We never really made an effort to bring our ideals of democracy and rule of law to Afghanistan. There was never any effort to bring that. What we did was kind of unwittingly exported the version of the American government system that we are currently experiencing. And that is where IC Afghanistan has a very sobering mirror that is being held up to us today. I'm Marianne Williamson, and welcome to the Transform Podcast, where we will examine the forces of chaos that threaten to distress, the acts of love that can make the whole thing you. Please tell my children that I love them very much. This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing life shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps

and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan

as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime. The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the 9-11 attacks. Our goal was to topple the Taliban's government and to route out the secret hideaways of Al-Qaeda. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. The U.S. Constitution explicitly assigned to Congress the role of declaring war. But after the 9-11 attacks, Congress basically gave to the president, whoever the president might be, the authority to do whatever was necessary to quote unquote, fight terrorism. And not only George Bush, but every President since, has expanded on that authority, to the point where Congress has willingly allowed itself to be peripheralized in the effort to fight terrorism. I frankly think we have overblown the danger of terrorism from the beginning. Sarah Chase is a former journalist with NPR who covered the war in Afghanistan. I'm not saying that 9-11 was not horrific, but I just think that in comparison with the damage that has been caused by these money maximizers compared to our health, to the health of the planet and to our lives, you know, as many people committed suicide in the wake of the crash of 2008 as were killed in the terrorist attacks of 9-11. So I actually think that terrorism has been a distraction from the real issues that we need to be focusing on as a nation and as people. Both our military and our civilian leadership spoke about the war only in military terms, and we, the American people, pretty much went along with that. They were applying ferocious forms of brute force, followed by more ferocious forms of brute force, all of which ultimately led to the realization that all that brute force was futile. For the United States, wage war in Afghanistan and we didn't really even try to wage peace. We destroyed things, but we created very little. Larged Indeed is a veteran of two tours of duty in Afghanistan. My unit was sent to train the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. And the 82nd Airborne Division doesn't know how to train anybody. The 82nd Airborne Division knows how to do exactly one thing. Smash this stuff. It, there were some real challenges in training, I think, in the first place. So what my unit ended up doing was doing all the missions themselves and then saying that the Afghans did it, but with our help, like we were in support roles, and that wasn't what was happening. Sarah Chase. What were we doing creating a conventional army in Afghanistan with people who knew how to fight a guerrilla war and were fighting against guerrillas? Why did we turn them into a conventional army that was bound to be completely dependent on expensive material and American trainers and maintenance people and things like that. What is becoming more and more clear is that we made the same fatal error in Afghanistan that we made in Vietnam. The primary architect of the war in Vietnam defends Secretary under both Kennedy and Johnson Robert McNamara, famously said shortly before his death. We didn't know the people of Vietnam. We didn't know their history, we didn't know their culture, we didn't know their religion. What Ubers, what arrogance the United States displayed. Not only in its failure to truly know the people in Vietnam, but then so tragically, the same way in Afghanistan. When I first went there, there was a real excitement in the 70s that they were gonna finally join the modern world. Tom Fruston is a media executive who set up Mobey Media, the first post-Taliban television and radio stations in a country. Kabul was only 400,000 people and it was part of it look like some old medieval city, but the people were excited to be part and connected to the modern world. You see women and miniscurs in Kabul in the 1970s and there was also some, you know, national women's week. They would have a lot of events for women. That'll of course, went away with the wars. I mean, once you got out of Kabul, it was still quite a conservative country. Joe Serencioni, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, and former president of the Plough Shares Fund. We didn't listen to the people of Afghanistan. We didn't listen to what they wanted. And we try to impose an American construct, a centralized government. Well, the last time Afghanistan had a centralized government that lasted was during, when the Greeks invaded around 350 BC in state for about 150 years. That was the last time there was a sustained central government. This is not the culture, the experience of the ECM people. Comfressed. We set up a centralized state where the president would get to appoint the governors in each province rather than the people in the province electing their own leaders, which is just to make things right for corruption. And we picked inside it with the warlords and the sort of power brokers who had ransacked the country that almost led to the Taliban in the first place. So we aligned with the wrong people, set up the wrong kind of constitution, and then we laid this heavy military footprint in place. Sarah Chase. What they had done was kind of connect with the warlords, whom the Taliban had kicked out of the country back in 1994. And these were people who were responsible for a kind of chaotic, violent extortion at Mayhem during the late, I would say, during the very early 1990s after the Soviet Union pulled out. So the one thing that Afghans were grateful to the Taliban for was kicking these people out of the country. Everyone I talked to said that. They detested the Taliban, but at least they got rid of the warlord. So what did we do?

We allied with those very same warlords and brought them back into the country and put them in position as governors of the major provinces. Larger deed. I didn't see a lot of excitement for our presence in those areas. There were of course people who wanted us there. People on the The bass who certainly said they wanted us there, but didn't see a lot of a... I didn't see a lot of buy-in where I was. They kept talking about security but they didn't mean security against a Taliban. They meant security for people against the militias who were roaming around that we the United States had armed, that we He had dressed we had dressed in US Army uniforms that were loyal to a man who had imposed himself as governor, in fact against President Karzai's wishes at the time. And we're, you know, I mean, one kid told me that his cousin was riding his bicycle and the, these militia men wanted some money from him. No, I think they wanted his bicycle, if I remember correctly, and he wouldn't give it to them. And so they beat him up, and then they took his bicycle. This is the summer of 2002, and these people, and I had half a dozen specific stories like that. And these people were dressed in US Army uniforms. And so what were Afghans to think? Other than this must have been how we wanted things to go. These are people who believed us. They believed the words that we said and just like in Vietnam, we didn't do it and just like in Iraq. It's, we have a pattern of doing this. And people believe us every time and that's the worst of it. And that's something that, I mean, even when I was over there, I have this very vivid recollection of a human intelligence operator coming in just screaming because orders had gone down on high based on his intelligence that was going to burn his source. They were going to figure out who it was because he had information that he could not have gotten any other way. And this guy, who was, I mean, he was a special forces guy.

This is like a hardened person.

And he was as angry as I've ever seen anyone at that betrayal.

And this happened all the time.

And it's just, it's a, you also hit, I think it's the same slip side of the coin.

It's the disrespect for what they want.

It's this feeling that we know best and that we can make these sacrifices

and we have no right. As it turns out, we now realize that the rural population of Afghanistan couldn't wait to get the United States out. They wanted an end to this war and they were more comfortable with the kind of security of the Taliban provided than the kind of security of the Afghan police force and the Afghan military was saying as they said, you know, we'll pay attacks to the Taliban, but we won't be stopped every few miles on the road and asked for a bribe from the security forces or the police forces that were there. Study after study that happened in the last 20 years, it would be done by Asia Foundation or others would find that the support for the Taliban was like 15%. That was their approval rating. The problem was the government had a lower approval rating. One could say that if they had a government that wasn't as corrupt and as predatory as the one they set up that the Taliban never would have made these inroads. There's almost like the Afghan government was a Taliban's best friend. While the United States likes to think that we were doing nation building, more and more people are recognizing that we did very little nation building in fact. For what is a nation, certainly if it's one that the United States can feel part of helping to create, it is not a democracy. And the government that we created, that we supported, and that we enabled was anything but a democracy. If then Vice President Biden had been concerned about corruption, did he have thoughts about how we might address that? Once his boss, President Obama, had decided to stay in Afghanistan into increased presence of troops on the ground, I didn't see any evidence of Vice President Biden waiting in to say in that case, alongside the troops that we're sending in, we need to do this that and the other thing to address the problem of corruption. That I never saw coming out of his office. Congress has basically abandoned its oversight responsibility over the Pentagon right now, and over this militarized foreign policy, and they've been doing it under Democrats, and they've been doing it under Republicans. Republicans think it's good politics to go forward and present the image of a strong Republican party that's back in the generals and the Democrats themselves are afraid of national security. They don't want to touch this. They think of it as a weakness as a distraction from their domestic agenda. So you had 20 years during this global war on terrorism, a basically Congress just writing a blank check for the military for everything they need. What we are learning now, of course, is that the Armed Services Committee, any congressional oversight, was so lax concerning this war, that while we were losing, while we were doing a terrible job, that while we were losing soldiers, while tens of thousands of Afghans were dying, congressional oversight amounted to little more than having some generals come down to the Capitol, answer some tough questions, put on a happy face, say we're turning the corner, then leave, and senators and Congress people, basically washing their hands of the whole affair. Thanks to our military, our allies, and the brave fighters of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is coming to an end. But while his top military man sees a Taliban resurgence, President Bush says he sees the Allies taking the fight to a determined enemy. It has been a tough month in Afghanistan, but it has also been a tough month for the Taliban. America and its allies have already boosted troop levels in Afghanistan, and more are slated to arrive next year. But the problem for America is so many are deployed in Iraq.

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population size. When Crystal told US lawmakers he is confident he will be able to report real progress by December 2010. And by the following summer of July 2011, I think the progress will be unequivocally clear to the Afghan people. Not only did the United States support a corrupt Afghan government, but let's also realize what they did in terms of quote unquote, building up the Afghan army. Afghan fighters are known historically to be among the best guerrilla fighters in the

world. So why didn't we try to build an Afghan army in the tradition of the Afghan military? We didn't because that would not have made two trillion dollars for the military industrial complex back at home.

We spent about $2.3 trillion, $2.3 trillion in this war. Two trillion of it went directly to the US contractors. So while this was a horrible war for many people, some people got very rich off of this war. The contractor's stocks went through the roof. Their profits increased. There was a 1,500 percent return on their stock prices during these 20 years. So there was a lot of profits were made in this war, selling the kinds of products that the U.S. government would buy, but not what the Afghan people actually needed. It's not just the military that has a lot to account for when it comes to the war in Afghanistan. The same can be true of course with Congressional as well as presidential oversight. And then there's the media. Between 2015 and 2019 annual coverage by the major media outlets in the United States to the Afghanistan war was an average of 58 minutes. Within a Gantt, you expect a television network who has advertisers like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon to start doing some deep digging into how much money they're making on a war. We now have the largest military budget that we've had the United States since the end of World War II with the one exception of the year right after the Iraq invasion. So it's bigger than during the Korean War, bigger than during the Vietnam War, bigger than during the Reagan build up. It is an enormous military budget and even though we're leaving Afghanistan and ending a war, it is growing. It is obscene what's going on in Washington. For some, this was really about establishing a major military presence in the Middle East. Afghanistan was one part of the board for them. Iraq was the other, Syria, Libya, Yemen. For some, this was all about projecting American military power deep into the Middle East and then deep into Asia using the Middle East as a springboard. This was a terrible idea from the beginning and I was delighted to see President Biden finally have the courage to end this war and in his speech announcing the end of the war to say that it was the beginning of a process, a turning of the page, he said, we would return away from 20 years of major military interventions.

I'm the fourth president who has faced the issue of weather and when to end this war.

When I was running for president, I made a commitment to the American people

that I would end this war. Today I've honored that commitment. This is an extremely popular decision. You wouldn't know that if you just listen to the talking heads in Washington DC, the pundits in Washington, disapprove of the decision. They're more interested in protecting their own reputations and their privileges than they are in looking at what really went on with this war and why they were so wrong over all these years. Here's why President Biden is making a catastrophic mistake in pulling out a remaining troops from Afghanistan. I personally think the leaving Afghanistan was a massive mistake. I mean, I believe that the handful of Americans and some air support should have stayed in the country for years to come. Is it a mistake? It was a crime. You know, I think it is, yeah. I think because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad. The vast majority of Americans, well over 70%, recognize that it was time to leave Afghanistan and that it was probably time to leave a long time ago. But many Americans are deeply unhappy about the way we accident. So, K. Osad Kabul right now, after the Taliban took over the presidential palace attempting to form a transitional government, civilians meantime trying to flee have been running under the tarmac of the Hamid Karzai International Airport. The video definitely shocking. Here you can see Afghan citizens chasing a C-17 aircraft, even clinging to its landing gear as the US military plane attempts to depart. While the president calls the evacuation a huge success, while it is claimed that there's simply no way to know that the Taliban would be able to take over the country so quickly. The truth is that obviously no strategic exit was ever planned. This has had tragic consequences. Hi, I'm Obed Lava here. I'm a lecturer at the American University in Afghanistan. And I am one of the few people that stayed back and were trying to make a difference with our voices and with what we can believe and stand by. There are families here under threat whose younger members have left. And they are in the US, they are safe, but their families are not, and their families receive threats and are under danger. Their scholars at risk here. There are people who are smart, their intellectuals, they can help shape future generations, but they can't do that if they stay in Afghanistan. Why aren't Western universities opening their doors to these academics.

Although we did evacuate over 100,000 people, way more than that needed evacuation and deserved evacuation,

given not only their citizenship, but as Afghans,

the help that they had given to the United States and our allies.

This has been particularly tragic,

...