Hello, dear listeners, welcome back to Conflicted.

As ever, I'm here with Aymand Dean, my stalwart co-host.

Today, Aman, as you know, we are going to be heading back to your old stomping grounds

and our original backyard, Afghanistan.

Ah, exactly.

I have so many happy memories there.

Typhoid, malaria, heroin, the smell of, you know, opium, and, of course, the smell of, you know, so many other things, like, you know, apart from spices, but also gumpowder and chemicals.

Yeah.

Hey, man, I was going to ask, after all these years, does the name Afghanistan still fill

your heart with a certain romantic yearning, the land of adventure, the land of jihad, the land

of men, unstained by the compromises of modern life? But it sounds to me like the word

Afghanistan fills your imagination with other things.

Yeah, and fills my imagination also, like, and my memories with how many times I had to suffer, you know, diarrhea from all the awful food poisoning, like, basically, because we were eating literal poison there.

Oh, goodness. Well, Aiman, it is off to Afghanistan we go, and not for tales of

moral purity, dear listeners. No, we are here to tell the story of the CIA-backed Afghan operatives

who were left high and dry when the Americans withdrew from the country in 2021. They were in the news at the end of

last year after a tragic shooting in Washington, D.C., hit the headlines allegedly carried out by one of

those CIA-backed Afghan allies of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. We'll talk about the shooting, and we'll go right back to the origins of this long and tortured story,

back farther than you might think.

But this is conflicted, this is what we do.

And I think I'm able to say here, Amin, that you know a lot about these CIA-backed Afghans.

Indeed I do.

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