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Dan Snow's History Hit

What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.712.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

History is vital for contextualising current events but as Professor Paul Miller argues in today's episode of the podcast it cannot tell us all we need to know about the present especially in the case of Afghanistan. Professor Miller has dedicated much of his working life to Afghanistan. He is an Afghan veteran, he worked for the CIA as an intelligence analyst and served on the National Security Committee for both President Bush and President Obama. He is currently Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He brings Dan up to speed on events in Afghanistan, why the country fell to the Taliban so quickly, why historical comparisons are not always as useful as they first seem and how a very different outcome might have been achieved.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everybody, welcome, welcome Dan Snow's history hit. We're having a little focus on

0:06.4

Afghanistan this week for obvious reasons. Yesterday we had the one and only William

0:10.9

Darrymple. Man who's written about Afghanistan for years and men who's met many of the

0:15.1

big players on all sides of this conflict and who has an unparalleled knowledge of failed

0:22.2

invasions of Afghanistan in the past. So we move on to an expert who's, well he's

0:27.7

entirely working life really as well as around Afghanistan. He went as a young soldier

0:31.7

to Afghanistan, the US Army. He then joined the CIA. He worked in the White House, the

0:37.4

National Security Committee under both presidents Bush and Obama dealing primarily with Afghanistan.

0:43.8

And he's now a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University

0:49.1

School of Foreign Service. He has written, researched and thought about Afghanistan ever since.

0:56.0

He's been a really interesting voice that I've been following the last few months and

0:59.2

articles he's written and social media posts that he's been sharing. Both of these two William

1:05.9

Darrymple and Professor Miller have got different takes on it. Both of which are fantastically

1:11.4

well argued, well researched and well thought out. Which leaves me folks, leaves me in a

1:16.6

quandary. I do not think I got no answers. Luckily I'm on this podcast asking the questions.

1:22.8

If you want to hear more of those podcasts, you can do so without the ads. If you start

1:26.4

to become a subscriber to history, you just go to historyhit.tv historyhit.tv you're

1:31.3

going to month for free if you subscribe today. And there you get all of these podcasts

1:35.4

out the ads over a thousand podcasts now with the last sibling podcasts. But you also

1:39.4

get hundreds of hours of history documentaries like Netflix for history. You go on there, you

1:44.4

have documentaries from the Stone Age to the digital age. It's all on there. At the moment

1:50.5

everyone is watching the famous UK survival expert Ray Mears talking through the history

...

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