Against the Globalist American Empire

Hello and welcome to the— actually, this is the first episode of Chronicles Live. With me today to talk about the weeping and gnashing of teeth around Afghanistan are senior reporter Curt Mills PhD at the American Conservative and Arta Moeini PhD, PhD, Director of Research at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. So if you've been following the news, you've probably seen this like weird harmonization between conservative and liberal media where this— there's a rare bipartisan consensus that we, one, leaving Afghanistan, the catastrophe that it created could have been avoided. Uh, two, that the United States lost something valuable by leaving Afghanistan. Uh, what that is, it's not clear, uh, whether or not we've lost access to these, these precious minerals that we didn't care about for 20 years, and now China can— you know, now we have to prevent China from getting them. Because China apparently is much smarter than our elites. And 3, I think what's implicit is that we should not try this again, that Afghanistan shows that any attempt to wind down the empire results in— it's a loss for feminism and women's rights and the globalist American project. And then I think the other aspect of this is whether or not neoconservatism is making a horrible comeback. It feels like we're in the early 2000s because George W. Bush, John Bolton, Karl Rove, Dana Perino have all reemerged as luminaries of foreign policy, and no one seems to have a problem with this. And in fact, the conservatives who were bashing the experts and the woke Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment are now saying that Biden did something very sacrilegious by not heeding their advice. So we're against the woke Pentagon, but also Biden should have respected their wishes to never leave Afghanistan. It's totally bizarre. Kurt, you consume more media than anybody else I know. Are the Are neocons making a comeback? Does the GOP wanna go in this direction?

Yes, I think they're definitely making a comeback and I don't know why the GOP would wanna go in this direction, but it very well might. I got a piece that's gonna come out in UnHerd later this weekend, I think. And I sort of hearken back to a moment in the 2016 campaign. It was late May in Anaheim. May 2016, and Donald Trump went after, then-candidate Trump went after Bill Kristol, then editor of the, or then founding editor of the Weekly Standard, now defunct, by name. And he sort of just, it was an interesting thing because Trump seems obviously very well aware of politicians, celebrities. It's not super clear that he's super aware of conservative intellectuals, et cetera. But he was aware enough of Kristol Bristol's prolific criticisms to sort of castigate them by name. And from that point on, I think the neocons were very much on the outs at that convention. And then when Trump won, the official neoconservatism was really sort of PNG during the Trump years. Now there are all types of people that are formally neoconservative, that had been quite, I think, able to sort of Trojan horse themselves into the Trump milieu. But a lot of the official language associations, those people were either never Trump or they were quiet, right? And even the issue of Afghanistan itself appeared to have been utterly on the back burner. Even people that I personally disagree with on a lot of other Middle East policy, would concede that, well, Afghanistan doesn't really matter for U.S. national interests. It's not central to the greater Middle East, et cetera, et cetera. Trump's right. So I was personally surprised that there was this much pushback when this occurred. And I think what you have seen is obviously the Biden administration was surprised, but whether or not that matters, I'm gonna put that on the, Over here, what has occurred in the media news cycle in the last 5 days has been an astonishing recrudescence of neoconservative personalities in philosophy in the mainstream press. And this is something we have not seen since the rise of Trump. And notably, Trump himself seems to be utterly oblivious that he— and I made the point in this piece that's going to come out— he agrees with Bill Kristol. They are lockstep on philosophy. So this is now a major change. And I think you could, especially for people who talk about things like realignment or the new right, et cetera, the idea of a Biden going up there and giving essentially an America First defense of his policy and the Republicans complaining about Afghanistan and the plight of Afghan women you know, this faraway country, you could see a complete realignment just, just to realign it back to where we were.

So yeah, no, I think the point about Trump— we'll put that aside and come back to it because I think it's really interesting and it's probably the most— like you said, it's the most remarkable part of this, that whether Trump realizes it or not, and I don't think he does, uh, he's basically, uh, giving aid to the neocons. Arta, what do you think about this?

You know, unlike Kurt, I wasn't surprised that this happened the way that it happened in the US. I think the US perspective on this is, you know, quite interesting because the neocons and also the entire sort of intelligence establishment has had a very, you know, they didn't know what they want to do with these images. These images are powerful. There's the plane and all these things, people running after it. It's a perfect opportunity for a sort of psyop to then say, "Hey, the American people, you're wrong. You were wrong about the very policy of us leaving because every time America leaves, there's gonna be chaos that ensues." Well, that's a myth because America is significantly, at least partly responsible for a lot of the disaster that's been happening in Afghanistan. And a lot of it goes back to this project of nation building. This whole thing about focusing on the execution of Biden's mismanagement of the execution is complete distraction and detraction from real discussion on the policy issues. Because they think that if they are able to focus, and that's corporate media with the military-intelligence establishment, what we can so-called call the sort of the, some people might call the deep state, but you can really call it the establishment. And what it really brought to the fore actually is that there does exist a uniparty in this country. And there is really no deviance from the center core of this enterprise. And that enterprise is liberal hegemony. And unless you're able to go back and change those assumptions, that's going to continue to have a problem. So I want to go back to what nation-building as an enterprise was about. Afghanistan, Iraq, these are all part of a mindset, a part of a sort of a mindset of what we can call the Imperium or the Empire, which wants to say that they have a certain moral superiority over the rest of the world. And we're not, we're gonna go to other places, not because it's in our national interest, not because American lives are threatened, but we're gonna use that as proxy to then establish our tentacles of liberalism everywhere around the world and try to make other nations in our image. That's a very millenarian project. It has very theological bases. And the neocons are basically, essentially, this whole, I think this is just a confusion. This is from the beginning. Neocons are nothing but liberals. And we need to say this. There's no conservativeness about neoconservatism. Neocons were, you know, originally they were Trotskyites, they were, you know, internationalists, liberal internationalists, they were just hawkish about the Soviet Union. But on every other issue, you know, they are liberals. And liberals in a very sort of even, you know, modern liberal philosophical sense, not even just the the way that you hear it on Fox News. And so that kind of position doesn't, I mean, if you look at MSNBC, MSNBC is defending this all the time now because they understand that the projects that they have at home need to also be expanded globally. And they want to go to Afghanistan, to this very conservative, tribal, traditional society, and talk about things that have nothing to do with the primary issues of people there, which is order and security. And so this entire enterprise of nation-building has been a failed exercise. And they think that they can gaslight us into believing that, oh, we made a mistake because of the way and the manner in which we left. Not that our entire presence in the country and our efforts to nation-build was entirely at fault.

That's right. I want to go back to that point about being— collapse being inevitable. And so, I mean, there's different— there's different reports of what the NatSec apparatus and the blob actually thought. And I think the, the, the one that I suspect is the most true is that these people really believed that the Afghan Sorry, Kurt, thanks. That the Afghan government would actually survive 30 to 90 days. And so there's, I guess there's Glenn Greenwald, who I really like, has made the point that Biden and other people who claimed that one, we were winning the war, and two, that the Afghan government, there was no question that they could handle it after all this training and money that we spent on them. There's no question that they can handle it, which is basically what Biden said. Uh, that's a lie. Yeah. And the— so the, like, the so-called experts lied there. But there's this other question of, it seems to be that they actually— these people actually did think that the Afghan government would survive up to 90 days, which, I mean, if that is true, I think it just shows that, like, like Arta was getting at, is these people are delusional. They, uh, they have these designs that there's this cognitive dissonance, right? Uh, the Afghan papers showed that the whole project in Afghanistan was in reality basically a giant money laundering operation. But then you have other people in the same establishment, the foreign policy establishment, who are saying like, no, you know, we're aware that there are these problems, but also we really think the government's going to be able to hold its own for at least 90 days and we'll be able to pull this off If we stay a little bit longer, right? If we just try a little bit harder, give them more money, more training, we can stay longer. Do you think collapse was inevitable, Kurt? I mean, my position is that this was going to happen regardless of who was president and someone basically just had to bite, be dumb enough or brave enough. I think in Biden's case, it's the former to bite the bullet.

Yeah. So a lot going on here. I just make one small addendum to what Arta said, and I don't have a PhD, so I don't look at this as philosophically as perhaps he does. But I would note that what we've actually seen in the media is a little less philosophical and a little more organic in that. And not to disagree with Adam Kay, who's participating prolifically in the comments, but the types of people that you see on television, you know, a Dana Perino, who was White House spokesperson for Bush, a Nicole Wallace, who was communications director for Bush, Fleischer, who was also White House spokesperson for Bush, on and on and on and on. These are people not trained in PhD philosophy. This is more a generational approach to what is known as movement conservatism within the Republican Party in the '90s, 2000s, and 2010s. And these are the types of people that frankly saw career ascension with a certain set of rhetoric that was discarded by Trump's rise and have seen their own relevance. Again, you know, I think Dana Perino was doing fine hosting a show on Fox News, but ideologically quite in a corner in the Trump years. And they are, you know, their muscle memory is far more Dem weak, Biden weak, White House weak, Republicans strong, Republicans hawkish, Republicans neocon. I think there's really not that much more thought into it than that. Not to say that they don't generally believe that. I think these people, the problem is they do believe this is why they're much more dangerous. To answer your question about the withdrawal, yeah, so I mean, it's an interesting thing that the way this all cuts, right? So it's like everybody wants to take the evidence as a justification of their own position, right? Right? So I think we should have gotten out. I think the fact that they collapsed in 2 days indicates that we shouldn't have been there for 20 years, because we got 2 days for 20 years. But other people view it as we didn't train them for long enough, right? If we had only done this for 200 years, they would have lasted 20 days. So I guess that's a view. But, you know, so that's interesting. I think here are the facts. They do seem to have been genuinely surprised that they collapsed so quickly. And Biden, to his credit, has conceded this. Everybody that I've talked to, an associate lost his leg in that country, thought they would have, just anecdotal, thought they would last till Christmas. This was a debacle. You know, like it really, really was as bad as it could possibly have gotten way worse than all the projections. Now, that all being said, the Pentagon spends billions of dollars every year wargaming this stuff. And, uh, one, why did no war game show this scenario? And number two, what do all the other projections that these guys get paid a lot of money to do show? And how confident should we be on their projections on Iran, Taiwan, Taiwan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a concerning milieu of implications to all of this. Arta?

I'm gonna jump in because I agree with everything Kurt said in regards to the muscle memory. And this is my point. I mean, I wrote a piece for the American Conservative talking about the generational sort of shifts. I just think that the generational positioning of the uni-party, of the blob, is not just limited to neocons. It stretches across both parties. It's right and left of center. And so the reason, the way to change that is to really go about the assumptions and also a generational shift. So it's not just a logical, rational thing. These people have lived through, most of them, I argued in my piece, have lived through the Cold War and they have assumed, adopted a sort of Manichean mentality about the world. It's good versus evil. You know, the famous George W. Bush speech. And so when it comes, they don't have to think about it. They don't have to philosophize about it. This is so ingrained that it's visceral. But before this became muscle memory, before this became visceral, it was a philosophical project. And I think unpacking that could help in fighting the project. And another thing I want to Now I'm gonna go back to your question, Pedro, about sort of, was this expected? It was not expected.

Or sorry, the question, the heart of it is, was it inevitable?

Was it inevitable, like the Taliban takeover?

Yeah.

Right, yeah, I mean, so from a very analytic point of view, it was definitely inevitable because of years of corruption and grift. Now, but there were institutional systemic failures on the American sort of intelligence military side. Part of it is delusion, but part of it is that they were just incompetent. They were talking with, and this is nothing to do with our forces, with our Marines, with all of the people who put their lives on the line. It's a lack of proper leadership, lack of proper sourcing, people who have been advancing through the ranks without any real merit. Sort of a yes man, don't rock the boat, status quo, keep the thing going attitude. And that has consequences. Now, if you want to look at why this was completely missed, there were two reasons for it. One, well, people like to justify and rationalize the kind of thing that they're doing. People did not think that they were going to leave. They thought they're always going to be able to manipulate, persuade, whatever word you want to use, the commander-in-chief in this country to continue to stay stay because, you know, another 6 months, another year, look at the kind of progress, this myth of progress that we are making in Afghanistan, which proved to be nothing. You know, this was used as justification, right, to stay there, to stay there just a bit longer because they're just on the precipice of becoming, you know, self-reliant and independent. It was always just around the corner. And this is what the progressive myth is about life, is everything is just a bit more. You just have to go a little bit further. You're never going to reach there because of the utopia. Now, if you think about the other side of this, which is the Afghan government, and we need to talk about this whole enterprise of grift with the Afghan government. Ashraf Ghani was an academic. He was a World Bank, you know, he was a World Bank official. He was put there to be able to channel all this money, and then he was also He had this whole entire network of corruption around him personally himself. And so when the Americans, when the Americans' intelligence services and the military wanted to ask and find out why, you know, what's the estimate, guess who they were gonna go to? They were gonna go to the Afghan government. Their sources were tied to this. And so Ghani was under this even more delusion that the US will never be able to leave. He had no idea. And so until the very last moment, He was basically telling, and Biden is going to get a lot of flak for this, why didn't we take people out? It's because of this. It's because Ashraf Ghani told all of our leadership, he came to DC just end of June. He had wined and dined with senators and he told them everything's under control and Afghan army is going to fight and please don't take Americans out of Afghanistan because that's going to legitimize like a crisis situation. So for the optics, he convinced America and Americans to stay. And this, but if you go and ask real Afghans, I have contacts with real sort of Afghans on the ground, and they will tell you people, the popularity and legitimacy of the Taliban was rising. It was rising for years. This did not happen overnight. This was not, you know, the Afghan army was this basically a ghost force of, you know, a few thousand people who were actually qualified. And the rest of it was just on the books to get money. This 300,000 number is complete BS. And, you know, they were using, you know, there was never any chance of the majority of these people fighting an actual war. And if you look at the Taliban, they were coming, working around the countrysides with the local leaders and warlords. And at some point they were just basically saying, this civil war, this chaos is going and going and going, and there's going to be this war nonstop until maybe, you know, the US leaves and maybe the Taliban can bring that order. So I always say even petrifying order is preferable to ordinary people than chaos and blood in the streets. And so that kind of thing.

Go ahead, finish your point.

Yeah, so I mean, I think we underestimate the amount that the Afghans value the importance of order and security and what they think to be stability, which they hope that Taliban can bring. And I will continue hopefully in the next segment on what Taliban really is, and that's a proxy of Pakistan. And we never talk about Pakistan for whatever reason.

Yeah, well, going— so a few things before we get to the— before we get into the next thing. Ghani, I think, recently said that the United States would not be welcome if they even did try to come back, that basically that the Afghan people embraced the United States as liberators, uh, believing that they came with good faith, but now seeing that they clearly did not come in good faith, they would not be welcome back even if they promised to change their ways. So I think this is hilarious, and like you pointed out, The Blob was really counting on a guy with a finance background who gave lectures on anthropology at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins to hold his own against hardened warlords. Like, that was the expectation. Uh, and the, the part about collapse— Richard Hanania made this good point. It was, it was anecdotal, but I think— but it's, it's still illustrative about a woman, uh, some kind of an envoy who was in the Middle East and she was told that they had to take a helicopter as opposed to this 2-mile stretch of road that was near Kabul. Pretty important piece of real estate to secure, right? Well, she was told we have to fly because they can't get that, that 2-mile stretch of road under control. So we couldn't do these basic things. The United States government with the Afghan government could not do basic things like this, but someone was supposed to pull off this clean-cut withdraw from Afghanistan and, and get thousands of people out and do like all of these logistical— resolve all these logistical issues without a hitch.

I—

so going back to it is, I think it was like this kind of a shit show was always inevitable. Uh, it just— no one was going to be able to pull this off in a way that did not, uh, where it does not go the way it goes now. Um, sorry, did you want to say something, Kurt?

Yeah, no, I mean, I just think it's why, I mean, the sort of gratuitous criticism of Biden is sort of boring. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. Which makes you a DSA member now. You're basically a Bernie.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm feeling it. I don't know. I mean, I just think like this is the reason the plot of the country. Like it's like the Taliban was going to win. Right. And it's not secure for Americans to be there on a regular basis. You know, I think that, what are we paying for this massive drone, you know, dragnet over the greater Middle East for if not to secure places like this? So I just, was it, you know, an A+ getting out? Like, no. They can see that they were surprised, but like, it's not the core of it. And, you know, the fact of the matter is we haven't seen the true horror stories yet. I don't want to jinx it. But it's like, you know, it's not—

But we need to, I think, bring to the fore that, you know, part of this whole discussion was that, you know, no American or Western person was harmed. And so, you know, this would have been a disaster had, you know, an American been killed in the streets of Kabul by the Taliban.

It still happened, but I mean, it's—

Right, yeah.

It's notably not happened.

Yeah.

It's not happening.

Yeah. I think, you know, and like, if you, you remember, I mean, so I'm 31. If you, if you, if you go back 20 years to when the original War on Terror happened and when Drudge was in his heyday, you know, anytime anyone was killed in these, this part of the world, it was a major deal. Remember the Nick Berg beheadings, all of these types of things. They were major political touchstones. You know, the smartphone technology is 8-fold more sophisticated now. We would all see it in gory detail, and it would be this millstone around— fine, this has not occurred. Um, you can criticize the Pentagon all day, but I think they're trained to do something. I think it's probably an end. Hopefully.

It has been interesting to see the Taliban come into this in a very clever way. They immediately started— you couldn't tell if it was trolling or if they were really doing this, but they deployed the language of diversity and inclusion. They promised the Afghan government would be diverse and inclusive. They amended their typical rules and regulations for women by saying that women could go to college, that they could work in certain capacities, I think teaching and like nursing jobs.

So under Sharia law, so that's going to add a huge limitation to it. But there's a bit.

Yes. Yeah, no, I'm not saying that would be very deeply disturbing if the Taliban had actually been influenced by like UC Davis or something. But my point is, is that they've clearly—

Taliban are not Trotskyists.

That's right. Yeah.

Yes, they're not.

They've come into this aware that basically everyone is expecting for them to immediately do what Kurt just said, just start indiscriminately killing civilians and specifically Americans. But they're not doing that. So they're actually playing this very smart. And I think they, like, we're getting at this, they know that kind of like all eyes are on them and there's a kind of almost ghoulish hope, right? I mean, that's the part you can't really say out loud. But I really think that a lot of these neoconservatives really do hope that something like this happens, that some Americans get killed, because then they can say, I was right. Yeah. I think that that is actually where people like Bill Kristol Jonah Goldberg and Tom Nichols are at. Nichols wrote a piece for The Atlantic and the headline was, uh, Afghanistan is Your Fault. And the— if, if that wasn't clear enough, like, the subheading was like, Afghanistan is the fault of the American people who were sick of endless wars. So I mean, I think they really do. Goldberg, uh, was even more explicit and said, I've never— there's never been a point in my life where I've been basically so disgusted by the American people, uh, for, for their desire to get out of this stuff. But really quickly, going back to the media narratives, and then I want to actually talk a little bit about the moral illegitimacy of this whole project that we kind of touched on about why there was so much, seemingly so much popular support for the Taliban. Do— is— I mean, is Trump— what is he doing right now? Is it like— I don't understand. His statement was like, I would have done it like this. Get out in the dark of night. They wouldn't have even known we were gone. One, that's not actually what apparently the administration had planned. There's an article in Defense One from Trump's last SecDef who said they had this plan to basically try to get the Taliban to agree to kind of peace sharing and that they would actually keep troops in there in Afghanistan. There was actually never a plan to get everyone out. We were just going to keep a limited presence there and try to negotiate with the Taliban. In other words, legitimize them. I'm not saying I'm for or against that. I'm not revealing my position, but this is the Trump administration. It kind of implicitly legitimized the Taliban and don't actually take all the troops out, leave them there. But publicly now, now that he's not president, Trump is saying, no, I was going to get them out in the dark of night. They wouldn't even know we were gone. Well, the Biden administration accidentally did that. When they evacuated Bagram, that the Afghan National Army complained that no one told them that they were leaving, that the Pentagon was leaving, that they just turned off all the lights and took off. And like, the Afghans were like, what the hell? Where'd the Americans go? So ironically, Biden actually did what Trump said he would do if he was president. But the Pentagon said, we actually communicated with high-level Afghan officials and told them we were leaving. So it's not our fault that they didn't know we were leaving because we tried to get this through to them. So, I mean, yeah, Kurt, thoughts on the Trump posting?

Yeah, I mean, Trump's criticism of this is so obviously tendentious as to be basically disqualifying for the discussion, but I guess I'll just leave that there. I will say in terms of what a President Trump would've done in the second term, on the one hand, this rhetoric is super deflating to the idea that he would've had this for lack of a better term, very based second term where they were gonna get out of all these places because he had all of these staffers that apparently didn't believe in that. It's a super complex story. There's a lot of interesting stuff there that was going on the transition between November to January 2021. We don't get into that all day. I will say in the defense of the idea that Trump actually would've gotten out, Miller was the guy the umpteenth acting SecDef. And Trump, we all know, it's public record at this point, would openly tell different people who worked for him different things. And he also liked this sort of idea of himself as the ultimate dealmaker. And so he loved this sort of subterfuge. So consider Iran, right? Is Trump an Iran hawk in the way that every other Iran hawk is? No. And how do we know this? Take Syria policy. He openly said, I don't care about Syria. No Iran hawk would ever say that. They would say that Syria was the coup de grâce of Iran policy. What Trump cared about was seeming tough. So he loves stuff like assassinating Qasem Soleimani, but he loved it because he thought it would give him leverage in a future negotiation. And of course, every Iran hawk wants no part of any negotiation with Iran. With this regime. So it's certainly possible that he had a meeting with Mr. Miller and Miller, who's the real deal soldier, had some sort of cloak and dagger plan to fool the Taliban. Trump was like, that was super cool. And Miller thought like that was what they were gonna do when of course the election results were overturned or something in January. And like, that's Miller's memory of that. I think Miller has come off a little bit like quack in his congressional testimony. And that's what I'll just say about that. There were definitely other people in that administration that wanted to get out pronto. There were definitely people in that administration that wanted to get out during the transition. There were definitely people in that administration that wanted to get out before the so-called fighting season, when it was really cold in Afghanistan in December. That was also an offer. So who knows? What we do know is that Trump was president 4 years, he hiked troops, and he did not eventually get us out, though he did lay the groundwork for this to happen. What we also know is that Biden, however imperfectly, has gotten us out. These are the facts.

Yeah, I mean, I think for us to have— for all sorts of people from all the different walks of life who are critics of US foreign policy need to be very, very genuine about the things that are at stake. Biden showed courage in actually completing this plan. And we need to be able to say this or else the neocon neoliberal spin machine is going to gaslight us into believing that this was something that should never have happened. This was supposed to happen. We were supposed to leave. There was no other way. But I said that on Twitter, I said, you know, every time you engage in nation-building, it's almost like you're in a sort of a long-term relationship or marriage. When you break up, there's going to be fights and there's going to be chaos and it's gonna be messy. There is no elegant way to get out of a country. And so that is something that we need to keep in mind. But also this whole idea that, you know, think about what we actually accomplished. Forget about the rhetoric about women's rights and, you know, putting some sort of like, you know, having banners in the streets of Kabul of like, you know, makeup, you know, ad banners. If you put that away and you forget about sort of the Kabul University kind of understanding of liberalism, then you get to something else. You get to the fact that after 20 years, Afghanistan continues to be, it's even more today than it was before, a narco-state. We were not able to change that. All of our money and development did not change that. The amount of money that we poured into that country, trillions of dollars, and also in aid money, which a lot of people would just be like, oh great, we need to help people because we are humanitarians, actually made things worse because it created more inequality, created more resentment, Most of the money went to the cronies of Ghani and before that Karzai. And, you know, that was something that, you know, we need to really take into account. Our money, our presence is destructive to the social fabric of the places in which we go. And finally, the last part, which I think is the most important, which I have to get in here. After 20 years, we did not lift a finger against Pakistan. We didn't move to pressure them diplomatically or otherwise, where everybody in Washington, D.C. and Kirkland jump in on this, knows that Taliban would not exist were it not for its sanctuaries in Pakistan, its support by the ISI, its, you know, and Pakistan is this weird sort of ally that we have, which nobody understands why we are an ally to Pakistan. Pakistan is also an ally to China, by the way. And, you know, if anything, this was the control of Afghanistan today is going through Islamabad. And, you know, I'm very sort of ambivalent about what does China see in this because, you know, in some cases, you know, they are very scared of Islamic militarism and Islamic extremism for the Uyghurs and in their Western Turkistan provinces. But at the same time, they are, you know, they care about Afghanistan as an important part of the BRI project. And so, you know, Pakistan and the Taliban have, you know, given assurances that they want to continue with the contracts, they want to continue with the economic programs. This is— they want to— they're projecting this image of being genuine, you know, genuinely reformed, at least in their rhetoric and approach with the rest of the world. They're still going to be tyrannical with their own people, but they're going to put on a more sort of collaborative face to other sovereign nations, including China and Pakistan. Now, Finally, last thing, if we think about— well, I'm just going to stop there.

Well, we should actually do, you and I, Arta, we should actually do something specifically on Taliban because you're right. No one— not Taliban, Pakistan, because not enough people seem to talk about this. But last point, because we're running out of time, the moral illegitimacy of the project. You can't tell if it's fake or not, if it's like a psyop, that people's— the media, the foreign policy establishment seem really disappointed that, like you said, Arta Moeini PhD, that the Kabul University will no longer teach gender studies and that we will no longer have pride festivals in Kabul. And but I think the thing that kind of ties all of this together, like the trillions of dollars wasted, the, like, the rank incompetence unethical practices is the practice of child sexual abuse. Because one, it was basically being subsidized by American tax dollars. The Leahy Amendment was being bypassed by the Defense Department using a loophole that basically allowed them— because the Leahy Amendment states that the United States is not obliged to provide funding to foreign forces that are committing human rights abuses. Raping little boys is a human rights abuse. Why did we keep funding them? Well, because the DOD found a loophole in a clause of the amendment that allowed them to basically continue funding troops on the, on the lie that if we cut back on funding in response to these abuses, they would put US troops at risk. And the DOD actually complained when people found this out. But so you had little boys being raped on US bases. By Afghan police chiefs and like our allies. In other words, the people that Republicans and Democrats right now are clamoring to import into the United States because they're our allies and therefore they never did anything wrong. Actually, our allies were some of the worst people that we were working with in the region outside the Taliban. Morally, it actually seems like the people of Afghanistan thought they were worse. They were more afraid of them, these commanders and these police chiefs, because they had the US seal of approval. And you couldn't do anything about it. Uh, and I think that is not being talked about enough. Uh, the fact that, like, I think the real, uh, talking point here should be that the liberal international order has completely lost its moral legitimacy.

What—

whatever, like, little patina shred of it it had left, it's gone. So we'll do, uh, quick responses from Kurt, Narda, and then we'll wrap it up.

Yeah, I'll just say quickly about the, the previous Afghan government, so-called. I will say that I think unfortunately this news cycle mirrors the news cycle that we experienced with COVID-19, various offshoot phenomenon with that in 2020, which is that, I don't know if it's education or smartphones or headline culture, but people are incapable of handling trade-offs. Okay. So like, you know, this is a, an extremely remote, I mean, just preposterously remote country in Central Asia. I read the other day that they had 50 kilometers of paved roads when the U.S. invaded in 2001. And you know, you had two essential factions status quo ante. One, a secular government, which it's not actually not secular. It was officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. So we're popping up a, second government, but you have the official government of Kabul, which, you know, allowed opium production to spike, which I think has relevance to the opioid crisis in the United States. Yeah. Also just notoriously abated the resumption of this practice of pederasty. And that is weighted against, you know, a group of pretty scary guys that take a pretty fundamentalist view of Islam, that harbored al-Qaeda, and, you know, say they won't and say they've reformed and are, you know, etc. All right, so it's a tough situation, but should the U.S. be sending people to die to fight for a stalemate to continue that situation? A stalemate in which, you know, the government, left to its own devices, will only defend itself 2 days. And I think the answer to that is clearly no, and I think that The closing line on this is, you know, why do people want to get out of Afghanistan? They want to get out of Afghanistan because Afghanistan is a disaster. And the argument for why we should not have left Afghanistan, you see in the news today, is how could you leave Afghanistan? It's a disaster. So it is, and I think it's an abused phrase, but what gaslighting is, is this, if anything fits that definition.

Yeah, that's right. Arta, final thoughts?

You know, I just, you know, I think Curt said what needed to be said on that point. I'm just going to add something about the hubris of the American empire, thinking that we know what's best for people around the world, that we can then use American or even Western, US and its allies, blood and treasure to go into these places and really perform social engineering projects. And eventually empires come home, and they will try to do all those things that they've been practicing on the poor Afghans here back at home on Americans. And so that's one side of it. Another is, you know, just think about— there is this romantic notion right now. I always say the Taliban right now is in this sort of honeymoon period because the West is that the establishment West, the media, corporate media, and our institutions have an interest in showing that sort of abhorrence of Taliban taking over Afghanistan. Well, first of all, it shows that you were doing nothing over the past 20 years and your project was a failure. But also that this is actually not the case because the Taliban and Afghanistan in general has never really had a national central government. I'll be extremely surprised if you're talking in 6 months around December and the Taliban is still fully in control of Afghanistan. There will be pockets of opposition. It's already begun in the Panjshir Valley, which the Taliban has not even gone close to even trying to reclaim because they know they can't. And there is going to be more and more pockets of resistance. Why? Because this is a tribal ethnically and religiously divided society. And it was never a country. This is the— people, we have this sort of like myopic understanding of history that starts with, you know, 2001, or at best, if we really care about it, the Cold War, 1979, when Soviet Union went in Afghanistan. The story of Afghanistan begins in the Great Game with the separation of Afghanistan from Persia at the time to be able to create a buffer zone between the Russian Empire and the colony of India. And that creation for a place that never had any tradition of central governments was always going to create lasting instability. And we have never had an actual stable period in Afghanistan ever since the state of Afghanistan was created. And it will continue to be so until the region is allowed to solve its own problems and the US stays away.

Yeah. Yeah, good point. Okay, well, we're going to end on that note. Kurt, Arta, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Really appreciate it. This video will be available on different platforms, but I'll send it out through my Twitter account and you can watch it there. Thanks again, guys.