The New Kabul

I'm trying to explain to everyone, trying to tell them by my words a picture of how the life back in Afghanistan was, but I can't find the right words.

When I'm saying it was normal, everyone asking me how normal it was back before the Taliban.

It was the regular life that everyone has.

I mean, we had a home, we had a job, we had friends, we had plans, we know we had a future.

Bushra Siddiqui is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic, and I'm Claudina Bade, Executive Producer of Audio.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Siddiqui gives us a glimpse into her normal life in Afghanistan and how that all changed in an instant.

My friends was a really good part and and a big part of my life because I spent most of my free time with my friends.

We were all the time shopping, and there's a lot of crowd, super crowded.

And I imagine those moments walking, and sometimes I remember all the cute smile of all the people, shopkeepers, and smile, energy, and everything was like you can notice those things in everyone's every face on that time.

We were spending our times in a lot of good places, going to office.

I mean, everyone was trying to do something for themselves.

I was a journalist.

I was really in love with my job and what I'm doing for my country and people.

So we spend our times our favorite places, our favorite restaurants, which we would love to go to there together with our family.

Or like cafes, going with our friends, having your favorite drink you want,

and sometimes listening to music and playing the music loud in the cafes.

Like everyone has their own tastes, what they usually like.

I like pop musics

and old musics, I mean from 17s, 18s of that time of music.

So I remember sometimes when I was playing that music, a lot of people say, Oh, come on, change it.

And some say, Wow, what the music?

Can we have another song of this singer?

So, I love the music by a singer named Ahmed Zoher.

He's not alive, he died many years ago.

But on that time, he was famous in Afghanistan as Afghanistan's Elvis Presley.

And I love his songs, they are so good, and he's one of my favorite.

Sometimes I remember the noise of the crowd, the noise of the cars, the noise of

really good music which was played in all shops, and those sounds, those voices of people with our pure language is such a good moment, which I miss a lot.

And this is not just in my case, it's for everyone, for all those who came in Afghanistan.

They have the same story, different stories, but the same feelings.

Everything was normal, despite we know that in parts of our country the war is going on, but we love those moments that we spend in our countries.

I still don't know how to explain how the life was normal at that time.

Oh, so I remember the very first day that the Taliban came to Kabul on the 15th of August.

I was coming from Kabul downtown and I was was coming back to home.

Then I received a call from my brother.

He told me, where are you?

And I said,

why?

Because he never asked me where I am.

He normally never do that.

And he asked me for the second time, where are you?

And I said, why?

So he said, the Taliban came to the Kabul center and it's not safe anymore to be outside.

Where are you?

Come home as soon as you can right now.

That was my brother's words.

And I said, you were joking.

He said, Bakoda means I'm swearing.

I'm swearing.

Come right now.

It's not the time to joke.

Come home right now.

There's a lot of traffic and there's no way to have a taxi.

So I was like 15 minutes away from my home by walking.

So

I run

and I run as fast as I can.

Then I noticed all the people around me,

men, women, girls, boys, kids, they're also running.

That was the time I noticed, okay, there is something serious.

It's real, not a joke.

So I run and I remember when I went home, all my siblings are already inside the home, including my parents.

And then, after a few hours,

there was no car in the streets.

There was no single person on the streets.

Nobody, nobody.

And it was really shocking for us.

Where are these people?

Where are the cars?

So, what happened?

And that was the time we noticed a lot of news.

Our president escaped.

Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace.

The government collapsed.

We've been watching them for a few moments now, milling around the lush environments of the presidential palace.

We watch on the news that the Taliban are in our president palace sitting on our president's chair.

I remember my father told me that turn off the lights of our apartment, especially the rooms that have windows outside.

turn off the lights.

I don't want any of you to be visible.

So we turn off the light.

But from our room when we were like observing and watching the streets,

the only thing I remember of that time was the Taliban's motorcycles and the very special kind of their own music which is

all about the war, how to fight, how to kill.

And I can still see their flags.

That was the very first time I noticed their flags, which was really scary.

And I remember on that night when we were doing our dinner, we cried.

All the family, including my father, me, my siblings, my mother, everyone cried.

And I remember that time, my father's crying.

And

my father's personality is he is very

obsessed with his country.

He always tells us, I will never leave my country, whatever happened.

And I went to him and

put my hands on his shoulders and asked, Why are you crying in our own language?

I asked my dad,

it means why are you crying, my dear father?

And he said, he was like, um,

uh, he was like telling me nothing.

But I know why he's crying.

He can imagine how the life he made disappeared in a seconds and a minute.

He never imagined that.

And I remember that time.

I was just watching my father because what my father did for all of us, I mean for our family, I can feel how he feels.

And my father never cries.

And on that time, when I saw my father, that he is crying now,

that was really heartbreaking for me.

So I can't control my tears because I can't see my father's crying like this.

So

it was like a moment of losing what you have in your hand,

moment of losing your achievements, moment of losing your past, moment of losing your kids or kids' futures.

It was like a moment of a lot of losings.

So that was the time not only me, both my parents felt that they lose or lost everything.

Siddiqui's story is one that has a vantage point from the ground in Afghanistan, where big decisions made halfway around the world and out of her control upended her life and the lives of so many others.

Like many others who were engaged in Afghanistan, of course, I was privileged to be the commander there, it became a bit more than a bit emotional, I think, for many of us who had served there.

A lot of

my old comrades and fellow travelers, and those I was privileged to lead,

were really quite depressed by this.

Someone who also questions whether the U.S.'s withdrawal from Afghanistan made sense is retired General David Petraeus.

The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, talked with him about that decision and mistakes made in Afghanistan.

Are you angry at the Biden administration for the way it went down?

I think that is among the emotions.

Very disappointed, certainly,

in part because, of course, the title of the piece was Afghanistan Didn't Have to Turn Out This Way.

I really believe that.

We never even got the inputs right in Afghanistan for nine years, not until the end of 2010 with the buildup that was approved by President Obama.

And then, of course, we started drawing down within eight months of that.

We didn't have the right big ideas in the beginning.

Again, not just the right level of forces, but also diplomats, development workers, intelligence officers, et cetera, et cetera.

Didn't have the right organizational architecture.

All of these, the preparation of our forces, there were so many shortcomings over the years.

But with all of that, there still were alternatives at the end.

Contrary to what is asserted, we could have kept 3,500 or so troops there.

We hadn't even had a battlefield loss in about 18 months, and it was not just because of the agreement with the Taliban, which I think has to rank with among the worst diplomatic apports we've ever reached.

And of course, we negotiated it with our enemies.

And that wasn't the Biden administration.

That was the Trump administration.

Right.

And we did that without the elected Afghan government that we were supporting being at the table.

But the fundamental issue is that we just did not have the strategic

patience, the resolve.

We didn't even have consistency within administrations.

None of the three administrations were consistent within their administration, much less from administration to administration.

And of course, if you keep telling the enemy that you want to leave and you're in a contest of wills with that enemy, and that enemy has sanctuaries, and a neighboring country, Pakistan, won't eliminate those sanctuaries nor allow us to do that, you're in the most challenging of all contexts.

And so we had to recognize, Jeffrey, at some point that we couldn't win, but that we could actually manage.

In your mind, the minimum viable number of troops that the U.S.

would have to leave in Afghanistan ad infinitum in order to keep stability was 3,500, or was it going to be substantially more than that?

I think roughly 3,500.

What we would have needed to do, though, was to increase the number of so-called enablers.

So add more drones, various types of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance aircraft.

These aren't soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines.

It's more hardware and capabilities.

At the the end, we were no longer on the front lines, with the exception of occasional counterterrorist force operations.

Now, when you talk about America not having a sustained commitment to Afghanistan, there are a lot of people, including two authors of ours who both served in Afghanistan, Gil Barndaller and Jason Dempsey, who wrote a piece called, not to make too fine a point of it, Don't Believe the Generals on Afghanistan.

Their argument, and many other arguments, is that two decades is a pretty pretty good commitment.

That 2,500 lives of soldiers.

They hear someone like you saying, what we need was a sustained commitment, and they say, excuse me, that was a pretty sustained commitment, and it wasn't working.

What's at the root of this argument that you have with other Americans about the definition of what constitutes a sustained commitment to a cause?

Well, the real issue here is it's sustainable.

And sustainability, I think, is measured in the expenditure of blood and treasure.

And if you have not had battlefield loss in 18 months, it seems to me that's sustainable.

And the 20 to 25 billion out of a defense budget of 800 plus billion it will be this year, I believe, seems to me sustainable as well.

Keeping in mind that, of course, Jeffrey, we've had 35,000 or whatever it is troops on the Republic of Korea for going, you know, way over 60.

And again, we've had troops in Europe continuously.

We still have, I think it's roughly 30,000 troops on Japanese soil in various locations, many, many decades, obviously after the end of World War II.

The question is, is it sustainable?

At the point we'd reached, it seemed to me that that was sustainable.

You know, I'd also note that, interestingly, we did actually accomplish what we set out to do at various junctures.

During the period that I was privileged to be the commander, our marching orders from President Obama were to halt the momentum of the Taliban, roll it back in critical places, accelerate the development of the Afghan security forces, develop and initiate a concept for transition of certain tasks, and of course the overriding objective, which was to ensure that Afghanistan is never again a sanctuary for al-Qaeda the way it was when the 9-11 attacks were planned there and the initial training of the attackers was conducted there.

I am worried about actually not just al-Qaeda returning.

I don't see al-Qaeda posing an international threat the way that they did when Osama bin Laden and

his deputies, Wahhiri, more recently the Emir, of course, who was tracked down in Kabul of all places, when they were planning these sensational attacks and carrying out attacks in the East Africa Embassy bombings, the USS Cole

in Yemen, and of course 9-11, et cetera.

I am concerned about the Islamic State, and I fear that they could build some kind of sanctuary, perhaps even a mini-caliphate there that we have to keep a very close eye on.

On Iraq,

let me put this question bluntly.

If the United States had not invaded Iraq and kept its focus on Afghanistan,

Would it, in your opinion, have been a winnable war?

Again, I don't know that Afghanistan would ever have been winnable because of the sanctuaries that the enemies of Afghanistan had.

Keep in mind, we went into Afghanistan, we didn't even have a real headquarters on the ground for a period of time.

We overlearned a lesson of Bosnia, which is never plant a flag, a division flag, because it's really hard to get out.

And so we went into Afghanistan, very sort of unconventional, to put it mildly, guys on horseback and others with suitcases full of money.

We get surrogates, not all entirely the most savory of individuals.

They force the Taliban to mass.

When the Taliban masses, we clobber them with air power, and the sheer shock effect of that shatters them and they escape across into Pakistan.

And then, of course, when we have this big operation to try to corner bin Laden and Tora Bora, A week ahead of that, there's a headquarters that's sent in that doesn't even have control over the different types of special operations forces, much less some of the intelligence assets, et cetera.

We finally put a headquarters in, but then we very quickly shifted our focus to Iraq.

And as you'll recall, Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, used to say, in Iraq, we do what we must, and in Afghanistan, we do what we can, and what we can was never enough.

Had we been able to exploit that period of relative peace in Afghanistan, which extended for many years, staff officers inside Kabul were driving themselves around in thin-skinned SUVs.

There was virtually no threat at that time.

It was just starting to materialize as the Taliban were putting their foot in the water again in Afghanistan from Pakistan.

But there was a real opportunity, and we missed it because we did not commit sufficient resources at that time.

Again, we wanted to have a very light footprint.

And, you know, this is where also then people say, well, it all went wrong in Afghanistan.

We've started to do nation building.

Well, you know, if you don't do nation building, how do you end up with the capabilities that are required for you to transition tasks that you're performing to, for example, Afghan security forces of various types, Afghan institutions?

The idea that we would have just, you know, again, taken down al-Qaeda and then just disappeared, al-Qaeda would have returned in a heartbeat.

Right.

There would have been a renewed civil war in Afghanistan.

Aaron Ross Powell,

there is this Jacksonian impulse in American foreign policymaking on a populist level that says we don't care about what you do in your own country.

Just don't hurt us.

That's the opposite of nation building, obviously.

What is wrong from a technical standpoint with that notion?

We go into Afghanistan in October of 2001, kill as many al-Qaeda operatives and their Taliban enablers as we can, and then say, don't do it again.

And then if they do it again, we just go do that again without all the efforts associated with nation building.

What's wrong with that theory?

Well, of course, that,

if you will, flies in the face of the, what is it, the pottery barn concept

that, you know, you break it, you own it.

Right.

And we owned it.

But do you believe in you break it, you own it?

Or can we just say,

Here, we just broke it.

You fix it yourselves.

We don't care.

And just leave us alone.

Well, it seems a little bit

contrary to an awful lot of our

basic ideals, I guess I would say, and values and so forth.

Now, you can say you should think really, really hard before you go into the pottery barn

and before you break it up.

And I think that's obviously one of the lessons of the post-9-11 period arguments.

That's a lesson more for Iraq than Afghanistan.

Previous decade as well.

But again, having gone in and having shattered

the country,

it would have been a civil war of

enormous violence, once again, keeping in mind that they had just gone through a civil war when the post-Soviet regime collapsed.

And we would have been responsible for that.

All I'm saying is that it's not an unpopular view.

And it is this, you know, Walter Russell Mead conception of that the nature of the American people is actually Jacksonian, which is isolationist, except if you try to hurt us, then we'll go out and destroy you, and then we'll just go back home.

We're not imperialists.

We're not nation builders.

We just want to be left alone.

And I have to say that, I mean, it's not my view.

I'm more in a pottery barn kind of mindset, but I can understand after two decades of

this kind of activity, it has a kind of attraction.

I can understand it as well.

But of course, we have a Wilsonian tradition as well.

And as you know, I mean, this has been a tug of war between these different traditions.

I mean, between realism and idealism.

And this is what has always played out.

And we are, without question,

sliding back more toward the realism state of the spectrum, if you will, given our frustrating experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All of this raises the obvious question, which is, are we, in your estimation, going to have to learn the hard way that leaving Afghanistan the way we left it is going to force us one day to re-engage the Afghanistan question.

I don't know that we will have to re-engage.

We have consigned a country of nearly 40 million people, actually millions less now already because of the refugee flow, to an absolutely horrible future.

And I see no

prospects for improvement as long as the Taliban are not the kindler, gentler Taliban that folks hoped they would turn out to be.

That said, I don't think we would go in unless there is the kind of caliphate, sanctuary, what have you, that Al-Qaeda enjoyed, whether it's Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, which I think is the more dangerous of the elements now, and which is also, again, trying to foment civil war.

There's just one other subject in this particular Afghanistan withdrawal.

It's the issue of Pakistan.

Sure.

And the impossibility of leading a successful or sustainable effort in Afghanistan Afghanistan when the Taliban has, as a neighbor, a country that will give it refuge.

It's the friendliest enemy or the

sort of country.

It's a country that's playing all sides at once.

My question to you is, when you're

running operations in Afghanistan back in the day, did it strike you that Pakistan has fundamentally made your job impossible?

And what lessons did you learn, if that's the conclusion that you drew?

Well, it was absolutely baddening.

maddening.

We thought at certain times, in particular in 2009, that they actually were,

in a sense, with us and they were going to address the problem of North Waziristan, the heart of darkness, this tribal mountainous area in which the Haqqani part of the Taliban and also the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, we believed al-Qaeda and others all had sanctuary.

And it just didn't happen.

It didn't materialize.

We were just let down repeatedly.

And even when I was at the agency, it was never entirely clear how much they were communicating with, much less supporting the Haqqani, much less the Taliban.

That made Afghanistan essentially unwinnable.

It didn't keep it from being manageable, but it kept it from being unwinnable.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Let me, for my last question, let me come back to the beginning.

It's a question that has to do with

an emotion

ideas of morality, public and private.

Many, many

thousands, hundreds of thousands of veterans of Afghanistan are

quite shocked and depressed by

America's, what they see as abandonment of

the Afghan cause and their Afghan friends.

Also, the promises that were made by the United States over more than a dozen years to the women of Afghanistan.

Obviously,

there is a twenty year period where girls could go to school.

And that was brought to you by the United States military, by United States foreign policy decision making.

And that's all gone.

And

I'm wondering two things.

One, what does it say about us as a country that makes promises based on shared humanity?

The second question is, is there anything we can do to mitigate the damage that we've done by over-promising and under-delivering to the women of Afghanistan?

Well, first of all, I think it is very disappointing to see us walk away, as you use the word abandonment, which I think does express accurately what it is that we did.

And

to see what we sought to achieve just disappear in a matter of weeks was

shocking.

It was hugely disappointing.

Now it is very, very difficult to figure out how it is that you can help those 50% of a country that used to enjoy certain opportunities in the economy, in society, in education, and now can't even go to high school, much less to college.

My wife and I funded a scholarship every year for a woman at the American University of Afghanistan.

And then, of course, all we were trying to do was get women out of Afghanistan so they could at least continue their education.

And again, there are lots of cases of these that are quite inspirational about how folks were able to get out and are now studying at great universities in the United States or in Iraqi Kurdistan or Albania, what have you.

But the bulk of Afghan women just will not enjoy the kinds of opportunities they had before, not remotely.

And I don't know how it is that we can actually influence the Taliban to provide those opportunities to them, given that they have made decisions that are completely contrary to what they should do if they want to get international assistance.

And we were actually in discussions with them most recently in one of the Central Asian states, of course, right before we take out the Emir of Al-Qaeda, who's living downtown Kabul within walking distance of the presidential palace in a house that was controlled by the acting minister of interior of Afghanistan.

So again,

the challenges here are enormous.

How do you help individuals in a country?

How do you help citizens?

How do you help the whole population, which again, 90% of which is not getting enough to eat on a daily basis?

How do you help them without enriching a regime that has put their country in this terrible position.

Right.

Let me thank you, General Petraeus, for your time and for your continued commentary for The Atlantic.

Thank you very much for doing this today.

Thank you, Jeffrey.

It was a privilege to be with you.

This episode was produced by me, Ace Valdez, Kevin Townsend, and Theo Balcom.

with engineering help from Matthew Simonson.

Sam Fentris is our fact-checker.

The news audio you heard in this episode was from Al Jazeera.

Visit theatlantic.com to read General Petraeus' piece, Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way, as well as Don't Believe the Generals, a counterpoint to General Petraeus' view.

Bushra Siddiqui's latest piece describing her escape from Afghanistan is, I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story.

So, I don't know, I have never imagined that the Taliban is coming and I'm leaving the country like this.

We were expecting that everyone from the US is going to leave Afghanistan, but we haven't pictured the ending like this.

It shouldn't be in like this.

But after the president escaped and after we lost almost all the provinces of Afghanistan, we thought everything is over.

We'll have an episode about Siddiqui's escape from Afghanistan in Radio Atlantic coming soon.