Twenty Years of Lies
Interviews Before and After the Fall of Kabul
As we near the second anniversary of NATO’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan and the “fall of Kabul,” I would like to share two interviews I did that summer—one just before the fall of Kabul and the other just after.
The war in Afghanistan was a major event in my life. On 9/11, I was cryptologic linguist in the US Army. Russian was my primary language, and I was in nearing the end of a course in Serbo-Croatian. I was on orders to deploy to Bosnia shortly after my training, but everything changed that day. My orders were cancelled, and the National Guard assumed responsibility for the missions in the Balkans. The regular army had a new focus.
I found myself in one of the US’s first post-9/11 courses in Dari or Afghan Farsi. In the years that followed, I deployed to Afghanistan four times in various capacities. One was on behalf of the US intelligence community. The remaining times were with a now-deactivated US Army unit called the Asymmetric Warfare Group.
Over the better part of a decade, I travelled much of the country and saw the US and Coalition operations at all levels, from the headquarters in Kabul down to the soldiers in the dirt. I also completed training at the counterinsurgency academy in Kabul. This gave me a broad, cross-sectional view of the war over time.
It was an excellent education, but mostly for terrible reasons. I learned, on a granular level, how not to wage a war. I learned—very much the hard way—why no leaders are deserving of blind faith. But I also learned things not specific to war or Afghanistan. For instance, I learned a great deal about how large, multinational organizations function. I also figured out how to be successful when dropped into chaotic environments in which I was very much an outsider. In any case, these two videos were accurate in 2021 and remain so today. I thought them worth sharing.
The first is from July 2021. Shortly after the White House, Pentagon, State Department, et al claimed the Afghan government would survive a US withdrawal, I gave this interview and described, in detail, how the Taliban was already well on its way to retaking the country. Kabul fell weeks later.
The second video is from August 2021. I explained what the future had in store for Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, according to these topics:
How anti-Taliban resistance would wither
What the Taliban wanted
How the promises of international support would not materialize
Dispelled the foolish notion of “Taliban 2.0”
Nearly two years later, the Taliban controls all of Afghanistan and Western leaders have moved on. To the latter, it is as if those two decades of war never occurred. The US Embassy in Kabul, for instance, now asks Afghans inane, navel-gazing questions on Twitter, like, “Who is Afghanistan’s MLK?”
Well, I will answer that one for them. It was a one-eyed cleric named Mullah Mohammed Omar, and his compatriots once again rule over the graveyard of empires.
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