Papier-Mâché Tiger | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it's tuesday august 24th and welcome back to goodfellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns i'm bill whelan i'm the virginia hobbs carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism here at the hoover institution i'll be your moderator today that means i have the honor introducing the three stars of our show three gentlemen we jokingly refer to as our good fellows that would be neil ferguson h.r mcmaster and john cochran hoover institution senior fellows all hello gentlemen great to be back great to see everybody missed you guys let's begin i owe our viewers something of an apology at the end of our last broadcast i uh told them that we would be uh doing uh viewer mail for this episode i asked them to write in questions and i made that promise five days before the taliban rolled into kabul uh we had a conversation before the show and felt it was only responsible to talk about the events in afghanistan uh given just the dimensions of what is going on in that country plus also the ramifications here in america and around the world so we will get to viewer mail at some point down the road i promise but today is afghanistan and neil and hr i'd like you to kick off the show i'm interested let's do this for just a few minutes uh i'm interested in how this fits into historical parallels historical context uh great empires leave nations after considerable time in this case the united states america having spent 20 years in afghanistan neil is it possible for a country to make a neat surgical removal from a country or is this what is to be expected is there anything about afghanistan's youth is unusual or is this just fits a historical narrative of when empires do leave well there is a cliche on this subject which you'll have seen in uh journalistic writings that afghanistan is the graveyard of empires and the british were ignominiously ousted in 1842 and then it was the turn of the soviets and now it's the turn of the united states and you can go even back further back in time and and and cite other examples but it's a little bit misleading because firstly if you look at exits from empire the sample size is huge and it includes a variety of countries that uh certainly compare with afghanistan in their ungovernability or economic backwardness and there are few examples if one goes through the list of of all the the colonies that the britain vacated uh in the period of decolonization of the debacle on this scale in fact what's always striking to me when i look through the annals of decolonization is how by and large there were rather dignified exits usually accompanied by the last post and the lowering of the flag this is this is a debacle by the standards of uh certainly british decolonization the other thing that people forget when they cite the example of 1842 is that britain subsequently fought another war in afghanistan in 1878 and then from 1879 until 1919 worked out an arrangement whereby the so-called iron emir governed afghanistan internally but britain handled the foreign policy of the country so that no hostile power in that time it was russia that that we mainly worried about had any ability to influence afghanistan that actually worked pretty well when britain then ceded full independence to afghanistan in 1919 there was a decade when it seemed as if a reforming uh king would be able to bring afghanistan into at least the 19th century if not the 20th and it only really began to unravel after he was overthrown by conservative opponents of his reforms so i think however you you contextualize this and the conventional ways to compare it with saigon 1975 actually if you contextualize it more broadly this is an f grade it's a failing grade exit from a military commitment because it has been so poorly executed as hr i'm sure will go on to explain that we have a significant risk not just of a saigon-like debacle but actually of a 1979 hostage crisis we're going very very fast from saigon to tehran and it's hard to think of a worse situation in modern american history than the one that the carter administration found itself in with the hostage crisis uh in tehran after the iranian revolution i think the biden administration is fulfilling a prediction that i made on this show some months ago that it was going to be the carter administration redux not franklin roosevelt not lyndon johnson but but jimmy carter and we're we're fast approaching that kind of a situation as far as i can see hr why don't you take over um there are a lot of military phrases i could throw up here a word that begins with cluster but i cannot end the phrase fubar comes to mind how can a lot of bright people in washington create such a messy situation well i just think this is this is a unique example because it's self-defeat is what we've seen i mean to go back to the decision the decision was made to engage in a capitulation negotiation with the taliban at a time when our cost in afghanistan was very low in terms of numbers of troops we were spending about 2.5 percent of our defense budget uh in in afghanistan and what that was buying us is is really what we came into afghanistan to begin with not imperial designs not to remake the country in our image but to ensure that afghanistan could never again be used as a safe haven and support base for those who are committed to mass murder as a principle tactic in a war against all civilized peoples and and and that these jihadist terrorist organizations could no longer be capable of carrying out an attack on the scale of 911 which was the most destructive terrorist attack in history and we we we're doing that at a relatively low level while the afghans bore the brunt of that fight so i would say if there are other examples of self-defeat based on a lack of will i think those are maybe the most appropriate historical analogies and i can't help but think about mark block's book strange defeat uh in which the author contemporaneously catalogued the collapse of france in in 1940 and this is what i think we're up against is a is a crisis of confidence based in a lack of moral will and uh and what we're seeing now is is really the opposite of what we had heard is the conventional wisdom uh for for so long right that that that really there essentially that there are no consequences for a lost war we're seeing the humanitarian consequences but the severe damage to our reputation uh as well uh and and the the severe damage to our broad effort against jihadist terrorists as the islamic emirate of afghanistan tryouts and bolsters uh the morale uh and and the capabilities of associated jihadist terrorist groups including al-qaeda the organization responsible for the mass murder attacks of 9 11. so i would say that the the most useful analogy is self-defeat uh this isn't imperial failure as neil said you know this whole construct of the graveyard of empires was was always a historical and was used as sort of a trope uh by those on what i would call the self-loathing far left and or or the bigoted you know narcissistic uh neo-isolationist far right my my job is to ask questions and compete with bill here uh because you guys know more about history military affairs in afghanistan than i do um certainly from my um lay perspective this looks like a a unbelievable screw up of execution now we can argue with whether the large-scale policy was right or not but you know the president does not personally sit down and take a year to fill out visas that's the job of the state department and they're through immense bureaucratic incapacity to do that over decades uh you know to get people out in in less than a year or two years or whatever is an example of things going on certainly the low-level planning from this uh department looks awful why would you leave bagram air base you want to leave something coherent behind you some idea that these people could fight and keep their government going so uh somebody needed to think about how are they going to get their helicopters repaired how are they going to fight without air support without medevac and this is uh you know we jump quickly to blame presidents but i see a grand failure of the thousands of people in the national security uh staff in the state department staff in the low-level bureaucracy that is supposed to run affairs like this along with we can argue with the high-level stuff perpetually announcing the date of your withdrawal for the last 20 years seems uh you know from this perspective to be an absolutely terrible thing to do all along and something that we were told all along is a terrible thing to do i read a wonderful report of a a i think it was a marine who was working in iraq who said you know we'd sit down with some local leader and say here's what we want to do here's our plan for getting the guys and the guy says great but your president just said we're leaving 18 months from now so you know how does that compute with with us keeping going on you so there's there are the larger strategic mistakes but i really want to learn from you guys how does the machinery of something like this gets grew so screwed up it's not just presidents it's the machinery of the policy that is screwed up the larger question i don't think empire is the right analogy uh we were not an empire in afghanistan i taught it up a little bit of the numbers we're going to get to economics afghanistan's total gdp is about 20 billion dollars a year we spent about a trillion dollars just on the military affair at least queen victoria ran a profit on her empire that you know vast amount of loss uh is you know that's not the purpose of of why we were there but the larger question i see here not just a failure of an administration not just a failure there's been reports of of squabbling and yes men and people not wanting to say no to biden and so forth but a 20-year failure of the foreign policy um apparatus thinking behind this and i and the historical analogy i'd like to look for can you since the end of the cold war where has there been a single success a single adventure we can look back on and say well that was a good idea run by american foreign policy uh call it kosovo call it iraq call it afghanistan now ukraine libya syria uh um you know this seems to be of a pattern of a grand failure of the foreign policy establishment and the bureaucracy that's supposed to run things that was supposed to be a question but thank you guys i think you're raising a lot of a lot of a lot of different points here john that are all which are relevant to understanding better what are the real lessons of our self-defeat you know in afghanistan i think that's what we have to call it i mean that's the reality and and i think it has a lot to do with competence as you're mentioning uh but it does have quite a bit to do with presidential responsibility you know what you hear these days is you hear well you know americans didn't really support the war in afghanistan and look at the poll numbers well i mean that should come as no surprise when three presidents in a row tell americans it's not worth it i would say with the exception of president trump's approval of a south asia strategy that was the first time that we had a long-term sustainable sound approach to afghanistan and south asia this was the speech that i think our listeners should go back and look at in august of 2017 and of course he he abandoned that he abandoned that because you know the the far-right neo-isolationists uh got in his ear and told him all of the stuff that we know is false right that this is the graveyard of empires uh that we did waste two trillion dollars you know when in fact our our level of effort was much lower and was at a sustainable level as i mentioned about 2.5 percent of defense spending committed uh in afghanistan with actually our allies and partners shouldering more and more of the burden and afghans taking the brunt of the fight so i i think that the presidents have responsibility i think president biden in particular was stuck in the obama administration right he keeps talking about the massive effort and do you want your sons and daughters to bear the brunt of this and so forth well he's talking about when we had 110 000 troops on the ground when he was vice president and he talked president obama into announcing the timeline for our withdrawal at the same time as we committed a reinforced effort now how does that work again it doesn't work and so i think that president biden got the advice he wanted i wrote a book about how why vietnam became an american war and a period during which lyndon johnson got the advice he wanted and i think this is a good analogy and you hear you know you hear president biden went back with his vice president he's echoed this don't box me in you know with your with your advice what does that mean you're supposed to get best advice nobody's boxing you in with your advice so i think there was a real drive toward consensus and self-delusion on afghanistan that's the only explanation for this utter debacle how the hell does it make any sense to withdraw your military before your civilians how the hell does it make any sense to give up control of of airfields uh before any kind of an evacuation of civilians or afghans who would have assisted us how does it make any sense to say you know that that you are you you're uh you're incurring a lesser military commitment by withdrawing everything from afghanistan so then you have to fly it for five hours just to get in you know how does it make any sense to say that you're you know that you're determined you know to reduce our military capabilities to i mean and numbers to zero and then immediately you have to commit you know orders of magnitude larger force just to cover your retreat so i i think that the president got the advice he wanted now on your point of confidence or competence and neil i know i know you have some thoughts on this i'm sure i'm going on so long but i think you have to look at what everybody's role is what is the role of the national security advisor the role of the national security advisor is to coordinate and integrate across the departments and agencies to give the president access to the best advice best analysis and multiple options did that occur i don't know that's a question to ask what is the role of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to give their best military advice from the secretary of defense maybe for more of a political perspective but from the chairman's perspective best advice there's also to execute right i don't know uh but of course you have to implement but you know what happened is the mission became withdraw as an end in and of itself and by the way the capitulation agreement we signed you know with you with the taliban has us leaving on a timeline because of our surrender to them and this is why i believe we are going to have a major hostage situation in afghanistan we're leaving americans behind there we're leaving and we're leaving afghan uh and and multinational partner allies uh uh behind so neil you have a column in the economist in the daily mail in which you put your finger on the problem would you would you like to explain that well it's it's like this joe biden is someone with a memory of vietnam after all he was uh elected to the senate uh in 1972 that is i think highly relevant here though i think it has led him uh to make a very bad decision and the clue could be found in an interesting book george packer wrote a few a couple of years ago biography of richard holbrooke and he he relates how holbrook who was one of those diplomats who tried to contribute to resolving the situation in afghanistan in 2010 the two had a row pretty heated debate discussion uh and i'm gonna quote holbrook when i mentioned the women's issue biden erupted almost rising from his chair he said i am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women's rights it just won't work that's not what they're there for holbrook goes on joe took the position plain and simple that we have to get out of afghanistan when holbrook remonstrated uh that this was not in fact the policy of the administration biden became heated quote he said it ain't gonna happen he said i don't understand politics we have to be on our way out that we had to do what we did in vietnam this shocked me says holbrook and i commented immediately that i thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us he said expletive deleted that f that we don't have to worry about that we did it in vietnam nixon and kissinger got away with it now that tells us that 10 years ago more than that 11 years ago joe biden had formed the view that the united states should exit afghanistan the way it exited the vietnam war and that there would be no domestic downside or for that matter international downside to doing that that is the the the story i think that holbrook was telling us now old brook uh was a controversial figure not everybody like dick holbrook i was in some ways charmed by him and in some ways in incensed by him when i knew him but but to answer a question that you asked a moment ago john has the united states achieved anything uh since the cold war yes actually the united states finally managed to end the war in in bosnia uh and and end actually the war uh in kosovo two with two successful interventions and it was actually richard holbrooke who negotiated the resolution of that uh that protracted conflict that and hey neil i'll just point out we still have small contingents of troops in both places exactly exactly what i was going to point out hr the point that i was trying to make earlier about britain and afghanistan is you're not going to turn these places into denmark but you can create with a relatively small force and a diplomatic framework a stable situation that reduces the threat that these places pose not only to the united states not only to us allies but to the people on the ground and we did do that in the 1990s now biden's wrong about his vietnam analogy in two respects firstly it is not the case that there were no costs to abandoning south vietnam to its fate and it was a grisly face at the hands of the north vietnamese communists it sent a signal to the soviet union and indeed to its allies not least cuba that the united states was a soft touch and in the subsequent period the period that saw dayton unravel all kinds of uh moves were made by the soviets uh in the caribbean in central america in southern africa uh in east africa it's not the case that abandoning vietnam had no costs it is also i think wrong to say that there was no domestic political cost even if it wasn't the abandonment of vietnam that led to nixon's downfall or ford's defeat i have to say that if i'm asking the question where did the great shift in sentiment that ultimately produced ronald reagan come from it came partly from that scene and partly from the 1979 iran debacle which i mentioned earlier i i think the the key point to make if you're going to cite nixon and kissinger the key point to bear in mind is something that that henry kissinger once said and i'll quote him the problem in foreign policy is not simply to state an objective but to be able to carry it out over an extended period of time otherwise even the noblest goal can wind up creating an impression of impotence that is the thing that is different here it wasn't a decent interval maybe it was just an interval but there was a peace agreement with the north vietnamese and then two years elapsed before the collapse of the south vietnamese regime because congress cut off all aid to it but this is something far different this is something in which there has been a completely disorderly transition from a bad deal that was reached with the taliban by the trump administration to the most poorly executed uh evacuation that perhaps there has been in modern times so i i don't think biden's framework is right and i think his national security adviser jake sullivan has served the nation very very poorly in trying to execute what he clearly thought was the president's will and this is where hr can can i think shed some really really illuminating light now we don't know exactly what has gone on we can only glean this from leaks here and leaks there interesting that we're getting the first leaks from this administration over this crisis but hr it is surely the job of the national security adviser to make sure that if the president says we're getting out of afghanistan it doesn't end with babies being thrown over the reservoir and untold numbers of americans to say nothing of those who assisted us being left in danger surely that's the nsa's job and surely the person who has really disastrously let the nation down is sullivan well we're just not going to know for some time right who's responsible uh to what degree and who failed and what you'll see as neil pointed out a number of leaks coming out but those will all be self-serving right from those who are trying to cast blame away away from them i do think it's important that a national security council process driven by the only person who has the president or as his or her only client that's the national security adviser delivered to the president really sound hard-hitting analysis that cuts against maybe the president's predilections i mean i'll tell you neil john and and bill that's that's what i did right that's how i kind of got chewed up as a national security adviser as well but you know what to serve a president well you have to tell the president what that president does not want to hear that's really what occurred all through 2017 on afghanistan and south asia and resulted in a presidential decision and the speech that the president gave in august and he wrote this paragraph into that speech himself this is not the decision i was going to make but you know what we did we showed him his preferred option first in the meeting at camp david we showed him this is what complete withdrawal looks like and this is what happens that cuts against our interests especially in in the in the need to secure our country uh from from and protect our country from jihadist terrorists and then we showed him alternatives alternatives that could accomplish our objectives at at a sustainable cost and he made i in my view the right decision he backed away from it uh but i i guess the question is what is the degree to which uh members of the administration and this process challenge the president's predilections i think it failed clearly because there is clear self-delusion at work and optimism bias and confirmation bias the taliban will share power really the taliban will impose a more benign uh form of sharia and and uh and become more responsible really how's that working out you know the taliban will be a partner this is what's crazy a partner with us against jihadist terrorists including al-qaeda those organizations are completely intertwined and then finally and maybe the most ridiculous you know sort of assumption is that hey i guess there are no there are no really negative consequences for losing a war for self-defeat against a terrorist organization and and approving the previous administration's negotiated surrender to a terrorist organization we're seeing all of that now who challenged that how did they challenge it was the president receptive to it did anybody have the guts to do it you know i i don't know i would like us to uh now look forward in three directions uh hr i'd like you to begin i want you to talk about what happens next in central asia afghanistan our relationship with pakistan i saw a report in the wall street journal that biden sat down with putin and asked talked about building a u.s base and in central asia putin said yet so apparently it's off the table and this thing also called over the horizon surveillance hr so first of all just explain what comes next for afghanistan in that region okay it's it's going to be hell uh because uh we there of the the view that jihadist terrorists have won right that's going to bring more and more you know young impressionable seeking affirmation people to the cause it'll it'll give them these jihadist terrorists the ability to put more young people into their brainwashing dehumanizing factories of these madrassas in the region but what we have we haven't heard i think enough about is that we forced the afghan government to release 5 000 terrorists and now the taliban have released the prisoners and these these include isis corazon as as well as al qaeda members they're going to flood the zone uh into pakistan and into central asia the fergana valley will become destabilized again and and so will uh become further destabilized along with uh along with the federally ministered tribal areas in pakistan and uh and the belucastan region these groups will become more potent as they gain access to revenue along the borders of afghanistan for example but also with with the lucrative uh poppy and and uh and heroin trade so i think that we are in for a period of increased danger that could destabilize central asian uh states as well as pakistan and so what do we need to do we need to redouble our efforts to to share intelligence uh and to go after these these terrorists as best we can mainly through partners because you know i you asked a question about over the horizon it just doesn't work bill it doesn't work it's a pipe dream right and uh you need kind of continuous surveillance capability if you're trying to kind of trying to collect uh intelligence remotely but you really need the human intelligence networks and that's that's what we're seeing you'll completely evaporate now i will say one thing that that we do have a real resistance in afghanistan uh that we could work with umrula saleh is in the pansier valley uh the estimates are with about ten thousand very capable fighters who are who are determined not to allow that valley to fall into the hands of the of the taliban if we had any guts you know if we had any will uh we would declare that a safe zone uh and and uh and i think we're gonna have to at some point retake an airfield uh maybe bagram airfield to evacuate those as we watch this humanitarian catastrophe and we recognize that there are american hostages uh in in afghanistan as well so you know bill this whole idea of of over the horizon of counterterrorism is just it's just a cover really for you know for what was the priority which was surrender and withdrawal so neil hr mentioned our allies our partners who are our partners right now does this president need to get on a plane and start an apology tour and go to london and paris and berlin and apologize for his neglect but also nail in terms of history this is an afghan population that's been subjugated now it's been liberated it's tasted freedom women have been able to get education they've been able to work they've been treated as equals and now they're going to be subjugated again what does history suggest deal about populations that are re-subjugated are they passive or are they resistive i think it's important not to let the nato allies off the hook entirely because they were more than just the servants or help meets of the united states they they were uh responsible actors in an operation that that dates back to the aftermath of 9 11 when article 5 was invoked and i i think it's a little easy for uh the the europeans to point the finger at the united states and say top tart in truth uh the europeans had plenty of time to prepare for a situation of this sort as the united states had signaled uh last year that it was getting out nevertheless it's a terrible indictment of of the administration's strategy which remember was to make alliances really matter because the complaint had been all along during the trump administration that president trump was disrespectful of nato and of ally alliances generally well nothing has done more damage to those relationships uh in the past five years than this and it's richly ironic that a democratic administration that claimed it understood the importance of alliances should be the one that can't even find time for a call with the british prime minister in the midst of a foreign policy crisis the second question you ask is is harder to answer obviously we shouldn't forget even if joe biden doesn't care about the women of afghanistan that their situation was completely transformed by 20 years of american of nato involvement of intervention a massive increase occurred in in the education of women in afghanistan the taliban want to end all that the taliban have a track record of using ferocious violence to impose their authority and turn the clock back to as close to the 7th century as they can get everything i see or hear or read tells me they're going to do that again and to be frank watching the us government fail abjectly to uh help those who not only supported the nato effort but in the case of women who have become uh educated and professionally active and have become part of a new civil society to watch all of those people be left in the lurch makes me furiously angry i've never seen my wife angrier than she has been over the past two weeks we have found ourselves spending time as of close friends doing whatever we possibly can to help people get out given that the the united states government has decided not to do that job uh and i i i can't say more than this that there are private actors who are managing to get uh women out and i i salute their efforts but it is a sad reflection on the most powerful government in the world that it is left to private actors to try to save people who are being left in this disgraceful way it is a shameful shameful dereliction of duty to use a phrase hr knows well and i can only say that i i feel a deep deep pity for the girls and women of afghanistan whom we are leaving to the tender mercies of uh the taliban just as i feel a terrible terrible sorrow for those interpreters and others who will be singled out and executed because we decided to leave them in the lurch go back re-read the quiet american remember the way in which uh the british journalist reproaches pyle uh with a tale of how uh americans and others have promised uh not just liberation uh but democracy made these promises uh encourage people to believe that we would be there to support the creation of a new future and then we leave them in the lurch it's a it's such a depressing pattern to see it repeated again makes makes me so so sad and does point out the degree of hypocrisy is astounding right america is back right we're going to value our allies more how about those who in the administration who were authors of the right to protect doctrine what are they saying now where are all the self-styled humanitarians within the buying administration where are they on the rights of the women in afghanistan we see them being extinguished and we see as as neil pointed out the taliban waged this campaign to drive afghanistan back to the seventh century so i i just think that that what we we should point out is that this degree of hypocrisy i think is i mean it's unprecedented i've never seen anything like it the hr to answer questions they're giving very pretty speeches about how the taliban must include uh all sorts of women and minorities and everything else in their uh in their in their efforts i want to turn towards the future and uh he's like i want to probe you guys on on what happens next not so much on what we should do i think there's a i've learned from hr stop thinking about what you're going to do think about what the other guy's going to do first and so what a what are the taliban going to do before we decide what our policy is now as an economist i start by interest not by ideology what's in their interest to do so what's their situation i'm going to think out loud and you guys going to tell me when i'm all wrong like like we usually do um first of all they've got internal protests they've got as neil pointed out people who've had a taste of freedom women who've had a taste of freedom and don't like at all what's going on uh on the also they're fighters so i gather we had a big problem recruiting literate people to work for uh for the afghan government army the typical who is the typical um guy with a gun standing in kabul he's you know basically a goat herd from out in the middle of the countryside maybe he can read maybe he can't how does i don't even know how they know their way around kabul and certainly the people of kabul are not happy to have uh people like that running over them so you know what what are you doing that in that situation i think um the natural thing is to appear moderate for a while they don't they also don't have the security state you're not in place yet so like the cubans uh you appear moderate for a while that also helps get the international community off your back and then you slowly tighten the screws so i would look there for a period of looking moderate and and then then the execution start the bigger problem they have is is plain old-fashioned money so uh um just for round numbers afghanistan's gdp is about 20 billion of which seven billion uh about a third came in uh from outside sources um and a not inconsiderable part of it came in on c-17s in the form of 100 bills so their g that's gonna stop their gdp drops by a third instantly uh so the and uh let's not forget all of the people who know how to do anything in afghanistan all the skilled people are are trying are either hiding or they have left and and trying to leave so in some sense you know all of the people we're trying to help get out leaving is another disaster so there are economies in a disaster and there most of it was based on farm what do you do about that how do you replace the money well uh first of all drugs um i'll put in a plug for if america were to legalize heroin uh and and cocaine it would do wonders for our foreign policy misadventures although it would have some problems at home they're going to sell drugs they need foreign hosts and as neo keeps pointing out uh america keeps saying there's americans there's people we care about deeply and will do anything for over there and we've got a ton of money they need a ton of money and they got our people so that they will they will practice some sort of selling hostages for a million bucks each seems to me entirely uh forecastable the other thing i think they can count on uh is of the effectlessness of us and the international community and and how we will not stick to anything for very long uh the status of women in in afghanistan now is in great danger but you know we give a lot of money and support to a lot of places around the world where the status of women is pretty darn awful uh we're big buddies with saudi arabia for example where the status of women isn't that great the international community the ngos and so forth they give a lot of money to the palestinian authority where the status of women is not that great so i think we're going to get over the status of women uh much faster than we should given our ability to do in other places and they need foreign support so uh they want foreign supporters who will send them stuff and there's gonna be competition uh between uh us you know who who is who is going to be the foreign supporters as well as you know plain old humanitarian aid that can be uh subverted to other uses um so uh that doesn't paint a pretty picture of where we go in the future but uh uh with those thoughts in mind what do you think they're gonna do well i think you've hit a lot about what what they're gonna do john i mean they're going to try to generate revenue in any way they can they already are generating revenue and one of the one one of the uh aspects of this campaign that was planned in part by the pakistani army's isi was to take over all the borders and crossing points and to use that for taxation and to begin to give them a revenue stream they'll use extortion as you mentioned of all kinds of foreign interests i think our non-governmental organizations are prone to this because of this sort of false nobility associated with neutrality i don't think anybody should be neutral about about the the taliban um and and i think what they'll what they'll try to do is create this this illusion of some degree of normality or a more benign form but they won't be able to help themselves i think we're going to see more and more evidence of of the brutality and and they'll use all sorts of illicit trafficking the narcotics trade you mentioned but uh so many precious gems uh lumber even uh is an illicit uh as an illicit good uh along the afghanistan pakistan border so i i think that you know i think that that's exactly what they're gonna try to do but and you know i mean shame on us if we allow them to do it i think what's what's uh extraordinary is that we still have zhao khalilzad there the the man who is most responsible for the capitulation agreement to the taliban he's most responsible for delivering psychological blows to the afghan government uh across the whole negotiation process he's done more uh i think to you know to to rehabilitate neville chamberlain's reputation than anybody uh in the la in the last uh 100 years and and he's still there and you know what he's doing he's encouraging actually you know other afghans to join the taliban government to help them create a veneer of normality and and this is a disgrace he ought to be immediately recalled uh and uh and we ought to to make sure that we shout down really anybody uh who attempts to portray the taliban as a government that ought to garner some degree of international uh recognition of course those who will be rushing to give them recognition are the pakistanis uh you know imran khan uh has has said he just said a couple days ago that the afghan people have been unshackled we need to make him pay for that and make him pay for pakistan's behavior we ought to impose sanctions on him every senior officer in the pakistani army and their families because these are people who bomb help help the taliban and others bomb girls schools in afghanistan while they send their children to private schools in the west we need they need to pay a price for this and and we need to work with the gulf states if we have any influence left over them to cut the funding off to the pakistanis and to these end of these organizations others who will rush in are the russians uh and the chinese because of their unscrupulousness and then also because they are caught up in the celebration of our self-defeat in afghanistan uh and and so those will be the immediate lifelines to the taliban but but really shame on even further shame on us uh if we if we begin to entertain ideas of recognizing the taliban government can i take up where you just left off hr ultimately what happens in afghanistan pakistan central asia is important but in the global context it's as important as what happened in indochina after the fall of saigon that is to say it is not in the first rank of importance what is in the first rank of importance is how china in particular but i think also russia interpret the implications of this fiasco and it seems very likely indeed to me that they will consider this administration as weak as imaginable and therefore as an opportunity for further action uh to expose the weakness of the united states now the obvious place where as we've often discussed on goodfellows this could happen is taiwan and and you and i hr uh were discussing only today the potential uh for xi jinping to make a move against taiwan in the belief that the united states is now a paper mache tiger because i think that would be the thing below a paper tiger therefore the real geopolitical consequence of the fall of kabul is not actually in central asia at all it may well be in the far east or it could be elsewhere what does putin make of this latest turn of events if he has any intention of of escalating in ukraine uh or of even challenging nato's credibility in the baltic states surely this is the moment does anybody on this show believe that if the uh chinese launched an invasion of taiwan the biden administration would go to war does it look likely that jake sullivan the great believer in a foreign policy for the middle class would recommend a full-scale uh deployment uh to support the taiwanese if i'm xi jinping i can't really imagine that scenario at the moment and if i'm putin i'm asking myself is it 2014 all over again the last time these people were in office they declared they weren't the global policemen a few months later i walked into crimea and next to what happened sanctions well you know that that made my my eyes water economically but i still have crimea and a chunk of ukraine as well of of eastern ukraine as well so i'm i'm really concerned that we are now going to see a salami slicing directed against american power american allies and this will produce a far more serious crisis than anything we're currently seeing the war over taiwan which i have written about uh many times now starts to look like an all too imminent danger as imminent as conceivably next year because when will the opportunity be better quite frankly for xi jinping than it is now what do you think i would just add to this um it's even more insidious because if they're smart they don't launch an all-out invasion that sort of looks like bris blitzkrieg across poland 1939 um you you send in the little green men uh you do it in some deniable way you china says oh there's problems with taiwan you start an embargo uh and you start controlling waters around taiwan like they did with hong kong hong kong they didn't bother to send in troops they just did it bit by bit by bit and uh our country might respond to a you know an actual invasion with missiles and airplanes and so forth though if it comes down to reconquering taiwan good luck to that good i i'm with you but uh i think we're as you said if it's a little bit by bit deniable some excuse uh a slow tightening of the noose we're going to issue stern communicates really stern communication response you know i think uh i think both you're right that i mean deterrence comes from capability times will right and and i think that there is a perception that we don't have the will uh to to be able to to stand up to various forms of aggression of which in which our our vital interests are are at stake and and uh and i think the reinforcement of that belief among our adversaries has just made the world a much more dangerous place i think that's true vis-a-vis russia as well i think russia could become emboldened vis-a-vis the ukraine and ukraine and then also in the black sea uh and the and the intimidation uh campaign that they're waging uh against uh against the bulgarians and romanians uh for example on an effort to make the black sea a russian lake uh i think there are recent examples of this right when when uh i think when when russia determined that we weren't going to do anything thought we were going to do anything after the unenforced red line in syria in 2013 2014 i believe that led directly to the to the annexation of crimea the invasion of ukraine it also led directly to the to the to the building of the islands in the south china sea and militarization of those islands so i i think that that you know the chinese and russians would be wrong to conclude this uh but that doesn't make it any less dangerous i think that you know we have responded when when our adversaries counted america out in the previous taiwan crisis and and certainly there's a dramatic example in june of 1950 uh but i do think that this has made the world this this self-defeat has made the world a more dangerous place and placed more of our vital interests at stake i think especially when you combine it with the fact that the dubai administration is supplicating to iranian leaders at this very moment as well in an effort to resurrect the iran nuclear deal and the only way that's going to happen because that deal is dead i mean it's it's completely dead uh the iranians are already enriching up to 60 percent uh you know the the sunset clauses of the old deal are about to expire in 2025 anyway begin expiring to 2025. uh and and uh and so the only way we're going to get you know an iran nuclear deal is concession after concession and this will be potentially another you know political disaster masquerading as a diplomatic triumph that actually strengthens our our enemies and i would not i would not be surprised if iran became more aggressive as we've seen them become aggressive against israel going against israeli-owned tanker recently uh and then also i think it's citing hezbollah to fire rockets interestingly drew's militia put down that the the hezbollah effort to to fire rockets uh into into israel from southern lebanon but i do think the the attacks out of gaza a couple of months ago also uh has aligned back to to iran so i think the the world is going to be a much more dangerous place based on the fact that in that equation of capability times will you know i think that many of our adversaries believe that that the you know the the the uh you know the will factor is down you know close to zero is there to some extent a moderating force uh a sense in which uh people around the world now say whoa the americans aren't here we better take care of ourselves uh you know the abraham accords the israelis starting to get along with some of the gulf states uh certainly smacks of that we can't count on the americans to defend us against iran iran by the way is a great we were talking earlier about can you take a a country where people have tasted freedom and stuff it back down their throats and iran is an example of oh yes you can because they were you know a westernizing country in the in the 1970s uh similarly let's look around china and you know yeah the invasion of taiwan is is the visible one but if you're um vietnam the philippines uh australia south korea japan you you look at the current situation you're saying hmm we might be on our own uh and perhaps that'll have a salutary effect europe uh you know the eastern europeans are you know i gather the polls are putting up more troops on the belarusian border well the polls have noticed that uh don't necessarily count on the americans and they might might want to think about it on their own i'm just trying to find something hopeful to think about here i i think that's the wrong way to think about this john i i wrote a lengthy essay for the economist actually back in may they took until last week to publish it so it went from being prescient to being kind of topical but the central argument i made there was that the end of empire or great power status or hegemony or whatever you want to call it is not a peaceful process the idea that you get to decline gently into some kind of geopolitical equivalent of of palm springs is is a delusion when power declines it's it's really more like a vertical drop and i worry about the consequences of that vertical drop if if we are now about to embark on it it's it's clear if one looks back on the dismantling of the great european empires after world war ii that that process was accompanied by extraordinary levels of violence think only of the partition of india but that's just one of many cases i could cite so i think what you're really describing here is that as it's clear or appear as apparent appears to be the case that the united states is in retreat then you will get multiple conflicts uh multiple regional conflicts and potentially large-scale conflicts even in afghanistan the future of afghanistan may not be in fact it almost certainly won't be monolithic taliban rule it's more likely to be civil war in the same way that this probably doesn't make pakistan a more stable country it may make it a less stable one now for me this is sort of deja vu all over again because i was writing about this 20 years ago nearly in a book called colossus which was the sequel to a book called empire and that the themes of those books were the united states might have good intentions in trying to transform iraq and afghanistan but would likely fail because of three deficits the manpower deficit that makes americans reluctant to spend long periods of time in countries like that the fiscal deficit that was already obviously a problem back in 2003 and the attention deficit of the american electorate which broadly speaking loses interest in these things after about four years to me what's what's depressing the reason i'm not angry i said i was sad earlier the reason i'm not angry is that i knew this was going to happen if anything i'm surprised it took us this long and and so i go back to i went back and i looked at that book colossus which was not popular at the time because it said and this annoyed the left uh you know actually this might not be such a bad idea and then i annoyed the right by saying but it's probably going to fail pretty badly but actually i think that that framework was the right way to think about this and one of the clear inferences is that if if a major power call it an empire or not if a major power retreats it does not lead to greater stability it does not lead to diminished conflict quite the opposite well it's certainly the the military falling apart of the uh english empire in in in world war ii is pretty astonishing so what you're painting here let me just paint it for our listeners is a really dramatically awful picture that is shown to be a paper tiger in afghanistan which as we pointed out well what the heck afghanistan we you know there's venezuela there's cuba there's horrible places in the world but um the the widespread perception that america is uh you know things fall apart quickly as they did in afghanistan and if they fall apart in the taiwan straits in the conflict with china if they fall apart in eastern europe if they fall apart in the middle east and it's all everybody for yourselves uh that is a absolutely awful conflagration that could happen all at once as soon as everybody figures out you know mom's not home anymore basically and the key lesson of the british imperial history and let me be very brief here but it's crucial is that if you behave in these ways if you if you accumulate both debt and doubt and lose your credibility at some point you end up having to fight a really big conflict against the superpower of great power that you failed to deter my worry increasingly is not cold war ii i think that would be the good outcome my worry increasingly is actually a hot war and that we end up getting to the point where having lost our credibility we then have to regain it much as uh britain had to do in 1914 and again in 1939 but from a position of great weakness and therefore a very great cost i would just say though that we we do have agency right this is not a foregone conclusion and and we do have agency because we live in a democracy and we can demand better from our leaders right we should we need to do this that's what it is right this is self-defeat right and we have to demand that our leaders across two administrations uh you know don't surrender to terrorists that we do exercise agency and you know we we had the the show a few episodes ago that 70s show the more i've thought about it uh since then the more i think that is a relevant analogy i mean if you think about it that was one hell of a decade right coming on the back end of of the the racial uh turbulence and and social divides of the 1960s of the increasingly you know unpopular war of vietnam which was a much much larger scale than what than what we're talking about here you know the you know the the uh the the fall of saigon in 75. uh we've alluded to it but i haven't really talked about it directly the khmer rouge takeover you know of of uh of cambodia the mayaguez incident associated with that a decade of stagflation and you know and and and uh and and it being that decade being bookended you know with the hostage crisis in in iran you know it looked pretty bleak right so i think the time is right for you know an american leader who talks to the american people about what we can achieve together uh and we need to restore our confidence our confidence in and who we are as a people and what we stand for and we have to demand better from our leaders and we can't do it right i don't think that we you know we should think that you know just because we're seeing you know this humiliation we're only seeing the beginning of it by the way uh in in afghanistan uh that this needs to be the beginning of a cascading loss of american power and influence in the world but what you guys are saying is that we are right at a tipping point yes it can come back i mean this is our job basically it's just you know our job at the hoover institute to say guys wake up be serious america can come back but we are at a tipping point and certainly my view of history and hopefully neil will agree this time is that we came a lot closer than we like to say to disaster there's sort of a view of history of the the inexorable march of progress but um uh you know would we really fight world war ii would we really win world war ii all of these things could have gone wrong in horrible at the 70s could have ended with kind of the pattern that we are now worried about ending now and it just it came so close each time and we are close once again as i think to do you the the climate people like to invoke tipping points but i think uh what you're saying is that we really are at one right now and it's not so much about terrorism it's about old-fashioned great power politics and what they take about our our competence our will our self-belief from how we handle uh terrorism usually important point that you have made john and also that hr made this is not inexorable there's no great law of history that says that great powers must decline in the same way that hooverfellows must age we must age but great powers do not have that propensity they don't have some natural life cycle as hr rightly says the united states was at a very low ebb in 1979 turned it around in the 1980s and then almost became intoxicated by its success in the 1990s uh to the point of hubris in the early 2000s but we can i think fix this problem though it will require far far higher levels of competence on the part of the leaders that we select and also i hope a greater level of historical insight what struck me as i revisited churchill's book the gathering storm which is a must read it it's extraordinary you read it and you think my god his account of 1930s britain is a description of the united states today it's uncanny but churchill was an exceptional leader because he had an understanding of history that was really quite extraordinary and it was the basis for all of his most profound strategic insights we have an historic a kind of a deficit of history in our in our elite which helps explain much of what what goes wrong they can't even learn lessons from events as recent as the events of the 1970s forget about any further any history further back so from my vantage point hoover's role has to be to try to revitalize the way in which the elites of this country learn from history that's one of the central things we need to work on because there's no other way of explaining this fiasco than as a kind of failure in the part of the elite to learn from history yeah to understand how the recent past produced the present as the first step of deciding what we're going to do in the future and uh and and i think that that what happens is we we have become over-enamored you know with social science theory that's what we teach in in a lot of the sort of national security foreign policy programs at our universities and and what that does is it it gives only a veneer of understanding and it becomes sort of a deceptive rationale for folly because we try to fit you know really the complex causality of events and the and the and and and a really designed thinking about these these problems that tries to understand the challenges we're facing on our own terms view them through the lens of our vital interests and and into these into these these theories these these reified theories which actually i think are a lodestone around our necks guys we're going to cut it off there um great conversation as always that's it for this episode of good fellows fear not we'll be back soon with another conversation on behalf of my colleagues neil ferguson h.r mcmaster john cochran all of us here at the hoover institution please by all means stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you soon [Music] if you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring h.r mcmaster watch battlegrounds also available at hoover.org

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 71,055

Rating: 4.8404255 out of 5

Keywords: Afghanistan, withdrawal, Taliban, Jake Sullivan, Putin, Russia, Crimea, China, Xi Jinping, Taiwan, The Quiet American

Id: nuqvAVwXtws

Length: 60min 22sec (3622 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021