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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin again today on the life and death drama unfolding in Afghanistan as the US failure to anticipate the Taliban's rapid takeover threatens the evacuations of Americans and especially Afghans who have helped the US-led war effort. As Taliban checkpoints continue to control who is and who isn't allowed to get to the Kabul airport, at least several new developments are worth mentioning.

Protests against the Taliban are spreading. At least one violent crackdown on the protesters is being reported, important in its own right, but also how will that affect Taliban decisions about how free movement to the airport will be? The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a state department cable sent last month from about two dozen people working at the US embassy in Kabul, warning of a potential collapse of the city soon after president Biden's August 31st troop withdrawal deadline. The journal says the cable offered ways to speed up the evacuation and was sent through the state department's confidential dissent channel.

With us now is someone who recently served at a high level in the US embassy in Kabul, Annie Pforzheimer was deputy chief of mission there in 2017 and 2018, and then became the acting deputy assistant secretary of state for Afghanistan until March of 2019. She is now an associate with the center for strategic and international studies Think Tank. Annie Pforzheimer joins us now. Thank you so much for your time at this very crucial time. Welcome to WNYC.

Annie Pforzheimer: Thank you very much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you first to give our listeners some context for that July cable from the embassy staff reported on by The Wall Street Journal? What is the dissent channel that the article says the cable was sent through?

Annie Pforzheimer: Sure. The dissent channel is a proud element of state department culture. Since, really, the Vietnam war era, there has been this ability for ordinary officers to send a message directly to the secretary of state and it goes to that person and the head of the policy planning office. Those two senior officials are going to hear an unfiltered criticism of a policy matter.

Brian Lehrer: The journal describes the cable as the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban's advance was imminent and the Afghan army may be unable to stop it, but reportedly, the warning was for after August 31st. How much can you say this cable is evidence that the Biden administration failed to act on intelligence that it had to make this evacuation reach more people?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, I think I can't comment on the timing of a prediction because what was at play was the morale and the readiness of the Afghan army to defend Kabul and defend the other parts of the country and that definitely collapsed faster than, I think, almost anyone could have predicted. What I do know as a diplomatic observer is that there were parts of the US withdrawal decision and our messaging that made it very likely that that collapse would happen and that it would happen relatively quickly.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me play a clip of joint chiefs of staff chairman, Mark Milley, on Wednesday reacting to other published reports that intelligence had warned them of what's happening now.

Mark Milley: Let me make one comment on the intelligence, because I'm seeing all over the news that there were warnings of a rapid collapse. I have previously said from this podium and in sworn testimony before Congress that the intelligence clearly indicated multiple scenarios were possible. One of those was an outright Taliban takeover following a rapid collapse of the Afghan security forces and the government. Another was a civil war and a third was a negotiated settlement. However, the timeframe of a rapid collapse, that was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months and even years following our departure.

There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.

Brian Lehrer: Does Milley's description sound either credible or adequate to you?

Annie Pforzheimer: I think I don't want to describe what is credible, because I spent a career working with intelligence estimates and what they have to be is one element among many for a policymaker to make a decision. An intelligence estimate is not something that you can actually-- you cannot claim that it has to be right in 100%. What it has to do is indicate to the policymaker, where are the problems? Where are the weaknesses? Where I think the embassy cable weighed in, it said our intelligence estimates are pointing in a certain direction, which means that contingency planning for those weaknesses should be our highest priority.

Brian Lehrer: Well, The New York Times is reporting this morning, and listeners, I see some of you are already calling in. I'll give everybody the phone number 646 435 7280. 646 435 7280, or you can tweet @Brian Lehrer as we continue to cover the life and death situation in and around the Kabul airport with this apparent deadline in place of August 31st, by which time or after which they won't be able to get more people out. 646 435 7280. Today for Annie Pforzheimer, who was the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Kabul in 2017 and 2018 and acting deputy secretary of state for Afghanistan to March of 2019.

The New York Times is reporting this morning that the United States has rushed troops and diplomatic reinforcements to the Kabul airport to speed up visa processing for Afghans and that American commanders are negotiating daily, it uses that term, negotiating daily with their Taliban counterparts, the former insurgents they battled for nearly two decades, to ensure that evacuees can reach the airport [unintelligible 00:06:57] from The New York Times. As a former US diplomat in Kabul, can you give us insight into what negotiations with the Taliban might be like right now, over what specific asks, and with what leverage on the US side?

Annie Pforzheimer: Some of this, I will say, is so astonishing to me. When I served there, of course, this was a city that US forces and US diplomats could go into all parts of. It was never fully safe, but we did not have to negotiate with the Taliban to go to the airport on a road that is actually quite short. The airport is pretty much inside the city. I'm sure the negotiations will center on American citizens first and foremost, that's our responsibility, but also on those who are carrying papers that show that they have refuge with US and NATO allies.

Those, and of course, there's a whole category of Afghans that we are very concerned about who are human rights defenders, leading members of the media, some members of the former government and parliament who are all under threat, and that category, I honestly don't know what our leverage is with the Taliban. We have left a lot of people in grave danger.

Brian Lehrer: The Times also describes the scene at the airport like this, it says, "Thousands are waiting fearfully outside the airport gates where Taliban soldiers have attacked people with sticks and rifle butts. As Afghans clutching travel documents camped outside and made Taliban checkpoints and tangles of concertina wire, anxious crowds were pressed up against blast walls with women and children being hoisted into the arms of US soldiers on the other side." The article refers to a growing impatience with the state department's inability to process visas quickly. As a former state department official in and for Afghanistan, can you explain why the paperwork part is going this slowly?

Annie Pforzheimer: The paperwork for immigration processes and visas and refugee asylum cases are at the end of the day, part of the immigration system, are put in place to protect the United States. They are not put in place to be used rapidly in general terms. There are many, many security checks, for example, that Congress and the American people have insisted upon and those are being applied. In this case, though, what I think is missing is the imagination to find a way to protect people and also be as compliant as possible with our laws.

Brian Lehrer: Why weren't more Afghans who helped the US-led war effort allowed into this country earlier? We've been having this conversation at some level for years, actually, and certainly since the last months of the Trump administration and the whole Biden administration so far, they knew a Taliban takeover was coming eventually. So why wasn't this done much more robustly in the first place?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, I think I need to ask about the premise of part of your question, that it was known that a Taliban takeover was coming. I think for many years that would not have been what others predicted. It would not necessarily have been what I predicted, because we didn't know we were a factor in whether or not the Taliban had this advantage. I believe that had we had more strategic patience about a very minimal presence of US forces, that we would not be looking at some kind of takeover of the nature we saw.

In fact, most Afghans didn't want to leave their country. Becoming a refugee is a terrible thing. They are leaving their own families in danger. They might be able to bring their spouse and their children, but what about their brothers? What about their parents? People did not necessarily want to leave their country and they also wanted to build it. I have a close friend who is there and he is in danger. He said to me, "My patriotism, that's why I didn't leave," and now it's almost too late for him, but people didn't want to just leave Afghanistan. They worked with us in order to be able to stay and build their country.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I'm sure that's true in many cases, but we've also had conversations for years about some people who were interpreters or translators or other people in support roles for the US led coalition who were trying to get out and were very frustrated by the application process even a number of years ago. There are people in both categories, right?

Annie Pforzheimer: You're absolutely right. I think that I will take ownership that people like me who served, we saw this as a process that would just take the time it took and it was very long. It had many stages, something like 14, some of which happened within the state department, some of which happened with our law enforcement and intelligence colleagues. I think a process like that, by its nature, nobody takes enough ownership of, and so I think we did wrong by them.

Brian Lehrer: Very candid. Here is Julie calling in from Virginia Beach. She says she's a Navy wife. Julie, you're on WNYC with Annie Pforzheimer, former deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Kabul. Hi, Julie.

Julie: Hi, Brian. Good morning. Long time listener, first time caller. Good morning, Annie. I read that a refugee advocacy group filed a legal challenge to the state department arguing that the department has a statutory duty under the Afghan ally protection act to protect all the SIV applicants when they're in imminent danger. The group is demanding that the US evacuate all SIV program applicants regardless of their application status or how fast these folks could be processed at the airport.

My question is twofold. Could a legal challenge like this have real influence with the state department, if so, what kind? Then related, when we leave Afghanistan, what happens to all these applicants who are in this long processing backup. Are we required under the protection act to continue because of the statutory duty working on those applications and what happens if they make it out to another country? Are we processing them wherever they are?

Annie Pforzheimer: Thank you so much for that question. I would not be able to answer it on a legal level. On a moral level, I think we bear a great deal of responsibility to this category of people. We bear responsibility, in my opinion, to remain engaged in Afghanistan to try to leverage the small amount of influence we still may have to protect these and other vulnerable groups of people. We do have a special responsibility to them. It would require, I think you're all aware, again, a more active military posture.

I think it is a bitter irony that we were very much in the background up until the president's decision in April. We were not fighting. Our troops were there. They were providing enabling forces to the Afghans, but they were not in the front lines. Now, this kind of challenge might put American soldiers back into a frontline position, which is obviously not what anybody wanted.

Brian Lehrer: Julie, I hope that answers your question sufficiently. Please call us again. Richard on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hello, Richard.

Richard: How are you doing? I read an article by Nick Wadhams that says Afghan deal struck in Doha over months crashed after Ashraf Ghani fled. It appears what he's saying is that there was a deal for a two-week ceasefire, but when Ghani left the country, that it fell apart. If he didn't leave the country, maybe this chaos that is happening by the airports would not be happening.

Annie Pforzheimer: Oh, that's very interesting. I don't know and I am not aware of the source of that, but there are a lot of stories that still need to come out about the negotiations, what was said. I do think, though, that this scene of chaos, unfortunately, was somewhat going to happen, whether or not it was a two-week period or a one-day period, because the way that we had failed to prepare for this evacuation.

Brian Lehrer: Well, on that failure of preparation and how long term it was, you were deputy chief of mission in Kabul and acting assistant secretary of state for Afghanistan. When Trump was president, he is now claiming this would have gone better if he were still president, even though he too had a deadline of even earlier, May 1st, to get all Americans out. I want to play a clip of president Biden addressing that this week.

President Biden: There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1, there was no status quo of stability without American casually after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.

Brian Lehrer: What's your take on either the Biden or Trump sides of this? Is it just empty talk by these two rivals or do you think the Trump and Biden teams really had different ways that they were going to manage this end game?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, first of all, the lead on this issue in the Doha negotiation was the same person under both presidents. I don't think that there is a sharp distinction between how it has been handled. That's almost unique among the policies that the Biden administration has undertaken. This was definitely one of continuity. I would just say that what really strikes me is that once again the American people get offered a binary all or nothing choice, and this situation has always been so much more complex than that.

It was not a question of a sharp date certain withdrawal with no conditions or a return to active conflict. I do take issue with that. There were ways that we could have maintained the capability that we had, again, as an enabler for NATO forces and for Afghan forces, without putting our troops into what you would describe as an active war. I think that is what the American people didn't hear enough about. What were the other options?

Brian Lehrer: What were the other options?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, the other options were different levels of US forces, and [unintelligible 00:18:58] said, their enabling power, but also could this have been a timeline for withdrawal that tapered over a certain number of months? I think the option, of course, of taking off the table a date certain, would have been a very important one for this administration to do. The agreement that the Trump administration conducted in February of 2020 had conditionality on the Taliban.

The Taliban did not fulfill their side of the agreement, and yet the US seemed to find itself entirely bound to carry out its side of the agreement. The very first thing that could have happened is to withdraw the deadline out of anyone's conversation and say that we will withdraw our forces fully when we decide it is in our national interest.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that the populist we shouldn't be spending American dollars and shedding American blood to help other countries who are just getting over us, right, Trump wing, and the get the US military off the backs of the rest of the world, left, came together on this one in what resulted then in an all or nothing end to this as opposed to something in the middle?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, I think so. I think that's what somebody like me would say. That I believe that there was another path and that that option wasn't really offered. I think that the poll said, do you want America out of Afghanistan or do you want to end endless wars? I think that the poll numbers are very predictable, but if you say to people, "Do you want this to happen in a way that guarantees the least amount of instability or atrocities, and do you understand the importance of Afghanistan as to our security in a region where we have Iran, China, the central Asian states, and Pakistan?" A number of nuclear powers are bordering Afghanistan and now we have lost any influence in that region that we may ever have had.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what do you say to President Biden's contention this week? That if we had kept a small force in, and I know some people say 2,500 troops, not at much risk, maybe 5,000 at the most, would have stopped the Taliban, at least from taking the central government in Kabul. Biden said this week, that if we had kept them there past August 31st, if the Taliban wasn't convinced that the US was actually leaving, the Taliban would have stepped up the war effort and their Americans would have been under attack again. We would have been in, in effect, all out war again, and faced with the old choice of either having to pull out amid an imminent, immediate, real-time defeat, or sending in more troops yet again, and continuing that cycle. Do you think he's wrong?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, I think that the congressionally mandated study group that presented a report to president Biden in February of this year, which constituted the best thinkers and former military and former intelligence and nongovernmental organization thinkers on Afghanistan, they made the case that about 4,500 troops, which is less than we have right now securing the airport, should have remained until there was traction in the negotiations. At which point, then the drawdown of forces could really begin, again, on a timeline that we decided, and I don't take the contention that it's all or nothing. I really think that there were ways that we could have worked with our leverage and negotiated a far better outcome.

Brian Lehrer: How could that have been the case under what's at least the popular perception that the Taliban was just waiting us out and they waited us out for 20 years and that no negotiation really would have curtailed their power because they would have just played rope-a-dope for a little while and then continued their insurgency?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, if the Taliban were only at war against us, that might've been a contention, but it was never our war. When we left, it's not like the war ended. We were one factor, one player among many. It's a very complex set of players. What was Russia doing? What was Iran doing? Or Pakistan, what are the people of Afghanistan doing? As you say, they're going to start to protest, the Taliban has taken control, but can they keep it? I don't think that it's about whether we left that the Taliban will wait us out. They had to be part of a bigger system of agreements. That's what I said we should have used our leverage to make a better deal than the one we got.

Brian Lehrer: We have to take a one-minute break. When we come back, I want to ask you more about those protests, which are, I think, perhaps aren't getting the publicity they deserve. We think of the Taliban as maybe an all-powerful and all-encompassing, dictatorial, authoritarian force now, but yes, protests. We'll talk about that in a minute with Annie Pforzheimer, former acting deputy assistant secretary of state for Afghanistan and former deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Kabul, and more of your calls and tweets. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue to talk about the evacuation crisis in Afghanistan with Annie Pforzheimer, who was deputy chief of mission there in 2017 and 2018 for the US State Department and then became the acting deputy assistant secretary of state, I knew I'd get that title right eventually, for Afghanistan until March of 2019. She is now an associate with the center for strategic and international studies think tank. I want to go right to our next caller because I think Mike in Nyack is a former Marine who just helped get an interpreter out. Mike, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Mike: Hey, how are you, Brian? I've been listening a long time. Thanks for taking the call.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. What'd you got?

Mike: This wasn't me. This was not me at all. This was a group of people that I'm very close with and we worked very hard to get an interpreter out of Afghanistan, and we just provided him with resources, where to go, at what time and things like that from eyes we had on the ground. It was a nightmare. It was a complete nightmare. He just got in very early this morning and I feel like this is the first time I slept. It was one of the scariest thing I've ever done.

The lines that are happening at the gates right now, I don't understand what's happening. It's hard to establish order from what I've seen, but a lot of them are just young males or males without families up there who don't even have a status to come to the United States, but there's children being crushed on these lines. It's crazy. I voted for Biden. I campaigned 80 hours for Biden. I believe in him, but I think that this was just a nightmare. In my opinion, the only way it could be redeemed is if, or some redemption, is if he manages to stay long enough to get these people out.

I also want to give a shout out to [unintelligible 00:27:11] the attorneys who are working so hard and they're on the ground day and night. These people-- I helped out with one thing and I was just a part of a team doing this. These people are emotionally invested, pulling people out. It is crazy. In all this craziness, I saw, and the sadness, I saw that humanity of the side of it. People working hard, not asking questions to say, "Okay, where's your guy?"

That was tremendous, but overall, it's just hard to celebrate our guy getting out with his family, with everything else happening over there, because he's just one and it's just the only way I could see this being a redemption for the administration, and I hope it is, is if they put a solid effort to thin those line-outs, thin out those lines, get some order over there and get people out because in my opinion, this situation in Afghanistan, it's like the [unintelligible 00:28:14] Taliban is just a domestic violent father who is hanging out and chilling with the family until the dinner guests leave. Once those dinner guests are out the door, it's going to be game on.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you for your call. Thank you for your heart. Thank you for putting such a human face on part of this story. Please call us again. Annie Pforzheimer, I heard you trying to get in there. What are you thinking?

Annie Pforzheimer: Oh, I wasn't trying to get in. I was just agreeing what an amazingly apt way of putting all of it. I know some of the people who are working, who haven't slept in 10 days, who are with those organizations. I sit on calls sometimes with people who have-- they're talking about their lists, the endless types of forms, because there's not just one way of doing this. They are scared. They're getting calls. Of course, I am also getting Facebook personal messages from people who are terrified.

At the human level, I can think of close friends I have who are still there, who are moving house to house because they don't think that they're safe any place. They're not even safe to get to the airport to get out of there. They have nowhere to go. They are terrified. The Taliban is making sure that people understand that they will shoot first, that they will enact retribution against people in government positions. As the caller said, they are not to be trusted for their words. It is only going to be their actions and so far their actions have-- It is terrifying and no one should have to live under that.

I would just say on a very tangible level, everything that has been done to protect the airport, at this point, there is a deadline, yet another, in my opinion, mistake to put another deadline there, of August 31. That is, as long as the US government is going to secure the airport. To get out on August 31st, that means you start packing six days before. So there are just a couple of days left to move thousands of people through multiple checkpoints. I just don't see it. It's not a humane thing. So the first thing that should go is that deadline. We need to let things take the time they take. Move expeditiously but don't tie your hands.

Brian Lehrer: Are there any risks to extending that deadline? The Taliban obviously wants us out as soon as possible, but we had another guest this week who suggested that because it's in the Taliban's interest for all Americans to get out of there, they'll have more free reign when the Americans are gone, that they'll work with us at least as far as the American side of the evacuation is concerned.

Annie Pforzheimer: That is plausible. I do think, though, that that shouldn't be a good enough answer. The US interest is that the vulnerable populations that we and others have identified, human rights defenders, prominent members of the media, members of the parliament, members of the religious minority there, they should be allowed to depart as well. We have to do everything we can to help protect those people. Of course, even if this evacuation occurs successfully, what about the people left behind? If we narrow our scope to really the smallest level, I don't think we're doing right by our moral obligation and I think we would regret it.

Brian Lehrer: What is the most we can do? The Pentagon leaders at their news conference said that they really don't have the capability to do anything beyond the airport anymore. What do you think is the most we could do to get the most number of eligible Afghans out?

Annie Pforzheimer: On one level, could be an operational question I'm not qualified to answer but I think that it probably should not be something where we want our military to fight their way too into the city to get protection. It has to be a negotiation. We have very able diplomats on the ground. The former ambassador who I worked under, John Bass, has just been sent back to Afghanistan to work with his counterparts on making this evacuation go more smoothly.

It will have to be probably a negotiation with the people who are in power and who control the people with guns. There are four or more checkpoints of different groups of Taliban that people have to get through. Somebody has to work to stand those people down. Honestly, it's like a rehearsal for what happens when this evacuation phase is over. All of the vulnerable people who remain, how do we, as the international community, help protect them? That means more negotiations and more diplomacy.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, The New York Times is going pretty big with its reporting on the spreading protests by Afghans against the Taliban takeover. They're making it hard for the Taliban to begin to govern. Do you have a take on how widespread these protests are or their impact?

Annie Pforzheimer: Well, yesterday was Afghanistan's national day. One of the most horrifying on a non-violent level things that the Taliban has done is pull down the Afghan flag, put their own up. Afghans feel passionately about their flag. The protest yesterday very naturally took the form of people carrying their flag and stating that they're still there and they still believe in their country. I think the Taliban will enact reprisals. They already shot into crowds. It will be very difficult for Afghans to successfully protest in ways that we might see in other parts of the world.

However, I do think that they will have trouble governing. Up until this last week and a half when they swept into cities, they really were only governing in rural areas and less densely populated areas. They haven't run cities and they are unaware of all the complexities of the institutions that are now in place. I hope there'll be a small amount of compromise that is worked out without it having to turn violent because Afghans are sick of war and sick of violence.

Brian Lehrer: Annie Pforzheimer, former US diplomat in and for Afghanistan. Thank you for so much information and your perspective today. We really appreciate it.

Annie Pforzheimer: Thank you very much.

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