Hello from Austin and welcome to episode 208 of the National Security Law podcast. We're brought to you by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. It's Monday, August 16th, 2021. I'm Bobby Chesney. I'm Steve Floddy. Bobby, we really have

one thing we want to talk about today. Yeah, it's a day to talk about Afghanistan. Yes.

It's probably best to begin on a note of sympathy and compassion for the people of Afghanistan, many of whom are in a

horrific spot right now. There are all kinds of, I would say, entirely predictable stories of the abuses

that are occurring in the terror of abuses yet to come that are unfolding

there.

And so entirely apart from whether the withdrawal is the right thing, whether it's been

handled appropriately, there's just a fact on the ground there about what people are experiencing

now that Taliban rule has so

comprehensively returned. And it's a, it's a tragedy. I mean, that's, that has to be the

starting off point is that, you know, finger pointing aside, and I want to talk a bit about

the finger pointing, because boy, was it a bad weekend to be on the internet. But finger-pointing aside, I mean, the human

tragedy of all of this has to be the first headline because, you know, as much as people want

to try to score points off of this, I think the most important point to make is that there are

very real people whose lives are going to be forever altered and for the worse by, you know,

not just this weekend's events, but by really the events of certainly the last few years,

but especially the last 18 months since the Doha agreement. Well, so as law professors, where do we

dive into it? So I thought it would be helpful.

So I thought I viewed our conversation as happening in three parts.

The first was just sort of information sharing, right?

Just sort of, because I think some of our, you know, obviously some of our listeners know more about this than we do.

And so this is going to be incredibly basic. But I suspect there are

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