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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone and thanks to Bridget Burgen and Nancy Solomon for filling in last week. Here we are on the brink of two major deadlines that both arrive tomorrow, August 31st. The deadline for the US leaving Afghanistan and the deadline for extending the eviction moratorium in New York, now that the Supreme Court last week struck down the federal one. We'll talk about Afghanistan first. The deadline for the US military to leave Afghanistan is tomorrow. Is it a US deadline? A Taliban-enforced deadline, when we now rather keep evacuating people longer? That remains unclear.

The tragedy and danger of this withdrawal period just keeps getting more intense too. Today, the US intercepted missiles, they say, that someone fired at the airport yesterday, the US blew up a truck full of explosives, they say was loaded for an attack. There was, of course, the awful tragedy of Thursday's suicide bombing that killed 170 people. We keep hearing about the Americans. It was 170 people, including 13 US service members. By the way, that included two women, US Marine sergeants, now that women are allowed into combat roles. They were Marine Sergeant Nicole G., 23 years old from Roseville, California, and Marine Sergeant Johanni Rosario, 25, from Lawrence, Massachusetts. To think they were three years old and five years old when 9/11 happened, and even now, casualties of the war that it sparked.

We could take that as a starting point and personalize any of the 170 human beings, American or Afghan, or other women or children or men with their names and ages and stories, and bring ourselves to tears. From a US standpoint, it only reinforces the dilemma for how many years should Americans be put in harm's way for another country's nation building when our own national security is not really at stake.

With us now, a journalist who is grappling with that question, New York Times magazine writer at large and national geographic correspondent, Robert Draper. He's the author of the book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq. He has an article on the National Geographic site now, called What Afghanistan and the World Could Lose With the Taliban's Return. Robert Draper himself has been trying to get safe passage out of Afghanistan for a man who was Draper's driver during a reporting trip there, and his family. Robert, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Robert Draper: Thanks so much for having me back on, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with the personal? Would you tell us a little bit about your driver and his family and what their status is right now?

Robert Draper: Sure. My driver, Abdulla Sultani ferried me through Afghanistan during the month that I spent there reporting on a National Geographic story about poppy farmers in 2010. The fixer that I used for that month-long trip has long since left Afghanistan. Abdulla and his young family of three children, and a wife have been left behind and join the thousands of Afghans who have worked with Americans and others in the West, such as myself, often at great personal risk, who now are confronting even higher risks, but are confronting as well, great difficulties in getting out of the country.

I think that for a lot of people like Abdulla, there was a sense at first, I understand a little reluctance to leave. It's the only life that he and his family have ever known. He's got a passport, but I'm not sure he's ever used it before, and wanted to see how things would be, but the rapid manner in which the Taliban took over Afghanistan province by province over a course of days, not months, I think was alarming to many individuals. Abdulla like a lot of other Afghans now, has joined the clamor to get out. To be frank, it's difficult. We've got less than 48 hours left and I've pursued a few avenues, the State Department's aware of him. We'll just hope and pray for the best over the next couple of days.

Brian Lehrer: I'll hope and pray with you for him, but for someone like you who has this personal connection to one Afghan family trying to escape, but who also reports on the bigger picture, how would you put his situation into the bigger, desperate picture of who gets to get out by tomorrow and who gets left behind?

Robert Draper: I don't know the answer to that, to be candid, Brian. I'll just tell you that I have not put my thumb on the scale anymore than seeking or actually receiving. I didn't seek it out with the assistance of a particular congressional staff who then helped me get Abdulla and his family's names on to the manifest of the State Department. The State Department is aware of them as among the thousands who want out and recognize as well that Abdulla is among those who were helpful to American journalists and to many other journalists like myself over the last 10 or 15 or 20 years. That's the full extent of the favoritism that he's been shown and it's not going to be enough in and of itself to drag him across the finish line as it were.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you think his life is in danger from potential Taliban reprisals for having helped you and other Westerners?

Robert Draper: Well, difficult to quantify, but it's significant enough that as long as American troops are there, as long as the Taliban did not have a house by house stranglehold over Kabul and the other provinces, then he was relatively safe, though he had to take precautions. All of those safety measures that I've just mentioned are now absent. It does not take much in the way of an imagination to recognize, so what could be next for him?

Brian Lehrer: I heard a theory that might pertain to how much risk Abdulla and others are after the US leaves. I'm curious if you give any credence to this theory, these are not facts. This is one report plus theory that I heard that said, "It was interesting that at a Taliban press briefing the other day, they were not just speaking in an Afghan language, they were also speaking in Pakistani languages." This was a multiple language press conference. With the theory being that the Taliban at this point is mostly a function of the Pakistani government, I'm curious if you've heard that or give it any credibility.

Robert Draper: I've heard it and I do give it some credibility. I will try to resist the temptation to extrapolate from experiences in Iraq, where the concern immediately was that invading Iraq would only empower Iraq's next door neighbor, Iran. That does seem to be a similar dynamic in play here. We've also tended to think of the Taliban as the unique adversarial force in Afghanistan, and yet with the attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, that was instigated not by the Taliban, but rather by this ISIS group, ISIS-K, who happen to be sworn enemies of the Taliban were reminded that the world is a great deal more complicated than what's staring at us in the face.

Brian Lehrer: Part of the theory is that Pakistan, technically a US ally that also received USAID doesn't want to alienate the US too much because of its economic and other interests. The Taliban of this generation, if really under Pakistani control will have a gentler hand, if not gentle by our standards, gentler. Is that consistent with anything you know?

Robert Draper: Only in so far is, we have recognized over decades now, how complicated the geopolitics are over there and how complicated in turn our alliance with Pakistan is. It require the day after 9/11, then under Secretary of State, Rich Armitage meeting with heads of Pakistani state and basically saying, "You guys are in a world of hurt if you don't wash your hands at this immediate moment of any ties to Al Qaeda and in fact, join us in hunting Al Qaeda down."

It's also the case that when we raided the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, that we took great care to notify Pakistan only immediately after the fact, rather than beforehand, because we were aware that there were different elements within Pakistan who were friendly towards Al Qaeda. It's not a new thing at all, Brian, to see Pakistan as titular allies and even substantive allies in certain meaningful ways, while also recognizing that they can work against some of our strategic interests.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anything you want to say or ask about the Afghan withdrawal deadline tomorrow, for New York Times and National Geographic journalist, Robert Draper, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet your question or comment @BrianLehrer. Robert, what's your sense now of how much the terrorist attacks and threats of terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks are succeeding in reducing the number of Americans or the number of Afghans who can actually be evacuated by tomorrow?

Robert Draper: It's certainly has ratcheted up the urgency and perhaps, the desire of the remaining couple of hundred or so Americans who were there as well. Brian, at least from what I understand, I know those Americans who have insisted upon remaining there unless and until their Afghan assistants and aids and coworkers can be freighted out of Afghanistan with them.

I think now that what we face is not so much a question of desire and a question of urgency, but just a question of manpower, and time is obviously not on our side. This has been a very, very successful airlift thus far, and evacuation. We're just confronting numbers that we have not had to confront before. With the deadline now as imminent as it is, the question isn't so much again who wants out, but how many we can get out.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the success of the airlift to date. I do see and I want us to acknowledge that there is an emerging counter-narrative now to this constant drum beat that Biden messed up the withdrawal with these mass casualty consequences. This counter-narrative is that the Afghan president had urged Biden not to evacuate Afghans further in advance because that in and of itself would have signaled collapse of their authority to the Taliban and caused Kabul to fall.

Biden shows the best out of only bad options, but we didn't work out that well. Also, that the evacuation should by and large be seen as a major success because more than 100,000 people, that's the number I've seen, evacuated in these short weeks. A historic rescue rather than a historic failure despite the tragic losses that are also occurring. How much do you buy this emerging counter-narrative?

Robert Draper: I think that it's definitely a part of the greater story. It's a bitter pill to swallow just as the success of the Iraq surge was often pointed to by Republicans as a way for us to look at the whole Iraq saga as something that had a happy ending to it. There were families and friends of 3,000 lost Americans, to say nothing of all the casualties in Iraq, who don't necessarily cotton to that notion.

It's worth noting Brian, further to all of this, that two congressmen went over to Afghanistan, who were critics of president Biden's approach to all of this. Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts and Peter Meijer, a Republican from Michigan, they came away from that experience still not exactly assuaged by everything that they saw, but at least, recognizing that extending the withdrawal deadline was not a good idea and that we needed to get out as quickly as we could.

Biden has said that he owns what has taken place, that the buck stops with him, that he's not going to point fingers and say, "It's not my fault." I realize that there've been plenty who said that, well-- Simply saying that, "I, Joe Biden, I'm only playing out, I'm only ratifying the agreement that my predecessor in the White House drafted up and agreed to the previous year." That's insufficient. There's a lot that's been done not well, but it's also true as you've described it, Brian, that this was the best of a host of bad options, arguably.

Brian Lehrer: With journalist, Robert Draper from the New York Times and National Geographic, who has reported from Afghanistan and is author of the book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq. Carolyn, White Plains, you're on WNYC. Hi, Carol. Thank you for calling in.

Carol: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking the call. My question was, why did this not come up? That it could have been covert and nobody seems to ask it and would it have changed? Because it seems to me that had it been covert, it might've been even more successful. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: You're saying they could have done a covert operation to get 100,000 people out of the country, right?

Carol: Yes, because if the news didn't report it, how do we know?

Robert Draper: I'm not sure where you're placing the blame Carol, it's the media's responsibility, of course, to report anything that it learns about, and this wouldn't have been classified. Brian's question answers itself when he frames it as are you really saying that we would do a covert operation, which we move 100,00+ people out of Afghanistan, it's not realistic.

Further, the Taliban-- This was an experience by the way, that I recognized when I spent my second trip, my month-long trip. I'd done a previous one in Afghanistan in 2010, that the Taliban at that [inaudible 00:16:08] the ground melted away, pick your metaphor, but they had not disappeared altogether. They were still there. They still lived in the villages where the Afghan military and their families lived. They knew everything that was going on.

The notion that, particularly since president Trump had signed this agreement with the Taliban, that there would be a removal of American forces by the late spring, I believe, of 2021, something that Biden extended by a couple of months, that they wouldn't have eyes and ears everywhere attending to any and all movements. It's just not realistic to assume that somehow we could have pulled this off and nobody knowing about it. This was not like the Abbottabad raid where we had 15 special forces members with 2 or 3 helicopters, this is far more massive in scale.

Brian Lehrer: Carol, thank you for your call. John in Port Washington, you're on WNYC. Hi John. Do I have John in port Washington? Do I have the right name? Do I have the right town? Retired senior Sergeant? Oh, all right. We'll try to get back to John. I think he was going to ask an interesting question. Let's try Charles in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Charles.

Charles: Hey, Brian. Thank you so much. I want to ask your guest, why didn't people get out earlier when Trump made such a bad deal. Also, they had time when also, again, Biden also said he was going to get out. It just seems like they could have been filled some rush to get out. At the same time, Joe Biden was lied to by the government, as far as-- There's a lot of things that people just haven't looked at, the way I see it.

Brian Lehrer: Joe Biden was liked by who?

Charles: Lied to.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, lied to?

Charles: By the government that they were going to take care of themselves. I just think that if you're a professional and you've got a family there and you see such a deal go down like that, does your guest know of anybody that got out after Trump made his decision?

Robert Draper: The answer to that, I think very good question is no, I don't personally, which is not to say that others didn't. I do think that two or three things, and you can argue that these are failures of the imagination, but one, I think that there were a lot of people who rightly or wrongly expected that the Taliban would not move as swiftly as they did and not with the kind of almost lethal force that they did in so many of these provinces. After all, we should be reminded that the US forces left behind an Afghan military fighting force that was four times the fighting strength of the Taliban, in sheer numbers. Now all of this is worth pondering because it was my experience and I've alluded to this a few minutes beforehand that the Taliban was where the Afghan military lived.

The question always was worth asking, what would the Afghan military be fighting for and for whom and against what odds? I heard this over and over during my time in Afghanistan, not just from the Taliban when I'd speak to them, but also to the villagers and members of the Afghan Military. They'd say, "You guys have an end date. Everybody knows that. We know you're not going to be here forever. The Taliban has time on its side, and they're fully expecting to be here to watch you all go away. We recognize that as well, and they're the devil that we know are the devil who will be here with us."

I think the most disheartening thing about this whole episode has also been probably the most predictable, which is that this immense fighting force that we have invested so much time and money in helping to stand up was really only as resilient as our presence there. The moment we began to back away, at that very moment, the Afghan Military Forces, like tribal leaders, began to cut deals with the Taliban, and simply cease to exist, at least, as a resistance to the Taliban.

Brian Lehrer: Charles, thank you for your call. In a minute, after a break, we'll get to a question that I want to ask about whether it's even fair to blame the Afghan Military for falling apart, fading away, melting away, all these terms that that people are using, because I'm seeing an emerging counter-narrative to that. Before we get to that, since the caller raised Trump, with the Republicans now dumping on Biden as failing here, I also read that because Donald Trump had set withdrawal terms so favorable to the Taliban, the Taliban actually endorsed Trump for re-election last year, thinking he would be weaker on them than Biden, did you know about that?

Robert Draper: I didn't know it, but it's completely unsurprising. I mean, after all, Trump was palpably wanting to get America out of Afghanistan. He fought constantly with his generals about it, at a certain point in 2017, 2018, when he ultimately conceded that, "Okay, we need to keep them there for a while," it was with no great relish on his part. The Taliban knew they had an ally in Donald Trump in the sense that Trump wanted to get out of there as quickly as they could. Despite what republicans are saying, when you [unintelligible 00:22:22] that kind of attitude, you're not dealing from a position of strength, and Trump indeed was not dealing from a position of strength.

By contrast, Joe Biden is someone who, frankly, is closer to a neoconservative than Donald Trump is in his willingness to use military force. He voted, after all, for the war in Iraq. He had been a proponent of the rescue mission of Kosovo during the atrocities that were committed in the late 1990s by Serbia. While I think that Vice President Joe Biden, and now President Joe Biden took a lot of lessons from the misadventure in Iraq, the Taliban had every reason to believe that Biden would be harder on them, a Biden administration would than a Trump administration. The fact that they ultimately supported Donald Trump is not surprising.

Brian Lehrer: I just fact checked. As you were giving that answer, I googled Taliban endorsed Trump, and sure enough, here's a CBS News story from October 11th last year, so at the height of the election campaign. It says, "President Trump's re-election bid received a vote of support Friday," that Friday, "From an entity most in his party would reject, the Taliban. Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid told CBS News in a phone interview. We believe that Trump is going to win the upcoming election because he has proved himself a politician who accomplished all the major promises he has made to the American people. Although he might have missed some small things, but did accomplish the bigger promises. It is possible that the US people who experienced deceptions in the past will once again trust Trump for his decisive action."

Then it goes on, oh gosh, this really goes on. "Other politicians including Biden, chant unrealistic slogans. Some other groups which are smaller in size, but are involved in the military business, including weapons manufacturing companies, owners, and others who somehow get the benefit of war extension, they might be against Trump and support Biden, but their numbers among voters is low." Here's the [unintelligible 00:24:37] sentence, "We hope he will win the election and wind up US Military presence in Afghanistan." So that wasn't even just an out the side of his mouth, under his breath remark, that was a full throated multi-paragraph Taliban endorsement of Donald Trump.

Robert Draper: Well, and you have to assume, Brian, that from the Taliban's perspective, it is after all, President Trump who cut the deal with the Taliban who said President Obama, despite his distaste for having sustained military presence in Afghanistan, that Trump said, "I want out of the forever wars. I want America to recede from places like this. I want to take care of America first." The Taliban, by contrast, had every reason to believe that President Joe Biden might reverse that decision. Now what they failed to recognize was, again, how unsettled Joe Biden was by our protracted presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and how he too wanted out. I think that they had some reason to question that, and every reason to believe that the guy that they sent them to cut the deal with would follow through on the deal.

Brian Lehrer: Also, on the alternative scenario, we can't prove it because it didn't happen. Can you imagine if Trump was the one doing the evacuation, would he be trying as hard to get tens of thousands, even 100,000 Afghans out of the country as refugees? Wasn't part of the promise of the Trump administration to reject Muslim refugees? Imagine the position he would be in and what position he would actually take with respect to that.

Robert Draper: Actually, further to what your listener had asked before about why didn't some of these guys leave earlier? It's been reported that then President Trump's senior adviser, Stephen Miller, in a lot of ways made it difficult, if not impossible, for many to do so. That he was already jimmying around, Miller was, with provisions that would make it difficult for Afghan interpreters and the likes to come into the United States. The truth is Donald Trump was intellectually honest throughout his presidency in the sense that he made it clear, "We don't want Afghans, we don't want Muslims in our country." He said as much and Stephen Miller basically said so explicitly. The pull out of Americans from Afghanistan, however expeditious it might have been, would almost certainly have under the Trump administration, come at the expense of Afghan allies of ours.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we'll continue in a minute with journalist Robert Draper. We'll get to that counter-narrative on the "melting away" of the Afghan Army. Some of the numbers in this counter-narrative will probably shock you, listeners. I'll also ask Robert Draper his take on who's really setting the deadline tomorrow, the US or the Taliban and if it can be extended. John in Port Washington, we'll try you again with your call. Alamm in Palisades Park, we see you. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue on this day before the US Afghanistan withdrawal deadline with journalist Robert Draper who writes for the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. His book is called To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq, and his newest National Geographic article on their site now is called What Afghanistan and the World Could Lose With the Taliban's Return. Let's give John in Port Washington another shot. John, do we have you now?

John: Hello, you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Now we hear you. Hi there. I hear you. Do you hear me? Good. Go ahead.

John: I hear you. I'm a retired Senior Master Sergeant and my question is, how did our intelligence fail to realize the Afghan Army would not fight? It doesn't make any sense. We supplied them with all the equipment in the world. We trained them for years, and they just collapsed. Nobody knew? Was there any whistleblowers out there saying, "Hey, these guys ain't going to fight"? Or were they set up? We don't protect our whistleblowers. We persecute them. Maybe that's why nobody said, "Hey, general. These guys ain't going to do nothing.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you. This is one of the premises of your new article on National Geographic, right? That the Biden administration should have known that something like that would happen.

Robert Draper: Yes. I don't know if John served in Afghanistan, I thank him for his service regardless, but to me, again, it was hiding in plain sight that the Afghan Army wasn't going to fight for the sake of fighting. When you have in 2020, the Trump administration negotiating a pull-up with the Taliban and excluding the Afghan government. It goes to show you how the low esteem in which the people doing the negotiating are holding the Afghan government. With that message being sent, it begs the question. Why stand up and fight if you're the Afghan army, particularly when the Taliban is making approaches to you, finding a way to-- These guys among other things, members of the Afghan army, they want a paycheck.

If the Taliban is saying, we'll incorporate you into our government, we'll incorporate you into our military. You'll be co-leaders of the communities in various provinces, and by the way, we're the only game in town and the Afghan government has been given short shrift by the previous administration, then really, what message are you supposed to receive from all of that? One of the more disconcerting things about my experience in Afghanistan was-- Two experiences, I should say.

One, I spent about a couple of weeks there doing a story on then president Hamid Karzai and the second was this month-long experience. In both cases, it was evident that there were all these advances that had markedly taken place, that one should not turn up when it [unintelligible 00:31:27], particularly when it comes to social advances for women and girls, but the economic advances were largely in place because just gusher of foreign aid, whether through the government or through NGOs to Afghanistan.

I remember interviewing this guy who was one of the heads of the big market that NGOs had helped stand up in Jalalabad, the capital of the Nangarhar Province. This guy said to me, "Look, everything that you're seeing, all these advances that have been made have been made despite the fact that we've been through wars for about 20 years, and owing to the fact that we've been through wars for as long as we have, it's going to take at least 80 years or so before we can stand up on our own."

I remember thinking at the time, "Whoa, 80 years? That it's unsustainable all the way around." When it becomes clear that the public has had enough, and by the way though, what has taken place certainly feeds into the narratives of people who didn't like Joe Biden to begin with, that he's somehow incompetent or feckless or whatever else, by and large, the decision to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan is an overwhelmingly popular one in America.

If Afghanistan wasn't on an economic level of Potemkin village, then it certainly was unsettling we're close enough to one, including not only its economic institutions, but also its military ones that the moment we left, they would be looking around saying, "Who's going to help us?" If the Taliban is basically assuring them that, "You can carry on with some of these activities, but in any event, we're the only ones that you have to deal with," then they're not left with much recourse.

Brian Lehrer: So many of my listeners don't understand, and I don't understand some of the math there. For one thing, why would it take 80 years? 80 years. When I read that number in your article, which you just cited, it blew my mind. 80 years to effectively stand up a country's own military when they have the personnel 300,000 or whatever the real number was and the Afghan military, it's a big military, 80 years to leave them as independent? The other number, it was just 2,500 American troops who were left. How do they have the leverage against the Taliban that the 300,000 Afghans don't have?

Brian Lehrer: All right. To the easier statistic, the second one that you're saying, the 2,500 troops, I suppose that if you're the Taliban, the view is, look if we remain in a compliant state, those 2,500 troops will go down to zero. If we're continuing to fight, then there was a possibility that the US government will say, "To hell with this, we don't want to fight anymore. Let's pull our troops out," but there also the possibility of particularly, under a Biden administration that will say, "The Taliban is now showing a level of aggression that will make us rethink our posture of pulling out." The 2,500 represented more than just the sheer numbers of 2,500 military troops. They represented the potential for us. They represented an agreement that we were securing the country, that we were securing the advances that we had made and the Taliban took due notice of that.

Now, as for the 80-year thing, obviously this director was pulling this number out of thin air, but I think what he was essentially saying to me was, "This is a multi-generational thing." You cannot expect for a country that has been for centuries and centuries being governed really, through tribal organization, much more than what we think of by modern governmental institutions. If there's anything in the way of participatory democracy, we'll really stay in the bloodstream. This is something that's going to require a sustainably lived experience. It will require whole generations having experienced and having endorsed it. Unless and until that happens, then it's just a theoretical concept.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Three or four generations by that math. This is what I tease before the break, about why we may be being unfair to the Afghan military. One commentary that I saw last week, by the way, what did I do on my summer vacation? I watched more Afghanistan coverage than I could have watched if I was working. I also watched White Lotus on HBO, which is incredible, but that's another show. One commentary that I saw last week while I couldn't take my eyes off the Afghanistan story, really struck me about the unfairness of some of this reporting about the Afghan soldiers being cowardly or weak.

The number of Americans killed in the 20 years of the war has been 2,300 and something. Now, every one of those 2,300+ lives is precious and should not be minimized in any way, but 2,360 something, thereabout. The number of Afghan soldiers and police killed as of April has been more than 66,000, according to the article I read. That's more Afghans killed in this war than Americans killed in the Vietnam war. They've taken on the bravery and the ultimate sacrifices of war in massive numbers, and all we talk about in the US seems to be from a US standpoint, this term, they melted away. I'm curious how you see this.

Robert Draper: Oh, I think that's right. Of course, as lamentable, as a 66,000 casualties among Afghan military troops is, it's [inaudible 00:37:29] was the plan. It was always the plan for the Afghan Military Forces to be not just rear-guard action, but to be the guys who were defending their country while we receded from a frontline approach to being military advisers as it were. The question though was just, what in the end would they be fighting for them? I do think in the early years, the Afghan army was very, very suspect.

I remember in 2006 going to visit some and they were, to put it bluntly, comical but that really has changed over the years. To what John was saying, your listener, a few minutes ago, to his observation. I think that our military intelligence tended to look more at the inch-wise progress of the Afghan military, just in terms of sheer fighting capabilities and failed to look at its motivations, where its allegiances might lie.

I'm not suggesting for a second that their allegiances war to the Taliban, that somehow, the Afghan military was always under their control, but that the Taliban is not a foreign force. Taliban is homegrown just like they are, and has remained there in one form or another throughout our 20 something [inaudible 00:39:04].

It just should not be viewed as so unnatural and unfathomable a proposition that there would be these Sub rosa conversations between Afghan military leaders and the Taliban. It is a really good question as to how our intelligence failed to pick that up but it is hardly the major failure of intelligence that the IC is known for over the last 20 or so years.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in before when run out of time. Allam in Palisades Park, you're on WNYC with journalist Robert Draper. Hi, Allam.

Allam: Good morning, gentlemen. It's interesting and there's multi-levels of heartbreak to this story. I remember, as a college student, I protested against the war and here I am all approaching 40 and knowing that my children will live in the shadows of however this plays out. My question to your guest today is, what are the ripple effects that you see to the immediate region? Also, extending a little further geographically, what are the implications to the Middle East? Then also, excuse me, I know this is a multitiered question, what are the ripple effects that my children will see? Where the generations of the Americans to come, how are they going to live this scenario out? I'm going to take your response off the air. Thank you, gentlemnen.

Brian Lehrer: Allam, thank you so much for your call. Okay you can predict that the consequences for multiple generations in the future, can't you?

Robert Draper: Easily. Let me just address the parts that I am able to do. We've already talked about the interplay between the Pakistan government and the Taliban and it's clear that that's going to continue to present complications and challenges for us. It's important for your listener to know and for others to know that the principal reason for us to go into Afghanistan after 9/11 was to chase down Al-Qaeda, who had committed the attacks on September the 11th, and further to rout out the Taliban who have harbored Al-Qaeda.

Then, what we intended to do after that was hold on to Afghanistan to make sure that it would no longer become the refuge for Al-Qaeda. Mission accomplished more or less, but what's happened along the way is that Al-Qaeda and other such Islamic extremist groups have seized to rely on Afghanistan and then moved on to other territories. As I mentioned in the National Geographic piece that you were referencing earlier, Brian. I did a story in 2018 in Niger, which is a very tough neighborhood surrounded now by four countries that all are hosted bodies and refuges or Islamic Extremist groups, so Africa has become a new refuge.

The Middle East has never stopped in being one, and they're a part of South Asia as well. Part of Joe Biden's strategic decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was that it no longer is the case that no other country will take in these Islamic extremist groups except Afghanistan and thus, it's of paramount interest to us to [inaudible 00:42:34] country. Now, the frontier and the war on terror has definitely shifted and we have to make our accommodations to that.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, in our last minute. Is tomorrow's deadline to end the airlift firm, as far as you can tell and if so, by whose decree, America's or the Taliban's?

Robert Draper: I'm not sure I have a straightforward answer to that Brian because I think that the Biden administration is weighing whether tomorrow's deadline is realistic to accomplish what they wish to accomplish, which is to get out every American who wants out and to get out as many of our Afghan colleagues as they can. If Biden decides on the fly to extend that deadline by a couple of days or so, is he going to get violent pushback from the Taliban,

I hate to predict this and be proved wrong, but I suspect not. I suspect that it's in the Taliban's interest as well for us to succeed and pull out Americans, they don't necessarily want to see thousands upon thousands of Afghans leaving as have been attested to, I saw the violent pushbacks from the Taliban. Just my way of saying that I think that it was originally the Biden administration's deadline, the Taliban has made as if they intend to hold us to that deadline, but it would not stun me to learn if there was some 11th-hour flexibility that both sides could agree to.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, we'll keep following it on the show and on the station. Journalist Robert Draper has laid his National Geographic article as What Afghanistan and the World Could Lose With the Taliban's Return. His latest book is, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq. Robert, thank you so much.

Robert Draper: My pleasure, Brian.

 

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