Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young and

Canadian editor Jonathan K.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

On Sunday, August 15th, Taliban fighters seized Kabul, following quickly on the evacuation of the last remaining

American troops.

And in the days since, the scenes of desperate Afghans trying to flee the country on outbound

aircraft have elicited parallels with the fall of Saigon in 1975.

But my guest on the podcast this week, Canadian journalist and book author Terry Glavin,

paints a more complex picture of what is now happening in Afghanistan.

Rather than comparing it to Saigon in 1975, Glavin sees it as something that looks almost like a plotline from Game of Thrones, with various

warlords still vying for influence from power centers both inside and outside Afghanistan.

Glavin is the author of Come From the Shadows, The Long and Lonely

Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, a 2011 book based on his extensive reporting

in Afghanistan, where he personally met and interviewed some of the power

brokers you'll be hearing him discuss in this podcast. By his telling, the story of Afghanistan

over the last two decades hasn't just been the story of a destructive Taliban insurgency against the government,

...