Episode 15: How Was Afghanistan Lost to the Taliban — Again? Part 1
After a 20-year war that cost the United States two trillion dollars and led to nearly 200,000 deaths, the Taliban are back in power — and offering safe haven to Al Qaeda once again. General David H. Petraeus, Trump advisor Lisa Curtis, Afghan ambassador to the U.S. Roya Rahmani and others, bring us "in the room" to explain how this debacle came to pass, and warn us of the consequences.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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When you go looking for Osama bin Laden, you don't find him, he finds you. The phone rang in my office in Washington, D.C. in March, 1997. On the other end a man said, “Osama has agreed to meet you in Afghanistan.”
This was to be bin Laden’s first TV interview. The journey to finally speak with bin Laden was long. Weeks of meetings with his mysterious associates who were living in London.
A trek through Pakistan, to the foothills of the Himalayas and over the Khyber Pass which snakes through the barren mountains that border Afghanistan.
With my crew from CNN, we drove down into the plains of eastern Afghanistan, which was now controlled by the Taliban, a then- little-known movement of religious warriors who had banned pretty much everything: women in jobs, girls in schools, music and television.
Afghanistan felt grim and desolate, like all the color had been washed out of it by the Taliban.
We had no idea how the Taliban would react to three Western journalists and all of our TV equipment — and we didn’t plan to find out. We hid our cameras under piles of carpets whenever we encountered Taliban checkpoints and we finally holed up in a zero-star hotel in the city of Jalalabad, waiting.
Eventually, bin Laden's “media advisor” came to our hotel and told us to get ready: the interview would be that night. He told us to bring nothing with us, not even watches. Bin Laden’s men told us if we were hiding any kind of tracking device it would be “a problem.” They implied that “the problem” would be resolved by a swift execution.
We assured them we were clean. We climbed into a van. Curtains covered the windows. Inside was a group of heavily armed men. Members of al-Qaeda handed us crude blindfolds.
Was I scared? Not really. I was excited, to be honest. We had spent a lot of time and effort to get to this moment and here we were. And in those days, al-Qaeda wasn’t murdering Western journalists, and they had chosen us to do the interview.
[MUSIC]
Back then I knew very little about bin Laden and wasn't really sure what he even would look like. At the time, there were almost no photos of him. As we drove through the mountains, I tried to imagine what he would be like. I pegged him as some sort of table-thumping revolutionary.
[MUSIC]
We arrived at a small mud hut after nightfall. While we waited, bin Laden’s men served us some kind of meat curry.
Late that night, out of the darkness, bin Laden finally, suddenly appeared. He was tall, maybe six foot four, very thin, and he seemed a little unwell, coughing and nursing a cup of tea. When he began to speak, his followers hung on his every word.
[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF BIN LADEN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
It turned out that he wasn't a table thumping revolutionary, at all. He seemed more like a cleric, calm and pious. He talked about his intense hatred of the United States in a monotone. A thin, ambiguous smile sometimes played on his lips. The answer to our final question…
ARCHIVAL Peter Arnett: What are your future plans?
…has haunted me ever since.
[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF BIN LADEN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
ARCHIVAL Osama bin Laden: [PETER BERGEN TRANSLATING:] You'll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
ARCHIVAL New York firefighter: The World Trade Center tower number one is on fire. Send every available ambulance, everything you got to the World Trade Center, now!
ARCHIVAL New York FDNY Dispatcher: 10-4, 10-60’s been transmitted for the World Trade Center.
ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: 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.
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010, the fastest possible pace…
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We've been there for 19 years in Afghanistan. It's ridiculous.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: NBC News Clip: President Biden is set to announce the apparent end to America's longest war…
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: After 20 years, the Taliban took Kabul and Afghanistan almost effortlessly.
ARCHIVAL U.S. Marine: [SHOUTING:] Let's go push back! Push back!
On August the 15th, 2021, as the Taliban took Kabul, you could see the fear etched on the faces of the men and women in the streets. Tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport hoping to escape the country. Some Afghans grasped onto landing gear as planes took flight, a final act of desperation that turned suicidal.
All of this was only the beginning of a much greater tragedy that’s unfolded over the last two years.
Some hoped that the Taliban had reformed, that the new Afghanistan would be ruled with a more moderate hand. But for Afghans with any memory of Taliban rule, it was pretty clear how this would all go down:
No girls in school. No women working. Gay men stoned to death.
Only now the Taliban would be even better equipped to enforce their rule with a vast armory of American weapons left behind.
[MUSIC]
When you look at the facts — 20 years of war, costing the United States more than 2 trillion dollars, 176,000 lives lost on all sides — it's still hard to get your head around this question: how did the same group that gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden as he plotted to kill thousands of Americans, how did they seize power again?
In part one of this two-part report, you’ll hear some answers… from U.S. generals who led the Afghan war, the Afghan and Taliban officials who fought that war, and from ordinary Afghans who bore the brunt of the conflict. They'll help you unravel how this debacle, one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history, came to pass.
I’m Peter Bergen. Welcome to In The Room.
[THEME MUSIC]
Our 1997 interview with bin Laden barely made a ripple. Maybe his threats just weren’t taken seriously at the time. Back then, most terrorist attacks were designed to make headlines, not lead to massive casualties.
Roya Rahmani remembers exactly where she was the day all of that changed. Walking out of a math class at McGill University in Montreal, where she was a student.
Roya Rahmani: I came out of the class and I saw everybody running around in the basement of the university. There was a sense of chaos. Like, ‘there is a bombing in New York.’ I'm like, okay, that's in New York. Why people are so worried here? I had experienced what bombing means, like missiles had gone through my own room. I had came close to them as, as much as they blew my hair from one side of my face to another. So I don't know anything about like what a big thing it is.
Many years later, in 2018, Rahmani became the Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States. She was the first woman ever to hold this key job.
Roya Rahmani: It feels like my life was overshadowed by conflict and war all along since I have known myself.
Rahmani was born in 1978 in Kabul. Shortly after, a communist coup overthrew the government. The new government was unpopular outside of the capital, and villagers in more conservative areas of the country started to take up arms against the new regime.
The neighboring Soviet Union invaded and installed their own puppet government. They deployed troops across the country for what they thought would be a quick campaign to end the insurgency. But the rural fighters got support from Soviet enemies like the United States and Pakistan.
Money and weapons poured in to help the bands of religious fighters known as the mujahideen — holy warriors — fighting to defeat the infidel Soviets and their puppet government.
After almost a decade of war, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, and then a chaotic civil war ensued.
Roya Rahmani: It was a question of whether you could make it to the next day or not because of the bombing. And we set for Pakistan — and the idea was that we are not going to stay. The maximum time that we would stay there would be four months. That turned for my family to be 10 years.
Rahmani’s family was still in Pakistan when a group called the Taliban surged to power in the south of Afghanistan.
Taliban translates literally to “students.” Their ideology was an ultra fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They promised to install Islamic justice and to end the abuses of warlords who were tearing the country apart.
Their victory gave Afghans hope for peace — hope for a generation that had known nothing but the horrors of war.
[AMBIENT SOUNDS OF TV CRACKLING]
Rahmani remembers gathering around the TV in 1996 with her family, to watch a transition of power that offered the possibility that they could finally return to their home in Afghanistan.
[ARCHIVAL AMBIENT SOUNDS OF KABUL, TALIBAN CHEERING]
Roya Rahmani: I remember it was around 10, 11 in the morning that that excitement completely died down. And everybody froze as we saw the images of the Taliban dragging the former president who was at the time at the UN compound as a refugee, dragged and hanged. Everybody was like as if there were buckets of cold water was thrown at them and like, what is this now?
With that act, a brutal spectacle in which Afghanistan’s former president and his brother were tortured, castrated, and hanged in front of the presidential palace, any chance of normalcy was gone.For Afghans in Kabul, that had once meant women at work, music blaring, and the freedom to choose whether or not to wear a headscarf or grow a beard.
Two years after the Taliban took power, Rahmani and her family made a short visit home to Kabul for her grandmother’s funeral.
Roya Rahmani: I entered a ghost city. A lot of people use this term, and usually here in America, they refer to, the way I understand it, that when, when there is not much going on and in the evening, things are closed and all that, but the way I'm using it, it really is different. It really is ghost city. There was nothing going on. It was dust and gloom. Even during the day, you felt the dark. It was just this ambience of fear descendant on every single person that was around and that you could see.
People were like zombies. They were walking with these faces that they couldn't trim their beard, they couldn't show their hair. There was no music, there was no TV allowed, no radio allowed, no photography allowed. There were no jobs and nothing was going on. You would just see, in huge pickup cars sometimes soldiers who were patrolling moving by and everybody froze around them. It was a city of zombies and ghosts.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
Peter Bergen: Your parents told you when you were growing up about a very different Afghanistan, what did that look like?
[ARCHIVAL AMBIENT SOUND OF AN OLDER KABUL]
Roya Rahmani: Oh, it's the Afghanistan that I have never seen, unfortunately. My father was brought up in Kabul and he was a city boy, and, he still talks about and romanticizes how they would make sure that they would never miss the premiere of a new movie.
[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF DIALOGUE, MUSIC, FROM AN OLD AFGHAN MOVIE]
Roya Rahmani: And they would tell me that this cinema or that theater would not allow people if they were not very well dressed. We looked at some pictures of my mom's wedding and I'm like, this is way too modern. I would like to have a hairstyle like my aunt when she did in my mom's wedding.
[1970s POP MUSIC]
Roya Rahmani: Even the golden times that my parents remember when there was stability, when there was, uh, prosperity in Afghanistan even then, Afghanistan was somewhat of a closed box. They did not have enough opportunities to seek education abroad to be exposed to the world, but as the world had changed, after 2000, especially with connectivity through the Internet, that opened immense opportunity.
Ironically, while the U.S. military intervention after 9/11 embroiled Afghanistan in yet another war, it also created more opportunities for ordinary Afghans to be connected to the outside world; to work at organizations supported by the foreign aid that was pouring into the country and to study at institutions like the American University in Kabul.
But soon, the U.S. was distracted by a second war — this one in Iraq. The Taliban used this opening to regroup next door to Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and began launching a horrifying series of suicide attacks.
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF SIRENS, TALIBAN BOMB EXPLODING]
Peter Bergen: So you were appointed, the Iraq Afghan war czar and what is that?
Douglas Lute: It remains a very good question, Peter some, some decades later.
That's Lieutenant General Doug Lute, an adviser first to President George W. Bush.
Douglas Lute: Initially the only thing on my schedule every day for the first week was to brief the president on overnight events at 7:00 AM when he arrived in the Oval Office.
And then to President Barack Obama.
Within days of coming into office, Obama ordered Lute and other top advisors to conduct a 60 day review of the Afghan war.
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: If we had chosen a different path, the right path, we could have finished the job in Afghanistan and put more resources into the fight against bin Laden.
Peter Bergen: What was the mood music in the room when Obama talked about Afghanistan?
Douglas Lute: So it was a sense of, a sense of urgency, a sense of now we have to deliver, you know, we've been elected, now we have to deliver. Essentially it's time for us to remember what took us to Afghanistan and what took us there were the attacks on 9/11. And so let's refocus on al-Qaeda and let's try to bear down and bring core al-Qaeda to justice.
The question was, how?
In the fall of 2009, Obama presided over a series of lengthy debates in the White House between his top generals and his national security advisors. Obama listened to these deliberations in his analytical, methodical style without giving much of an indication of where he was going to land.
He was scheduled to unveil the plan publicly at a speech at West Point on December 1st. Just two days before the speech, General David Petraeus, who was in overall charge of the Afghan war, was summoned to the White House:
David Petraeus: Got a call that morning that said, we need you up here in Washington this evening, 5:00 PM in the Oval Office. The president's going to share with you and the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the national security team his decision.
In the Oval Office, Petraeus learned that there would be a surge of troops into Afghanistan. This was a win: he and other generals had made their case for more military support at great length. But then he was informed of the second part of Obama's planned announcement: 18 months after the surge, the troops would start coming home.
David Petraeus: That element, I was surprised and-
Peter Bergen: Did you think it was a good idea?
David Petraeus: I didn't. But to be truthful, it was the first time I'd heard it. It was essentially, here's the deal it was a bit of a take it or leave it moment.
As Commander in Chief, it was Obama's decision to make. And once generals like Petraeus had made their opinions known, the time for questioning was over.
[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF OFFICIAL MUSIC GREETING OBAMA’S ENTRANCE]
It's worth taking you back to listen to Obama's West Point speech from the points of view of those who would have to live with the consequences.
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: And as commander in chief I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
The four thousand young cadets listening in their impeccable gray uniforms, several of whom would later die in Afghanistan.
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: After 18 months,
Generals like Petraeus, stone-faced in the audience…
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Our troops will begin to come home.
… and the Taliban.
To Americans listening, the surge of troops sounded like more war, but the Taliban understood the true significance of Obama’s speech: the Americans were leaving.
David Petraeus: If you're in a contest of wills, you want the enemy to think that you have the will to continue and to do what is necessary, so that that enemy realizes eventually, I guess I need to cut a deal here. How do you have negotiation? How do you have leverage if the enemy knows you're going home?
But there was a plausible argument for making the timeline public. One of the key voices supporting this approach was then-Vice President Joe Biden.
ARCHIVAL Joseph Biden: Unless you set a timeline, Baghdad in the case of Iraq and, and, Kabul in the case of Afghanistan will not step up. They're happy to let us continue to do the job. The only way they step up is say, fellas, we're leaving. We've trained you. Step up!
Biden had once been optimistic about what was possible in Afghanistan,
but by the time he became Vice President, he had visited the country many times and he’d transformed into a skeptic.
[MUSIC]
Lieutenant General Doug Lute remembers that Biden was particularly concerned that the Afghan government was too weak and too ineffective to fight off the Taliban.
Douglas Lute: Yes, they could rule Kabul and yes, they could look the part as an Afghan national government, but how much did they really influence what was happening outside, where actually the fight with the Taliban was taking place. It wasn't taking place in Kabul, it was taking place in the, in the most remote pockets of Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen: So what would he say in these meetings specifically?
Douglas Lute: He was frequently a voice of what I would refer to as healthy skepticism about just how much we could accomplish and whether or not that investment really aligned with our interests. He would say things like, look, we need to understand that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are connected, but they're not one and the same. That the Taliban were, they were singularly focused on Afghanistan. They had never threatened, nor had they any vision of combat, of conflict, of violence against America outside of Afghanistan.
Something else just didn’t sit right with Biden — or Obama. The generals kept upping the ante by asking for ever more troops to go to Afghanistan, right from the very beginning of Obama's first term.
Douglas Lute: President Obama had approved a request, which had been transitioned from the Bush administration for an additional 20,000 troops and those troops were flowing into Afghanistan. So there was this impression that he had already authorized a troop surge early in 2009, and now we're in August, September of 2009 and there's another 40,000 troops on the table.
Peter Bergen: So the, the military came in with, you know, as they always do with sort of three options…
Douglas Lute: You've, you've studied us too closely, Peter. Yeah.
Peter Bergen: One was 10,000 troops, one was 40,000 troops and one was 80,000. Everybody knew 80,000 was impossible. And, the military was hoping for 40,000.
Peter Bergen: How was that received by Obama and Biden?
Douglas Lute: Well, that caught the White House somewhat by surprise.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
As a result, Biden clung to the belief that the generals would always ask for more when it came to Afghanistan.
By the end of his second term in 2016, Obama wanted to get all American troops out of Afghanistan. But when he considered the risks, he decided to keep a small U.S. military presence, enough to keep the Taliban at bay.
And then came the new commander in chief, Donald Trump. Trump had made it abundantly clear even before he campaigned for president that he wanted the U.S. out of Afghanistan.
[MUSIC FADES]
Trump voters in the 2016 election were delighted to see that their candidate won. But it turned out, the Taliban were pretty happy too. The top Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told me:
Zabiullah Mujahid: [MUJAHID SPEAKING DARI, KHALID MAFTON TRANSLATING:] We did not support Mr. Trump himself; however, his stances about the American occupation of Afghanistan and removing his troops, were commendable. His stance led to foreign troops leaving Afghanistan.
Lisa Curtis: It's no secret that President Trump wanted to withdraw U.S. troops.
Lisa Curtis was a top official on Afghanistan. She was in the room for many of the debates about the Afghan War in the Trump White House.
Lisa Curtis: I was brought into my job by General McMaster, who, uh, was the second national security advisor who served under Trump, and he did a great job in establishing a policy process to develop a South Asia strategy in a very methodical, professional way. Developing consensus, among all the different agencies. Answering questions.
But there were some key dissenters to the consensus that McMaster was trying to develop, like Trump's “chief strategist” Steve Bannon, who was once part of the National Security Council but later removed.
Lisa Curtis: There was a lot of tension with Steve Bannon, in particular, who was not a believer in the Afghanistan mission. He didn't believe it was a real country, didn't think it was worth U.S. troops being there, fighting for, and you know, Steve Bannon, was not part of the National Security Council. But he would sometimes show up at the NSC meetings. And this really angered General McMaster.
And there was one meeting in particular, I remember, in the summer of 2017 where General McMaster was chairing the meeting, Bannon showed up. He was sitting in the corner and he started, criticizing the Afghans. How it's not a real country. And, General McMaster got very angry, kind of put his hands on the table, leaned forward, and, you got the sense he was, you know, getting ready to sort of throw a punch or something at him.
So I think between General McMaster, Secretary Mattis, and General Kelly you had a formidable group of individuals who could prevail on President Trump, explain why it was so important to keep U.S. troops there. That's initially what President Trump decided when he announced the South Asia strategy in August 2017.
The new strategy put 4,000 additional American troops into Afghanistan. But by the spring of 2018, Curtis saw that President Trump was growing increasingly impatient.
Trump was skeptical, she says, of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, calling him corrupt. But while the previous administration in Afghanistan was indeed riddled with corruption, Ghani himself didn’t have such a track record.
Curtis thought that Trump might have been confusing Ghani with other Afghan leaders.
Lisa Curtis: Compared to some other Afghan leaders President Ghani was not as corrupt And so I think he may have had him confused with somebody else, but he persisted in his perception that the whole Afghanistan mission was doomed to failure and it was just a waste of U.S. money and resources to be there.
When Roya Rahmani met with Trump, when she was Afghan ambassador to the United States, she got a similar impression:
Roya Rahmani: He seemed to be uncertain of what was going on. He questioned me why the conflict is never ending.
Trump always believed in his own gut, and on Afghanistan his gut was telling him: let’s just get the hell out!
So he began to talk about withdrawing U.S. troops again. But this time, there was a twist.
Lisa Curtis: I do remember one meeting that he was chairing on Afghanistan at the Pentagon. And the idea came up about trying to pursue peace talks with the Taliban.
It’s hard to overstate how much of a change this was for Trump.
Lisa Curtis: He essentially said, I wanna get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but I want to kill as many Taliban as possible before doing so. So his attitude was very skeptical about the idea that we could even have a peace agreement with the Taliban.
Peter Bergen: What changed?
Lisa Curtis: It was really, you know, Ambassador Khalilzad, Secretary Pompeo, who sold Trump on the idea that we could have this great peace deal.
That’s U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who became the chief U.S. negotiator with the Taliban.
Lisa Curtis: It's wrong for people to say that, ‘Oh, the terrible peace agreement was because of Trump, Trump really wanted the peace deal.’ I don't think he really cared about a peace deal. He cared about getting U.S. troops out.
The first round of negotiations took place in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in 2019. But excluded from any of these negotiations was the elected Afghan government; a demand that was made by the Taliban that the United States just went along with.
The negotiations went for about eight hours a day for about a week.
Peter Bergen: It was tense?
Lisa Curtis: It was very tense. We got reprimanded by Ambassador Khalilzad for sort of talking amongst ourselves and looking uncomfortable during the meetings and even for taking drinks of water while the Taliban were speaking, because that was disrespectful so it was, it was a very uncomfortable situation to be in.
But everyone in the room could agree on the magnitude of what they were there to do.
Lisa Curtis: The very first meeting where we sat down, it was actually very emotional. The interpreter was an Afghan. He had lost family members. And so when he started off, he broke down. And that caused me to get very emotional as well. And I think we just realized the weight of what we were doing. We realized the level of loss in the country over the last 20 years.Every single one of us in the room, had, you know, experienced loss. The Afghan people had experienced so much loss.
During a break, Curtis and the only other woman in the room, who was Khalilzad's deputy, were approached by one of the Taliban leaders.
Lisa Curtis: He made a point of telling me, you know, ‘I kept the women's university open when I was Governor of Herat in the late 1990s. We support women going to school.'
Peter Bergen: Did you take that at face value?
Lisa Curtis: Of course not. Look, I’m very skeptical of the Taliban.
Peter Bergen: Was our negotiating position, sort of like, you're gonna buy a car and you tell the car salesman, 'I'm ready to pay sticker price. Now let's negotiate.' Was that kind of our position?
Lisa Curtis: That was exactly the feeling that one had sitting in the room. During the second round of negotiations, Ambassador Khalilzad, he assessed that the Taliban did not believe that the U.S. troops would ever leave. So he brought in several senior military leaders to brief the Taliban on what a U.S. withdrawal would entail.
Curtis said one of the U.S. military officials rolled a whiteboard into the room with information about U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Just consider how bizarre that was: During nearly two decades of war, giving the Taliban any information about American troop positions would have been unthinkable.
Lisa Curtis: And one of the Taliban leaders joked, 'Oh look, They're bringing out the crown jewels before we've even gotten started.' So it was this kind of feeling in the room that, you know, the U.S. was really desperate to withdraw and the Taliban were sitting back, you know, taking this in. We know that President Trump wanted to withdraw. We know that Ambassador Khalilzad was under pressure.
Peter Bergen: From?
Lisa Curtis: Well, I guess from his perspective, if there was to be a peace deal, it had to happen quickly before Trump would announce that the U.S. was pulling out forces. In my personal opinion and what I had suggested to my leadership is that we have a plan B: We wanna withdraw U.S. forces, let's negotiate that withdrawal with President Ghani.
Peter Bergen: The elected Afghan government.
Lisa Curtis: The elected Afghan government. But instead, the way the peace deal was carried out with the Taliban, it sort of looked like the U.S. was changing horses midstream. That we simply were shifting our support to the Taliban and I think it demoralized the Afghan government, which also contributed to the quick fall of the Afghan government.
Afghan officials had the nominal support of the U.S., and yet here was the United States negotiating with the enemy. Curtis couldn’t believe what was happening.
Lisa Curtis: This was devastating for me and I had to consider many times whether I would resign from my position.
Matin Bek, President Ashraf Ghani’s chief of staff, felt betrayed.
Matin Bek: Afghanistan was unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately, was handed over to the Taliban through the deal. The United States should not have excluded the Afghan government.
Peter Bergen: Why?
Matin Bek: Because we were actively fighting against the Taliban. It was not the U.S. army. U.S. Army was just behind, doing little. How could you end the war excluding one of the main party, and you directly talk with the Taliban and whatever they want you easily give it to them.
And indeed, it did seem the Taliban got everything they wanted. They wanted their prisoners released. So, American negotiators pressured the Ghani government to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners, many of whom reportedly went right back to the battlefield.
While the Taliban did release 1,000 Afghan soldiers they were holding as part of the prisoner exchange, they continued to hold an American citizen they’d taken hostage months earlier.
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was leading the negotiations for the Trump administration, was determined to make a deal. Evena deal that didn't mention women’s rights or human rights. Even a deal that freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners, without getting just one American hostage back.
The question is, why? Why did the world’s biggest superpower give away pretty much the whole store to a rebel group with a long track record of harboring terrorists?
Khalilzad declined multiple interview requests with us, so I put that question to those who’d worked with him, people like Lisa Curtis, who’d spent months observing him, in the room.
Peter Bergen: What was Khalilzad's motivations in all this?
Lisa Curtis: Oh, I, I cannot say what Ambassador Khalilzad's motivations were. He had been dealing with these issues for so long. He knew all of the players. Maybe he thought that he was helping to end the violence and bloodshed. Maybe he felt it was inevitable that the Taliban was coming back.
I also asked Matin Bek, who was often in the room with Khalilzad.
Matin Bek: I, I don't know later on it became more about the personal thing of two individual than United States interest, than an Afghanistan interest. It became interest of him, and interest of Ghani. It's kind of a wrestling—
Peter Bergen: Wrestling match.
Matin Bek: A wrestling match between two individuals. That's how Afghanistan was lost. That's how United States was humiliated. I think this two individual has to be hold accountable and put on trial. They are responsible, equally.
A wrestling match between Khalilzad, the chief negotiator for the U.S., and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
[MUSIC]
Two men who should have been on the same team, but whose unusual relationship made things… complicated. They had known each other since they were high school students. Both won scholarships to study in the U.S.; Khalilzad received his PhD from the University of Chicago while Ghani's doctorate was from Columbia. Khalilzad was always more the back-slapping, glad-hander of the two, while Ghani was an intellectual technocrat.
They had been frenemies for decades, but now that Ghani was Afghanistan's presidentand Khalilzad was leading the U.S. negotiations with the Taliban, the gloves came off. Let's put it simply: they loathed each other.
I wanted to hear about President Ghani from the perspective of my close friend, Gianni Koskinas, who’d served in Afghanistan as a Colonel working with U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. He’s known Ghani for more than a decade.
Ioannis Koskinas: President Ghani was an academic, a hard working man that I think he, he was intellectually, you know, probably one of the smartest guys in the room always. But he can't run a business, he can't run a government that way. We could see this. We never focused one day on fixing this. You know, we focused so much on fixing the Taliban which we had no influence over, okay? And we spent the littlest of times trying to fix something like the Afghan government, which we had enormous influence over because we were paying the bills.
It’s a familiar story — a student of recent American history might conclude that it was simply par for the course: the U.S. had thrown its support behind the battle in Afghanistan, and then, once it was no longer politically popular back home, packed up and left. The weapons to be stockpiled, the factions to fight, the citizens to suffer.
In the 1970s, that’s the way the story had played out in Vietnam. And the U.S. did something not too different when its proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan ended in 1989. The U.S. then closed its embassy in Afghanistan and washed its hands of the country, which then descended into a nasty civil war out of which emerged the Taliban.
Ioannis Koskinas: So our problem with Afghanistan, you know, and the Taliban and the, everything comes down to this one sentence: we overspend and under think. You can take that into Afghanistan, you can take that to Iraq. And we just keep on throwing money at it and thinking that that's gonna win it. And the fact of the matter is that we keep on not doing so well. The score isn't that great.
Indeed the score isn’t that great: from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. Americans generally go into foreign wars with the illusion they will end quickly and decisively. In Afghanistan it would instead end in tragedy.
[MUSIC]
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHAOS, CRIES, CROWDS]
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: At Kabul airport, the desperation is dangerous.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: The soldiers can't help them.
ARCHIVAL Afghan Man: I’m working with CIA. [inaudible] What can I do? This is all my documents.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: Nobody's letting you in?
ARCHIVAL Afghan Man: No!
[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF A BABY CRYING]
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Medics rushing from the next casualty, to the next, and the next…. And then what we feared: the inevitable. Is this a stabilized withdrawal from Afghanistan? It looks like death to me.
Coming up on part two, you’ll hear how the decisions made in a conference room of a 5 star hotel in Doha played out… in the streets of a Taliban-controlled Kabul…
[ARCHIVAL AMBIENT SOUNDS OF TALIBAN TAKING OVER KABUL]
…at a U.S. military base where Afghan refugees sit in limbo…
Breshna Musazai: I can't believe that I spent more than a year in Doha.
…how it may have emboldened American rivals around the world…
David Petraeus: I believe President Xi of China highlighted that in one of his speeches, and noted that this showed that the U.S. was not a dependable, reliable partner and ally.
…and how it affects your safety, today.
Lisa Curtis: You basically allow the Taliban to take over this country and you're back to square one where we were before 9/11.
###
If you want to know more about post-9/11 Afghanistan, I recommend, Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan, which is an authoritative account by a Pashto-speaking historian who worked in Afghanistan as a U.S. State Department official.
We also recommend The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, and Steve Coll’s deeply reported Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.
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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from broadcasts by BBC News and Sky News.
