Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
robert cruz a historian at stanford
specializing in the history of
afghanistan russia and islam
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in the description and now here's my
conversation with robert cruz
was it a mistake for the united states
to invade afghanistan in 2001 20 years
ago
yes
as simple as yes why was it a mistake
i'm a historian so i say this with you
know some humility about what we can
though i think you know i'd still like
to know much more about what was going
on in the white house you know in the
hours days weeks you know after 9 11 but
i think
the george w bush administration acted
in a state of panic
and i think they wanted to show kind of
toughness they wanted to show
some kind of resolve you know this was a
horrific act
that played out you know on everyone's
television screens and i think it was
really uh
fundamentally a crisis legitimacy within
the white house the level offs and i
think they felt like they had to do
something and something dramatic
i think they didn't really think through
you know who they were fighting you know
who the enemy was what this geography
had to do with 911 i think looking back
at it i mean some of us not to say i was
you know clairvoyant or i could see in
the future but i think many of us were
from that morning skeptical about the
connections that people were drawing
between afghanistan as a state
as a place and the actions of al qaeda
in washington and
new york and pennsylvania
so as you watch the events of 9 11
the things that
our leaders were saying in the in the
minutes hours days weeks that followed
maybe you can give a little bit of a
timeline in
of what was being said when was the
actual invasion of afghanistan and also
what were your feelings in the minutes
weeks
after 9 11. i was in dc i was you know
on the way to american university uh
hearing on npr
what happened
and i thought of the
american university logo which is red
white and blue it's an eagle and i
thought you know washington is under
attack and
symbols of american power are under
attack
and so um yeah i was quite concerned and
at the time lived yeah just a few miles
from the capitol
and so um you know i i felt it you know
it was it was real so i appreciate the
you know the sense of anxiety and fear
and panic and for
two three years later in dc we were
constantly getting
reports you know mostly rumors and
unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks
before the city so i definitely
um appreciate the sense of being under
salt
but in watching television including
russian television that day because i
just
just installed a satellite thing so i
was trying to watch world news and get
different points of view and
that was quite useful to have an
alternative you know a set of eyes in
russian yeah in russian yeah okay so
your russians is good enough to
understand uh russian television the
news yeah the news and the visuals that
were coming that were not shown on
american television
i don't know how they had it but they
had they were not filtering anything
in the way that the major networks and
cable televisions were doing here so it
was
a very unvarnished view of the violence
of the moment you know new york city if
people
diving from the towers are being just
you know it was really
they didn't hold back on that which was
quite you know fascinating i think much
of the world saw much more than actually
the american public saw
but to your question you know amid that
feeling of imminent doom
i watch commentators start to talk about
al qaeda and then talk about afghanistan
and
one of the experts was um was barnett
rubin who's at nyu he's a you know kind
of long
very learned um afghanistan hand
and he's brought on peter jennings on
abc news to
to kind of lay this out for everyone um
and i thought you know he did a fine job
but i think it it was formative in
cementing the view that
somehow al-qaeda was synonymous with the
space afghanistan
um i think
again
i was no al-qaeda expert then and i'm
not now
but i think my immediate thought went to
war
and because my background had been with
at that point mostly afghans who had
been displaced from decades of war
whom i encountered in uzbekistan who
were refugees and so on
i thought immediately my mind went to
the suffering
of afghan people that this war was going
to
sweep
sweep up of course the the defenseless
people who have nothing to do with these
politics so we should give maybe a
little bit of context yeah you can speak
too yeah
so assume nobody's an expert at anything
yeah so let's just say yeah um
you and i are not experts in anything
right
what
as a historian were you studying at the
time and thinking about see
uh is it is it the full global history
of afghanistan is it the region
were you thinking about
the muji hadin and al qaeda and taliban
were you thinking about the soviet union
the proxy war through afghanistan were
you thinking about iraq and oil like
what what's the full space of things in
your heart in your mind at the time i
mean just the moment of course it was
you know there's the sense of
you know the suffering and the tragedy
of the moment of you know what the death
that was i think i was preoccupied by by
the violence at the moment
um but as the conversation turned to
afghanistan as a kind of theater does
not respond to this moment i think
immediately what came to mind was that
little i knew about al-qaeda the times
tested that the geography was was
inaccurate that this was a global
network a global threat
that this was a kind of you know
a movement that went beyond borders and
i think that
it felt early on that
afghanistan was going to be used as a
scapegoat and it's intellectually at the
time you know i was teaching at american
university my courses
you know touched on a range of subjects
but i was trying to complete a book on
um islam in the russian empire actually
but in doing that research which took me
across russia and central asia purely by
accident
i had developed an interest in
afghanistan because
uh just again a series of coincidences
i found myself in tashkent the capital
of jupiter without housing
through an american friend who was like
the king of the market in tashkent he
knew everyone he run into some afghan
merchants there
they found out i didn't have a place to
live
i didn't know where afghanistan was
honestly this was 1997. i had a big idea
it was next door well you lived in
uzbekistan yeah in tashkent doing doing
distinction research yeah because it was
you know hub of the russian empire in
central asia yeah so just by accident i
ended up with these young afghans who
took me in
as roommates
and that i think that the sense of that
community
shaped my idea of what afghanistan is it
was my
first exposure to them
they're part of a trading diaspora they
brought
they had brought matches from riga
latvia
they somehow brought um
flour and some agricultural products
from from egypt and they were sitting in
enclosed containers in tashkent waiting
for
these pakistani state to permit them to
trade so these guys are mostly hanging
out during the day they'll get dressed
up they put on suits and ties like
you're wearing they'd polish their shoes
and they would sit around offices
drink tea
pistachios
then they'd feast at lunch
and then at night we would go out so
part of my research because i also had a
bottleneck in my research i was going to
the state archives in tashken
and because of the state of uzbekistan
you know that was a very kind of
suspicious thing to do so it took a
while to get in so
i had down time in touchkin just like
these guys so i got to know them pretty
well and it was really just a an
accidental kind of thing but
grew quite close to them and i developed
an appreciation of um
which now i think again thinking of the
seeds of all this um these people had
already lived
young guys you know in the 20s they'd
already lived in 67 countries
they all spoke half a dozen languages
one of my best friends there had been a
um a kickboxer
and breakdancer trained in tehran his
father was a theater person in
afghanistan
he told stories of escaping death in
afghanistan during the civil war
going to his pakistan escaping death
there
and these were very you know real
stories
can you also just briefly mention yeah
geographically speaking yes afghanistan
uzbekistan tajikistan you mentioned iran
right what uh who are the neighbors of
all this what are we supposed to be
thinking about for people i i was always
terrible at geography and spatial
information so can you lay it off yeah
i'm sure sure so tashkent you know it's
a it's the capital of uzbekistan
it was um
a hub of russian imperial power in the
19th century the russians take the city
from a local
kind of muslim dynasty in 1865
it becomes the city the kind of hub of
um soviet power in central asia after
1917 it becomes the
center of
the soviet republic of uzbekistan
which becomes independent finally in
1991 when the soviet union collapses so
these are all like these uh republics
are the fingertips of soviet power in
central asia that's right
and
they've been independent since 1991 but
they have struggled to
disentangle themselves from moscow from
one another
and now they face very serious pressure
from china
to form a kind of periphery of
you know the great machine that is the
chinese economy and its
ambitions to stretch across asia
um for afghanistan where my roommates my
friends hailed from um
afghanistan had fallen
into
civil war in the late 1970s
when leftists tried to cease power there
in 1978
the soviet union then extended from
uzbekistan you know crossing the border
with its forces in 1979 to try to shore
up this leftist government that has
ceased power in 1978
um and so
for central asians in the wider region
you know their their fate had for some
decades been tied to afghanistan in a
variety of ways but it became much more
connected in 1980s when the soviet red
army occupied
afghanistan for 10 years
and here i refer your listeners and
viewers to um rainbow three as the guide
to
the historically accurate historically
accurate the bible the bible of african
history and rainbow three yeah yeah as
as a fantastic um window onto the
american view of the war right but for
us afghans you know there are people who
fought against the soviet army
um but of a certain generation
the guys i knew
you know
their mission was to survive and so they
fled in waves you know by the millions
to pakistan
to iran some went north into south
central asia later in the 1990s
and some were displaced across the
planet so california where we're sitting
today has a large community that came
in the 80s and 90s
in the east bay
um can i ask a quick question that's a
little bit of a tangent yep what is the
correct or the respectful way to
pronounce
afghanistan afghanistan
i
iran iran
so as a russian speaker afghanistan yeah
are the on versus the and yeah is it a
different country by country as an
english speaker in america
is it pretentious and disrespectful to
say afghanistan
or is it the opposite respectful to say
it that way what what are your thoughts
on that that's a fascinating question um
i defer to the
people from those countries to of course
sort out those politics i think
you know i think one of the fascinating
things about the region broadly is that
it is a place of so many cultures and
really quite cosmopolitan
so i think people are mostly quite
forgiving about how you say
afghanistan afghanistan it's not like
paris
yeah yeah right right the french are not
forgiving
exactly and i think people are very very
forgiving and i think that you know
iranians are a bit
you know
more instructive in suggesting iran
rather than iran right
iraq
iraq you know i i think there's this
there's come to be a fit between
certain ways of pronouncing these places
and
the position that americans take about
them right so
it's more jarring when
people say
iraq
and it comes with you know a claim that
a certain kind of person you know should
be the victim of violence or yeah right
so yeah it's kind of like talking about
the democratic party or the democrat
party it's sometimes using certain kind
of terminology
to make a little bit of a
sort of uh
implied statement about your beliefs
that's fascinating yeah i mean i think
when i hear iraq and iran i mean i think
it yeah is it intentional in the case of
a democrat or is it just a
you know innocent whatever i think again
i think most iranians and afghans people
i know have have been
very cool about that
what
annoys afghans now i can say i think
it's fair to say i don't mean to speak
for
maine's people
but i can just share with our our
non-afghan friends um
the term afghani
uh is is a kind of term of offense
because that's the name of the currency
and so
a lot of people ask you know why
having especially again it's more
addictive to americans because you know
we've been so deeply involved in that
country obviously for the last 20 years
right so
afghans ask why after 20 years are you
still calling us the wrong name
what is the right name this is somebody
they prefer afghans afghans yeah and and
afghani is the name of the currency and
so i just dodged the book because i was
going to say yeah i don't know yeah
that's really great to know yeah and
it's it's again i think but i would
emphasize that
people are quite open and and you know
it's a it's a whole region of incredible
diversity and
and respect for linguistic pluralism
actually so i think that
you know but i also appreciate that
during in this context um when there's a
lot of pain you know in the afghan
diaspora community in particular
you know being called the wrong name
after 20 years when they already feel
so betrayed at this moment you know just
kind of
if one follows us on social media
that is one
kind of
hot wire right yeah so the reason i ask
about pronunciation
is because yes it is true that there are
certain things where mispronounced
kind of reveal that you don't care
enough to pronounce correctly that's
right you don't know enough to pronounce
correctly right and you dismiss
the culture and the people which i think
that's right as per your writing is
something that
if it's okay i'll go with afghanistan
just because i'm used to i say iraq iran
but i say afghanistan yeah that's great
is as you do in your writing uh
afghanistan suffers from much
misunderstanding from the rest of the
world but back yeah to our discussion of
uzbekistan tajikistan the whole region
that
gives us context for the events of 9 11
right right
so yeah if we go back to that day in the
weeks you know that followed um in my
mind went to the community i knew in
tashkent
which was interesting it was i mean they
were
so islam was the focal point of our
conversation in the u.s about 9 11 right
everyone to know
was relationship between
the terrific violence and that religious
tradition with its
you know
one billion plus followers across the
globe right
that became the issue of course for
american security institutions
for you know
local state and police institutions
right i mean it became the i think it
was the question that most americans had
on their mind so
again i didn't imagine myself as someone
who had all the answers of course but
given my background and coming at this
from russian history coming at this from
studying empire and trying to think
about the region broadly
you know i was very alarmed at the way
that the conversation went can i ask you
a question what was your feeling
on that morning
uh of 9 11
who did this isn't that it's not a
natural feeling there's a it's coupled
with fear yeah of
what's next especially when you're in dc
yeah but also who is this is this an
accident yeah is this a deliberate
terrorist attack is this uh domestic
like what were your thoughts of the
options and the internal ranking given
your uh expertise i mean i suppose i i
was taken by
the narrative that this was
international
i mean i'd also lived in new york during
one of the first bombings in 94 of the
world trade center
so it was clear to me that a radical
community had
really fixed new york as part of their
imagination of
and i immediately you know thought it
was a it was a
kind of
blow to american power and
you know i was drawn
by the symbolism of about you know if
you think of it as an act it was a kind
of
um an act of speech if you will kind of
a way of speaking to
from a position of relative weakness
speaking to a you know
an imperial power and that i saw
i saw it as a kind of symbolic you know
speech act of that with horrific you
know real world
um consequences for
all his innocent victims for the firing
of the police and just the
you know the horror of the moment um
so i i did see it as as transcending
the united states but i did not see it
as really having anything necessarily to
do fundamentally about
afghanistan and the history
of the region that i've been studying
and the community people that i knew
who were optically religious right that
the the guys i hung out with actually
wore me out because they wanted to go
out every night
they wanted to party every night we had
drinking yep we had discussions about
alcohol i mean uzbekistan is famous for
its
drinking it's drinking you know it's
that's something to look forward to so i
i do want to travel to that part of it
when was the last time you were in that
part of the world
early 2000s well then mid-2000s
so by the way we're drinking vodka what
what's the pur yeah i mean that kind of
choice
uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as as
the um the choice um
and that and it informs you know and
it's but but the fascinating thing you
know as a student is what you're
observing is a non-muslim
you know i'm a non-russian i'm this is
all
you know
culturally
new to me and i'm you know a student of
all that right as a graduate student
doing my work there so you're like jane
goodall of vodka and russia that's right
just observing that's right yeah and
then you you get you get the summagon
the grass vodka you get you know i have
i've had some long nights on the
kazakhstani frontier yeah that i'm not
proud of um
you know but you got to know the people
and some of them from from yeah but
intellectually so the thing i mean the
the fascinating thing there was it and
just as a
i mean there's a whole you know i'm
historian right but there there are
great contributions by
you know anthropologists and biographers
who who've gone across the planet and
try to understand how muslims understand
the tradition
at different contexts
so
many uzbeks will say you know
this is part of our national culture to
drink and eat as we please right
and yet i'm a very devout muslim and so
of course you can encounter other muslim
communities who
won't touch alcohol right but it's
become kind of i think it's very much um
you know soviet culture left a deep
impression in each of these places and
so their ways of thinking
ways of
performing ways of you know enjoying
oneself
that are shared across
soviet and former soviet space to this
day right and you've written also about
muslims in the soviet union that's right
uh
there's an article
that uh there's a paywall so i couldn't
read it and i really want to read it is
uh happy to share with you yeah moscow
and the mosque or yeah something like
that right right um
by the way just another tangent on a
tangent yeah uh so i bought all your
books i love them very much
one of the reasons i bought them and
read many parts is uh because they're
easy to buy
unlike articles
every single website has a payload yeah
yeah so it's it's very here i'm sorry
very frustrating to read brilliant
scholars such as yourself no no no um
i wish there was one fee i could pay
everywhere i don't care what that fee is
that's what it
allows me to read some of your brilliant
writing i don't think i hear you no i
think
moving toward
more kind of open source
formatting stuff i think is what a lot
of journals are thinking about now and i
think it's
definitely for the kind of
democratization of knowledge and
scholarship that's definitely an
important thing that we should all think
about and
i think um
you know we need to exert pressure on
these publishers to do that so i
appreciate this is what i'm doing here
yeah yeah good good yeah i appreciate it
so uh yeah so your thought was
afghanistan is not
it's not going to be
the center this is the source exactly
where it's not the center of this and
invading that country isn't going to fix
isn't going to fix the
you know toxic milestone of politics
that produced
911 right
against thinking of some of the
personalities just thinking about going
back to the touchdown story which i'll
end with i mean just observing you know
real muslims doing
doing things and then asking questions
about it and and
trying to understand
through their eyes what tradition means
to them
and then you have a we had we had a very
narrow conversation about what islam is
that you know generated immediately
exploded in you know on the day of 9 11
right
and then of course um
i think the antipathy toward islam and
muslims
it was informed by
by racism and formed by xenophobia so it
became a perfect storm i think of
demonization
that
didn't sit with you know what i knew
about the tradition and with the actual
people that i had known because then
going back to i mean there were other
friends and encounters and so on but
just thinking about afghanistan and and
tashkent from what i mean
just that
thought about my friends who had been
who had suffered a great deal in their
short lives who've been
you know cast aside
from country to country but had found a
place in tashkent with some relative
stability
and you know they wanted to go out every
night
and you know they explained you know one
friend we talked about the alcohol and
all that and he he didn't get crazy but
he was like
you can drink but just don't get drunk
that's that's permissible within islam
right
um
and he's
you know i think pashtun i think uzbek's
had a different view you know
often the more vodka the better you know
and it doesn't violate as i understand
islam so even yeah it's kind of a silly
example but it's just an illustration of
the ways in which
different communities different
generations different people can come at
this very complex tradition
in so many different ways so
obviously
if whatever kind of scholar you are any
kind of expert whatever you're you know
it's always
disconcerting to see your field of
specialization be flattened right and
then be flattened and then be turned to
arguments for for violence right mixed
up with the natural human right feelings
of hate yeah and uh and hurt depression
and pain so i you know i mean that day i
vividly remember i sat with um
other phd historians in different fields
we you know we oddly enough had lunch
that day and it kind of deserted
washington's place was open we went
um and we just thought you know this is
gonna kind of
open up like
a great mall of destruction
and you know the american state is going
to destroy and it's going to destroy in
this geography
and i thought that was
misplaced for lots of reasons and then i
think
if when you know
i'd
been doing some research on afghanistan
then i was kind of shifting to the south
and i had
been looking at the talbot on um from
afar for some years and you know i think
it's clear now that in respect there
were opportunities for alternative
policies at that moment
so what should
the conversation have been like what
should we have done
differently because
you know
from a perspective of the time the
united states was invaded by a foreign
force
what is the proper response or what is
the proper conversation about the proper
response at the time what do you think
you know i know my colleague at stanford
con lisa rice would tell me this is
above my pay grade
and um you know she makes a point in her
classes to talk about
how difficult decision making is under
such intense pressure
and i appreciate that um you know i am
an historian who sits safely in my
office
i don't like battlefields i don't like
taking risks um
so i can see all those limits you know
i'm not a military expert
i've been accused of being a spy
wherever i've gone because the way i
look and because of my nationality and
so on but i'm not a spy so i defer
you know i respect the expertise of all
those communities but i think
they acted out of ignorance
they acted i think because i mean if you
think of the
in a way there was
a compensatory aspect of this
decision-making i mean
the bush administration failed this was
an extraordinary failure right so if we
start way if we're going to break down
the fear of intelligence i mean if they
if you follow the story of richard clark
um
who's richard clark he was a
national security expert who was tasked
with following al qaeda
who had
produced a dossier
under the clinton administration that he
passed on to the george w bush
administration
and if you look at
the work of conor lisa rice she wrote a
very famous
i think unpaywalled foreign affairs
article that you can read
announcing the george w bush foreign
policy kind of outlook
and it was all about great powers it's
about the rise of china is about russia
i mean there's definitely a kind
of hangover of
those who missed having russia as the
boogeyman
who spoke you know the clinton's mission
repeated again again the idea of making
sure the bear stayed in his cage
which is why the united states
threw a lifeline to the central asian
states
hoping to have pipelines
hoping to shore up their
national sovereignty as a way of
containing
russia initially but also iran yeah
which sits to the south and west
and then peripherally looking down the
road to china to the east so the the
bear is
what like russia
or is is it kind of like some weird
combination of russia iran and china but
the bears russia and and russia is
this um i think i'm trying to
characterize the imagination of some of
these yeah bachelor figures
um this is an image formed in the cold
war
i mean it has deeper seeds and
european and western intellectual
thought that go
back at least to
the 1850s in the reign of zarnickels the
first when we first get this language
about um the russian empire is this kind
of evil
uh polity
obviously this was
a kind of pillar of reaganism
um but the clinton folks kept that a lot
alive they wanted to make sure that
you know american power would be
you know unmatched and they
being creatures of the cold war
themselves they looked to
russia as
a resurgent power well before putin was
even thought of yeah i mean this is you
mentioned one
deep uh profound historical piece in
rambo it's probably uh the this this
conflict has to do with another
celestial stone movie iraqi iv which is
also historically accurate and based on
uh
it's basically a documentary so um
there is something about the american
power even
at the level of condoleezza rice these
respected uh deep
kind of uh
leaders and thinkers about history in
the future
where they like to have competition with
other super powers right and almost
conjure up
super powers even when
those
countries don't maybe
at the time at least deserve the label
superpower that's right a great point
yeah they're all allow some points so
yeah i mean russia was i think many many
experts i mean my my mentor at princeton
um stephen kawkin you know
was then writing great things about how
you know
if you look at russia's economy the
scale of its gdp
you know its capacity to actually act
globally it's all quite limited
um but kanye rice and the people around
you know came into power with george w
bush thinking that you know
the foreign policy challenges of her era
would be
those of the past right richard clark
and others within the administration
warn that in fact there is this group
that has declared war against the united
states and they are coming for us
the fbi had been following these people
around for many months and so
you know by the time george w bush comes
to power
lots of al-qaeda activists are well not
lost but you know
perhaps a dozen or so are already you
know training in the united states right
i mean what we knew immediately from the
biographies of some of the characters of
the attackers of 9 11
it was a hodgepodge of people from
across the planet but most of they were
saudi right and that was known very
early on or presumed very long so again
if we go back to your big question about
the geography why afghanistan
it didn't add up right it seemed to me
that afghanistan was a kind of
soft target it was a place to
have explosions to
seemingly recapture american supremacy
um and also i think there was in many
quarters there was a deep urge for
revenge and this was the place to
have some casualties have some
explosions
and then i think you know restore the
legitimacy of the bush administration by
showing that we are in charge we'll pay
i think there's a very old-fashioned
punitive dimension which
rests upon the presumption that if we
intimidate these people
they'll know not to try this again right
all these i would suggest are all
misreadings of a
of an organization that was always
global it had no real center i mean
called itself the center that's one way
to translate al qaeda
but that center was really in the
imagination um
bin laden bounced around from country to
country
um and crucially i think
a dimension that i don't claim to know
anything new about but has endured as a
kind of doubt is the role of saudi
arabia and the fact that you know the
muscle in that operation of 9 11
was saudi right i mean this was a saudi
operation with
if one thing so again just on the basis
of nationalities saudis you know an
egyptian or two a lebanese guy and
the
egyptian guy you know had been studying
in germany he was an urban planner right
um so if one thinks of the imagination
of this i mean
and in fact if you look at the kind of
typology of
the figures who have led this radical
movement i mean if you think of the the
global jihadists
they are
mostly not religious scholars right but
london was not a political scholar
his training was an engineer you know
some biographers claim that he was a
playboy for much of his youth
but really the the these ideas i think
that's probably why they chose the twin
towers i mean
this is uh
an imagination fueled by
training and engineering i mean a lot of
the
you know the sociology if you do a kind
of post pornography of a lot of these
leading jihadists
their backgrounds are not in islamic
scholarship but actually in engineering
and kind of practical sciences and
professions
medical doctors are among their ranks um
and so there's long been a tension
between islamic scholars who devote
their whole lives to study of texts and
commentary and interpretation
and then what some scholars call kind of
new intellectuals new muslim authorities
who actually have secular university
educations
often in the natural sciences or
engineering and technical fields who
then bring that kind of
mindset if you will
to
what muslims college called the
religious sciences
which are you know a field of
kind of ambiguity and of gradation
and of subtlety and nuance and
really of decades of training before one
becomes authoritative to speak about
issues like whether or not it's
legitimate to take someone else's life
with the relation to afghanistan who was
bin laden
milan was a a visitor um
if you look at his whole life course
part of it is an enigma still you know
he
is from a saudi elite family but a
family that kind of has a yemeni
arabian sea kind of
genealogy
so the family has no relationship to
afghanistan pastor president except
at some point in 1980s when he went like
thousands of other young saudis
first to pakistan to places like
peshawar on the border
where
they wanted to aid the jihad in some
capacity
and for the most part
the
arabs who went opened up hospitals some
opened up schools
the bin laden family
had long been
based in engineering construction
so it's thought that he used some of
those skills and resources and
connections to
build things um
you know we have images of him firing a
gun
uh for show right it's not clear that he
ever actually fired a gun in what we
would call combat
um
again i could be corrected by this and i
think you know
they're competing accounts of who he was
so he's kind of a
i mean these figures that he said at the
pinnacle of this world are
you know fictive heroes that people you
know map their aspirations onto right
and so
people like mueller omar who was then
head of the taliban
was rarely seen in public
the current head held on
is almost never seen in public i mean
this kind of studied air of um mystery
that they've cultivated
to make themselves available for
all kinds of fantasies right do you
think he believed so his religious
beliefs you think he believed
some of the more extreme things
that enable him
to commit terrorist acts maybe put
another way
what makes a man want to become a
terrorist and what aspect of bin laden
made him want to be a terrorist
great um i mean let me offer some
observations i think you know there are
others who know more about bin laden and
and have far more expertise in al qaeda
so
i'm coming this
in an adjacent way kind of from
afghanistan and from my historical
training so
this is my two cents so you know bear
with me um i'm i don't have the
authoritative account which in itself is
fascinating because you're a historian
of afghanistan and the fact that
bin laden isn't a huge part of your
focus of study
just means that bin laden is not a keem
part
of the history of afghanistan except
that america made him a key part of the
history of afghanistan i would endorse
that definitely that's it i mean you put
it in a very pity pity way um
yeah so listen he was he was a so he was
an engineer
he was said to be a playboy um he spent
a lot of cash from his family
you know like many young saudis
and from some other countries he was
inspired by this idea
that that was jihad in afghanistan
it was going to take down
one of the two superpowers the soviet
union
who you know the red army did murder
hundreds of thousands perhaps as many as
two million
um
afghan civilians during that conflict
it's very
you know
plausible and very you know completely
understandable that many young people
would see
that cause as
you know the righteous pious
fighters for jihad who call themselves
mujahideen
arrayed against this evil empire right
of a godless soviet empire that
when there's even confusion about what
soviets wanted right now now we know
much more about like what the kremlin
wanted what brezhnev wanted
and how they elite thought about it
because we have many more of their
records but from the outside you know
for jimmy carter
and then for reagan it looked like
the soviets were making a move on
on south asia because they wanted to get
to the warm water ports you know which
russians always want supposedly right
and it was kind of a move to take over
our oil
and you know to assert world domination
right so there are lots of ways in which
this looked like
good resival in congress it looked like
um
you know kind of vietnam again but this
time this is our chance to get them and
there are lots of great quotes uh i mean
disturbing but
really revealing quotes that american
possibilities made about wanting to give
the soviets their vietnam
so the cia
funneled you know
hundreds of millions of dollars into
this project to back the mujahideen you
know who reagan called freedom fighters
and so milan was part of that universe
he's part of that you know he's swimming
in the ocean of these afghan mujahideen
who out in size you know did 95 of the
fighting they're the ones who died
they're the ones who defeated the red
army right the arabs that were there did
a little fighting a lot of it was for
you know their purposes it was to get
experience it was to
kind of create their reputations like
bin laden began to forge for himself
of being spokesman for a global project
because by the late 80s
when bin laden i think was more active
and began
conspiring with people from other arab
countries the idea that you know
gorbachev power in 85 he's like let's
get out of here this is this is draining
the soviet budget it's an embarrassment
uh we didn't think about this properly
let's focus on restoring
um the party
and strengthening the soviet union
let's get out of this costly war you
know it's it's it's a waste um it's not
worth it
we don't lose anything by getting out of
afghanistan
um and so their retreat was quite
uh effective and successful from the
soviet point of view right it's not what
we're seeing now
what year was the retreat um i mean it
began
so michael gorbachev kind of found out
85 you know he was a generation younger
than the other guys
he was a critic of the system he didn't
want to abolish it he wanted to reform
it
he was a true believer in in soviet
socialism and in the in the party as a
you know
a monopolist right
um but he's critical of the old guard
and recognized that
the party had to change and the whole
system had changed to continue to
compete
and so afghanistan was one element of
this
and so he
pushed
the afghan elites that moscow was
backing
to basically say listen we're going to
share power
and so
a figure named najibola
who was a soviet trained
intelligence specialist sitting in kabul
agreed and he said we need to have a
more kind of pluralistic
accommodations approach to our enemies
who are
backed by the us mainly sitting in
pakistan stated in iran
backed by these arabs to agree getting
money from saudi and he said let's draw
some of them into the government and
basically have a kind of unity
government
that makes some space the opposition
and for the most part with u.s backing
with pakistani backing with iranian
backing and with saudi backing the
opposition said no we're not going to
reconcile
we're going to push you off the cliff
and so that story goes on from at least
the last soviet red army troops leave
early 1989
um but the nigeria government
holds on for three more years
it is the um i mean they're still
getting some help from the soviet union
its enemies are still getting help from
the us mainly
and um it's not 1992 that that um that
they lose
and then the mujahideen come to power
they immediately
you know they're deeply fractured and
that's where bin laden is watching all
of this unroll that's right and he's
he's part of the me he's also mobile so
he he at one point you know goes um
you know he's in sudan you know he's
he's moving from place to place his
people are all over the world in fact
they i mean if you think of the
once the mujahideen take power
yeah they have difficulties with arab
fighters too and they don't want them
coming in and you know messing with
mujahideen regardless as like you know
this is an afghan national state that
we're going to build it's going to be
islamic it's going to be islamic state
but
you can't interfere with us and so
there are always tensions and so the
arabs are always kind of i would say
they were
bear fighters were always interlopers
um yes the afghans are happy to take
their money
send patients their hospitals
take their weapons but
were never gonna let this be like a
saudi or egyptian or whatever project
um but then many of those fighters went
home
they went back to syria they were back
to egypt
some wanted to go back to saudi arabia
the saudis was very careful i mean the
saudis always used afghanistan as a kind
of safety valve
in fact they had you know fundraisers on
television
they chartered jets they filled them
with people to fly to pakistan um
get out in the shower and say you know
go fight and it was one way that the
monarchy the saudi monarchy
very cleverly i think created a
kind of escape valve for would-be
dissidents in saudi arabia right just
send them abroad you want to fight jihad
go do that somewhere else don't don't
bother the kingdom
but all this became dicier um
in the early 90s when some of these guys
came back home
and some of the scholars around them
said you know let's we've defeated the
soviet union which is a huge huge boost
i think part of the dynamic we see today
is that
the taliban victory is a renewed
inspiration for people who think look
we beat the soviets now we beat the
americans
and so already
watching the soviet retreat across this
bridge back into uzbekistan if you see
these dramatic images of the tanks you
know moving a lot of people interpreted
this as like you know we are going to
change the world
and now we're turning to the americans
and our our local national governments
are backed by the americans
so let's start with some of those places
and then let's go strike let's go strike
you know the belly of the beast which is
america which is new york
and going back to bible you're
questioning about you know what
motivates him what motivated him
you know again he was not
a
rigorously trained islamic scholar
and that i think you know when i when
this when this comes up in our classes
you know i think especially young people
i mean people weren't even born i mean
they're shocked they see they see his
appearance they see
him pictured
in front of a a giant bookshelf of
arabic books he's got the klashnikov
he's got what looks like a religious
scholars library behind him right
but if you look at his
words i mean one fascinating thing about
just our politics and just one thing
that kind of sums us up i mean
the fact that on 9 11 we had to have
a few people
a few experts
people like bernard rubin who was an
afghanistan expert so that was one way
in which i think you know i'm not
faulting him personally but it's just
one way in which that relationship
appeared to be you know
formed right of linking afghanistan to
that moment
um
if one looks actually you know what bin
laden was saying and doing
people like richard clark were studying
this
there were arab leaders the arab press
was watching this because he gave some
of his first interviews to
a few arab newspaper outlets
but speaking of our american kind of you
know monolingualism a lot of what he was
saying wasn't known and so i think
for several years
people weren't reading what bin laden
said i mean experts are reading reading
it in arabic
but there was great anxiety around
translating his works so you know we
have my conf we have all this other
stuff you can buy the collective works
of lin and stalin mao whatever you want
in whatever language you want
but bin laden was taboo for american
publishing so it was only a
verso in the uk
that published
a famous volume called messages to the
world
which was the first combining compendium
of of banan's writings so he has a
mineconf he has a type does he have a
thing where he's kind of collected works
it's the collected works okay uh of his
like a like a blog
like yeah it's a collection of articles
versus yeah these are interviews these
are his his missives his his
declarations his um
his
decrees right um it would but i think
just in terms of if we zoom out for a
second about you know american policy
choices and so on the powers that be
didn't trust us to know what he was
really about i put it that way and i
don't say that in a conspiratorial sense
i just think that it was
you know it was a
a taboo i think people
you know there were
a kind of consensus that um
you know trust us we know we know how to
fight al-qaeda
and you don't need to know what they're
about because they're they're crazy
they're they're fanatics they're
fundamentalists they hate us remember
that language yeah uh it's us versus
them
but if you read bin laden that's when it
gets messy that's where the bin laden's
argumentation is not fundamentally
about islam
and if you were sitting here with an
islamic scholar he would say
you know depending on which islamic
scholar they would tend to go through
and dissect
and negate
you know 99 of the arguments that milan
claimed was in islam right but what
strikes me as an historian who's again
looking at this adjacently
um is read bin laden i mean the
arguments they make
are first of all they're sophisticated
they reflect
a
mind that
is about geopolitics
he uses terms like imperialism
he knows something about world history
he knows something about geography so
imperialism is the enemy for him or
what's the nature of the enemy it's a
it's an amalgam and
he like a good politician which is what
i would call him
he
is adept at speaking
in different ways to different audiences
so if you look at
the context in which he speaks if you
look at messages to the world
if you look at his writings
and it would zoom out now and we now
have compendia of the writings of
al-qaeda more broadly
you can purchase these
you know they're basically primary
source collections
um
we now have that for the taliban i mean
what's fascinating about
i think
if you like this culture acknowledging
it's very
you know diverse internally
is that
these people are
representatives of political movements
who seek followers they speak
they often
are very
i'd say skilled at
visual imagery and especially now i mean
what's fascinating is that i mean the
taliban used to shoot televisions
they used to you know blow up
vcr um you know videotapes um
they used to string
audio and video cassettes from trees and
kind of ceremonial hangings right that
we're we're killing this nefarious
infidel technology that is doing the
work of satan and yet today
and last i mean one of the keys to the
top on success is that they got really
good at using media
i mean brilliant at using
uh
the written word the spoken word music
actually
um and
you know hollywood hollywood is the gold
standard and these guys have studied how
to create drama how to speak to modern
users i mean islamic state did this i
mean the the role of media new media i
mean
i am i follow and i am followed by
senior top on leaders which is
you know bizarre you know on twitter on
twitter i don't know why they care about
me i'm i'm nothing uh they they follow
they follow you on twitter i don't know
why this is no joke this is no joke so
it's
they are part of our modern world and
how they talk is how they recruit and
this is part of the this is why they are
you know so bin laden if you're bin
laden he
he speaks multiple languages i would say
it's uh
it's
environmentalism
you know the west is bad because we
destroyed the planet the west is bad
because we abuse women
so in class you know
especially you know female students
are very surprised to learn and actually
say you know this this feminist argument
is not
you know we start with you know this is
a murder
this is a person who has taken human
life innocent life over and over again
and he is um
you know
aspirationally genocidal
but let's try to understand what he's
about so we walk through the text read
them and people are
shocked to learn that
it's not just about
you know quotations in the quran strung
together in some irrational fashion
he knows um
i mean the core i'd say is the problem
of human suffering
and he has a geography of that that is
mostly muslim but he talks about the
suffering of kashmir all right so if you
have a student in your class
who's from south asia who knows about
kashmir
you know he or she will say
that's not entirely inaccurate you know
the indian state commits atrocities in
kashmir
uh you know pakistanis from that too
you know palestine is an issue right so
you have
the american university setting people
across the spectrum who
get that you know palestinians have had
a raw deal
and so it's a
victimhood is essential and it's
muslim victimhood which is primary
but
as number scholars have written and i'm
you know i definitely think this is
a framework for what this useful i mean
in this kind of vocabulary and this is
framing this narrative um
today in today's world if we think of
today's world being
post-cold war
91 to the present
looking at the series of gulf wars and
seeing the visuals of that i think that
you know i think the american public has
been shielded from this but if you look
at just the the carnage of the iraqi
army
that
george h.w bush produced right or you
think of you know the images of the
suffering of
iraqi children under george h.w bush's
sanctions u.s british airstrikes
then you have madeleine albright
answer a question on 60 minutes saying
do you think you know the deaths of
half a million iraqi kids is is worth it
he was that justified to contain saam
hussein
and she says on camera yes that it's
worth it to me
if you put that all together
i mean american kids and of course the
american public
they're not always aware of those those
facts of global history
but these guys are and they they very
capably
use these images use these tropes
and use facts i mean in fact i mean so
many things are not are not deniable i
mean the
i mean these estimates about the number
of iraqi civilian children dead you know
that that came from i think the lancet
and it came from yeah those are those
are estimates but
looking at the point of view of
of oman of you know jaffa
of
nairobi you just think around the planet
um and if you see yourself as the victim
of this
great imperial power
you know you see why especially young
men would be drawn to
a road of of
of self-sacrifice
and the idea is that
in in killing others
you are
making
them feel how you feel yeah because they
won't listen to your arguments
reasonably because they won't you know
recognize palestinian suffering
bosnian suffering right chechen
suffering
you go across the planet right because
they don't recognize our suffering
we're going to speak to you in the only
language you understand and that's
violence and look at the violence of of
the post-1991
world right in which american air power
really
becomes a global you know kind of
fact in the lives of so many people
um and then the big mistake after 9 11
among many i mean fundamentally was
taking the war on terror
to some you know 30 or 40 countries
right so that you have a
more and more of the globe feel like
they're under attack right
and then the logic is essen