1 00:00:04,790 --> 00:00:07,160 Good evening, everyone. My name is Michael Willis. 2 00:00:07,160 --> 00:00:14,240 I'm the director of the Middle East Centre here at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford, 3 00:00:14,240 --> 00:00:19,370 and I'm very pleased to welcome you to the second of the Middle East Centre's webinars focussing, 4 00:00:19,370 --> 00:00:25,130 focussing on contemporary events in the region, the second that we are holding this term. 5 00:00:25,130 --> 00:00:33,350 Two weeks ago, we looked at Tunisia. This week we are moving to the other end of the region to look at recent developments in Afghanistan. 6 00:00:33,350 --> 00:00:39,710 Now, Afghanistan is a country we traditionally have not covered very regularly or extensively in the Middle East Centre, 7 00:00:39,710 --> 00:00:47,450 but one that is quite obviously has strong, both strong links to and significant influence on the Middle East region. 8 00:00:47,450 --> 00:00:55,070 And to discuss this topic, we are very pleased to have two noticed specialist on Afghanistan. 9 00:00:55,070 --> 00:00:56,720 We have Kate Clarke. 10 00:00:56,720 --> 00:01:06,620 Kate is co-director and senior analyst at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a policy research NGO based in Kabul, where she's been since 2010. 11 00:01:06,620 --> 00:01:14,120 Kate has been researching and writing on Afghanistan for over 20 years as a journalist, analyst and documentary maker. 12 00:01:14,120 --> 00:01:20,360 She was BBC correspondent in Kabul between 1999 and 2002 and was the only Western 13 00:01:20,360 --> 00:01:24,860 journalist based in Afghanistan Dreamer last year of the Taliban emirate, 14 00:01:24,860 --> 00:01:34,820 and was in fact expelled by the Taliban in March 2001, largely for her coverage of the destruction of the statues of Buddha Bamiyan. 15 00:01:34,820 --> 00:01:41,030 Kate returned to Afghanistan in November 2001 and thus witnessed the fall of Kabul, 16 00:01:41,030 --> 00:01:47,850 both in 2001 and very recently, of course, this last summer in 2021. 17 00:01:47,850 --> 00:01:51,120 The research and publications have focussed on the conflict in Afghanistan, 18 00:01:51,120 --> 00:01:57,480 including militia formation and investigations into breaches of law of war detentions and the use of torture. 19 00:01:57,480 --> 00:02:04,230 She has also written extensively on Afghanistan's political economy as well as its wildlife and the environment. 20 00:02:04,230 --> 00:02:06,780 Kate knows the Middle East region also very well. 21 00:02:06,780 --> 00:02:15,440 She holds in May in Middle Eastern politics from the University of Exeter and has lived and studied and worked across the region. 22 00:02:15,440 --> 00:02:23,810 Our second panellist tonight is Ibrahim Marashi. Ibrahim is associate professor of Middle Eastern history at California State University San Marcos 23 00:02:23,810 --> 00:02:30,290 and is currently visiting professor at the University School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid, 24 00:02:30,290 --> 00:02:33,170 Spain, from where he joins us this evening. 25 00:02:33,170 --> 00:02:41,630 Ibrahim obtained his doctorate here at Nancy's College at the University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 26 00:02:41,630 --> 00:02:48,830 And Ibrahim achieved quite a significant seat in the fact that his doctoral thesis actually became briefly, 27 00:02:48,830 --> 00:02:53,510 certainly nationally famous and in fact world famous due to it being plagiarised by 28 00:02:53,510 --> 00:02:59,390 official officials in the UK government in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 29 00:02:59,390 --> 00:03:00,650 And what those of you remember, 30 00:03:00,650 --> 00:03:09,320 certainly those of you based in Britain will remember is the dodgy dossier affair that was based on plagiarised from Ibrahim's thesis. 31 00:03:09,320 --> 00:03:15,170 Ibrahim's work as focussed mainly on Iraq, and he's probably several books on Iraqi history. 32 00:03:15,170 --> 00:03:20,030 But over recent years, however, he has focussed increasingly on Afghanistan, 33 00:03:20,030 --> 00:03:27,050 specifically looking about how we understand it can teach Afghans Afghan history over last two decades. 34 00:03:27,050 --> 00:03:30,380 And also and this relates very much to us in the Middle East Centre, 35 00:03:30,380 --> 00:03:39,360 how the discipline of Middle East studies should relate to Afghanistan again and neighbouring countries of a region sometimes regarded part of it, 36 00:03:39,360 --> 00:03:44,390 sometimes regarded as its next to it. And these sort of issues about the relationship with it. 37 00:03:44,390 --> 00:03:49,730 Now, before I move to our speakers, I just wanted to say that we will be taking the speakers. 38 00:03:49,730 --> 00:03:55,940 We speaking for 15 minutes each, then we'll be opening up the floor to questions and discussion. 39 00:03:55,940 --> 00:04:01,010 Now, if you would like to pose a question to either of our speakers, please do so. 40 00:04:01,010 --> 00:04:06,770 If you see the Q&A function on on Zoom, a little Q&A button. 41 00:04:06,770 --> 00:04:16,400 If you press that you can type in your question and then I can pose it to the panellists in the question and answer session. 42 00:04:16,400 --> 00:04:23,060 Please feel free to put your name in. Similarly, if you prefer to remain anonymous, that's absolutely fine. 43 00:04:23,060 --> 00:04:29,360 And we will. We won't mention your name, but every is fine. So as we go from a talk, feel free to enter them at any time, 44 00:04:29,360 --> 00:04:36,050 and then we'll have them at the end and we'll be able to put the questions to our panellists. OK, so we'll move to our panellists. 45 00:04:36,050 --> 00:04:40,790 The first will be we working. Speaking would be Ibrahim Ibrahim. 46 00:04:40,790 --> 00:04:55,320 Thank you for that introduction. As well as. Organising this event that I began considering back in August after the fall of Kabul, 47 00:04:55,320 --> 00:05:04,590 the particular subject that I wanted to deal with is the notion of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires. 48 00:05:04,590 --> 00:05:14,910 Notice I put a question mark because this trope came into use and August and last August, and what I wanted to do was interrogate. 49 00:05:14,910 --> 00:05:25,200 Where did this come from? Because. You might get the impression that this was something that might have been said by, let's say, 50 00:05:25,200 --> 00:05:35,310 a imagine one of the Anglo Afghan words and colonial officer with a helmet after leaving Afghanistan after the second Anglo Afghan war, 51 00:05:35,310 --> 00:05:43,470 saying This is the graveyard of our empire. But in fact, the appetite it's a it's really a historiography. 52 00:05:43,470 --> 00:05:54,170 It really only emerged in the Journal of Foreign Affairs and if the journal Foreign Affairs has given us. 53 00:05:54,170 --> 00:06:01,460 Terms have entered our lexicon, such as the clash of civilisations, so too did it introduce the graveyard of empires? 54 00:06:01,460 --> 00:06:11,150 It was. It's not a historical term. It was a term coined and on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan after 2001, 55 00:06:11,150 --> 00:06:20,780 but has been used kind of reflexively kind of in the assumption that this is what the British Empire considered Afghanistan or the Soviet Union. 56 00:06:20,780 --> 00:06:24,890 So just briefly speaking, how did I get interested in Afghanistan? 57 00:06:24,890 --> 00:06:37,460 And the story of my Ph.D. research is really reflective of the state of knowledge of Afghanistan and Afghan history around prior to nine 11, 58 00:06:37,460 --> 00:06:47,540 I should say. So growing up in the US, as a child in the 80s, there was really two stories that I grew up with on the Seven O'Clock news. 59 00:06:47,540 --> 00:06:56,900 Before I knew this was on a 24 hour news cycle, one was the Iran-Iraq war, which involved my actually two ancestral homes, both Iraq and Iran. 60 00:06:56,900 --> 00:07:02,420 That was always in the background. And the other was the war in Afghanistan. 61 00:07:02,420 --> 00:07:10,280 Those were the wars in the 1980s, particularly from the region that I identified with the Lebanese Civil War had started in 1975. 62 00:07:10,280 --> 00:07:16,550 More or less was no longer newsworthy by the 80s and really after my college education, 63 00:07:16,550 --> 00:07:25,410 when I was trying to choose a page, the subject was either going to be the Iran-Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan. 64 00:07:25,410 --> 00:07:35,310 Both would prove to be difficult to do when I was considering doing a in the US because in terms of Afghan scholars who worked on Afghanistan. 65 00:07:35,310 --> 00:07:40,710 So we're talking about the very late late 90s right before 2001. 66 00:07:40,710 --> 00:07:43,740 There was one political scientist, 67 00:07:43,740 --> 00:07:51,090 the entire of the US who worked in Afghanistan and one anthropologist and another political scientist was really in the policy 68 00:07:51,090 --> 00:07:59,070 circles but really primarily focussed on Pakistan and who told me doing a Ph.D. on Afghanistan in the US would be impossible. 69 00:07:59,070 --> 00:08:03,120 That gives you kind of a state of the knowledge of Afghanistan given. 70 00:08:03,120 --> 00:08:07,500 And keep in mind also, Middle East studies didn't really touch it. 71 00:08:07,500 --> 00:08:12,150 South Asia studies really considered Afghanistan as an appendage. 72 00:08:12,150 --> 00:08:20,340 This was the reflection of the state of knowledge of Afghanistan in the US, and I would argue it also in terms of the US State Department. 73 00:08:20,340 --> 00:08:30,660 You had this kind of mirroring effect where the knowledge of Afghanistan was quite well, look, the same went for Iraq. 74 00:08:30,660 --> 00:08:37,800 Iraqi history there was really no one in the US working in the late 90s working on Iraqi history, 75 00:08:37,800 --> 00:08:46,080 and it says a lot prior to 2001 and 2003, the dearth of knowledge, at least in academic circles, on both Iraq and Afghanistan. 76 00:08:46,080 --> 00:08:49,080 But and of course, in the introduction, you know how the story ended. 77 00:08:49,080 --> 00:09:00,810 I ended up going to the Middle East centre of Oxford to do a history of the Iran-Iraq war, which later became a history of the Gulf War of 1991. 78 00:09:00,810 --> 00:09:07,440 So, so that's on one level talking about the kind of the state of knowledge on both countries. 79 00:09:07,440 --> 00:09:13,860 But here we're going to be focussing on Afghanistan prior to the war in Afghanistan. 80 00:09:13,860 --> 00:09:20,400 Now, finally, to interrogate the graveyard of empires, I told you the context in which the term emerged. 81 00:09:20,400 --> 00:09:31,950 And just like the clash of civilisations, often history is needed to more or less deconstruct these terms that have so much been in our lexicon. 82 00:09:31,950 --> 00:09:42,210 Let's think of this term that emerged in the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, and let's look at the historical record. 83 00:09:42,210 --> 00:09:46,380 So where does Afghanistan and the Persian Empire begin? 84 00:09:46,380 --> 00:09:51,180 Or and I would argue it's an artificial arbitrary distinction. 85 00:09:51,180 --> 00:10:00,450 It's more or less a continuum. And not only the origins of rasp patriotism could most likely be traced to somewhere in Afghanistan. 86 00:10:00,450 --> 00:10:11,370 Of course, becoming the official law of the state religion of various Persian empires, Afghanistan was not the graveyard for Alexander the Great. 87 00:10:11,370 --> 00:10:21,960 In fact, he left the legacy as the city of Kandahar would have been one of the Alexandria that were left during Alexander's career. 88 00:10:21,960 --> 00:10:27,690 So not only was it not the graveyard of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Hellenic project, 89 00:10:27,690 --> 00:10:36,710 but what you saw was kind of a hybridity, a flourishing of the local country cultures, as well as a lannert culture. 90 00:10:36,710 --> 00:10:47,200 Do you go to the early Muslim empire under the caliphate and then in the early phase of the Roman Empire, now only. 91 00:10:47,200 --> 00:10:58,690 Neither was Afghanistan the graveyard of that empire. But of course, the adoption of Islam in this area is relevant to this very day. 92 00:10:58,690 --> 00:11:09,700 Jump to the 1800s, the era known as the gunpowder, not only was, in other words, 93 00:11:09,700 --> 00:11:15,370 the notion of the graveyard of empires is Afghanistan is an area that's acted upon. 94 00:11:15,370 --> 00:11:26,290 It sucks in potential imperial aspirants and then ultimately more or less and traps them in a quagmire. 95 00:11:26,290 --> 00:11:32,920 If you jump to the 1500s, the Mughal Empire actually began in Kabul. 96 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:38,860 In other words, Afghanistan or we could call Afghanistan in this case, is the birthplace of empires, if you will. 97 00:11:38,860 --> 00:11:46,150 And rather than being a graveyard of empires, the Afghans were responsible also, 98 00:11:46,150 --> 00:11:50,320 particularly in the fields of the Pashtun tribes, for bringing the collapse of an empire. 99 00:11:50,320 --> 00:11:57,790 Not necessarily it being invaded, but then invading. And that was the Zafar bid empire. 100 00:11:57,790 --> 00:12:02,320 And I just have this screenshot of the Mughal Empire to remind us, in other words, 101 00:12:02,320 --> 00:12:13,010 Afghanistan could we don't think of it as the font of a kind of civilizational entity, but that this is what this lecture is trying to remind us. 102 00:12:13,010 --> 00:12:25,850 And then finally, when we get you, the British experience in Afghanistan, here are we could find something similar in terms of the British experience, 103 00:12:25,850 --> 00:12:36,770 which was really a reflection or an outcome of preventing Russian expansion towards its interests in the Mughal Empire. 104 00:12:36,770 --> 00:12:38,660 Otherwise known by another trope, 105 00:12:38,660 --> 00:12:46,590 the great game the graveyard of Empires was used to disappear or is used to describe the British experience in Afghanistan, 106 00:12:46,590 --> 00:12:54,350 the Soviet experience and the American experience. But what I've been trying to do was delineate what is the difference between 107 00:12:54,350 --> 00:12:58,880 Afghanistan being part of the empires of the past and the British Imperial, 108 00:12:58,880 --> 00:13:06,110 the Soviet Imperial and the American Imperial Project? And what all three have in common was, of course, 109 00:13:06,110 --> 00:13:10,880 those three entities mentioned were more or less what you consider Western trying to 110 00:13:10,880 --> 00:13:19,250 impose a certain their own interests without any kind of consideration of local culture. 111 00:13:19,250 --> 00:13:29,360 No attempts at hybridity and of course, in those cases, those foreign attempts of the imposition of their cultures, 112 00:13:29,360 --> 00:13:36,530 whether it was their imperial culture, I should say British, Soviet or American ultimately were undone. 113 00:13:36,530 --> 00:13:44,900 In Afghanistan, in other words, rather than being a graveyard is more or less a site of imperial western, 114 00:13:44,900 --> 00:13:54,470 I should say Western imperial hubris, and I think that is a distinction that has to be made when looking at the broad span of Afghan history. 115 00:13:54,470 --> 00:13:59,690 So now with situate the history of Afghanistan very briefly in the Cold War. 116 00:13:59,690 --> 00:14:09,620 And here are show images of the streets of Prague in 1968, when there was during any episode of the Cold War, 117 00:14:09,620 --> 00:14:17,000 when there was a communist regime that seemed to resist the control of Moscow more or less. 118 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:24,380 The solution was to send in the tanks, whether it was Hungary 1956, Prague 1968 or Kabul. 119 00:14:24,380 --> 00:14:27,290 Nineteen late nineteen seventy nine. 120 00:14:27,290 --> 00:14:38,540 The usually the deployment of the Soviet military was enough to change the government and ensure the rule of a pliant communist regime. 121 00:14:38,540 --> 00:14:43,940 So in other words, whether it was Hungary, Prague or Kabul, it was Kabul where we saw the failure. 122 00:14:43,940 --> 00:14:52,220 So here we have the images of the Soviet tanks going into Kabul in 1979 and 1980. 123 00:14:52,220 --> 00:14:59,760 And this is. Bring me now with the Soviet invasion. 124 00:14:59,760 --> 00:15:07,860 I prefer this map of where we kind of reimagined the Middle East and Southwest Asia because it will map like this, 125 00:15:07,860 --> 00:15:13,890 we can appreciate Afghanistan's position with the region. 126 00:15:13,890 --> 00:15:21,930 So in other words, I'm situated. The history of Afghanistan with an empire briefly discussed Afghanistan's history during the Cold War. 127 00:15:21,930 --> 00:15:28,260 Now, if I could situate Afghanistan with the 1980s and the Middle East and then take 128 00:15:28,260 --> 00:15:34,450 it to the present and then leave it off for Kate will continue this narrative. 129 00:15:34,450 --> 00:15:44,040 It's this when we look at Afghanistan in the 1980s, I would say Afghanistan is related to the Middle East, 130 00:15:44,040 --> 00:15:50,130 or if we could use this term, just Southwest Asia, then we could see it as one continuing on one geographical continuum. 131 00:15:50,130 --> 00:15:55,050 What does Afghanistan represent? First of all, vis-a-vis the Arab world, 132 00:15:55,050 --> 00:16:04,590 I would say the 1980s represented the failure of various Arab regimes to deal with their political Islamist movements. 133 00:16:04,590 --> 00:16:12,780 Afghanistan If we look at whether Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and the various foreign volunteers who have come from Algeria, 134 00:16:12,780 --> 00:16:17,640 Yemen, Syria and each and every single one of these states, 135 00:16:17,640 --> 00:16:30,060 there was the failure of the various Afghan fighters to see a role of political Islam within their various home 136 00:16:30,060 --> 00:16:39,520 countries that resulted in them finding refuge in Afghanistan and implementing their vision in Afghanistan. 137 00:16:39,520 --> 00:16:46,000 So on one level, that's it's just a reflection of the history of political Islamism of the eighties. 138 00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:56,410 On the second level, then, is ideation in the kind of Islamist imaginary where the political Islamist project succeeded, 139 00:16:56,410 --> 00:17:02,890 where it was a transnational political Islamist project in Afghanistan and according to the Islamists, 140 00:17:02,890 --> 00:17:10,390 imaginary on an ideation the level that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union as of 1989, 141 00:17:10,390 --> 00:17:17,470 when the next level I would connected to is then during the 1980s, 142 00:17:17,470 --> 00:17:28,450 continuing to would say to some levels to the various present Afghanistan as a side of a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, 143 00:17:28,450 --> 00:17:38,680 which I would argue goes back to the 1980s. And during this proxy conflict, and also to some extent, that existed in neighbouring Pakistan, 144 00:17:38,680 --> 00:17:45,490 which is also why I'm kind of keen on taking South Asia and also including getting into an entity called Southwest Asia, 145 00:17:45,490 --> 00:17:49,850 where they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, particularly in Afghanistan. 146 00:17:49,850 --> 00:17:53,200 This led to various forms of Arab Islam taking root. 147 00:17:53,200 --> 00:18:04,090 There was one mujahideen fact, then that of Abu Sayyaf that was ostensibly Wahhabi, and we could say the forms of Islam practised by ISIS. 148 00:18:04,090 --> 00:18:11,560 I wouldn't say are inherently Afghan in character. They are Islamic Islam because they have the South Asian context. 149 00:18:11,560 --> 00:18:17,950 But the various forms of Islam that took root in Afghanistan, I would argue, had their origins in the Arab world. 150 00:18:17,950 --> 00:18:26,830 And then finally, the fourth level is one of a human security framework that unites Afghanistan with the rest of what we call the Middle East. 151 00:18:26,830 --> 00:18:35,170 And when I'm talking about a human security is the following of those kind of liminal peoples. 152 00:18:35,170 --> 00:18:40,930 As a result of this conflict, I shouldn't say $11, but precariat those in a precarious situation, those vulnerable. 153 00:18:40,930 --> 00:18:43,450 I'm particularly talking about refugees. 154 00:18:43,450 --> 00:18:52,060 We've seen refugees in Pakistan who were, of course, introduced to various forms of Islam that usually came from Saudi Arabia. 155 00:18:52,060 --> 00:19:00,640 But I'm also talking about refugees in Iran that would later be used as fighters in the Syrian Civil War. 156 00:19:00,640 --> 00:19:08,200 It's this how this place ends up being part of Middle Eastern politics, 157 00:19:08,200 --> 00:19:12,940 particularly in the case of the brigades recruited from the Hazara minority of Afghanistan. 158 00:19:12,940 --> 00:19:17,740 They found themselves as forming battalions in the Syrian Civil War. 159 00:19:17,740 --> 00:19:22,080 So those are the various ways I would connect. 160 00:19:22,080 --> 00:19:29,880 Situate Afghanistan in the greater history of the Middle East, and then finally, to start to conclude just two primary sources again, 161 00:19:29,880 --> 00:19:39,420 going back to the history of situating Afghanistan's history during the Cold War and looking at resonance with the present. 162 00:19:39,420 --> 00:19:45,780 And this is the various language, and I underline the key points. 163 00:19:45,780 --> 00:19:54,360 Various language that you would find familiar coming from Biden's White House, the attempts to not portray. 164 00:19:54,360 --> 00:20:03,810 If you look at this document from 1987 or 1989 noticed the emphasis on language, this is not a withdrawal. 165 00:20:03,810 --> 00:20:11,520 This is not sorry, a route or a light. Look at it in 1987, the emphasis on this is the withdrawal that we've planned. 166 00:20:11,520 --> 00:20:17,370 And then again, two years later, if you look at sentence number three, this is withdrawal not to. 167 00:20:17,370 --> 00:20:21,600 And again, now look at sentence number one. 168 00:20:21,600 --> 00:20:29,970 And here we come to the historical tropes that we use back in number one, a sentence number one that I took from this primary source. 169 00:20:29,970 --> 00:20:38,070 This is not analogous to the situation in Vietnam, as uttered by this official in 1989 and again in August, 170 00:20:38,070 --> 00:20:44,370 when we see the repeated emphasis this is not Saigon 1975. 171 00:20:44,370 --> 00:20:54,240 And then finally, to conclude with an image and two maps of this image says it all in terms of the Soviet invasion 172 00:20:54,240 --> 00:21:01,160 was really a project that allowed the communist government of Afghanistan to control the roads. 173 00:21:01,160 --> 00:21:07,850 And the urban. City centre of Afghanistan, when the Soviets withdrew. 174 00:21:07,850 --> 00:21:12,350 What we see is the next phase of Afghan history. 175 00:21:12,350 --> 00:21:17,240 The Afghan government was able to control the roads, the various urban centres. 176 00:21:17,240 --> 00:21:21,620 But the next phase would be the Civil War and within the Civil War. 177 00:21:21,620 --> 00:21:30,650 I'm setting up today's presentation. If you look at the various mujahideen factions here, we have Afghanistan ripe for a economic system. 178 00:21:30,650 --> 00:21:34,250 We rarely call it a warlordism. 179 00:21:34,250 --> 00:21:43,760 The control for fives and mini economies that will set up Afghanistan's instability during the 1990s, and if I show you this image and then finally, 180 00:21:43,760 --> 00:21:51,770 this image that came from the American NATO experience in Afghanistan, again, you see a similar dynamic. 181 00:21:51,770 --> 00:21:59,660 The blue represents the various cities that were controlled by the ISAF forces as well as the roads. 182 00:21:59,660 --> 00:22:12,180 But if you see the story here of kind of where the Taliban was operating or the various areas here, you have again a reflection of what? 183 00:22:12,180 --> 00:22:22,170 Connected, the Soviet and the American experience controlling the urban centres and the roads was easy enough if you had superior military power. 184 00:22:22,170 --> 00:22:32,960 The mountains, the provided harder geographical locations for either superpower to secure Afghanistan. 185 00:22:32,960 --> 00:22:37,820 And within that context, that's where I would want to conclude, not really. 186 00:22:37,820 --> 00:22:48,320 Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires, but Afghanistan is an area that administration is difficult and will ultimately fail when 187 00:22:48,320 --> 00:22:52,850 the project is imposed from the top down when the project attempts to be centralised. 188 00:22:52,850 --> 00:22:58,880 And that's the story I think of the Soviet and the American experience to create a centralised government 189 00:22:58,880 --> 00:23:05,060 in both cases where the history of this particular area has always been one of decentralisation. 190 00:23:05,060 --> 00:23:16,100 Sophocles, there? Thank you. Thank you very much, Ibrahim, for giving us a very interesting and very comprehensive and very short space of time. 191 00:23:16,100 --> 00:23:22,190 Outlook on Afghan history, particularly how it's been misunderstood in the past and thank you particularly by linking, 192 00:23:22,190 --> 00:23:24,860 was showing all the ways that it links into the Middle East. 193 00:23:24,860 --> 00:23:31,590 I have to admit I thought the graveyard of empires I'm biased quote was again, similarly from some 19th century British officials. 194 00:23:31,590 --> 00:23:38,140 So that was very interesting to know that a lot of the things we sometimes think of long history are actually a recent invention. 195 00:23:38,140 --> 00:23:43,970 That's a feature in history. But thank you. Now tend to Kate Clarke. 196 00:23:43,970 --> 00:23:50,870 So, yeah, I'm reminded of the joke that Afghans say that their country is not a graveyard of empires. 197 00:23:50,870 --> 00:24:01,460 It's a graveyard of Afghans. And we've seen an awful lot of dead Afghans over the last 40 years as various countries and groups have fought over it. 198 00:24:01,460 --> 00:24:06,260 So as I have, I've been doing a lot of these briefings. 199 00:24:06,260 --> 00:24:13,130 I do quite a lot of them anyway. But particularly since obviously the fall of Kabul, there's been a renewed interest in Afghanistan, 200 00:24:13,130 --> 00:24:18,200 and I thought I would take the opportunity to speak to an audience of Middle 201 00:24:18,200 --> 00:24:24,440 Eastern people or people interested in the Middle East to take a slightly, 202 00:24:24,440 --> 00:24:29,330 you know, a different look at Afghanistan, which is to look at it as a frontier state, which is, of course, 203 00:24:29,330 --> 00:24:38,990 is one of the, you know, the classic theories for looking at the Middle East and the oil producers in particular. 204 00:24:38,990 --> 00:24:45,560 And of course, one of the other ways in which my, my my will will fit into Ibrahim's. 205 00:24:45,560 --> 00:24:57,230 It's been a frontier state since it's basically since it was formed as a modern state in the late 19th century by Amir Abdurrahman Khan. 206 00:24:57,230 --> 00:25:01,520 How did he consolidate the modern state using British subsidies? 207 00:25:01,520 --> 00:25:10,910 So he, you know, he announced a jihad and conquered the Hazara Shias in the centre of the country. 208 00:25:10,910 --> 00:25:15,500 He forcibly converted the people who had been living in Carfare Tristan. 209 00:25:15,500 --> 00:25:20,960 It was renamed Nuristan. Some really horrible things happened with the with the use of British subsidies. 210 00:25:20,960 --> 00:25:26,000 That was really when Afghanistan became a frontier state, and it has not stopped ever since. 211 00:25:26,000 --> 00:25:33,650 Through the Cold War, the USSR and the U.S. vied for control through the wars of the nineteen and 90s. 212 00:25:33,650 --> 00:25:41,690 And of course, also after 2001 with. And I think one of the key things is that why would anyone bother with Afghanistan? 213 00:25:41,690 --> 00:25:49,670 It's isolated, it's poor. It doesn't have natural resources. The key thing is, everyone has always wanted no one else to control it. 214 00:25:49,670 --> 00:25:56,900 So British India didn't want Czarist Russia to control Afghanistan, USSR and the US. 215 00:25:56,900 --> 00:26:07,140 And since 2001, of course, it was the America America and its allies didn't want Taliban and al Qaida to control Afghanistan. 216 00:26:07,140 --> 00:26:15,840 Afghanistan has been a frontier state for four generations, but since 2001 it's been a frontier state on steroids. 217 00:26:15,840 --> 00:26:22,110 I mean, the amount of money coming into the country since the invasion is eye watering. 218 00:26:22,110 --> 00:26:29,370 Not just aid, though that's been a lot, but also the money that was given to foot to the army and the police, 219 00:26:29,370 --> 00:26:37,740 and especially the money that was spent by the military. The various foreign armies that were based in Afghanistan. 220 00:26:37,740 --> 00:26:48,030 Billions. Billions of dollars. And it's it's had the same sort of effects that you would expect in a classic rentier state run to a state. 221 00:26:48,030 --> 00:26:57,110 There's the sort of financial autonomy of the elites. They don't answer this for the people, they answer, if at all, to the donors. 222 00:26:57,110 --> 00:27:03,850 I mean, up until 2000, August, the 15th 2021. 223 00:27:03,850 --> 00:27:10,990 No taxation without representation, actually very little taxation in Afghanistan and calls for representation have been very weak. 224 00:27:10,990 --> 00:27:16,500 We've had this sort of sham parliament sham elections. 225 00:27:16,500 --> 00:27:25,930 Weakening of the domestic economy, we end up in 2021 with Afghanistan importing six times as much as it exports. 226 00:27:25,930 --> 00:27:37,340 And that the difference is covered by important imports, medicine, food, oil, gas. 227 00:27:37,340 --> 00:27:48,020 And staple food. So it has all the sort of what you would say is a sort of classic classic frontier characteristics, 228 00:27:48,020 --> 00:27:55,250 corruption, nepotism, the importance of a vertical political organisation rather than horizontal. 229 00:27:55,250 --> 00:28:04,080 But then it's also very different from you. Think about Iraq under Saddam or Libya, and of the Durfee, you don't see the consolidation of the state. 230 00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:08,960 We saw it with Abdul Rahman Khan in the late 19th century. We don't see it with the post-2001 state. 231 00:28:08,960 --> 00:28:15,410 And it's strange. Why is that the case? And I think you can look at where the where the rent went. 232 00:28:15,410 --> 00:28:21,170 Not to one party or to one one leader, but to a multiplicity of actors. 233 00:28:21,170 --> 00:28:29,540 So the Americans got rid of the Taliban and this sort, a slew of commanders and factions grabbed control. 234 00:28:29,540 --> 00:28:30,170 They were. 235 00:28:30,170 --> 00:28:37,760 It was commanders who were the new district governors, provincial governors, generals, corps commanders, ministers, you name it pretty well. 236 00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:41,480 Most people, apart from there, was a few exceptions. Hamid Karzai was one. 237 00:28:41,480 --> 00:28:50,210 Ashraf Ghani was another. If you look at the first cabinet, four fifths were either military men or civilian members of armed factions, 238 00:28:50,210 --> 00:28:57,780 and they absolutely used the state as spoils with divvied up divvied out that the. 239 00:28:57,780 --> 00:29:09,270 The positions look at the first hundred generals, 90 were from one ethnic group belonging to the same as General Fahim, who is the defence minister, 240 00:29:09,270 --> 00:29:19,850 mainly from his his faction and that faction controlled Kabul controlled Defence Intelligence, Foreign Affairs Police. 241 00:29:19,850 --> 00:29:28,880 You know, it was a real, real grab of power. And of course, with the Americans and others giving all this rent to Afghanistan, 242 00:29:28,880 --> 00:29:38,480 they absolutely consolidated those men's power so largely military and they became they sort of mostly moved out of the political arena, 243 00:29:38,480 --> 00:29:43,700 but they continued to be a mainstay of where political power stayed in Afghanistan. 244 00:29:43,700 --> 00:29:50,120 And there was a sort of this parallel state. It was called a sort of kitchen cabinet under Karzai. 245 00:29:50,120 --> 00:30:01,860 Ghani, the later President Ashraf Ghani he had, he created various commissions that he had more power in the ministries in some respects. 246 00:30:01,860 --> 00:30:12,620 So what happens? You do have a reduction in the rent with the international forces mainly living in 2014. 247 00:30:12,620 --> 00:30:20,510 You do have a more tax coming in from the from the state does gather more tax and Ashraf Ghani. 248 00:30:20,510 --> 00:30:28,490 But this year, the rent still amounts to 43 percent of GDP. 249 00:30:28,490 --> 00:30:32,450 43 percent of GDP. 75 percent of public funding. 250 00:30:32,450 --> 00:30:37,850 50 percent of the government funding of the government's budget. 251 00:30:37,850 --> 00:30:43,260 Even the you know, the Taliban, in fact, so funds the education fund schools. 252 00:30:43,260 --> 00:30:49,980 Women's groups, the frontier groups, civil society groups, the frontier groups, largely with some honourable exceptions. 253 00:30:49,980 --> 00:30:55,320 They are funded by the donors. The Taliban are funded basically by the donors. 254 00:30:55,320 --> 00:31:01,800 I mean, this is especially the case when the Americans had this surge, when they had 100000 troops on the ground. 255 00:31:01,800 --> 00:31:09,810 Barack Obama was trying to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, even though at that point they probably would have gone voluntarily. 256 00:31:09,810 --> 00:31:15,130 You know, the Taliban were taking 10 percent of an estimated 10 percent of the of the logistics bill 257 00:31:15,130 --> 00:31:20,610 that the American army would fund were paying to get supplies to their bases 10 percent. 258 00:31:20,610 --> 00:31:26,290 And even in the last few few years, we've been doing research my organisation looking at what it's like to live under the Taliban. 259 00:31:26,290 --> 00:31:31,980 We looked at service delivery in the areas controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban were taxing effectively. 260 00:31:31,980 --> 00:31:40,110 A lot of that money came ultimately from from rent, but they didn't spend they didn't spend on education or schools or health. 261 00:31:40,110 --> 00:31:49,480 They ran no services. All those continue to be run by NGOs, by the government and ultimately largely paid for by donors. 262 00:31:49,480 --> 00:31:59,140 So what happens what happens on the 15th of August is the Taliban, they've decided to go for a military because they had this, you know, 263 00:31:59,140 --> 00:32:07,990 political negotiations, a deal on the table that the Americans are negotiating with any government were happy with, 264 00:32:07,990 --> 00:32:21,160 but there was a negotiated programme. A ceasefire was offered, but no, they went for a military victory and they succeeded. 265 00:32:21,160 --> 00:32:28,170 A disaster, an absolute disaster, they killed the goose that had been laying the golden eggs. 266 00:32:28,170 --> 00:32:33,240 Because not only, you know, Western donors don't really like governments that come to power by force. 267 00:32:33,240 --> 00:32:41,100 They particularly don't like governments coming to power who they've been fighting for many years and especially once they've got sanctions on. 268 00:32:41,100 --> 00:32:45,690 So both you and you and particularly us are very, very tricky to avoid. 269 00:32:45,690 --> 00:32:54,200 So overnight, the rent went. Aid cut, largely cut. 270 00:32:54,200 --> 00:33:00,900 That was funding civil suit, you know, hundreds of thousands of civil servants salaries, education, schooling, agricultural inputs, 271 00:33:00,900 --> 00:33:09,410 infrastructure projects, you name it, and all the services that are then paid for by those, those people, those salaried people. 272 00:33:09,410 --> 00:33:15,210 The reserves are frozen, they're large in America, also in Germany, and you can eat the frozen. 273 00:33:15,210 --> 00:33:19,580 The World Bank funds are frozen. 274 00:33:19,580 --> 00:33:28,620 There's this dearth of dollars in the country and of Afghanis, that's the local currency because they were printed outside. 275 00:33:28,620 --> 00:33:33,420 Tel Aviv, that sort divvy up the spoils, but there isn't much. 276 00:33:33,420 --> 00:33:44,080 There really isn't much, and there's been quite a lot of complaints from fighters about, you know, it was much it was much more fun during the jihad. 277 00:33:44,080 --> 00:33:53,960 A. What we have, we have paralysis in Washington. 278 00:33:53,960 --> 00:34:01,750 You know, the lovely project has failed and there and the way that Biden timed it with the withdrawal about two and before night, 279 00:34:01,750 --> 00:34:07,490 the anniversary of 9-11, it meant that on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, their enemies were in charge. 280 00:34:07,490 --> 00:34:17,340 They'd lost a state within a few months. And and America is the big player in Afghanistan, it's May it was the major donor. 281 00:34:17,340 --> 00:34:23,640 It's the major player on the World Bank to determine what the World Bank does. 282 00:34:23,640 --> 00:34:31,740 A US sanctions are particularly devastating because the international banks don't want to go against the U.S. when it comes to transactions, 283 00:34:31,740 --> 00:34:40,170 so commercial transactions that are out. The US Treasury did make some waivers to allow humanitarian other urgent needs to go to Afghanistan. 284 00:34:40,170 --> 00:34:46,790 It's really, really difficult because you. It's actually very difficult to actually get money into the country. 285 00:34:46,790 --> 00:34:54,290 People wanting to send money home or people like me have got friends who are now really struggling getting reparations or final, 286 00:34:54,290 --> 00:34:57,800 you know, finances to people in countries really difficult. 287 00:34:57,800 --> 00:35:04,310 One in 20 households in Afghanistan have enough to eat and the country is on the verge of famine. 288 00:35:04,310 --> 00:35:09,410 So just over half of the country this winter. 289 00:35:09,410 --> 00:35:15,350 Always a lean, hungry time are either in crisis or emergency mode. 290 00:35:15,350 --> 00:35:20,730 And this is because you've got you've had a really bad drought and that's a global warming problem. 291 00:35:20,730 --> 00:35:28,860 Plus, the fighting really intense of fighting earlier in the year, plus the pandemic and then this lack of aid, 292 00:35:28,860 --> 00:35:34,220 so you've got rural poverty and you've got urban poverty, really, really brutal. 293 00:35:34,220 --> 00:35:41,090 Health care systems collapsed almost. Schooling is tricky, so, you know, the donors are left. 294 00:35:41,090 --> 00:35:50,120 No leadership from it, from America. The donors are very, very they don't really know what to do because they don't want Afghans to starve to death, 295 00:35:50,120 --> 00:35:52,010 but they don't want to work with the Taliban. 296 00:35:52,010 --> 00:35:56,900 The, you know, the easy political option has been humanitarian aid because it's apolitical but actually delivering. 297 00:35:56,900 --> 00:36:02,000 It's difficult and it's a drop in the ocean compared to the rest that Afghanistan was getting. 298 00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:13,460 It does not cover what Afghanistan has lost. So even though thank the Lord, the war is over, and that's of course, you know, the war is over. 299 00:36:13,460 --> 00:36:17,030 We've got the first real peace for 20 years. 300 00:36:17,030 --> 00:36:26,290 There were a number of years where where there was peace at the start of the American intervention, but otherwise it's first time for 40 years. 301 00:36:26,290 --> 00:36:31,480 And that's wonderful. It has marginal economic interests. 302 00:36:31,480 --> 00:36:39,850 You know, people couldn't get into the field this year to irrigate, to water, to harvest, to get the food, to get crops to market, for example. 303 00:36:39,850 --> 00:36:50,220 But it doesn't make up for these huge, calamitous economic losses, and the Taliban have not been able to. 304 00:36:50,220 --> 00:36:52,620 And they're so concerned with internal cohesion, 305 00:36:52,620 --> 00:36:57,810 with keeping themselves together with rewarding their thought that the followers that they have not been 306 00:36:57,810 --> 00:37:02,190 able to make the concessions that could have made it easier for the Western donors to carry on funding, 307 00:37:02,190 --> 00:37:10,590 keep the schools open for girls, allow women to work, don't carry out reprisal killings, have some sort of inclusive government at the moment. 308 00:37:10,590 --> 00:37:13,560 We've got a government that's pretty much what it's all male. 309 00:37:13,560 --> 00:37:20,790 It's largely Pashtun, which is one of many ethnic groups, mainly from the South, pretty well, 310 00:37:20,790 --> 00:37:29,160 all madrassa educated and very little thought to trying to match the minister's experience with his ministry. 311 00:37:29,160 --> 00:37:34,500 We saw the same in in 2001. It's not new in Afghanistan. And actually, the reprisal killings there were far, far worse. 312 00:37:34,500 --> 00:37:40,690 There were massacres, but it doesn't help Afghanistan in the current situation. 313 00:37:40,690 --> 00:37:49,110 And. It's difficult to imagine at the moment that Afghanistan won't become again 314 00:37:49,110 --> 00:37:54,570 one of the poorest countries in the world with an eviscerated middle class, 315 00:37:54,570 --> 00:37:59,910 the poverty stricken middle class and a lot of the things that have been great about the last 20 years. 316 00:37:59,910 --> 00:38:08,310 Girls going to school, boys going to school education, education opportunities, up to further education or higher education, 317 00:38:08,310 --> 00:38:16,050 better press institutional knowledge in things like how to run a modern economy 318 00:38:16,050 --> 00:38:21,980 that it's very fragile and it could well be lost in the next few months. 319 00:38:21,980 --> 00:38:26,900 So I'm just going to kill one joke, Michael, and then I pass on to you, and it's sort of like, 320 00:38:26,900 --> 00:38:31,640 I have to credit Michael Semple, who's a professor at Queen's University Belfast. 321 00:38:31,640 --> 00:38:37,160 It claims it comes from the nineteen nineties, but I'm not entirely sure he didn't come up with that reasoning. 322 00:38:37,160 --> 00:38:44,660 So it follows Mullah Omar, who was the founder, one of the founders of the Taliban, and he was the first leader, the Supreme Leader, a male. 323 00:38:44,660 --> 00:38:47,840 And he's with his his advisors unless he asks them. 324 00:38:47,840 --> 00:38:51,200 So is Afghanistan one of the richest countries in the world? 325 00:38:51,200 --> 00:38:57,290 And they say, Oh no. Melissa, Melissa, Melissa with one of the poorest. 326 00:38:57,290 --> 00:39:02,780 And he says, Why is that? And they and they say, we don't really know. 327 00:39:02,780 --> 00:39:07,220 And he says, Well, what are the richest countries? They said, Well, it's Germany and Japan. 328 00:39:07,220 --> 00:39:11,630 So how did they become rich? Well, they picked a fight with America. 329 00:39:11,630 --> 00:39:18,260 They lost an America, funded them, and they became richer than you could ever imagine. 330 00:39:18,260 --> 00:39:27,410 So strikes is so, so so. So we should pick a fight with America, and they start to wonder, you are the wisest leader ever. 331 00:39:27,410 --> 00:39:35,470 And he says, yeah, it's just one problem. What happens if we win? 332 00:39:35,470 --> 00:39:41,770 Thank you very much, Kate. It's not a it's it's rather unusual to have a seminar in Afghanistan and you have us laughing, 333 00:39:41,770 --> 00:39:48,610 but some of those perhaps given how quite depressing some of the things that have happened, they're having. 334 00:39:48,610 --> 00:39:52,670 It's not about that, but that it's a rather particular take on it. 335 00:39:52,670 --> 00:39:59,920 But thank you very much for that. I mean, Michael, and if you've hung out with Afghans, you will know that it's not Iraqis and Syrians. 336 00:39:59,920 --> 00:40:04,450 They specialise in it because of the horrors. So I'm not making light. 337 00:40:04,450 --> 00:40:08,980 The situation is, though, nowadays, I mean, I, you know, I work on Algeria, 338 00:40:08,980 --> 00:40:17,380 and there was an enormous boom in jokes about during the Civil War in the 1990s is thought to have the mechanisms of people cope. 339 00:40:17,380 --> 00:40:24,140 But thank you very much for the Iraqi jokes as well. After 1991, actually, there's a project to be done on that. 340 00:40:24,140 --> 00:40:28,150 I think so. Anybody wants to write a thesis on that. I think that be fascinating. 341 00:40:28,150 --> 00:40:33,050 But thank you, Kanan, but actually really interesting to look at it as a rentier state. 342 00:40:33,050 --> 00:40:37,390 Nobody really thinks of Afghanistan in those terms, but for all the reasons you set out, as you said, 343 00:40:37,390 --> 00:40:44,380 one one completely on steroids and where we move on, that is going to be very interesting. 344 00:40:44,380 --> 00:40:49,000 OK, well, thank you to you both. We now move into the question and answer session. 345 00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:55,690 I'd like to begin myself with a question mainly aimed at a cape, but also Ibrahim wants to weigh in on. 346 00:40:55,690 --> 00:41:02,080 This was was to what extent do you think the Taliban understood this rentier state and that they would have problems? 347 00:41:02,080 --> 00:41:10,600 In other words, what happens if you win? Is there any sort of sense of what their political economy or even economy would look like? 348 00:41:10,600 --> 00:41:16,630 And are there any hints from their first period in power in the late 90s, early 2000s? 349 00:41:16,630 --> 00:41:20,860 Or is that just such a different situation that there's going to be no parallels and there were lessons to 350 00:41:20,860 --> 00:41:28,780 be drawn that I'm convinced they didn't know because they were told repeatedly by the Americans and others. 351 00:41:28,780 --> 00:41:34,900 I, someone I know who was who was at Doha, said, You know, if you go for military victory, you will be like North Korea. 352 00:41:34,900 --> 00:41:40,990 You will be really isolated. I just don't think they understood the scale of the money coming into the country. 353 00:41:40,990 --> 00:41:49,510 And I think actually probably Afghans didn't understand it either. They didn't ask why their schooling was free or my wife health clinics were free 354 00:41:49,510 --> 00:41:54,160 when they weren't really paying taxes and there wasn't this connexion at all. 355 00:41:54,160 --> 00:41:59,260 I think it's been a huge shock to them, and they expected the Treasury to be fuller, and they're really annoyed that, you know, 356 00:41:59,260 --> 00:42:05,740 they can't get their hands on the on the reserves so that, you know, they're actually in a honeymoon period at the moment with the donors. 357 00:42:05,740 --> 00:42:11,710 They're trying to persuade everyone that they're they're nice and, you know, they should all come back and actually access is much better. 358 00:42:11,710 --> 00:42:18,760 You know, it's the difficult areas, the country, obviously, because it's not a war going on and the Taliban trying to kidnap foreigners for ransom. 359 00:42:18,760 --> 00:42:22,520 So in that sense, it's a bit easier. 360 00:42:22,520 --> 00:42:35,920 They they haven't made any concessions into confidence building measures that they may well be doing a bit somehow. 361 00:42:35,920 --> 00:42:40,600 So, for example, on customs before there was a three way split, there was Taliban. 362 00:42:40,600 --> 00:42:44,740 There was the government taxing and then there were pro-government actors who were taking bribes. 363 00:42:44,740 --> 00:42:51,670 That's consolidated now. So it's just taxing the traders down, but possibly more risk. 364 00:42:51,670 --> 00:42:54,730 More money is actually coming into the Treasury because it's not being split three ways. 365 00:42:54,730 --> 00:42:58,840 And the Taliban, for all their faults, are less corrupt than the, you know, 366 00:42:58,840 --> 00:43:08,440 the horrors of the of the the Karzai and the Valley administrations, which shocked Afghans in the early years of two of the early 2000s. 367 00:43:08,440 --> 00:43:15,460 The Taliban didn't have a political programme. They didn't have an economic programme. They are a military organisation dedicated to jihad. 368 00:43:15,460 --> 00:43:25,150 And we saw that in the areas under their control, they would appoint commanders to civilian roles, with very few exceptions. 369 00:43:25,150 --> 00:43:31,270 I mean, the judges would be an exception where they had clauses rather than, but they might also be commanders as well. 370 00:43:31,270 --> 00:43:39,520 But they, you know, they had some sort of specialism in the nineties. You had the same situation where you know, 371 00:43:39,520 --> 00:43:47,510 you'd go to the Ministry of Education or Health and the command that the minister was also a front line battle commander. 372 00:43:47,510 --> 00:43:51,880 He'd be at the frontline as part time ministry, and we see the same things now. 373 00:43:51,880 --> 00:44:01,280 Of course, poor Taliban, they don't have a war to fight anymore. They've got to like govern this country and. 374 00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:08,720 Mainly mullahs, with very few exceptions, we've got one of them, you know, one of the negotiators in Doha is now in charge of mining. 375 00:44:08,720 --> 00:44:12,750 We had someone in. A higher education. 376 00:44:12,750 --> 00:44:16,770 The allegations were that he was a literal I don't know if that's correct or not, 377 00:44:16,770 --> 00:44:20,550 but it's that sort of, you know, disconnect between what they're doing. 378 00:44:20,550 --> 00:44:28,020 It was the same in 2001. But the problem now is a lot of the technocrats left because of the mass evacuation that the West 379 00:44:28,020 --> 00:44:36,650 decided to embark on in August has taken away a lot of a lot of expertise from the country. 380 00:44:36,650 --> 00:44:40,220 Thank you, Ibrahim, did you want to add anything on that? I do. 381 00:44:40,220 --> 00:44:44,450 I want to take this opportunity to ask my own question to Kate. 382 00:44:44,450 --> 00:44:50,090 You are talking about the various ministries of education and you mentioned corruption. 383 00:44:50,090 --> 00:44:58,280 An issue I'm looking at in Iraq and I've been wondering about this in Afghanistan is the various ministries dealing with environmental issues, 384 00:44:58,280 --> 00:45:08,600 water resources and wondering how the Taliban emergence would affect those various ministries, 385 00:45:08,600 --> 00:45:14,840 particularly the delivery of governance, the delivery of water management of water. 386 00:45:14,840 --> 00:45:22,010 How how would climate change affect Afghanistan? That these are kind of long term issues are concerned about? 387 00:45:22,010 --> 00:45:26,570 Well, we're in the middle of a severe drought last year. 388 00:45:26,570 --> 00:45:31,220 Predictions are for this year. Afghanistan's always sort of regular droughts. 389 00:45:31,220 --> 00:45:38,540 Maybe every 20 30 years has been a bad one. The predictions are that by the end of this decade, there will be annual. 390 00:45:38,540 --> 00:45:42,920 So and one of the problems, of course, now that there are soldiers in Yemen, 391 00:45:42,920 --> 00:45:49,430 this there's ways of getting the water from the aquifers now that mean there's overuse of certainly the aquifers in Kabul, 392 00:45:49,430 --> 00:45:56,360 but also they're being used for opium production, for example, in the South. 393 00:45:56,360 --> 00:46:01,700 There's been a greening of the desert that is not sustainable given the precipitation. 394 00:46:01,700 --> 00:46:08,000 Glaciers are melting, and they're really important for having a steady flow of irrigation water in the springtime. 395 00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:10,370 It's horrible. It's really horrible. 396 00:46:10,370 --> 00:46:18,800 And you know, one of the desperate things I actually went to the central area on to look at drought conditions two years ago, 397 00:46:18,800 --> 00:46:26,510 and on the last day when one of the people I've worked with, his cousin is a glacier expert and there's various other people. 398 00:46:26,510 --> 00:46:30,350 We asked one of the local up environmental engineers to just gather a group of 399 00:46:30,350 --> 00:46:34,520 people together on our last night and in this room in the middle of nowhere, 400 00:46:34,520 --> 00:46:40,970 you know, Bamiyan is in the middle of it's all right little city, but it's really in the middle of nowhere. 401 00:46:40,970 --> 00:46:49,850 Everyone at the table had a Ph.D. offer from Germany or Japan or outside, and they all have their feet in the soil. 402 00:46:49,850 --> 00:46:59,300 They were sons of farmers, so they had land. Or they understood there was soil experts, water experts, environmental experts, glacier experts. 403 00:46:59,300 --> 00:47:05,930 And they all came not only with sort of academic expertise, but technical expertise. 404 00:47:05,930 --> 00:47:09,710 What can we do? And I asked them, You know, this is what? 405 00:47:09,710 --> 00:47:15,710 What are you the worst affected in the country? And I'm expecting them to say yes, yes, we're really poorly off. 406 00:47:15,710 --> 00:47:21,530 Good Lord. No, we've got the watershed of the main peaks running through the middle of Afghanistan. 407 00:47:21,530 --> 00:47:27,680 We can do things. We have solutions, but we do need help to sort of to do it. 408 00:47:27,680 --> 00:47:35,840 So the, you know, the solutions are there. At that point, there wasn't very much interest in funding anti-global warming measures. 409 00:47:35,840 --> 00:47:40,610 And now of course, it's off the table because it's not humanitarian. So goodness knows what. 410 00:47:40,610 --> 00:47:47,740 And I don't even know actually follow up what's happened to those people or those people who were, you know? 411 00:47:47,740 --> 00:47:56,020 Amazing experts in the field. And as for the Taliban, they are replacing the experts with mullahs. 412 00:47:56,020 --> 00:48:00,160 They've replaced the directors of departments with mullahs. 413 00:48:00,160 --> 00:48:06,390 Some of the old old directors were corrupt, but others were young, technically able people. 414 00:48:06,390 --> 00:48:15,930 They may be in a kept on as advisers, but that but the political parties going back to the going back to the Taliban. 415 00:48:15,930 --> 00:48:24,000 Thank you. When members of questions coming in from you in the audience and I encourage you, if you do have a question or comment, 416 00:48:24,000 --> 00:48:29,400 please do puts it in the Q&A box and we're happy to will relay it to our speakers. 417 00:48:29,400 --> 00:48:35,280 So we have a question coming in from Anton Deborah. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, Anton. 418 00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:41,400 And Anton's question is, what did the Americans expect? And that's in in capital letters from Doha? 419 00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:49,330 And to what extent did it appear? The Taliban negotiators had conflicting intentions. 420 00:48:49,330 --> 00:48:53,770 He wants to have a go at that, says, do you want to go first? No, OK. 421 00:48:53,770 --> 00:48:58,180 I defer to you. Yeah, we have this fantasy peace process in Doha. 422 00:48:58,180 --> 00:49:02,920 Goodness knows what the Americans were thinking. I mean, look at the Soviets. 423 00:49:02,920 --> 00:49:09,860 I mean, they spent years before they withdrew. Building up the Dr. Najib government to withstand the mujahideen. 424 00:49:09,860 --> 00:49:19,300 What the Americans do, they legitimise the Taliban? They undermined the Kabul government and the Afghan armed forces. 425 00:49:19,300 --> 00:49:26,860 They came, you know, they they they decided to talk to the Taliban independently and to the exclusion of the Afghan government. 426 00:49:26,860 --> 00:49:31,420 They came up with this deal that gave the Taliban pretty well everything they wanted, 427 00:49:31,420 --> 00:49:37,840 which was the the withdrawal of their main most dangerous enemy from the battlefield, which was the American. 428 00:49:37,840 --> 00:49:41,170 Special forces, an air force then. 429 00:49:41,170 --> 00:49:49,560 But worse than that, they did things like they promised that the Afghan government would release 5000 prisoners and they they. 430 00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:52,000 They force them to do that. 431 00:49:52,000 --> 00:50:00,870 The old Mike Pompei, the old secretary of state, said we will will will withhold $1 billion of aid if you don't release them. 432 00:50:00,870 --> 00:50:07,590 The last year, they insisted that the Afghan forces have a defensive mode, so they weren't actually fighting. 433 00:50:07,590 --> 00:50:14,010 Some Taliban were busy consolidating areas, taking territory the whole last year, 434 00:50:14,010 --> 00:50:24,300 and then they left unconditionally and that the deal hadn't even, you know, made the Taliban, if not things like Al Qaeda core. 435 00:50:24,300 --> 00:50:29,100 What would you think of as core U.S. interests, al Qaeda and the other foreign jihadist groups? 436 00:50:29,100 --> 00:50:36,300 The weakest, the weakest of concessions? The Taliban made it look like the Americans were cutting and running. 437 00:50:36,300 --> 00:50:39,120 That's what the Taliban assumed they were doing. That's what they were doing. 438 00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:46,200 Both Trump and Biden did that, and they absolutely undermined the Republic. 439 00:50:46,200 --> 00:50:50,400 It was not inevitable that it fell. I know it looks like that now, but it wasn't inevitable. 440 00:50:50,400 --> 00:51:02,850 There were really serious undermining by the Americans, also bad leadership by Ashraf Ghani and this unwillingness to look reality in the face, 441 00:51:02,850 --> 00:51:08,220 including on things like the rent coming in that might be disappearing. 442 00:51:08,220 --> 00:51:13,320 So I mean, the Americans had a fantasy project that they got everyone involved with. 443 00:51:13,320 --> 00:51:22,200 All our governments just joined in. Various research institutes were making doing research on the post piece as they called it, 444 00:51:22,200 --> 00:51:26,010 i.e. when the Taliban and the Afghan government was supposedly going to make peace. 445 00:51:26,010 --> 00:51:30,360 Meanwhile, we were asking the time I was asking the Americans, What's your plan B? 446 00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:35,340 What are you going to do if the Taliban are being deceitful and actually want to go for military victory? 447 00:51:35,340 --> 00:51:37,770 Nothing. No answer. 448 00:51:37,770 --> 00:51:46,860 There was no Plan B, and it was pretty clear from what you know what we were hearing from the Taliban on the ground and in Pakistan, 449 00:51:46,860 --> 00:51:56,490 where the leadership was based, the negotiations with their Plan B and military victory was their plan, which is what turned out to be the case. 450 00:51:56,490 --> 00:52:04,830 So I mean, I think there's blame on all sides the Taliban for choosing war in a drought year in the middle of a pandemic. 451 00:52:04,830 --> 00:52:07,260 I mean, the suffering they inflicted has been horrible. 452 00:52:07,260 --> 00:52:14,270 The Ashraf Ghani government has being weak and feckless and and undermining itself and the Americans. 453 00:52:14,270 --> 00:52:19,130 So you can tell that I'm still quite worked up about this. Back to you, Michael. 454 00:52:19,130 --> 00:52:24,680 Thank you. No question. Everything you do want to mention, you didn't want to comment on that particularly. 455 00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:28,680 OK. Next question comes from Iftikhar Malik and Iftikhar us retrospectively. 456 00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:35,090 Can we say that the US led alliance chose a wrong enemy in 2001 and persisted with it? 457 00:52:35,090 --> 00:52:41,600 I'm pointing at an alienated and targeted Pashtun populace, a populace that happened to be land based peasantry. 458 00:52:41,600 --> 00:52:51,710 Both these factors largely anchored the Taliban. I did raises areas in and study even before the Doha talks, and Iftikhar apologised for plugging it. 459 00:52:51,710 --> 00:52:56,270 No problem at all, but we're happy to plug that as well. So any of you like to take that question? 460 00:52:56,270 --> 00:53:06,110 I'll start with the mate. If there was again going back to history, if there were two pivots, in other words, was the rise of the Taliban inevitable? 461 00:53:06,110 --> 00:53:12,710 It's kind of a historian I always have to argue, were the key pivots that would have made a difference. 462 00:53:12,710 --> 00:53:18,710 No one would be the US. Lots of interest in Afghanistan after 1989. 463 00:53:18,710 --> 00:53:26,540 The international community has lots of interest in terms of the interest in Afghanistan was getting the Soviets to withdraw. 464 00:53:26,540 --> 00:53:34,220 The minute that happened in terms of reconstruction and political settlements, there was no interest whatsoever. 465 00:53:34,220 --> 00:53:41,390 And it's in that vacuum in which the Afghan civil war began and which the Taliban was able to emerge. 466 00:53:41,390 --> 00:53:47,450 The other key was in 2001, I think, in the sense of Victor's justice. 467 00:53:47,450 --> 00:53:54,770 The failure to engage the defeated elements of the Taliban in a post 2001 order. 468 00:53:54,770 --> 00:54:00,020 It was the same mistake made in Iraq the failure to engage at least some elements of the bomb, 469 00:54:00,020 --> 00:54:06,950 not necessarily the higher elements, but these kind of lustration, if you will, this broad swath of thing, 470 00:54:06,950 --> 00:54:14,810 anyone affiliated with the Taliban or anyone affiliated with the Pashtun majority affiliated with the Taliban in the same way with Iraq, 471 00:54:14,810 --> 00:54:23,180 anyone affiliated with the Baath, but eventually became this large Arabs in the past, it led to disasters in both states. 472 00:54:23,180 --> 00:54:31,670 And I think that if the that that gives you an answer with right immediately after 2001, when the Taliban were defeated, 473 00:54:31,670 --> 00:54:37,520 when they had more or less been disbanded militarily in both Iraq and Afghanistan, 474 00:54:37,520 --> 00:54:43,310 I think both the defeated saw no future in the American system and thus took up arms. 475 00:54:43,310 --> 00:54:51,260 And I think those are the two key junctures in both states. Could I add to that? 476 00:54:51,260 --> 00:54:57,420 I mean, the extraordinary thing about 2001 was it was basically a welcome intervention. 477 00:54:57,420 --> 00:55:02,340 And this was the Taliban. It was a it was a sea change. 478 00:55:02,340 --> 00:55:07,680 The Taliban were not just defeated militarily, but psychologically. No one had come to their aid. 479 00:55:07,680 --> 00:55:10,890 Apart from a few Pakistanis that collapsed. 480 00:55:10,890 --> 00:55:19,170 People welcomed the foreigners, and that was partly because they'd had, you know, this was this marked the end of the Civil War. 481 00:55:19,170 --> 00:55:24,210 The Taliban went home in peace. Some of them slipped across the border. 482 00:55:24,210 --> 00:55:28,200 Some of them reached out to people in the in the new regime to try and get security guarantees, 483 00:55:28,200 --> 00:55:33,540 which is typical for what you do at the end of an Afghan war. They were double crossed. 484 00:55:33,540 --> 00:55:38,100 You know, you had people turning up to meetings and the CIA would swoop down and arrest them. 485 00:55:38,100 --> 00:55:50,160 You had the people who took power. After after 2001, they used the Americans, they use a new position to persecute their enemies, 486 00:55:50,160 --> 00:55:57,180 and often this was on a tribal or factional basis, often in the Pashtun south, it was often tribal and factional. 487 00:55:57,180 --> 00:56:04,350 The new the first governor of Kandahar, for example, he put his enemies in prison. 488 00:56:04,350 --> 00:56:08,040 He confiscated land. He murdered people. 489 00:56:08,040 --> 00:56:11,580 There was torture and the Americans were willing allies. 490 00:56:11,580 --> 00:56:18,810 They, you know, they had this practise of giving money for intelligence, and then they also had a fantasy. 491 00:56:18,810 --> 00:56:24,880 They talked about hunting down the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda. That did not exist. 492 00:56:24,880 --> 00:56:30,550 This was the thing the Taliban did not exist as a fighting force. The insurgency came later. 493 00:56:30,550 --> 00:56:39,400 And by carrying out mass arbitrary arrests, using torture, stripping men in public in front of their families, 494 00:56:39,400 --> 00:56:44,020 using dogs in people's houses know trampling on people's dignity. 495 00:56:44,020 --> 00:56:48,010 Sending, you know, 200 Afghans off to Guantanamo. More in Bagram. 496 00:56:48,010 --> 00:56:55,450 Who knows how many forward forward bases they sparked the insurgency? 497 00:56:55,450 --> 00:57:00,580 And we see that again and again, you look at the map of Afghanistan, where the insurgency took off. 498 00:57:00,580 --> 00:57:07,090 People didn't want a new jihad. You know, there were a few Taliban who came round trying to get jihad and people say, Well, just go away. 499 00:57:07,090 --> 00:57:12,870 We want this to work. We try and make this work. But there was persecution. There was corruption. 500 00:57:12,870 --> 00:57:23,220 And there was sort of the people who took power behaved very, very badly, so for example, one district and just to the south west of Kabul. 501 00:57:23,220 --> 00:57:29,890 People told me, look, we really tried, we kept sending delegations to Kabul seekers like we want a different place. 502 00:57:29,890 --> 00:57:34,410 Is looting our shops. He's looting our houses. Please get rid of him. 503 00:57:34,410 --> 00:57:42,450 Nothing happened. Five years later, the Taliban came and they piggybacked off what was actually originally popular resistance. 504 00:57:42,450 --> 00:57:49,980 And. Then, of course, the Americans started dealing with an actual insurgency, and they did really badly. 505 00:57:49,980 --> 00:57:55,050 They set up an army that I won't go into it, but this was not inevitable. 506 00:57:55,050 --> 00:58:00,960 It was bad behaviour by the Americans, bad behaviour by the various Afghans who'd won power. 507 00:58:00,960 --> 00:58:09,630 And, you know, shame on our governments, our government, Michael and me, that we went along with that because how could we go along with a, 508 00:58:09,630 --> 00:58:15,570 you know, a system that was sending people to Guantanamo and torturing people in black sites? 509 00:58:15,570 --> 00:58:17,400 How did the British government go along with that? 510 00:58:17,400 --> 00:58:24,240 It's a question that I don't think London has answered, but certainly the Nordic countries have come back saying What on earth? 511 00:58:24,240 --> 00:58:29,670 What are we doing in that? And we see that, you know, we see the fruits of that now. 512 00:58:29,670 --> 00:58:33,410 The one thing I would say is that the Taliban are not doing much better. 513 00:58:33,410 --> 00:58:41,690 And traditionally in Afghanistan, if you want a peaceful end to a conflict, you treat the vanquished with dignity. 514 00:58:41,690 --> 00:58:47,960 They come and they give you, you know, they they they'll give you loyalty, you give them back their weapons, even. 515 00:58:47,960 --> 00:58:51,890 That's how you did. That's the proper way you do with the end of a war. 516 00:58:51,890 --> 00:58:57,920 You don't go and kill them or try and take the land. So, you know, the Americans. 517 00:58:57,920 --> 00:59:01,550 And again, as in as with the peace treaty, it was a fantasy war. 518 00:59:01,550 --> 00:59:07,830 They started fighting that turned into an actual war. Thank you, Kate. 519 00:59:07,830 --> 00:59:16,530 We have time for one last question, and that comes from Brent Spelman Brent asks, What do you think might have been an effective Plan B, 520 00:59:16,530 --> 00:59:21,900 whether realistic alternatives offering more competence and less corruption than the Ghani government? 521 00:59:21,900 --> 00:59:27,210 Was there ever truly possibility of balancing the Taliban in a broader coalition government? 522 00:59:27,210 --> 00:59:33,120 And what level of continued foreign support would it be necessary to prevent state collapse? 523 00:59:33,120 --> 00:59:38,820 And how might Western or Arab governments have been persuaded to fund it? 524 00:59:38,820 --> 00:59:45,460 Go ahead. Yes, so yes, of course, of course, there were alternatives. 525 00:59:45,460 --> 00:59:52,030 It's a pretty sick, dysfunctional system that was set up. 526 00:59:52,030 --> 01:00:00,820 And the state theory makes sense of why it was so difficult to get democratic elections or anti-corruption or sought out the government. 527 01:00:00,820 --> 01:00:05,470 There were absolutely honourable brave people within the government trying to sort it out, trying to clean up. 528 01:00:05,470 --> 01:00:09,670 They came into death threats they were know from for the people making money. 529 01:00:09,670 --> 01:00:16,420 They weren't supported, but obviously they weren't supported by Karzai because he was up to his neck in corruption. 530 01:00:16,420 --> 01:00:19,090 Certainly, there was a lot of corruption around him as well. 531 01:00:19,090 --> 01:00:26,650 He did not give political leadership or protection to people, and the donors were, you know, they knew what was going on and they funded anyway. 532 01:00:26,650 --> 01:00:37,310 So they I think they were also culpable. And on the ground, there were a lot of people on the ground who wanted peace, including amongst the Taliban. 533 01:00:37,310 --> 01:00:43,820 But this top down approach that the Americans took when they thought again, they like working with strongmen as they did in 2001, 534 01:00:43,820 --> 01:00:45,380 they wanted to work with the Taliban leadership, 535 01:00:45,380 --> 01:00:53,240 the men who were most closely allied with Pakistan and Pakistani intelligence, the people with the least skin in the game. 536 01:00:53,240 --> 01:01:01,190 And there are, you know, there are sort of there were of people amongst the Taliban on the ground who wanted that jihad to win. 537 01:01:01,190 --> 01:01:06,750 They wanted victory in Kabul. There were many, particularly old ones who thought, Oh, it's a disaster. 538 01:01:06,750 --> 01:01:13,830 You know, we have to live here, and their fear, I think, was not so much military victories as ongoing civil war, 539 01:01:13,830 --> 01:01:22,330 but there's definitely grounds for doing local peace deals. And, you know, the Americans didn't want them. 540 01:01:22,330 --> 01:01:26,070 And it's a subject that I think will come up more in the future. 541 01:01:26,070 --> 01:01:31,380 There were earlier peace deals on the ground in Helmand and elsewhere that the Americans sabotaged. 542 01:01:31,380 --> 01:01:36,540 So remember the eat? Remember the aid in 2018? Maybe people don't remember it. 543 01:01:36,540 --> 01:01:43,890 It'll filter. There was a three day ceasefire. Unbelievable. People went home to their villages for the first time from the cities. 544 01:01:43,890 --> 01:01:47,880 They hadn't been able to go for years because of the war. Taliban came into the cities. 545 01:01:47,880 --> 01:01:52,080 They sat down with the governors. They sat down with the Afghan army. 546 01:01:52,080 --> 01:01:57,030 You know, there's pictures of Taliban eating ice cream, looking amazed, looking at the city. 547 01:01:57,030 --> 01:02:05,490 This was the this was the the the strength of the Afghan people, both Taliban and government people. 548 01:02:05,490 --> 01:02:09,900 That was just not. It was just not leveraged by anyone. 549 01:02:09,900 --> 01:02:23,080 And we have this fantasy peace process that ended in a Taliban victory in the defeat to the Republic. 550 01:02:23,080 --> 01:02:27,850 Thank you, Ibrahim, did you want to add anything? Yes. OK, thank you. 551 01:02:27,850 --> 01:02:31,300 It's a very powerful, powerful words to end now. 552 01:02:31,300 --> 01:02:37,030 Yes. I mean, I think my cupcakes would be it's going forward that you would have, you know, 553 01:02:37,030 --> 01:02:43,070 better commanders in control who can work with local people and get the girls schools open, for example. 554 01:02:43,070 --> 01:02:47,430 What's happening in small ways? But you have to come back. 555 01:02:47,430 --> 01:02:55,750 I think you have to come back to the resilient, not resilient as horrible word, but the strengths that are there in in communities in Afghanistan. 556 01:02:55,750 --> 01:02:59,710 Thank you very much, Kate, and thank you both to you and Ibrahim. 557 01:02:59,710 --> 01:03:05,860 I've watched a lot of coverage and read a lot of things about what's happened in Afghanistan since August, but in the last hour, quite honestly, 558 01:03:05,860 --> 01:03:11,380 I think I've spent way more and understand things a bit better than having watched all the coverage on television, 559 01:03:11,380 --> 01:03:14,920 all the various things I've read in the newspaper. I'm sure that same for everybody else, 560 01:03:14,920 --> 01:03:20,500 but thank you very much indeed for taking time to join us at the Davids seminar and also blinking into the Middle East. 561 01:03:20,500 --> 01:03:25,850 You said, Ibrahim, you illustrated how much it is very much linked to the Middle East Eastern, 562 01:03:25,850 --> 01:03:32,410 part of the Middle East, in all sorts of all sorts of ways. And thank you to Kate for just showing how rapey the economics. 563 01:03:32,410 --> 01:03:40,660 I should probably add, but many, many moons ago, both Kate and I study political economy of a Middle East that Exeter University. 564 01:03:40,660 --> 01:03:47,170 And you can see which of us obviously learnt was about the better student of that from today's presentation. 565 01:03:47,170 --> 01:03:52,330 But thank you very much for both of you, and thank you all of you for joining us and pleased to join us again on our next webinar. 566 01:03:52,330 --> 01:03:55,900 But thank you very much, Ibrahim. Thank you very much, Kate. Goodnight, pleasure. 567 01:03:55,900 --> 01:04:06,385 Thank you.