actors on this question? I know that there’s some bid for sort of official recognition from the Taliban. I think the last time it was only Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, I think, that recognize them the first time around in the UAE that they’re looking for broader recognition this time around. Obviously, that’s crucial to both their legitimacy avoiding the worst humanitarian disaster possible and getting the country functioning again.
What is the kind of posture in the ‘international community’ this time around?
Anand Gopal: Well, this time around people at the various states are much more hesitant and nobody wants to be the first mover, nobody wants to be the first one to recognize the Taliban. So even Pakistan, which historically has been very close to Taliban, have not recognized the movement. There was an interesting example where Pakistan International Airlines, which is the national carrier, a couple of months ago, when I was in the country, started to fly routes into Afghanistan and all of a sudden, somebody within the government or the ISI said, wait a second, this looks like we’re de facto recognizing them, so they stopped the flights.
At this point, there’s hardly any commercial flights going into the country. It is more isolated than North Korea, which is extraordinary to think. Nobody is willing to take this first step to recognize the country, but you need recognition to be able to begin to open up all these sort of bureaucratic mechanisms to get funding into the country. So this is a chicken and egg situation, but really the first mover here, the one who would set the agenda is United States. Everybody from the European allies to the gulf states are looking to the U.S. to make the first move.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it seems to me unlikely U.S. is going to recognize the Taliban government for a bunch of reasons, political reasons, geopolitical reasons all that. But it does seem like there’s a lot of ground between recognize the Taliban and say, hey, like, we’re cool. You’re a normal country and grinding them into the dust of poverty and international isolation. It does seem to me like there’s a bunch of things you can do that are not full recognition, that make things better for average Afghans.
Anand Gopal: Well, there’s the dejour (ph) recognition, which, of course, is a (inaudible), but there’s de facto recognition, which is not happening, Which would be, for example, allowing certain Taliban representatives into international spaces like the United Nations or there would be funding and U.S. has released some hundred million dollars of funding, but that’s like a drop in the bucket, because we’re looking at a massive economy that’s rapidly contracting.
Of course, it’s going to contract because there’s no way to maintain the status quo ante, because there’s a war now. But to be able to taper it in such a way and to be able to help build the Afghan government’s capacity to collect revenue, to collect taxes would be a really important thing to do. All of those are small steps that could be taken.
The Taliban have, for their part, have made gestures towards that, saying that we’re willing to discuss these things with the international community. Everything that the Taliban is that has been promoted in the ’90s is kind of on the table now for discussion, even the question of women’s education. And at the very least, United States should be sort of ramping up its diplomacy and negotiations to try to get to that point.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to give you an argument that landed in my inbox the other night when I did a commentary on air saying that it’s just indefensible, inexcusable moral scandal to let this country sink into starvation, which people said, well, you don’t know the Taliban. You’re naive if you give the Taliban money. It’s not going to actually get to the people that you want to try to help, and this government is brutal and it’s oppressive and you would just be essentially propping them up.
Anand Gopal: That’s true, you would be propping them up. But let’s talk about two caveats. One is the previous regime, which the current administration and every U.S. official has been involved in the conflict would acknowledge is extraordinarily corrupt. And the vast amounts of money that were going into the country, which was actually keeping Afghans alive was also partly being captured by this autocratic class of individuals. So at the worst-case scenario, if that were to be repeated now, we would be keeping people alive, in the worst-case scenario, number one.
Number two, it is true that by propping up or supporting the Afghan economy and keeping people alive, it is going to give the Taliban life support, but let’s look at what the alternative is. Inside Afghanistan right now the Taliban is waging a pretty brutal battle against ISKP, which is the ISIS franchise inside the country. The real alternatives we’re facing is either the Taliban or all for all civil war or an ISIS takeover. Those are the only alternatives. When we’re looking at it that way, the Taliban is a lesser of three evils.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I mean, just again as someone who is not an expert in this, but it just seems like, okay, well, you’re sanctioning them. You’re putting on all these pressure points to the Taliban, what’s the end game, like do you want the Taliban government to fall, like what would come after that. We literally went around this. We took this entire trip over 20 years. So what exactly would be the point of – particularly when reading your work about the importance to people of some semblance of stability, it does seem like it’s not like the U.S. government is incapable of valuing stability over all of this. I mean, they propped up Mubarak, for years. They propped dozens of odious regimes in the name of stability and often, to great criticism, but this just seems like one of those real politics situations where stability, some kind of stability, some kind of functioning state is really the most important thing over any other concern.
Anand Gopal: Absolutely. This is not like Syria or Egypt where there was an alternative. There was a revolution. There was a different imagination of what the state could look like. This is a case where you’re looking at either the Taliban or some kind of nihilistic civil war or ISIS. It’s unfortunate that’s where we are and that’s what the choice is in front of us, and then we need to interrogate the choices and decisions we’ve made in the last two decades, but that is where we are.
If this downward slide continues, the Taliban will be further delegitimized and ISKP will be further emboldened and that will be a disaster, not just for stability, but for refugee flows and for the entire region.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about ISIS-KP for a second, ISIS of the Khorasan peninsula, is that what it stands for? And that’s a name for that part of the world that stretches back years, centuries.
Anand Gopal: It’s a name that was used like once in the Quran or something that’s not really taken seriously until it was rehabilitated by ISIS.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit about that group. I mean, what was striking to me when we were watching this all play out in August, of course, and just to reset people’s memories on this, the strange situation developed in which the Taliban take Kabul faster than the Americans realize. The U.S. then needs to use the airport. The U.S. and the Taliban create, essentially, a back channel that then is basically a front channel in which they are essentially cooperating on airport security. The U.S. offers Taliban assurances like we are actually totally getting out. The Taliban then in exchange says we will essentially have checkpoints and we will let your people through and, again, a lot of this is honored in the breach. A lot of it gets extremely messy.
But there is essentially this kind of truce between the two parties in the waning days of the war to get the airport functioning. Into this comes ISIS-KP, who are the ones responsible for that just horrifying suicide attack into the crowd, killing I think over a dozen U.S. service members and maybe a hundred to 150 Afghans were there. I remember thinking two things, one, what a monstrous act it was at a human level, how horrifying and upsetting it was. But two like, man, there’s always someone on your flank, isn’t there, in life.
It’s like you could think you’re the most radical MFR (ph) around and there’s someone else there and it’s like, here’s the Taliban and they’ve got someone on their flank saying like, you guys are sellouts and we’re the real deal. We’re the actual radicals here and it just was like pretty mind-blowing thought to entertain.
Anand Gopal: Yes. A good way to think about this is you should think about the Taliban as conservatives like ultra conservatives and ISIS or ISKP is radicals and there’s a difference. Ultra conservatives are tapping into something that is latent in certain rural communities in the south. It is a kind of discourse that exists in these communities, there are others. This is not the only one, but they are saying we used to live in this way, and we want to live in this way again, so we are the arch conservatives.
ISKP, they are radicals in the sense. They’re projecting a world view that really is not indigenous to Afghanistan in any way, so that’s really what this is about, ultraconservatism or a kind of like alien radicalism.
Chris Hayes: Yes, like a much more blank slate kind of utopian fascist vision of we will create the new utopia, the new god’s kingdom on earth authoritarian fantasy.
Anand Gopal: Exactly. Exactly, like Khmer Rouge, that kind of thing. You’re just bringing in ideas that didn’t have currency and it’s important to understand the distinction, because why the Taliban was able to emerge is because they were tapping into something that at least in some communities was labeled. Where the Taliban emerged because of the violence, they were able to put a narrative onto the violence. The Americans were killing people and the Taliban said here’s why they’re killing people.
They’re these people who are opposed to our traditional way of being, whereas ISKP they don’t really have narrative, so what they’re doing is kind of imposing all that in sort of alien way. The only way they can sort of flourish is chaos in civil war. That’s why it’s so important that we avoid civil war right now.
Chris Hayes: One of the last acts of the U.S. government in the war of Afghanistan was subsequent to that brutal mass murder that happened outside the Kabul airport. The U.S. launches an airstrike, all U.S. officials, I think up to and including the president say that it was based on intelligence that it was launched against some party responsible for plotting it. Because there are so many reporters in Kabul and because Kabul is so close to reporters in a way, that is not the case of the areas that you had reported on before, that story very quickly unravels. Tell a little bit about what we learned about that airstrike, but also the larger lesson of that, which is that a lot of this was happening for a very long time outside of the view of people.
Anand Gopal: Yes. I think what we learned on what we saw, for those of us who are seeing this for the first time in real time, is that U.S. intelligence is awful, is not very accurate or precise and that we need to take U.S. intelligence claims with a grain of salt. People have seen Azmat Khan’s reporting in The New York Times. She really shows that in a much grander scale.
But yes, exactly, I think Chris your point is worth highlighting, which is that it is the case that because we all happen to be paying attention and this was in the center of the country, in the most populated area, that we could see this kind of tragedy unfolding. This kind of thing was happening all the time for 20 years. This was a drone strike, most of these attacks were manned aircraft, old-fashioned B-52s or whatever, bombing people. Or if it wasn’t airstrikes, it was ground forces kicking in doors all based on really flimsy intelligence, where you get the sense, if you look at the pattern of this type of intelligence, you really get the sense that what was happening is there’s some sort of intelligence theater that was being undertaken, where people kind of went through the motions, ticked off boxes, but everybody kind of knew the wink and nod that this is a war and they’re just going to have to do what they have to do.
This is why in my reporting in Helmand, everybody, every single person I met lost somebody in this fashion, whether a drone strike or a night raid or a roadside bomb, every single person, and that’s the reality that most of the people in the southern provinces had to live with for 10, 15 years.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I have to say like you do such a thorough job of reporting and documenting these stories, again, because it’s a very difficult reporting question in Helmand Province when someone says this person was killed by the Americans to then cross-reference that and then talk to the two or three other people that saw the strike and you do all of that. It’s all very incredibly rigorously reported, which is not to say that there’s any reason to not believe that people are telling you the truth. It’s just that if you’re going to be reporter in that situation, you have to run those things down.
What’s so striking in that reporting is just the sheer scope of it. I mean, I felt like I knew before I read that an inkling of the scope of it and I had no idea until I read that piece that everyone had lost someone and that that’s how common it was. These are people who are not fighters, just to be clear. Like they were men, basically, was what made them targets in this environment, no matter what they were doing, and everyone had lost a male family member.
Anand Gopal: I mean, even I was surprised. I’ve been reporting on this conflict since 2008. I knew in a kind of general sense that people had suffered a lot in the countryside. I interviewed this woman named Shakira who ended up being the sort of the protagonist of this article. I was more interested in her like day-to-day life and then like kind of the inflection points of her life when she decided to flee her village, et cetera.
She started to just bring up casually in passing, oh, this is my cousin so-and-so and he died in this incident or my other cousin so-and-so who was killed in a drone strike. At some point, I was like, “Wait a second, you’ve already mentioned like nine people to me. Can we just like stop for a minute and you just go through the list and tell me each the name and the situation in which each person died?”
In her case it was 16 people, 16 family members. We say the war really started in 2004, 2005 and I interviewed her in 2021, so we’re talking 16 family members in 16 years. Imagine the tragedy every single year. When I interviewed her, I said, “Well, this has got to be sui generis. This can’t be the case across the board.” But I had to find out, so I started to go to households in the village and just started to survey people and ask them.
I didn’t ask them at first what was the cause of death. I just said, tell me who died in your family and give me the documents. Then you would get 10, 15 people for each family. Then I went back and tried to discern who was the cause and it turned out that most of these were due to the Americans and I was taken aback. I just never expected this.
Chris Hayes: This lines up with the reporting you just mentioned of Azmat Khan that was in New York Times about the broader machinery of death, civilian death that the Americans construct in Afghanistan, and for which there has been nothing, no accountability. I mean, occasionally, I think there are stories of U.S. forces paying reparations, showing up with money or sometimes livestock or different forms of payment to say, we’re sorry, that was an accident.
But that seems like a very small percentage of the deaths and it really seems like there’s a church committee level reckoning to do what the American killing machine constructed over the last 20 years that just goes through every single strike and who it got, and what the intelligence was, and what was the system that produced it, and who was responsible and why we can never do it again, because it’s just a complete both moral and tactical disaster, as far as I could tell from reading you and other people.
Anand Gopal: It’s a moral disaster, Chris. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a tactical disaster, it is in Afghanistan. But let’s look at Syria and Iraq, where the U.S. basically leveled cities. I mean, the city of Raqqah; 300,000, 400,000 people was basically wiped off the map in the extent of destruction. When I went to Raqqah, it looked like pictures I had seen in (inaudible), but the U.S. won the war and they were able to keep the images of the war and the idea of the war out of American minds and I think that’s really what’s driving all this is to the extent that we Americans are inured from the realities of conflict. That’s seen as a victory for the military or for politicians.
I’m not saying anybody’s consciously thinking this. It’s not like somebody is saying, we should do this and kill these civilians, and therefore, Americans back home won’t realize that we’ve been at war for 20 years. Rather, there’s incentives that are built into the rules, the bureaucratic rules, where everybody in the chain of command is just following orders, just adhering to the rules and the rules themselves are producing extraordinary amounts of death and destruction.
Chris Hayes: Left me follow up on that, because this is a really interesting point, if people have not tracked this, Raqqah was a city in Syria that was essentially ISIS capital and it was, I think, the first big place they had taken as large city, they then administered it as the governing authority. They had a sanitation crew, like they were the municipal authority for Raqqah. I mean, again, maybe this is a naive view, and I don’t necessarily even hold it, but let me just say it and I would like you to argue against me.
It’s like there’s no question that the campaign against Raqqah was brutal and the air campaign against ISIS in Iraq was unbelievably brutal. The house-to-house fighting that ends up happening in Mosul which we interviewed an author about a book he did on that on this show. It was probably the most brutal fighting, the most brutal close urban fighting since World War II that happened on planet Earth. That all of that was in pursuit of like a bloody war against like the most malevolent force on the earth at the time. I don’t say that as some comic book thing. I think loathed across all sorts of spectrums by all sorts of actors, people who are underneath their control, the proximate governments, the other jihadi groups, I mean, there’s a whole host of people that wanted to get rid of ISIS. In the end, the U.S. actually won that as a clear marketed battle that it never did that in Afghanistan for a bunch of other reasons.
Anand Gopal: I think that’s true, but I think when we judge conflicts, we should judge them on two axes. One is the morality of the purpose of the conflict and the second is the morality of the conduct in the conflict. Yes, the purpose of the war against ISIS was a just one, because this is a horrible group that nobody in the region or anybody wants to see around. Then there’s the morality of the conduct and the United States (inaudible) the second, United States in Iraq and Syria made a choice where they decided to prosecute this conflict purely through air power and purely to destroy or backing ground forces in close quarters fighting, which led to extraordinary destruction instead of actually if we thought, if we as Americans thought this is a war that was worth fighting and ISIS needed to be defeated, then Americans should have been put in harm’s way to fight this.
Otherwise, to outsource the violence and the risk onto Syrian civilians, I think, is an unjust act. Now, where Afghanistan is slightly different is that it’s not clear the Taliban are not the same as ISIS. The Taliban emerged because of our presence and our activities. ISIS did not, at least, in the immediate sense, emerged in Syria because the United States is on the ground. It emerged because of a revolution against the dictator in Syria.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. troops were on the ground after 2001 and it was the crimes committed by the U.S. and our allies that led to people with a dearth of better options turning to the Taliban. So in that circumstance, the very purpose of the war is not even just, unlike in Syria and Iraq, where what’s incumbent upon us to just is to see how we can end the war, because we are the ones who essentially caused this war to begin in the first place.
Chris Hayes: We’ve had Spencer Ackerman on the program about his book, Reign of Terror. He connects the war on terror to American democratic backsliding, the sort of continuity between the language, the actions and the illiberal corner cutting that permanent state of exception requires leading to Trump and ultimately the kind of real proximate threat to American liberal democracy as we know it.
Do you think the war on terror is over or can it ever be over? Like what would it look like for it to really actually be over?
Anand Gopal: Yes. I mean, the war on terror is not over, I think. One in the most immediate sense, I mean, the paradigm of the war on terror, which is that the United States has the right to be able to sort of deploy drones or whatever else in any conflict it deems necessary, that still is very much the case. In that sense, within the context of the war on terror, Afghanistan is a tactical defeat or a strategic defeat at most. It’s not a defeat on principles.
So there’s still the war on terror being waged in parts of West Africa and East Africa and North Africa, there’s also in Afghanistan as well. The U.S. has approached the Taliban to ask the Taliban if they could ally together to fight ISKP to the succession of the war on terror. There’s talks about the U.S. having —
Chris Hayes: That really feels like a perpetual motion machine.
Anand Gopal: — it is a perpetual machine.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it’s like Joseph Heller Catch-22 it seems like absurdist just like, “Oh, hey, guys. Oh, you guys are the new guys here. Wondering if we could buddy up against the new —
Anand Gopal: The newer guys, yes.
Chris Hayes: — the newer guys.” It’s like, oh, my lord.
Anand Gopal: Exactly. Exactly. There’s no kind of reckoning whatsoever. But there’s another way, I think, and a much more profound way in which they were entirely still with us, which is the way, I think probably Spencer talked about this, how it’s transformed American democracy. In examples, there was this shooting in Michigan, a horrific shooting. Obviously, the person, perpetrator should be brought to justice, but the prosecutors wanted to bring terrorism charges. And there’s a question like if we’re defining terrorism so broadly, it just becomes a way in which prosecutors can hand heavy sentences down on people and that could be used against all sorts of people, it was used against Black Lives Matter activists, it was used against people in the protest who really didn’t commit acts of violence. So that’s a really dangerous way in which the war on terror is still with us and still continuously eroding our democracy.
Chris Hayes: What are you working on now?
Anand Gopal: I’m writing a book on a city that overthrew the government, it’s a city in Syria, that overthrew its government and for 18 months had a participatory democratic experiment, which was eventually taken over by ISIS, but taken over politically, not without a shot fired. In other words, ISIS won the allegiance of the street and it’s bringing the examination of liberalism in our age, and what are the strengths and the limitations of liberalism and why extremist groups or far-right groups like ISIS are able to win the allegiance of ordinary people against liberals.
Chris Hayes: Wow. That sounds incredible. I mean, there are stories that came out of places in Syria in the midst of the revolution and particularly some of the Kurdish-controlled areas that sound like a little like Orwell’s Barcelona. I mean, this kind of revolutionary ethos and collective solidarity, but also collective decision-making, but also the inevitable factional disputes and conflict that comes on the heels of that and that sounds like a really amazing story.
Anand Gopal: Thanks. Yes. I mean, I was very much inspired by Catalonia (ph), because a lot of that did happen in Syria and this is a city of a hundred thousand people, which, before 2011 had a single newspaper, the state-run newspaper. They overthrow the government, and they have 11 newspapers, liberal, leftist, Islamist, right-wing, there’s assemblies, like the French Revolution that are created. People are debating on this. There’s lectures on the street. You go to the town square and people are debating John Locke. This is what was happening, in the middle of a civil war, one of the most brutal civil wars in the world.
Chris Hayes: Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker. He covers war revolution democracy. He’s also assistant professor at the Center for Study of Religion and conflict at Arizona State University. His book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes is incredible, and it sounds like his next book will be and we’ll have you back on to talk about the book when that’s out, how about that?
Anand Gopal: That would be great.
Chris Hayes: Awesome. Thanks, man.
Anand Gopal: Thanks a lot.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Anand Gopal. If you are interested in learning more about the conversation about Afghanistan, we did that conversation with Spencer Ackerman about the war on terror and Sarah Chayes on Afghanistan particularly in corruption.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the “All In” team, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the “All In” team and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.