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SB and I The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Hey, folks, welcome to episode two hundred and seventy five of The
Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. Our guest on tonight's show is
Dante Paradiso. He is the current director for East African Affairs at the State
Department. He is a career Foreign Service officer. He's the author of The
Embassy, which we hope you guys will take a look at. He had
many different assignments, many different travels around the world, including some hot spots
in Africa and as well as Afghanistan. We're excited to talk to him tonight.
First up, top, do you want to give your disclaimer? Yeah,
just as a current serving Foreign Service officer, I have to say the
views I expressed are my own and not necessarily those of the United States Government
or the United States Department of State. Thank you, And I just want
to tell people before we get started. If you want, you can check
out our Patreon the links down the description. Consider supporting the team house keeping
this show going. And if you sign up for five bucks a month,
you get all of these episodes ad free, both the video and the podcast.
And we really appreciate you guys supporting us. So, you know,
you're the first State Department guy we've had on the show. We've talked a
lot on here about you know, they say there's the three options. There's
military action, there's covert action, and then there's diplomacy. We haven't really
talked about the diplomacy so much, but I wanted to just kind of,
like, before we get into your personal story, kick off the conversation a
bit because I was thinking as I was I was reading in Foreign Affairs this
week about like why this matters, Why diplomacy matters? And in this article,
the authors write, China, in contrast with the United States, invests
and the diplomatic resource is necessary to market its initiatives, speaking of like the
Belton Road initiative and things like that. It has more embassies and representative offices
around the globe than any other country, and Chinese diplomats frequently speak at conferences
and publish a stream of articles about China's various initiatives in local news outlets.
So we talk a lot about great power, competition and these other buzzwords.
Nowadays a new era of strategic competition diplomatically, Why does it matter that China
is out diplomating US. Yeah, it's a great question to start with.
The core of diplomacy is the management of relations between countries. Right, you
can't go to another country, you can't trade with another country, you can't
conduct operations through another country, you can't fly over another country without agreement of
that country. I think a lot of folks, you know, we were
talking offline about global war and terror, there was a lot of freedom of
movement within other countries that there was always tension about sovereignty, but there was
a question of how sovereign some of these entities were. In an error of
strategic competition, sovereignty is at a premium, and so if you look at
how integrated the world is, it's basically impossible to get along without the diplomatic
aspect because you're not doing military solutions. For whether you get the component parts
to make your iPhone through a series of countries into a manufacturing base that then
sells back to the United States. The global flow of oil goes from refinery
processes to export into plastics. That whole network is based on agreements between nations
on how to treat the flow of goods, services, and people. So
it's kind of a critical component to our everyday life that we don't see because
so much of what America is and is built on was built out of diplomatic
relations. I mean, you take French support for US in the Revolutionary War.
It goes back to that. But that's sort of the core of diplomacy
is managing how we interact as America with other states, and if we fall
behind China, if they have more embassies, more consulates. I don't mean
to just put an arbitrary number on it, but what I mean is if
they're conducting more diplomacy and building more relationships than we are, does that affect
us from a security standpoint an economic standpoint? Well, you know, I'd
say economic and security are completely tied together. But you know, just to
give a very very simple example, you know, Rarer, it's critical minerals,
things that are minded that go into the technology that we're relying on to
put on this show that we use in our phones, in our pockets.
If supply chains get locked up by one country, it doesn't have to be
China, it could be any country. If that supply chain gets locked up
and we haven't paid attention to it because we haven't put resources into the diplomatic
relations that would keep that supply chain open for us, what is that going
to do. It's going to have an effect on whether the availability of that
technology for us, which directly affects our lives, our economy, and it'll
do things like drive inflation, right because things are harder to get at.
So when we take a country like China that is in vesting in building up
ties around the world, if we were to scale back significantly, it would
have knock on effects for US. So I think that's you know, when
you're talking strategic competition, it's not always a zero sum game. Diplomacy fundamentally
is about how to manage the relationship. You try to get to cooperation,
but when you're talking strategic competition there is a bit of that zero sum factor
that comes in. Fascinating. Yeah, so Dante, thank you first off
for that, for that answer. But to back up a little bit,
I want to pick up a little bit with your story, and I want
you to literally start at the beginning if you could, because I was convinced
that your name is a pen name. I was like, where did Dante
Paradiso come from? Who were you born to, where did you grow up?
And how did that take you eventually towards governmental service? Yeah, I
don't know. I don't know where the government came into that, you know,
I'm a classic New Yorker Irish Italian. Uh. You know, my
my mom's side of the family was Staten Island through Brooklyn, via Ireland.
My dad's side of the family was Italian, Southern Italian Bronx classic New York
love story. They met in the stacks at the Columbia University and the sort
of school of General ad not the not the she she part of the School
General Studies, right, yeah, exactly, they were. They were working
in the stacks. They met there. It was the late sixties. Said
and here I am. I started, uh started my first steps, you
know in h Up in that area, you know, steps of Saint John's
and things like that. It got pulled out of you know, the States.
They were a little bit Bohemian. My my my mother's father, so
my grandfather was an illustrator. He illustrated classics, illustrated comics, John Wayne
comics. He did pulp comics in the fifties. But back in those days
that was a poor thing to do, Like you didn't make a lot of
money. You just turn this stuff out and uh, but you know,
there was a lot of artistry in the family. Uh. Come from a
lineage of artists and filmmakers, and uh, they they decamped. My parents
decamped from New York to uh, Spain. If you go back to the
early seventies, this is Franco So this is fascist Spain. Uh and uh
and uh they stayed there a couple of years and didn't didn't quite work out
as artists, you know. Uh. Uh they came back and uh.
You know, I grew up in mostly in Connecticut, uh, and then
returned to the city for high school. Uh. And over that time,
you know, uh, I watched a lot of film. Back in the
day, we didn't have the access to you know, our kids have today
to everything, so you know, but that started to influence me. Film
and literature started to influence me about getting interested in the world and overseas things.
And then, as in New Yorker, you're just all day, we're
confronted with opinions, so you got to develop some and you get you interested
in the rest of the world. So that's I think sort of where the
origins of my international interests started. And so what was the next step after
high school? I mean, you presumably go to college and some interest in
foreign affairs. Yeah, it's it really I had kind of wanted to be
a journalist. I had gotten interested in high school in journalism. I'd read
a lot of you know, literature, you know, folks like Steinbeck or
big influences on me. And then, you know, a child of the
seventies and the eighties, I also grew up on a lot of the Great
War films like Apocalypse. Now, you know, these are like seminal films,
and so you you kind of want to challenge yourself physically and mentally,
and you also want to see the world and you want to participate in something
that's bigger than yourself. You know. I really thought journalism would be a
great way to do that. I took a course when I was at Yale.
They had these seminars that you could take, and they brought in a
guy who was a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor who had published a book
on Afghanistan, but this was Soviet Afghanistan. He'd gone in through Peshawar and
describe what that was like. His name is EDG. Gerr Day, you
know, tremendous reporter. Still does stuff at a Geneva. He's got a
little company called Global Geneva that still talks global issues and serious journalism, you
know, trying to tell you what's going on is not politicized, this is
sort of the story. So he was co teaching this with a guy who
had worked as a UN lawyer. And this was ninety one, and you
know, the Cold War was ending, and what he was trying to do
now with the withdrawal all of the Soviets from Afghanistan, it was a turbulent
time. They were trying to do was start a d mining effort through the
United Nations. And he was a lawyer and he was trying essentially to get
the Soviets to cough up maps of where they put the minds so that you
could actually protect civilians. And I started to see that there were maybe other
avenues to go down rather than just journalism. We also didn't have any money
as a family. So you know, when I saw a lot of successful
journalists, I would I would talk to them. I would say, how'd
you become a journalist? Oh? You know, I was a stringer.
It's like, how'd you pay the rent while you were stringing? Because people
could do that, you would you would string for a while. You know,
you'd write a few articles. People in the community would get to know
you, they'd maybe get you picked up by an organization. But you know,
I mean I didn't have any money to go to a place to strength.
I also, you know, it was I had the James Woods model
in my mind from you know, Salvador. If you guys ever saw that
movie from the from this early eighties, I don't think it's a great film.
Yeah, but you know that was James when he was on the left,
not on the right, So you know, different James Woods back then.
But so I started to get interested in, as you know, is
there a way through law that you could do something. But so I graduated
Yale and was kicking around. I you know, wasn't quite sure what to
do. And I got called out by a friend of mine to build trails
in northern California on a trail crew for at risk youth. The crew was
for at risk youth, and I went out there. You know, I
took a friend of mine from from Yale, also one of my one of
my old roommates. He came out too. So we spent a year doing
that, and from that I joined Peace Corps. Interesting story though, because
I had wanted to join a navy and i'd add an injury. And it
was sort of between this program and the Navy, and they the Navy came
back and they you know, I took the ASVAB test and they were like,
man, you you scored really well. We're gonna put you on the
nuclear program. And I said, I'm like terrible at math. I don't
know what. I don't know what happened, but apparently I sent them too
many X rays to prove that the leg was good, so they need more
time. And I got the other offer, and I just went out and
did the trail crew, you know. So and then later I had developed
a little bit of respiratory condition, so that was that path was foreclosed to
me. So anyway, I ended up in Peace Corps coming out of that
other thing, and that was my first real introduction to embassies. I didn't
know much about what embassies did, but what what embassies do in places.
I went to Kenya and a lot of peace corps you get kind of dirty
and unshowered over the over the years. And some embassy communities are real nice
and they may open their houses to the Peace Corps. And so, you
know, when you go into Nairobi, some people would go and stay with
an embassy family and they would have a weekend that was you know, with
a clean bed and a shower and things like that. I didn't actually have
those relationships, but I started to talk to people who were in the embassy
community and learn a little bit about what an embassy does. And I learned
things like, we have jobs that you report on the politics of a country,
So it's kind of like being a journalist, but for the government feed
that information back that determines what are policy is going to be to the country,
but you're living over there. And I got interested in that, and
so it took a couple more details, and I came back and I went
still didn't have any money. You know, volunteer service doesn't really get you
at nor does a minimum wage work for a trail call, but I highly
recommend that kind of work. By the way, it was fantastic time building
trails in the Redwoods. But didn't have any money. And you know,
my set of folks were like, so law school is where you end up,
And I ended up in law. A lot of my law school colleagues,
of course, you know sort of you know, we're in it for
the money. I was in the sort of you know, idealistic camp.
I guess still sort of hoping to do international law, and I would talk
to people, how do you do how'd you do international law? And there
was this lawyer who was a prosecutor, Pierre Prospery became a big name prosecutor
in l A. He was I think he had Haitian roots, so he
spoke some French. And when the International Criminal Tribunals came for Rwanda, they
were looking for an American prosecutor because we had some funding relationship with it,
and so he ends up out there. I said, you know, how
do you get these jobs? I just fell into it. I don't know
how I'm going to fall into that job. He had a unique skill set.
There was a genocide, it happened in a Francophone place, and you
end up with the skill set that matches. So but like a lot of
us, I'm a nine to eleven product. So before nine to eleven,
I interned with the State Department in Tanzania and that was ninety eight. So
they sent me over for the summer to be a reporting officer as an intern,
and that was the year that the bombing happened, and so I was
in the bombing, came back, still needed money, so I took the
corporate law job, and then I'm up in Boston the morning those planes would
have flown right past my office. I had an office on the twenty seventh
floor, and I was on the call with the client. And I'll never
forget it because the first plane hit and I assumed it was like one of
these little biplane things. And you know, because of the ninety three bombing
that everybody forgets in the World Trade Center, I thought it was I immediately
assumed it was a bombing. Nobody else does, right, but you know,
I kind of just assumed this was a sort of bombing. I called
a friend of mine. I was like, yeah, they tried again.
He was in New York. He hadn't even heard anything. It was the
first he'd heard of it. I go back on with the client. The
client is asking me about the minutia of board minutes, and somebody runs in
and says, you know, the tower is on fire, like this is
It was a This was a jet plane that went into the tower. And
so I said, look, this is New York. I'm a New Yorker.
I'm up there in Boston but the guy is up in New Hampshire,
and I said, I gotta I gotta go, and he goes, you'll
call me back, I'll go. I gotta go. So so I went.
I watched with everybody else the second tower fall, and I'll never forget
that either, because the newscaster on the feed that I was watching did not
realize the second the towers were collapsing. They were just reporting as the towers
are sort of on fire. They were just they just didn't know. And
then, of course, because we were in a high rise, you know,
they we evacuated the building, walked home. Everybody's out on the streets
just wandering around in a daze, kind of crazy. And then, because
it's the corporate world, within a few days, we're back at work and
it is you don't even know. I mean, everybody's talking about it.
It's a thing. But it's back to you know, meet the client deadlines,
and the clients are focused on a whole bunch of other things. They're
focused on corporate governance issues, bankruptcy issues, finance issues. The next mezzanine
round of a financing for a joint venture, is it going to be affected
by the events that are happening, you know, does this effect our you
know, the funding that's coming in, you know, because there's some turbulence
in the markets. I said, okay, I'm working away. And then
we go into Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden. And
you know, this is you know, two thousand and one now, and
I'm a year year and a half in and I'm walking around the luffer.
But I'm just sort of I mean, I really enjoyed the partners I worked
with. There were some terrific people there. But I would poke my head
in I go, you know where at war. People would look at me
like you're a little different, and I'm like you had this feeling like,
okay, this is a there's something larger going on here. It's my city
that's affected. Afghanistan is something that I'd been tracking, you know, all
the way back from you know, high school. I think we all remember
that National Geographic cover with the girl with the green eyes, you know,
I mean that that thing was all seered into us. Then I'd studied the
topic, and colleges I discussed, and so I just had a sense that
you know, you got to join and a lot of other people, you
know, joined the military at that time. You know, for me,
I ended up with an offer from from the Foreign Service, and so I
said, okay, I'm taking that and headed off to you know, see
what I can contribute. Now. The Foreign Service they don't you know,
they'll say, okay, you're you're coming in. You're going to go to
Afghanistan, right, But that's that's sort of how I got in into the
career. Can weind rewind it a little bit because you you were involved in
a bombing and then and and I'd love to hear about short experience if you
don't mind talking. No, absolutely, So this is August seventh, nineteen
ninety eight. Dara Salaam was a you know, bustling but relatively sleepy,
dusty port town. I had just gotten back from a trip to Arusha to
visit the International Criminal Court where I was kind of reporting on the activities there
so we could kind of see where our investment uh. And they again,
they were prosecuting folks that were responsible for the genocide and kind of wanted to
see how that effort was going. And this is in northern Tanzania, at
the base of kiliman Jarro, and it was having a great summer. Again.
I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, so I knew the
region had a little opportunity to go on safari. It's always great, you
know. And I get back and we're in a morning staff meeting during the
summer, particularly at embassies that are smaller in their footprint. You know,
not every embassy is Embassy Beijing with you know, a thousand people working there.
You know, some of our African embassies may have you know, fifteen
twenty officers. The summer is generally transfer season, so you have a lot
of interns, temporary duty people out there, very small staff. So they
were about ten or eleven of us in the charge's office. I mentioned charge
is the acting ambassador. We hadn't had ambassador appointed yet, or had the
ambassador hadn't arrived at post yet. The charge was John Lang and just a
regular morning staff meeting to go over you know, where are we with development
assistance today? That kind of thing, you know, who's in, who's
out of the office, and we hear a large boom is the best way
I can describe it. And then there was a strange, pressurized feeling and
I was sitting right next to the charge on a couch just like yours,
and I slouch, which is good because normally if I was standing up,
the entire window structure went over us and hit the back wall of the office.
And folks were sitting sort of in an L shape like me, and
they were covered with debris. But if you'd been standing, if any of
us have been standing in front of that window, somebody would have been decapitated.
So people were sort of cut up in shock, kind of wondering and
it's dar As Salam, What what's going to happen in Daras Salaam? You
know, you had the trouble in the east, out in Goma where you're
talking about, you know, the Rwandans and the Eastern DRC issue with the
Hutus and the Tutsis are still you know, fighting. This is ninety eight,
right, so you're you're doing you know, I mean, there's still
still fighting there. So was it something related to that? Could it have
been some sort of you know, honestly, gas explosion? Right, That's
that's more what you're thinking. You're not thinking you're going to be the epicenter
of a of a terrorist attack. It just but the shape of the embassy
was such that the bomb went off on a corner and blew out the whole
corner. We were sort of tucked around in a second wing of the embassy,
so we sort of got the blast came around. It had come in
under a water truck, water delivery truck. Massive, massive hole. So
we didn't know any of this though. We start making our way out.
We go one direction and we decide, okay, we got to there seemed
to be some damage where things had fallen in. I was trailing the whole
group. Our charge was at the lead. He disappeared. He went down
to our consular section and was digging out one of the consular officers who was
the spouse of one of our marines who was buried under the rubb. She
survived, so he had made it immediately did that. We made our way
out, and you know, we had a wall in front of the embassy
that was concrete gone vaporized. All of the motor pool which was parked out
front on the street pancaked. All the frames melted completely, right, but
we kept hearing pop pop pop pop. Sounded like gunfire. It was tires
exploding from the residual heat. So We're all standing there. Everybody's in a
daze, and trucks pull up and ladders come over. I think it was
like, I don't know, fire trucks, I don't know who's coming.
Maybe it was the local Tanzania. We made our way over the wall.
There was a French embassy compound on the far side of a a road.
We went over there and then I could see everybody was completely dazed, and
so I started doing accountability and just got out. I said hey, and
I remember my boss, Chris mcmowan later became an ambassador, a great diplomat,
the head of the political section, just absent mindedly, you know,
handed me a pen and I took it one of those old yellow sheets and
started saying, who's here. In the end, we didn't lose any Americans,
but we lost eleven of our Tanzanian colleagues, and there were some other
folks that were, you know, vaporized on the street. And then you
know, from that point on, we sort of regrouped and we figured we
were going to go to our public affairs officer's house and we regrouped there.
That was the sort of the the part that we were going to go back
to if there was ever anything like this, it's not a contingency plan,
and we may have gone to the charge's house first. We ended up at
the public affairs house. I think we went to the charge's house first.
I remember at some point there was like a fax machine or something and I
saw a printed thing come in that said this is Israelis think this is Issama
bin Laden. Oh wow that quickly, Yeah, it was like within hours,
right. But the other thing that happened is where there were like,
okay, so this is a bombing, where at the epicenter of bombing,
we don't know what's going on. The Marines are trying to secure the premises
small it's our Marine Security detachment and you know, for embassy workers, these
guys are gold right. Our MSG's are our core defense. They're under the
control of the RSO, so they're cut to the Regional security off right.
So it's a unique arrangement. And the Regional Security officer was immediately liaising with
you know, host country officials. But they're trying to secure it. So
we still had a whole bunch of communications equipment in there. I had to
go back with our communicator to with a sledgehammer yeah, this is how we
did with a sledgehammer to bust up everything. Because the truth is, we
weren't going to be able to really fully secure this compound. And you know,
back in those days, there was still a lot of paper files around.
Then we're burning things, you know, feeding them into an incinerator and
stuff. These days it's a lot it's more efficient because there's just a lot
less paper. We had paper file cabinets. You had to break into the
cabinet and so I did a lot of you know, destruction of the of
the sensitive items with a sledgehammer with by one other coworker who was her responsibility.
She ran that shop. I'd never even been back there. I had
no oh we got servers. I have no idea what's going on. So
but then I remember, you know, seeing you know, this has bin
laden and this is a terrorist attack. But in that early in those early
moments, were like, okay, so you know, we got to need
Washington support. And we find out Nairobi's been bombed. So it took us
a little time, but we realized that this is a dual bombing. And
then everybody was under lockdown because they thought that Campala was going to be bombed
too, but that shifted everybody's attention because Nairobi's embassy. Our embassy was in
essentially a suburban area at a crossroads of two large roads. It was a
dispersed explosion. It crushed the embassy, it crushed the chancery right, blew
out all our walls, pancaked everything, but we had a small foot print
and there were virtually no civilians around in Nairobi. There was a it was
a complex attack where there was like a grenade or something went off in advance,
and they're in a downtown concentrated area, and two hundred and forty people
were killed. And you also had secondary explosions so that people had heard some
sort of initial disturbance. Kenyans had gone to the windows in these downtown offices
and the windows were all blown over them. So it was this massive event,
and you know, Washington's attention went to Nairobi because we were also we
had lost Americans. You had a collapsed building in downtown, and you had
thousands of people trying to be helpful, you know, complete chaos, whereas
we were in this sort of more days discreete and we had crowds gathering,
but you know again it was the nature of the area. So you know,
that was it. That was the start of you know, for me,
the global warrant at that time ben Laden was he still in Sudan or
he had been exiled by that No, he was in Sudan. And so
if you guys remember we the initial response was was to you know, drop
some some missiles on what was claimed to be some sort of pharmaceutical factory.
You know, I honestly lost the thread on you know, sort of what
what happened. But that's how you know this. The Sudanese didn't want any
part of him after that. That's how he ended up in Afghanistan, right
right, because he was looking for safe space and we were putting pressure to
on the Sudanese to turn him over and he just got out of Dodge.
So that takes us through. Then you told us about nine to eleven propelling
you towards foreign service. Tell us about I mean, it sounds like maybe
this was your first overseas assignment. Was was Liberia the first one? So
I count this because I was an acting political officer. It was an internship,
but you know, I was doing the job and you know, so
I count that the first formal assignment was Liberia in two thousand and three.
So I go through the whole you know, you know process to bring us
in. They give us, you know, ten eleven weeks of training,
and then you're out the door and I get to Liberia in April of two
thousand and three. So what's happening in April of two thousand and three.
Charles Taylor is in Liberia. He's under extraordinary sanction arms embargo. They had
just done an embargo on Timber to try to cut off revenues to Taylor because
you know, he had sort of come to power running a lot of irregular
units. There's a lot of stories about the early nineties and sort of you
know, his legendary coming in at Christmas and you know, eventually eventually winning
an essentially internal struggle to get control of Liberia. He was definitely on the
on the wrong side of Washington policy, so he was on the outs.
But he had allowed his troops to get because he wasn't paying them to sort
of go loot in internal conflict that had broken out in neighboring Cote Devoir,
and the Ivorians got mad and they allowed an insurgency to you know, crop
up there magically, while there was another ongoing one on the border with Guinea
and Sierra Leone. The Lord rebels, No, it's not the Lord of
right. Yeah, it was like Liberians united for the Restoration of democracy.
You know. So everybody's got there. And the other one was Modell in
the south. So so Taylor was now facing two insurgencies from different bases while
being under tremendous pressure, and Liberia was just sort of collapsing in on itself
and turning into a real humanitarian catastrophe. They had, you know, several
hundred thousand internally displaced people, and the war started to come into toward Monrovia.
They started making gains because again, you know, people weren't really getting
paid and the payment was looting, and the looting was driving chaos and so
it was it was all manner of bad situation. And so so you know,
my first assignment was to go into the embassy. I you know,
you get a bid list of potential places you could go. You're matched with
I had eighty nine people in my incoming class. There's eighty nine places you
find. Everybody enters. They have different ideas of what they want to do
with their careers. You know, there's certain people who they want those parish
jobs. Not a lot of parish jobs for the entry level officers. You
know, I think I put like Moscow as my number one. I was
always interested in sort of seeing what the Russians were up to. But I
had library pretty high, and not a lot of people had library a very
high, so, you know, and it was because of the crisis experience
I had, and that again the sense that you want to do something with
your career, that you're part of something bigger, different. I knew there
was conflict, and you know, this is opportunity to diplomacy because for me,
I talked about the management of international relations because you started with China,
you start with strategic competition, right, so that is the core. But
the core core is war and peace. And you know what drew me was
the same impulse that drew me to apply for the Navy to be interested in,
you know, working on military issues, is that that if you can
be part of something that stops a war, you know, that can that
can be meaningful work, deeply meaningful work, which I just want to point
out the Libera experience is detailed in your book here the Embassy, not just
your experience but some of your colleagues as well that you went through there.
And I'm afraid I haven't read it yet, but I plan too. It
sounds really good homework for you guys. But absolutely so. I would love
to hear because we always hear about embargos and we hear about sanctions. What
is an embargo? How does US enforce that of art bargo? And then
at a time like maybe when China wasn't so much a near peer, but
like Russia may have, how if we put in an embargo or sanctions in
another country decides to just ignore that, What are the recourses for us?
This is a great and timely question. You know, sanctions I think were
viewed It's a little bit before our time, but I think they were viewed
as an alternative to military solutions and as a way to sort of shape behavior
in a world that is completely dominated by the US dollar. Okay, the
sanctions idea, there's certain things that you could always do, like deny entry
to the country, an individual sanction on visas, which you know is perfectly
reasonable. You commit you know, human rights abuses or something right is not
going to invite you to to the United States is that you don't have no
right to come here, right, you need to apply to come here legally.
So but you know, there were there were a couple things. Uh.
So it was born out of the discomfort with apartheid and how do we
shape South African behavior or you know, the government's and I hate the word
behavior because we're not you know, you know, it's not a parent child
relationships. It's patronizing right for us. But how do you how do you
shape or influence policies of a foreign government? And one way to do that
was, you know, to try sanctions, and so it was a means
to respond to apartheid. It was one of the core ways to do it.
An embargo where you stop sending uh you know, aid has a you
know, is a way to express our own policy directly into a country.
So, you know, the most famous examples are from the you know,
the Carter years, where they introduced really human rights into the as a as
a core part of our calculus. In the late seventies, and so we
started trying to scale back military assistance to right wing governments in Latin America.
And then when Reagan came in. He flipped it and he said, no,
no, no, those are our allies. We're not giving it up
to the Sandinistas. And so we're gonna we're going to turn the aid back
on. So the embargo would be, hey, we're stopping that. So
sanctions work if a country doesn't have friends, Okay, if the country has
a lot of friends, sanctions don't work. Liberia didn't have a lot of
friends. So, and we were at a moment in history where Russia and
the Cold War was over. You're talking late nineties, early two thousands.
China had not exceeded. They just acceeded to the WTO thanks to US.
They were not an economic powerhouse. They did not have all these diplomatic resources.
They were still very much dealing with China and and and you know,
Russia's army was in complete disarray. They were at a point of you know,
uh, not a lot of you know, it was the Yelts and
years moving into early early putin. So the the KGB had not re established,
you know, full control over things. And so here you have an
isolated country that's running a cash economy right where the key sources of revenue or
shipping registry. It's run out of Virginia. And you know timber that they
were selling, and so if you sanction that, meaning you you get agreement
at the Security Council that countries will not buy Liberian timber. There's no market
for it. So when they go in and pull in to a port with
the Liberian timber, it can't be offloaded. So now there's no revenue coming
in. Now what are you doing. You're starving that country of the resources
to do what buy guns to perpetuate the regime. It's a way to put
pressure on the regime in that case. You know, eventually the objective really
was to just have Charles Taylor leave, but you know the core objective was
to steer them back to democratic elections. That's what we were trying to do.
How did that go when you got there in two thousand and three?
How did things kind of unfold in Liberia? Yeah? Well, what had
happened was the sanctions were somewhat effective again, but it was part in just
the sort of the way the country was being run. Where money would come
in, it would be cash dispersed. They weren't doing a sophisticated banking section.
There so the regime was collapsing, and you know, our thinking was
that the war was going to be going on indefinitely, and so our role
was to try to get the groups to the peace table. And I think
Taylor started taking some hits in the south part of the southern part of the
country because of again this new insurgency that had come up. I think it
started. I think he was going to try to play the long game and
go to peace talks and kind of draw it out. But the rebels didn't
really have the ability to overthrow them, and so peace talks were initiated.
They started up these trilateral peace talks in Ghana, and right at the start
of the peace talks, a court for Sierra Leone, a special court that
we are Congress was funding with an American prosecutor again for crimes that they accused
Charles Taylor of committing in Sierra Leone. More backstory to why Charles Taylor was
on everybody's blacklist was, if you guys remember the Sierra Leone, you know,
conflict was horrific. You know, they would do things like, you
know, cut the arms off children and pile them in a pile in the
middle of the village and I mean just horrific, horrific crimes. So Taylor
was in trouble with this Special Court. The Special Court unseals an indictment for
the head of State of Liberia while he was out of the country in Ghana.
This led the complete chaos back in Liberia where they were like, oh
my god, are the President's gone. All of his militia, you know,
started panicking, and so the Ghanaians were like, you're asking us,
the court is asking us to We invited this guy for peace talks, to
bring the parties together, and you're gonna tell us we're supposed to arrest him.
They flew him back. They flew him back to Liberia because Liberia was
melting down. And who gets who's the victims? The victims of the population
that's at the mercy of you know, militia that are completely loyal to one
guy who thinks their guy has been taken off the board and they're gonna loot
and they're gonna rape and pillage and do damage. And then you also had
rebel groups that were basically doing the same thing. So the rebel groups took
that as a momentum play. Taylor returns he gets back command and control.
But the rebels, you know, the other rebels, the lord attacks the
city and they made it, you know, further than people thought. Over
the course of the a three month period, the rebels attacked Monrovia three times
and they ended up taking half the city and driving everybody into the center of
the city. By everybody, I mean tens of thousands of displaced people and
people who had lived in the city in the part of the city that the
rebels had come in. They all came streaming into the uh the embassy,
into the variety of the environs of the embassy. Because Liberia has such a
unique relationship with the US, we essentially gave money to found the country.
The idea was to give former slaves a homeland back in in the in Africa.
Liberia is like liberty. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So so
the whole idea of Liberia. So there's has been this long, unique historical
relationship between Liberia and the United States. Far too complicated. We could do
a whole nother podcast on that, but but for the for these purposes,
you know, folks had sort of crowded around the embassy. What was amazing
was at the low point. We had about six officers and seven marines and
our local guards. So embassies, the embassy secure posture is generally reliant on
host country security. Hear, the host country security or contract security, but
there's also a relationship between the host country security and our contract security. So
in Liberia, because of the ongoing conflict, we had contract security, but
those are local Liberians, just as we had local Tanzanians that provide the bulk
of the security for an embassy. So it's very unique dynamic. And your
marines are really sort of inside the perimeter, you know, protecting the core
things of the chancery. So you had seven marines and that, and that
was sort of dealing with hundreds of thousands of people at the gate saying what
are you going to do to help us out? What's also happening right at
this time Iraq, Iraq. So from a US government military standpoint, from
a Defense Department standpoint, particularly Rumsfeld, it was we do not need this
problem. You guys are out. Colin Powell was Secretary of State and he's
like, this is our credibility for all of our defense and security architecture in
West Africa. So everybody will look to see what we are doing in Liberia.
If the United States is committed to its partners, and we had been
spending a lot of money on building up echoas the economic community of West African
States, but from a military training standpoint to handle regional security problems, putting
money into Nigeria Ghana, but it had been a mixed result. In the
mid nineties, there had been Echo echoass missions that the Nigerians had gone into
Liberian It didn't work out so well for anybody. So, you know,
Colin Powell said, no, no, we have reasons to be there.
There's a humanitarian crisis. We shouldn't just you know, abandon the folks in
a country that we have a deep historical relationship to. We've got broader issues.
And then there's always in the global War on terror world, the core
belief right was ungoverned spaces are going to lead to places that you know,
Al Qaeda and others can take root. And so this is the counter argument
to just what are we doing. It's totally chaotic because if you look at
it from a diplomatic security standpoint, a military standpoint, you say, you've
got no way to exfiltrate the airport is twenty miles away. Your neighbor is
you know, through the jungle. There are no roads going out there that
are passable. It's you know, two days drive out through Sierra Leone.
You can't convoy out. You can't convoy out through Guinea or you know,
you know Cote dey Voors because rebels hold that territory. So what did we
do. The first thing we did is the French came sent a warship.
I got in touch with the one French attache who was there, and we
conducted an evacuation. But the ambassador, John Blaney, said, hey,
here's the case for staying. And I think it's my estimation that the Liberians
want us to stay. That means the rebels and the government who were trying
to get the head of state out, they still want us. He's making
that assessment right, And so that's a call because if you look at it
sort of tactically, if you're looking at threat streams, you're isolated. You
don't have the assets. So we evacuated everybody onto this front. By everybody,
I mean we called Americans that were in town and said hey, if
you can make it to the embassy, well we'll get you out with the
French, because the French were evacuating the UN and other foreign nationals. The
Lebanese whoever was around, not a lot of It wasn't a big tourist destination.
In two thousand and three, they got everybody out and a second rebel
attack happened. Right again, I told you there were three attacks. So
now you know the number one response for US is at the time we had
a fast platoon that would come down from Europe to augment embassy security. The
ambassador of course asked for the fast platoon. Rumsfeld held it wouldn't act on,
it wouldn't send down, wouldn't let the platoon go down to starve us
out real stuff. So they end up because of the high level differences in
the cabinet between Rumsfeld and Powell, and Powell being the advocate to actually get
something done here, we end up getting half the platoon and uh and we
got some some seals to augment our security. So they went in. Yeah,
they went in and uh so, so we had this this small augmentation,
but everybody had mixed signals because some people were getting the signal that we're
going to send an aircraft carrier and we did send an aircraft carrier, and
the ambassador sent a cable because we needed to request a NEO to get the
aircraft carrier to get out non competent evacuation operation. Right, and Don didn't
care for that. I'm sure so well, so so well he wanted it
at that point, he did well because the NEO is the way to get
us out. What the ambassador did was he requested the neo, but the
embassy would stay open with a core staff of two or three people to work
the diplomacy. And that said, you know, that led to you know,
just real, real, real fights. So the rebels pull out,
they get beaten back, and we're in this sort of stasis. Charles Taylor
can't leave, he can't go back to peace talks because he's under indictment and
doesn't know if he's going to get rolled up. President Bush goes on television
and says, Charles Taylor needs to go. Now. We talk about sanctions,
we talk about the effect of diplomacy. Right, if you go back
to if you said this today, a foreign leader may just say, what
are we talking about? Who's going to remove me? Right? I've got
friends, I've got other spate. Charles Taylor is looking, what did we
just done to Saddam Hussein when we said Saddam Hussein has to do it?
Right? He doesn't know, yeah, as a factual matter, that he's
under indictment. Potential ships are coming, He's seeing more marines coming into the
country. Right. He doesn't know that this is not an assassination operation,
has no idea right right. It's also weird because to get all these people
into the country. We're in touch with his national security advisor and his team
saying, hey, don't shoot at our helicopters because we're bringing people in.
So we're working with the guy. We're trying to remove fairly complicated stuff because
I once had an analyst tell me that Americans politicians, you know they they
or administrations. I say, they just don't understand like foreign mentalities, and
that if they like shake hands with somebody, then that somebody thinks that America
has their back, and they don't understand like that. They don't understand that
that could shift two months or three months down the road if somebody else comes
into office or somebody else's appointed to a position like that. Americans just don't
understand that. So many of these people think very long term and Americans think
very short term when it comes to politics or political Yeah, the way I'll
put it, I mean our strength is a country is we're optimistic and forward
looking. I mean, this is you know, and and and you know,
folks who you know are your audience, are people who believe in purpose,
believe in the country, believe in that that we stand for things right.
But by definition that means we're very forward looking and we tend to allid
history. We just tend to do it. And you know, I think
a good example is, you know, going back a few years, we
were on the wrong side from the African National Congress, from Mandela's party,
were on the wrong side of the apartheid debate. Right when Mandela came in
to us, Americans were like, this is a great story, right,
He's a voice of the people. He's preaching a peaceful right, not a
retributive thing. This is the story we all want to hear. It's a
new multicultural South Africa, all of that, and so we love South Africa,
right, and and multiple administrations, you know, looked at South Africa
as this shining model of multi ethnic democracy, triumph of you know, progressive
politics, right, South Africans are like, well, you've still got half
of our people sanctioned as terrorists. So we didn't forget right, we were
happy that you're you're happy with Mandela, but you they didn't forget that part
of the history. We tend to be like, but that was that was
like like that was like that was that was yesterday, and so you know
this is true again, you know, there's a so there's a an ahistorical
element to us foreign policy. We're looking at we're very much looking forward.
And look, you guys have dealt with it a new rack. Yeah,
you deal with it in places. Hey, uh, you know, we
just we were I mean, we were supporting Saddam against the Iranians, right,
and then all of a sudden, now we're on the wrong side of
Saddam. So we gave all these terms to like fulfill. He did it.
He thinks he thinks that like we're like cope aesthetic now and then it's
like, oh, good off, he's got to go like yeah, I
mean, and so that can lead to i'd seen some difficult outcomes or just
misunderstanding. So again, the core for diplomats and the core for analysts,
the people who are charged with the long term view is for your ambassador class
and for those to learn the history, understand the history, understand the environment
which you're operating in. As we define we, our administration, our Congress
define us interests today, you've got to interpret that in a way for the
local audience so they understand where we're coming from, so that you can say,
Okay, you know, I recognize the history. I understand where we've
come from. But here's why I'm saying the relationship has to get to a
different place or here's where the relationship needs to be today, because the policy
won't necessarily be taking the history into account. So rather wrap up Liberia for
us because I'd like to make sure we have enough time to talk about Afghanistan.
Yeah, for sure. So you know, in the end, what
was interesting in Liberia is the ambassador wouldn't leave. He won. He had
the backing of Colin Powell. It was a gutsy move because you know,
if it goes wrong, you end up with, you know, a situation
like Mexonity, and you're the person avery blame exactly. And the messer knew
that. He gave us all an option he said to the whole you know,
the country team, very few of us, but he said, anybody
wants to leave, you can, you can check out. We had a
extraordinary defense attage and she and I worked together to establish contact with the rebels
and we got the numbers for the and eventually what happened was again you can
read the details you know at your own leisure, But eventually what happened was
we had the rebels owning half the city and Charles Taylor and his group in
the other half of the city, and civilians caught in between mortars dropping on
everybody. It was like fish in a barrel. Bad scenes, very tough
time. We were able to go in and convinced Charles Tayler to leave,
not us. That was done at senior levels, and he was convinced that
he's going to have to leave. He ends up going to Nigeria. On
the ground, we crossed the front lines with a small contingent of folks that
had deployed from JTF Liberia. JTF was stood up and it deployed in through
the embassy and we took a contingent of folks from JTF Liberia. We got
an echo mill and West African peacekeepers were able to come in and we were
able to broker a local ceasefire that got the rebels to voluntarily pull out of
the capital and allow for the broader peace agreement to take hold, because otherwise
they could have just fought until the end. It allowed the broader peace agreement
to take hold that was hashed out in Ghana and we were able to end
the war. So it was the core stuff of diplomacy, as I talked
about. So after Liberia, tell us about your kind of entry into Afghanistan,
how that begins for you. Yeah, So after Liberia, I went
off to Beijing, and then I was in Ethiopia. And in Ethiopia I
did a TDY to CJTFO, you know, our counter terrorism platform in Jibouti,
And so I'd had some experience working with a command staff. And when
two thousand and nine rolled around and there was a big push to get a
civilian complement to the military effort. As we started to surge troops into Afghanistan,
they were looking to fill these billets that had been created by General Ikenberry.
Ikenberry, as you know, had been the commander of the forces over
there, US Forces over there. I don't know if he was commander,
but he was. I guess he was. And then he became ambassador.
He was made ambassador under President Obama. But rather than have a traditional political
advisor that's a State Department person attached to a commanding officer, he had this
idea that as the military elements ramp up and you've got you know, two
all the way up to your you know, command headquarters, that you would
pair civilian leaders that would report back to him and the embassy, but be
sort of co equals with the military commanders at each level as I've described,
you know. So I took one of these jobs. It was a brigade
level. They called it senior civilian representative, so they would have it down
at the you know, battalion level. They even had it down at the
company level in some provinces, so company senior civilian representative, you know,
battalion, brigade, and then division. Up at division, we had an
ambassador rank person or a senior person that was going to be you know,
paired with the generals up there. So I was paired with initially Task Force
Mountain Warrior, and I went down and Randy George, who's now the Chief
of Staff of the Army is you know the uh he's you know, was
the brigade commander and UH sixty five hundred troops. We were responsible for N
two KL so that was Nangahar, Kunar, Logman and Norristan. And you
know, we didn't have a lot of presence up in Norris Stan at that
time. Uh, you know, but we had thirty five cops and fobs
scattered throughout the four provinces. Uh, and it was you know, pretty
intense combat operations. The main effort was under the crystal and it was down
south, so we were, you know, the supporting effort per the campaign
plan. But you know it was very clear that we needed we were you
know, going heavy into coin. Well this was this was this was a
coin centered approached to the to the war. So, I mean we've talked
a lot about on the show, including about Nurse Stand specifically from a military
infantry special ops perspective. I mean, what was it like for you as
a diplomat to dovetail with that effort and as you talk about, you know,
wage of accounter insurgency. So you know, again we talked a little
before the show that it was interesting because when I was in Liberia, the
command element from the JTF. They sent a liaison from the ships into my
office, right and you know, I said, take this space, set
up what you need to set up. We're going to be hand in glove.
But you're coming in on an embassy platform under Chief Admission authority because it
was not an active combat role. I mean it was they were in a
combat zone, but you're fundamentally embedding with us to achieve the diplomatic outcome,
you know, in Afghanistan, and the civilians were embedded and relied one hundred
percent on the military downrange. We were opening some consulates. We had a
couple of consulates open up in Bombyan for example, that you know had a
slightly different footprint because the Taliban had just not penetrated there the same way they
had self drive for example. But I was embedded, and this civilian complement
to the military was going to be you know, development experts, So yeah,
USAID, Department of Agriculture, and then you know, you State Department,
diplomats. The idea in the you know, counterinsurgency operation of course,
was that you were going to work by with and through your partners, and
you were going to build governance in the in the provinces, because the core
issue in Afghanistan fundamentally was nobody liked the government, and the government each didn't
go down to the village level. I mean two thousand and nine, ten
years into the war. Nine years into the war, you know, you
had a unitary government that would appoint people down to the district level, but
those people were not from the district. The people were not from the province
at the provincial level. So the idea, of course was to instill We
also had rule of law experts like lawyers that went out and the idea was
to first explain to the Afghan people the constitution that the Afghan people had crafted
for themselves, right because it was just not understood, explain to them the
benefits of kabble to people who had very little interaction with Kabble other than the
officials that were given that they could see very clearly were kind of looting the
money that we were pouring in. So, but this is the idea right
now, when the structure is such that we're embedded. The truth is is
you know, you you know, it's going to take a commander who is
also given the task of doing governance and development. It's actually built into their
subordinate plans. Right. So you're talking to a battalion commander. They're supposed
to go out and they have the relationship with the provincial governor, They've got
the relationship with their company. Commander has the relationship with people the state department
person in theory should lead on that. But you know, I think in
Afghanistan, given that these were military leads and the military was providing all the
platform and sustainment, where it was effective, Where it worked in terms of
the civilian military relationship was where the civilian understood, how can I be of
use to you, the commander? Right, And again I say, in
my own organization, this is a controversial position. You're supposed to lead.
Well, I'm not leading a brigade commander with sixty five hundred people. I
had forty people in four provinces that are all reliant on what the command provides.
Right. So the dynamic you work out is that it's partially advisory,
partially consultative. But I also just you know, road right, So when
we needed to do things that would help brief up, we could brief up.
I also report it. This was an interesting dynamic because what you find
is is that in a true embedded relationship, by being out of channel,
I could provide the commanders because I wasn't reporting to them, I could provide
them a perspective, frank conversation. The other thing is is I could send
things up my channels. He could send things up his channels if we had
blockages in there of our channels that were trying to get done, so you
could you could work, you know, the embassy could hear something that could
be useful that could be then spoken to at the senior command level because the
commander can't speak to up the chain that way, right, So there's there's
these interesting dynamics that develop in that in that thing. But you know,
fundamentally you're an in bed and what you're trying to do collectively is to essentially
instill confidence in a government that nobody had confidence. It's due to the nature
and structure of this government. It sounds like you really accepted this role and
kind of dove into it in this sense that you weren't a subbortinate, but
you also weren't a superior. It was a partnership. Even though that was
that's not the standard role for State department when dealing with the military. Are
you aware of and you don't have to spill any tea or anything, but
are you aware of other instances where that type of relationship was not so successful
when it was? No? Absolutely, listen, I had you know,
there was heavy pressure to show civilian leadership, right, and that that was
all the way through, and so all the time you would see in the
field, even in my aor people that were subordinate to me that were reporting
up to me, but they didn't have a good relationship. Their sense was,
Hey, this battalion commander, they're supposed to take me to my meeting.
Yeah, you know, it's not happening. You're in the middle of
combat operations. These are combat foot patrols. If you're engaging, the engagement
is with intentionality that has to meet the commander's intent for both force pro and
to generate the effects that they're being asked to do as part of the counterinsurgency
effort. And you would see those relationships break down, and you would walk
into a combat outpost and you would see your military command on one side,
or your security detail for example, for civilians eating in the cafeteria on the
other side, you know, and you know that's not an effective relationship in
a combat se right, So so you know there's that would break down.
And then of course you know in other areas, right, there's just this
You know, you have to come at it from a sense of mission and
trust, and you have to have the mindset of, hey man, we
are here. You know, General Miller always used to ask people in Afghanistan,
why are you here? The answer is to protect the homeland? Right
in Afghanistan, that was very much so we were there because fundamentally this tied
back to nine to eleven, Right, that's the core purpose of being there.
But that can break down in you know, the day to day operational
things and we go into our tribal put on our tribal hats of I'm supposed
to do governments or you guys think short term, we think long term or
whatever whatever the tropes are that they breed the agency during this timeframe. I
mean, for you and the people you worked with, I mean, how
how did the capacity building side of it go? Like success is failures?
I mean, what do you think you know? For me, there was
a part in my biography we didn't touch that much on. I was a
corporate lawyer right before I came right for two years, I did finance and
insolvency. What else is So we talked about what was happening in Liberia,
what was happening in two thousand and nine in Afghanistan. Afghan back in the
States, the financial crisis boring billions of dollars. In Afghanistan, we had
senior leaders talking glowingly about our burn rate and our spend rate. I'm sitting
there with the private sector view going, this is absolutely unsustainable. What effects
are we achieving? Well, I remember, you know. Then Colonel George
said, Okay, we got Commander's Emergency Response funds right, you know,
the SERP program right to you know, allow our commanders on the ground to
sort of build things for people. So you're gonna win hearts and minds,
classic hearts and mind stuff. So he said, can I get a roll
up of all the SERP projects that we've done in the nine years we've been
here in you know, Nangahar, for example. Okay, can we overlay
that with the projects that the UN has done in the area, and then
can we also ask what the USAID has done and what the you know why,
because here's the kind of stuff we were doing. You're in the Kunar
River Valley. It's rocks. They've had rocks for millennia. They know how
to do retaining walls for their farms. We were paying two hundred thousand dollars
to build a retaining wall. We were hyper inflating this economy while you knew
the American public would have been outraged because the American public is losing six hundred
thousand jobs a year and freaking out and we're in you know, you know,
we're hitting ten percent on unemployment and you could see this disconnect. So
what effects are being achieved? A growing insurgency, massive wastage of US government
resources, and a great construction boom in Dubai for all the Afghan officials that
we were funding, right, this is what was happening. And if you
asked Afghans, which anybody who was out there with Afghans did, corruption was
their number one issue. The Taliban was not it. Right, of course,
if you were frontline shinwar in Nangahar, you've got tribal and issues with
the Taliban. But remember most villages were ungoverned. I mean they're governed by
their own village rules. The unitary state didn't come down there, so you
could see very clearly that this was not achieving the effects. The second thing
is is that as part of counterinsurgency, part of the initial thing was protect
the population centers right go to the collapse into the population centers, because what
we had done was a theory of interdiction for a while. If you got
there. In you know, two thousand and one, we started to expand
the ink spots out through places like Norris Stan and we're putting you know,
these common outposts out there. Why oh, because the guys are coming through
these ungoverned spaces. I think it was the you know, I think the
mindset that we collectively as a government had was been Lodden planned nine to eleven
from a cave, right. I think this is the what led. So
you got to go out there to the Corngall. You've got to go into
capillary valleys off capillary valley of capillary valleys to find these guys. The reality
was, and you know, General George was always articulate on this. He
said, the reason we're being shot at in the corn Cornngall is because we're
in the cornball, right, Yeah, and if you looked at it from
an interdiction standpoint, if they wanted to pass the corn gall you just go
on the opposite side of the ridge. Remember we're also pre drone. We
had started to you know, like this is like the very early days.
I remember seeing a kid somebody opened it up and you know, there was
like a tiny little it was like the old balsa would thing that you would
fly as a kid. You know, they put a camera on. But
like, we didn't have hardly any of the real you know surveillance. We
had you know, stuff up in the sky, uh, you know,
much higher altitude. But again, you guys will know competing demands, limited
resources. So you've got all of these things. If these guys wanted to
bypass us, they could just hike right past. You would have no ideas.
So and then where did where was bin Laden in the end? Right?
Where was his command and control? Probably in play? Probably this is
pure speculation, but is in places like Jalalabad. Why because they have access
to you know, food, resource, communications, the internet and you know
the road that never got hit? Ever, what was the road that never
got hit in Nangahar? All of our guys were getting hit with massive IEDs
every time they We're on all of the all of the surface streets. It's
the main road, you know, from the Kyra Pass to the base.
So this also tells you what we knew. Everybody knew it. I don't
know it as a factual. Here's the specific intel that I'm now referring to.
We all knew the Taliban a making money off the war. The Afghan
government's making money off the war. Everybody's invested in it. So you ask
what kind of effects you're achieving. You could see very clearly we're not achieving
the sustained you know, self government government. You know, the sustained self
government. You know, where are the revenues coming from that Afghanistan is going
to use to run itself while doing this, the government is largely funded by
the international community, and the security forces were funded by US. So it's
it's not a self sustaining model. Yeah, that's that's where we were.
It was knowable, it was seeable, so you know, and I think
anybody down range would have would have felt felt that. So after a few
years when we started, you know, to come out. You know,
I actually wrote on this in twenty eleven, after I had left, I
said, we should be honest with where this is going. This is like
twenty eleven, twenty twelve, I wrote this, and I said we should
just be honest that the core thing, particularly after we got in Laden,
was we we have achieved the national security objective, which was to take bin
Laden off the off the off the board. That's a good thing. We
also gave Afghanistan. Look, we've poured resources into other countries. They've stood
up, you know, obviously, the famous examples of Germany and Japan and
South Korea. You know, South Korea, you know, we So there's
a It's not like pouring in resources to a partner means a partner is going
to be forever dependent. It's just the way Afghanistan ended up developing, the
way the economy developed, the way the officials chose to interact with us,
what they chose to do with the resources. You know. One of the
things I like when I think back on Afghanistan is you can see it as
a failure from a certain perspective, but on the other hand, I look
at it as we achieved national security effects that we needed to achieve. We
gave our partners every chance to go in a different route. The fact that
it didn't go there is not for lack of you know, generations of soldiers,
civilians, contractors, you know, people who put good faith into trying
to make it work. That to me, that work doesn't go away.
And for all of us who have Afghan friends, you know, people that
we know have experienced difficulty, who are still stuck back there, some who've
made it out. I mean, you know, that partnership was real,
you know, but it was overcome by the structures that we're employee. Yeah,
Afghanistan is really interesting because, like you, I feel like people talk
about losing the war in Afghanistan and it's sort of like, well, we
won, like we won in the first thirty days. Then we decided to
just stay after the party was already over, and then it was just became
very nebulous. And you know you mentioned like you know Germany and Japan,
Well there you're funding a government that is building projects in a tribal area,
which I don't think. I don't know if any administration ever really got in
a tribal area like Afghanistan. That's not there's no there's no Afghanistan National identity.
Really like when you fund somebody, you're funding a tribe and it's going
to their tribe members who they install in all the different regions. Like it's
we went in there and we tried to impose a federal system where we have
Yeah, it's like, no, it's a system of tribes, Like,
well, shut up, you're going to have a federal system. Yeah,
yeah, I mean, I you know, I strongly agree with that.
As as the as the core it's a unitary state where people were being appointed
from a central government. I always the way I always looked at it was
imagine, look, I'm a New Yorker man, if I'm if you send
me to Texas to tell somebody how to run their town, it's not going
to go that way, right. And so as a result, you know,
it was interesting that we as a as a as a as a core
self government like govern your own like this is the core of in the DNA
of America, that we were fundamentally supporting a structure that does have models of
Pakistan runs that model. There are other countries in the region. It's not
like it's a you know, and they had a history of a monarch in
Afghanistan, they used to central authority, but that we would be the ones
to say that this is the model that has to be and not approach it
differently, because obviously the model they got constructed and put together was put together
by people from the diaspora and things like that, and you know, yeah,
they brought in, you know, a number of constituents, but fundamentally
it was our money that kept backing that particular system. So it made it
hard I think for us, you know, as a government to reassess that
just the collective weight the accretion of the project over years. The other thing
though, in the accretion though, is interesting because remember that Rumsfeld on this
case didn't want troops on the ground, right, It felt strongly that we
shouldn't get ourselves involved. Now he contradicts himself by then running the whole Iraq
war, right, And it's a contradiction is the reasons he had were very
well founded to not get involved in Afghanistan. He just blew those out of
the water in a rock. But the accretion of our forces there came from
a demand signal from the Afghans and also international partners, including the NGO community,
who was saying, hey, there's not enough security you can't go in
this war in Iraq and just forget Afghanistan. So it was a weird dynamic
where there was a demand signal from communities that you wouldn't naturally say would have
a demand signal for US forces. Now by two thousand and nine, when
you're coming in with a heavy footprint, suddenly that signal is, oh my
god, you're escalating the war. But it was you know, I think
that we we ended up having multiple missions, right, because it's also backed
in the whole you know, neo conservative worldview, which is create democratic society.
So one is democratic society is as partners for us and expand democracy that
came out of the bush hears. You know, you're doing that with your
aid people who are like, hey, the reason for this is to because
we can't abandon the people. If you abandon the people, you know you're
going to end up with an ungoverned space, a humanitarian catastrophe. So that's
irrationale for the war, and we sort of drifted away from Hey, the
core reason we're we're the Taliban is they didn't turn over bin Laden, and
had they turned over been Laden, we wouldn't have been at war, but
we went into a whole bunch of other justifications, and you know, so
that's how we ended up where we were. Well to fast forward a bit.
I mean, you've had some other experiences too. I hope if we
can't get into tonight another time for sure, but I want to fast forward
a little bit because you were involved in sort of the end game Afghanistan as
well. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit about that.
Yeah, sure, I was. You know, I got an assignment.
There was a unique assignment that in twenty eighteen, they stood up a
peace and reconciliation section in the embassy, thinking that we needed to get a
peace process going because there was no discussions of note with the Taliban. And
they started this section with the idea that there would be bottom up, that
we would be reaching out to the provinces and at the district level and trying
to see if there are folks out there that can reach out and start to
build some consensus around a national way forward that comes bottom up. But about
a year after they stood that up, or almost soon after they stood it
up, not even a year soon after they stood that up, President Trump
came into office. And decided that we should just do a top down approach,
that it's time to rept this war up, and that means a direct
negotiations with the Taliban. And so this section which reported to Ambassador Bass through
the DCM. Karen Decker also served as Ambassador Khalil Zad, who became the
special envoy that was going to take on the direct negotiations. It was going
to support him when he was in Kabble because the negotiations were not going to
happen in Kabble. The negotiations, you know, the Taliban were not in
Kabble at the time. They were in Doha and they were in Pakistan and
so where we were going to engage them was going to be somewhere other than
Kable. But we had to keep the government closely informed. It was a
choice to and you know, certainly a Taliban ask that we negotiate directly with
the Taliban and not include the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban always were clear
that they only wanted to negotiate with us, that the central government was a
proxy government for us, and so as a way to catalyze the negotiations,
we were going to talk to the Taliban directly and then essentially keep the government's
equities close at heart and keep them briefed very closely of what we would be
doing. The government never felt that they were a true partner in the Afghan
government never felt that they were a true partner in that process ever. But
this was the arrangement. And so when Ambassador Khalil's out in his team came
in to Kabble, my office became the support structure to go to all the
meetings, take the notes, and provide feedback and input into that process.
But again working for Ambassador Bass, so it was an interesting dynamic. And
then what happened was after we got to agreement, I left and I came
back for the last let's say five months in Doha working directly for Ambassador Jhalilzad.
We had a military touch point that was under General Miller's command with the
Taliban. So for the last, you know, year after the agreement,
this was to kind of give the Taliban a touch point with us because they
would keep complaining that we violated the agreement, and we could from a military
perspective explain, no, no, no, no, we're in complyingiens with
the agreement. And I became the ambassador Khalilzad's representative on that group that was
reporting to General Miller. Can you tell us what so Trump wanted out of
Afghanistan? You guys were trying to make it happen. What were the US's
chief goals and you know, sort of hardlaments, soft liments. What were
the Taliban's chief goals their hard limits, their soft limits for making this agreement
happen. Well, I think for making the agreement happen. You know,
I was not in the room for the negotiation phase of the agreement. I
got there when the agreement was all but done, and we can talk a
little bit about that period, you know, when I arrived on the scene.
But you know, the Taliban were always clear that it would be basically
to give them the government. That was it, that there was going to
be a new government, and it was going to be a Taliban led government.
That was their objective from the beginning. The real question was whether there
was any accommodation possible, meaning you know, the goal ultimately for US would
be that they would be brought into the existing construct in some way, shape
or form, so you can call it power sharing, not predetermined by US
so Ambassador khalilza did not want us to predetermine it. But what the goal
was to get the Afghan government leadership into the room with the Taliban to negotiate
that. So his objectives, Ambassador Khalilzad's objectives and what I think, you
know, essentially the deal with the administration was was if we're coming out and
the intent is to end this war, the American war in Afghanistan, if
we just come out, it'll be chaotic, it'll be dangerous, and we
get nothing. There's nothing we leave behind, right we At the time,
the thinking was that it would be likely a civil war that the Taliban couldn't
just win because there's so many other constituencies in a loaded country, right that
you would have a rerun of the early nineties where there was this horrific civil
war. You know, the Taliban had done a lot of work and this
obviously became apparent later eroding all of those other constituencies, either buying them off.
Something was happening, because in the end we did not see a civil
war breakout. We saw the Taliban take Cobble with less than three thousand people
six million people, less than three thousand people there were more than enough capabilities
to defend Cobble, and you know, yet everybody went to ground. The
whole thing dissolve. So that tells you that the Taliban had made a lot
of inroads all around the countries, particularly in the north. You know,
for anybody who had been up there in previous years to then go back in
twenty nineteen and twenty twenty and find out the North is basically you know,
you know, Mazarli, Mazar sharif Is is basically nearly under Taliban control.
You're like, you've lost the how can you lose the problems? For me,
I knew things were over when it was a couple of weeks is maybe
maybe it was a month before Ghani fled the country. His office put out
like a press release about building a hydro electric dam in Kunda's and like,
we have this big plan, We're going to build this hydro electric dam.
It's like, well, Kunda has already fell of the Taliban, you're talking
about building it, Like the priorities are so off and so weird. Yeah,
that is like you just knew this wasn't going to end. It was
sort of there were a lot of mismatches going on there. But so the
core objectives that that Investad Khalilza was trying to get at was one to get
the Taliban to break with al Qaeda and transnational terrorism al Qaida specifically because of
the history, but also transnational terrorism, that you're not going to use Afghanistan
as a platform to attack other entries. Second, and you know, second
equally, you know, critical priority is that our withdrawal be not a hostile
withdrawal, that that when we come out, they're not going to be attacking
us on the x filtration. That we're going to get to an agreement.
You know. The third critical point was that the Afghans would have the opportunity
to come to a peace agreement that we would be committing to, you know,
a peace agreement. And so, you know, he viewed these goals
as all very interlocking goals. There's four elements and I am forgetting one.
But so was there any sort of was there any with that peace agreement or
or aside from that, was there any sort of thought of amnesty for like
the Afghan national forces who'd against the Taliban, or was there any like no,
because because it was never presupposed, never that the Afghan government would collapse.
You know, what you're dealing with in peace agreements. Often in these
kind of piece agreements is what we euphemistically call security sector reform, which means
you bring the irregular elements. In this case, it would be the Taliban
into the professional military that has been built right. Right, So we've all
seen the images of these guys driving around in our funded APCs, right,
But the idea would have been, rather than to have the unit dissolved,
the expertise dissolved, the logistics supply channel dissolve, they're coming into these existing
structures that in theory are functional and operational, right, and we're not losing
all of that capacity to a civil war. So it was never amnesty for
the Afghan government. If anything, the question would be, Oh, the
other thing that the Taliban very much wanted was removal of sanctions. Individual Taliban
are all sanctioned because they're terrorists, right, Okay, so you know they've
killed people, including Americans, so they're on sanctions, you know, individual
sanction, financial travel, et cetera. So the Taliban of course wanted that
that peace removed. But for us, it's okay, you know, if
we're going to go down that path, you are going to break the ties
with al Qaeda, and you are going to commit to not becoming a terrorist
state, right to state sponsors terresponding to that, well, I mean they
negotiated that they would essentially do that. The reality on the ground is that
we killed you know, Zawahiri, who was celebrating, you know. With
that said, I will say that's a good example of why it was once
we got out, we actually achieved the biggest, the second biggest effect that
we could have achieved, probably because we weren't there, because he's not being
hidden by those guys and he thought he was in a safe space. Right
So, so in some senses we achieved the effect on that particular target,
and that is a significant target, right. So, but but it is
in the agreement, right the county that their counter terrorism commitments are in the
agreement, and you know, even you know, to this day, there's
you know, you can see that they have gone full Taliban right in terms
of how they're governing the country, in terms of where they are. But
you know, there's still the idea for the Taliban, and it will eventually
fade that there could be some sort of arrangement with the United States that can
achieve these other effects that they want, and so that that element is there,
the core thing that that was achieved because the other pieces didn't come together.
The governance piece, the peace agreement between Taliban in the Afghans was not
tied to the timetable of our withdrawal. Right, so in theory we would
come out and that wouldn't have been didn't necessarily have to be done. The
idea was to have it done. But you know, it wasn't. It
wasn't. It didn't talk to us a little bit about that. It's I
mean, the deal is negotiated. Eventually we signed a deal. Yeah,
what happens next? And how do things? You know, I think we
all agree that the way we ended up pulling out of there was not ideal.
Yeah, so so first of all, you know, there were some
stops and starts to to to how that that came forward. You know,
Trump hit a pause after a US soldier was killed, right, you know,
on the eve of the signing, and was that sort of like if
we if we follow through this now, it'll look like it like it's an
image issue or they're not holding their their deal. They're not I can't.
I can't speak for President Trump. I mean we know his words. He
said, what kind of people are these? You know? You know,
I think the thinking, you know, the Taliban explanation was we weren't in
the scope of the peace agreement yet because we hadn't signed it, right,
I mean, that's that was their mentality. He's like, hey, you're
gonna you know, that's what he said. What kind of people would do
this? Yeah, so he he hit he hit the pause button. We
then conducted negotiations in Doha that were off book negotiations where Ambassa khalilza the the
agreement, the US Alberian agreement was all but done and then it was paused
and there was no It was called off I mean we didn't know whether it
was a permanent pause. When you say off book, you mean like informal
essentially, I'm going to say informal to not use other words. You know
it was. It was because we were no longer negotiating with the Taliban formally,
right, but behind the scenes, I now do that, so now
each other. So now you know, Inbassador Khalilzad said, well, let's
not lose what we have. We've got the US to alband agreement is basically
ready to go. We can make some adjustments. I would like to take
a run at how can we get the Taliban? The Taliban said, hey,
we'll come back to the table. But it's you guys, you know,
so what is ambassador you know Leo Zady? He One of the big
goals of the Trump administration was free American hostages. They put a lot of
time and effort into that that they felt that Americans should not be left overseas.
Now, you know, I think all of us understand the very difficult
choices made with Americans that are hostage overseas. And you know, we've had
a long standing policy that we weren't going to negotiate on hostages. And there's
a very good reason for that, which it introduces moral hazard. You pay
four million dollars for somebody, the next person is eight, it becomes an
economy and or it becomes a series of political objectives that they can get.
And we always pay a lot more, you know, for Americans. We
trade a lot more, We give up a lot more than other people you
know, are willing to do. But you know, it's not just the
Trump administration, you know, this administration, every administration has committed to you
know, it's our top thing is protecting Americans overseas. So you make trade
offs when you deem that there's an opportunity. So what Investador Leo Zad realizes,
we could bring somebody home safely. And what we're going to do is
use this as an opportunity to sort of go back and test a few things.
And one of the things was whether the Taliban really had command and control,
whether they could deliver what roll Miller was asking for, which is,
if we're going to go into a US Taliban scenario, we need to see
a reduction of violence, a serious reduction of violence. Because the Taliban view
was always we're not going to attack you, but we are going to come
after the Afghan government because they're not party to the agreement, of course,
because they didn't want them to party the unit. They wanted the power.
And our point to the Taliban was always, Okay, you know that's not
good. You should be negotiating with the government, but if you attack our
partners, we are going to defend our partners, right, Okay. So
we were still engaged in combat operations against the Taliban, but it was not
in theory, not direct right. So one of the things to test was
whether you could actually have a ceasefire, whether you could get to a point.
We couldn't get in ceasefire, but we were going to have a reduction
of violence. And so one of the operations for these negotiating to get the
return our people was we needed to have the Taliban stand down in an area
and not attack if we were sending our special operations forces in to the area
to pick up a guy that you don't even know if he's alive. Right,
So we worked out that agreement. The mission happened. The Taliban did
have a ceasefire. They actually ended up in a firefight with the Afghan government
at one point, which they blamed on the government, and we spent months
trying to unstick in this military touch point. It all worked, The agreement
was eventually signed, We returned to the table, we got a hostage freed,
and the agreement happens. I exit the scene for a while at that
point. Now we go into implementation. We're drawing down. But we had
COVID, so it that, you know, really jacked up a lot of
things. You know, there were a lot fewer meetings within Afghanistan. A
lot of stuff was being done virtually at this point, you know, and
part of the agreement was prisoner releases. So this was a huge thing.
The Taliban were supposed to get back FI up to five thousand prisoners. The
government didn't want it. They didn't negotiate for it, so they didn't want
to give them up, and so we did a lot of stop and start
over these prisoners, trying to get the two sides to the table. All
of this was happening while we're drawing down, and the Taliban were slowly making
some inroads, right, So I get recalled back and you know, they
started calling me and say, hey, we have this this gap. We
need somebody to be in their military touch point, to be partnered with the
general General Klein. It was General Tooley who was the main guy for fifteen
months talking to the Taliban every day. You know, that guy wore one
out for him. Yeah, pour one out for him, I mean,
you know, really truly, but nearer to the end. As as as
we got closer to the end, he was replaced by General Klein, and
so I was going to be the civilian counterpoint to this. So Zol's representative.
These guys are reporting to General Miller, they're conveying essentially to the Taliban.
Hey, we are we are on the trajectory that we said we're on,
which was for April first, right, well it was I think it
was May first, because the Taliban were not attacking us in a way you
know, of course some you know, and it was a deconfliction channel too,
like, okay, so if you're not attacking us, why why did
we have seven rounds drop on Bogrum last night? Oh it wasn't us,
Or we're going to investigate, or it's a rogue command or whatever, you
know, but you're you're trying to deconflict so you don't get people killed on
the way out. And so I came back to that, and what had
happened was we have the change in administration. And during the change in administration,
you can understand, you come in, you've got a deal on the
table to get out. There's a lot of equities in Washington saying okay,
let's let's not come out. I mean, you know this is this was
a controversial thing, yeah, that President Trump did because look, huge equities
within the defense establishment we're operating under the mow the grass theory that it's a
relatively low cost to stay in Afghanistan and this will not become a terroristaent and
we cannot be kicked out. With some number of troops that are supporting the
are enabled, you can keep like two thousand people in the contrary and just
maintain a counter terroristy. So I'm not going to put numbers because that was
always a controversy. Yes, a small platform, but again with our Afghan
enablers and with or sorry with our enablers for the Afghans. But also remember
the Europeans are also in there, NATO is in there. So you know
when we looked at we had eight thousand troops, well we're actually at a
sixteen thousand troops strength because you have your partner nations are in there, right,
so you're at a higher level. But you can understand. So there
was a constituency within the Defense Department which was very much like why are we
doing that? There's still the neo, you know, conservative approach of a
ungoverned space. Then there's people who are like you're on the doorstep of Pakistan,
China, Iran rushes over there, strategic environment to be there, right,
you know. And then there's the State Department, which is you know,
hey, we educated a generation of women, We've got partners in here.
This is a valuable partner in the region. And let's economic we're also
emotionally tied to this subject. And there's the emotional ties to the entire US
government establishment that has worked under the GAT framework for twenty years building this thing.
Right, We're deeply vested. So, you know, I think President
Trump made very much the right decision because, as you guys know back home,
outside of the foreign policy establishment, it's why are we still in Afghanistan.
I don't think we should be spending any money over there. I don't
know why people are dying over there. Why are we fighting a war even
though we could convince ourselves that this war was against somebody else. So I
think, you know, President Trump made a decision that was difficult to make.
That's why people don't make it because if you, if you choose to
come out, you're the one who gave up the al Qaeda scenario. Parties
were kind of done with this war. Well, so here's this is where
I'm going with this, right, So when the new administration comes in,
it's got to take on board all of these inputs. This is a logical
thing for any new administration. Sure, let's examine and remember President Biden's position
from back in two thousand and nine was not come out entirely, but keep
it just as a counter and it's a CT presence. Now we know that
the CT presence was enabled by the military flight print. Right, the logistics
of a landlocked country through which you've got to go through in Afghanistan don't really
allow you that pure CT presence if you have two thousand people. But his
position wasn't radically different from President Trump's position, with the exception he would have
kept a CTVY. Now would President Trump if that had been you know,
sort of at the end, would that have been you know, an outcome
because we don't know, because you know, there there were still moments at
which you could have paused this trajectory, right, So we don't know the
administration chain they took. The Biden administration took a prudent pause. There's no
question you have to take the inputs. You have to come with a fresh
set of eyes, assess this, and remember you're getting it from a lot
of other people. The problem is is we had a deal and that deal
was May first, and as part of that deal, the Taliban we're not
attacking the ex filtration. So if you're going to abrogate that particular term of
the deal, you are exposing us to risk. General Miller, as the
commander, understood that crystal clear. Right. So the advice that tends to
go up is, well, I think we should keep a certain level and
maintain because we've got force pro we've got all these other equities. But if
they were going to come out, which is what they ended up doing,
then you better get out under the terms that we agreed because otherwise the Taliban
are telling us and where are the Taliban telling us? In the military touch
point? Right, you're telling us this in the military touchpoint. So the
people that we're interacting directly face to face with the Taliban are very few in
the US government. There's Ambassador Khalilzad directly his deputy from time to time,
but really Ambassador Khalilzad, right, and General Miller through is a military touch
point, right, that's it, right, This is how we're communicating with
the Taliban, and what we're hearing is, hey, what are you doing?
What is this pause? What's going on? Okay, now we're be
on the scope. When the Biden administration came and said August thirty first,
and first they said September eleventh, I think prudently back to to August thirty
first. The Taliban said, we don't accept that. Where did they say
it? They told us in this touch point. They didn't accept it,
but they said we don't trust you. You know, we heard you were
coming out before. You know, again under the Obama mystery, we were
supposed to have a significant drawdown and it just ended up being ramped back up.
So we had to keep delivering the message we are coming out militarily.
But you guys got to get to the peace talks, and we did start
to get the Afghan government and the Taliban to finally meet face to face.
The problem was is as we started to move out district after districts started to
fall, they just can you can come up with any theory you want.
The reality was I mean, and look, the beauty of Afghan maps was
again always goes to that village level. Right that you look at the map,
it says, hey, this is this is Afghan government controlled if you
looked at at the village level, none of the villages where Afghan. They
may have been Taliban, they may not have been, but they certainly weren't
governed. The district center was controlled. That was the space. So now
those district centers are gone, and now you're seeing, okay, well they
haven't gone after the provincial capitals, but you're watching the map go red from
May June July, and this is all open source stuff that you know they
did. You know, I found I don't you know, use Twitter anymore
at all, gotten off that platform. But at the time they were Twitter
accounts from rando's doing spectacularly good. This battle happened, or the Taliban have
now taken this village, this village, this thing with pin drops. I
would then call my Afghan contacts or talk to the Taliban and they would confirm
that these places are gone. And I don't know who the randos are that
are dragging the stuff on open source. The military is briefing in the Commander
Update brief. There's a lot of open sources feeding into that stuff because what
are we also losing. We're losing intelligence networks, and we're losing our intelligence
network because we're reducing all those not only that we're losing assets because now Syncom's
losing assets to pake on, you know, because you have the larger battle
for resources within our government. So this all starts happening and you can kind
of see the thing coming down. So a I think a prudent decision made,
which is that we we stick to the agreement. An irritant that produces
a significant vulnerability and the reality now shifting on the ground. I think there
are a lot of people who will argue, okay, well that you know
that it was a red flags and all of this stuff right. The challenges
is when you look at it from a Washington perspective, and again, you
know, I can't emphasisize enough. You guys know, people working on Afghanistan
worked in good faith. You know, we're trying to get to the right
outcome. There's very few there are cases where you say, oh, what
did we do this? This government, we overthrew this government, we tried
to do is no. People were trying, you know, working to try
to get you know, from your line soldiers to your diplomats, to Inveassador
Khaliozad to General Miller, different perspectives, different approaches, but definitely trying to
do the right thing for the United States and also for our Afghan partners.
So if you look at it from Washington's perspective, the analog, the historical
analog is the civil war. And you have to think that with thousands of
Afghan police and officers and the armaments that we dumped into Cobble itself, that
at a minimum you would have a several large inkspots as provincial centers, maybe
the Taliban would sweep through parts of the country, but that at the end
you're going to have some sort of bad civil war if you can't get to
a deal. And certainly that was Ambassador Jalilzad's analysis, that it would be
a civil war, not an outright victory, not a dissolution of the Afghan
forces. So I think what was happening was the reality was we were built
on quicksand again, you know, the agency said, hey, you know,
I think there was some assessment at some point where they said it's got
six months or whatever, you know, earlier in the process, that it's
not going to last maybe a year or whatever. But I think it is
a really good argument that the Afghan government would defend itself, at least in
Kabble, that they were equities of all of these troops and all of these
families, that they would defend themselves, which meant that your time horizon would
be longer. Right. General Miller clearly said, once we're beyond the agreement,
we've got to come out faster. And so they were pulling out,
and you know, I think my assessment is that no matter how you came
out the twenty year relationship, once that military piece is out, it was
going to be chaotic. Are there mitigants that could have you know, stopped
you know, some of the scenes that we saw. Yeah, there are
things that we can do better as a government, right, But in the
end, the outcome was the right outcome, right, And that's fundamentally what
we have to focus on, because you know, I said this to you,
you know, before we were taping. If you look at the world
today and the battle space and the change in technology, if we're opposing Russia
in Ukraine and we're you know, crosswise with you know, Iran, and
you see the damage the Huthis are inflicting, I find it impossible to believe
that that stuff wouldn't be hitting US forces and US diplomats if we were still
in Afghanistan today, because you know, we would be beyond the scope of
any agreement. And it's also folks that the Taliban do business with, you
know, are ramped up and the technology has changed because for the first time
ever, some of your guess appoint is you have to look to the air
now in a way that we've never had to look to protect embassy platform.
It's also a question of like priorities. We're trying to counter Russia, China,
Iran, and then somewhere after that, we're also looking at the global
war on terror, counter terrorism North Korea. I mean, you get to
a certain point where it's like, can we maintain these long term you know,
quote unquote sustainable counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,
and elsewhere while also trying to confront some of these larger nation states. The
logistics chain, the cost I mean, there are many in our defense establishment
and you know, and you know, also on the state side. I
think that would argue that these costs are relatively minimal. I don't. I
don't agree with that, and I don't think most Americans would agree that.
You know, nine billion dollars a year or whatever whatever cost is just simply
because again the complexity of sustaining operations in Afghanistan was immense. And saw that
when BOGRAM closed. Because now you've got a single point of failure, which
is that runway at Karzai International Airport one way in and one a out.
Could you convoy outshore? But you're convoying hours and hours and hours. I
mean it's very very easy to you know, take out those you know,
convoys. So I mean this is operationally, you're you're stuck at that point.
So when you look at this, you know, sort of global force
posture and global diplomatic posture. This cost if you're under if you're really drawn
deeper into the war, which we would have been had we stayed, because
again, you know, all of this technology would have flowed in there.
The Russians would have loved to hit us. I am sure, and I'm
not a Russian expert. It just stands to reason that you know that we
would have more Tower twenty two's if we were still there. So the outcome
was the right outcome. And you know, again, you know what I
mentioned before is what's unique about this is we had two presidents that are from
radically different perspectives on virtually everything. Right, that understood I think where the
American public was on this issue and understood the American public was not, you
know, aware of supportive of pouring money into this particular war anymore. And
so the decision was made across both administrations. So when we go back to
execution again, things that you can do, some of the things are just
going to be what they were. I'll give you a very good example.
You know, it's a really tough conversation for State Department people when we have
to pull up out of an embassy. When I was in Liberia and it
was a potential for us to pull up star and pull out, and sometimes
the security posture and the logistics to sustain the place are not viable. Maybe
the country wants us out, maybe we're directly under attack, so it's not
viable. The large number of people who work for the embassy that run generators,
that run your human resources in many countries are our foreign service nationals.
These are local Liberians, local Hong Kongers, local you know people, many
of whom have put twenty thirty year careers in with US. Right, just
like all the military interpreters that we hear about that in Afghanistan worked with US
for ten fifteen years in traditional evacuation. By traditional I mean historical evacuations.
The answer is they stay in place. We don't take them out. If
they are in titled to a special immigrant visa, they've worked for US for
a certain amount of time, we can bring them and their families home.
But it's not happening generally in evacuation. This would be the normal course.
If you work your twenty years, you apply, an interagency committee looks and
says, this person is who they say they are. They've got recommendations through
the years, and we're going to give their family a chance to come to
the States and say a reward. And you know, in places where people
you know don't have difficult circumstances, you don't use a lot of SIVs where
they have difficult circumstances. It's an option. Most people don't want to really
leave their country, but it's a nice thing. Now. In Afghanistan,
you heard we had a lot of people that would be targeted, and so
we had a bigger program, but we worked with people across the spectrum for
twenty years that we've invested in relationships that anybody who was in country has friends
or you know, contacts or that was a good person or people that they've
saved your life, right, literally saved your life. So in Afghanistan,
sorry, in a normal situation, the answer is to local staff is you
don't come. We will try to help you. We will try to keep
your salary on the books for another year. We'll try to get back.
But you and I had to have those conversations in Liberia. We cannot take
you out. That is a hard conversation. You are keeping the lights on
so I can get the messages back to work the diplomacy. But if I
am ordered to leave, I can't take you in Afghanistan because like in Iraq,
we had this we basically, if you worked for us for a short
period of time, we were going to give you the option of an SIV.
Basically most of our staff had an option. And then we had all
these other relationships that were you know, contracting relationships with people meaning they didn't
work for the embassy, but they may have worked for a military contractor who
was supporting our fob Right, we felt a certain obligation to try to get
a lot more people out. And then we also had made twenty years of
commitment to Afghan women girls. There were vulnerable groups of people that we've We've
had our Congress sit with them, we've had you know, and then you
look and you say, well, here's a woman author. For example,
there's a book, The Secret Gate that came out about this about a DS
agent who became a State Department Foreign Service officer. Well DS is foreign service,
but he became a political officer and he came in and you know,
evacuated an author. Why did the author come out? The author came out
because as a matter of policy, we said, we're going to try to
take out some of you know, as many of our friends as we can
and vulnerable people. So if you're looking at an after action, what did
that do? That was a magnet for everybody to come to the airport.
Now, if you've worked the issue, are you really going to criticize and
say, hey, just leave everybody, just leave. By the way,
you know, there's a ton of American citizens in Afghanistan, but a lot
of folks who you know, were Afghan and now they're American, So we
have an obligation to them but what were they doing there. They were doing
there because they were trying to get They were there on vacation, visiting family,
you know, things that we wouldn't conceive of in a war zone.
But they're there because they thought the state was going to be there. Right
now, they're caught off guards, but they also have very tough choices.
Do you leave the family that is under US immigration law under all that not
entitled to come out? Right? But now you have these moral questions.
The American citizen is saying, hey, you know, I've got one daughter
who's in America, but my other daughter came back with me, you know,
right, Or my other daughter was here, she was in the immigration
process. All of those people, some of them are entitled to come out.
Many are attached to people who are entitled to come out. If you
say no, right, you might mitigate people trying to get to the airport,
but probably you wouldn't because people would not, you know, have a
sense. And so as a result, there was a magnet coming to the
airport and what did that do? That introduced a ton of vulnerabilities, and
we saw the very tragic outcome of that. Do you want to tee up
the question. Yeah, for Dante, you know, I'm curious because something
you mentioned has kind of stuck with me, Like when I wonder if,
for you know, people in state, people in the Department of Events,
people in the administrator like administration of workers, when they look get it an
effort in Afghanistan and they say, well, you know, for nine billion
a year or whatever like that, or how much ever it is for nine
billion dollars, like that's not a high price to pay. I wonder if
how many of those opinions would change if they were forced to go out and
walk patrols with the troops walking. There's you know that that like we look
at this as a monetary thing, but there's also you know, a generation
of war fighters who are also living with you know, sort of the consequences
of that war and then the moral injury of how we left, how we
left, you know a lot of the Afghan partners and things like that.
Listen, this is an excellent question, right, and it's a core question
that any of us have worked on the issue. Because I will tell you
that the way you framed it, you would say, okay, it was
people. People who have that perspective are only looking at the monetary costs.
Right. You know, some of the people who are framing are those same
people who are out there because because there's still the theory that we operate under,
which is it's better to take the fight into the field forward rather than
have to fight it back here. Now there's another theory, which is it
really doesn't matter what happens in Afghanistan if we protect the homeland. In the
homeland, your border control is working, your port access is working. We
all take off our shoes at the airport so we don't get a shoe bomber.
Right, that's a these are This is a theory. There's no right
answer. But those people I would still say, would say, yeah,
I don't minimize the physical cost of families, the cost and loss of lives,
but we're trying to protect the homeland. And if so, again,
I come back to good eight. I don't run into a lot of people
who are dismissive it's just that cost. But but I do agree that the
further you are from the front, the further you are from a combat outpost
or an embassy, the easier it is to put it in economic terms rather
than the human toll. I agree with that but some of the people making
those decisions do have that. But it's the calculus is you know what,
three thousand people were lost in nine to eleven, so we're trying to prevent
a nine to eleven. We're trying to prevent you know, what the houthis
are doing right now. So but it's a great question. Okay, M
Corbyn, thank you very much. How big of a headache is the leasing
agreement for Jibouti? But now you're talking my current job, you know,
listen, I have to go into State Department speaking. Jibouti is a critical
counter terrorism partner. We can see the we can see the challenges the Red
Sea, so we want to make sure that our partners feel, you know,
that we appropriately view the relationship as a strong strategic partner. Out of
curiosity, have you ever had from any of these partners? Obviously there's there's
the monetary there, you know, all types of diplomat diplomatic things. Has
there ever been a really weird request that just caught you off guard or you
know anything that that like the an ambassador or something like anything, not an
ambassador, but like, have there ever been concessions that they wanted or or
things that struck like you or or like Americans is odd, you mean,
from our partners, from our partners. You know, there's I mean,
you know, when you're in a foreign country, you there's just different things
happen and you don't really understand. I'm not going to give an example.
The example I want to give you is a funny one because it just popped
into my mind, not because I'm you know, trying to avoid a formal
government request. I just didn't have one right away. I'm negotiating with General
Cobra, and we're trying to get General Cobra to withdraw his forces from Liberia
from Monrovia, and he ends up doing it. So then I go back
to his headquarters, right and they're trying to sort of figure out what their
new posture will be in the sort of post war era. And this is
what he figured out. He throws down a giant lump of stone and he
goes, this is a raw diamond. You and me, we can sell
this. And I was like, General Cobra, I don't want to read
you kindle the war. I don't want to get shot. I'm like,
you know, this is a great I you know, sorry, I this
is not my laying, you know, and I'm trying to so, I
mean, things come. You know, you don't quite know what is uh
what you're going to be dealing with it on a daily basis, but uh,
yeah, that's the example that pops into my is. It was not
a formal government request, but it was yeah, ahead of the of the
rebel contingent. Thank you, Devin. Thank you very much, very generous.
I would like to know your action in a nuclear war setting. Wait,
if a nuclear bomb dropped, what would you do? Die? Probably?
What would I do in a nuclear by Yeah, I mean, look
like everybody, if I'm not vaporized immediately, I'm going to go find my
family and you know, try to go to ground. Thanks definitely appreciate it.
Uh Colly, thank you very much. We define success in Afghani stand
as a strong, stable central government ignoring ignoring reality. Did this mislignement ensure
failure? I would say that again. I want to be clear. I
think we achieved our core strategic mission in Afghanistan, which is we took the
leadership of al Qaida off the board and the ideological gravity center of that organization
off the board. And that's the organization that killed you know, three thousand
Americans. Right, So I feel strongly that that core national security objective.
Now when you're talking about what came and what we were trying to achieve in
terms of the stability, it's less sort of that objective. Then. I
think there are alternate history lines as we've talked about that certainly us. I
think the bigger, you know, the bigger mistakes that were made were hyper
inflating an economy that couldn't handle it, that it blatantly enabled corruption. So
we fueled a completely dependent structure that wasn't serving the benefit of the people that
in theory, we were trying to help. And again it gets back to
why we as Americans supporting a unitary state. By unitary state, I mean
a central government that appoints the governing structures the governors and the district governors of
the provinces in the outlying areas, and all the resources flow back to centrally
led ministries. This is the type of stuff that drives us crazy in America.
And so I, you know, the fact that we worked so much
on that project, if I had had a stronger say, you know,
and had been a senior person I would have been looking more at, you
know, what are the relationships of the tribes, and how do we do
you know, a looser confederation of peoples that you know will fundamentally be willing
to accept some money far smaller amounts to tell us when al Qaeda shows up
and ted them over and that's it, and then leave the Afghans to sort
out a different construct, rather than we didn't fully impose it, but we
funded it so much that so I think the you know, you know,
I hope I'm being responsive to the answer. I don't think it was a
preordained failure, but I do think that the structure as it developed was definitely
not the right structure, and there are other things that probably could have should
have been tried earlier in the process. I mean, once we were,
once I got there in two thousand and nine, we were we were far
down the road supporting a unitary state, and that was our problem. I
think we should have looked at other models. That's my own view, Ian
Brown, Thank you very much. What are Dante's thoughts about the Diplomatic Security
Service? How did he work with him? Thanks? Guy. I mean,
I can't say enough positive things about my colleagues in diplomatic security and again
the marine security guards that work for them at embassies. I'm a field person.
Most of my career has been overseas. You know, those folks are
responsible for not only our safety of us, safety of the chancery, but
they're maintaining the relationships with all the local security apparatus, right because fundamentally we're
in somebody else's country, we are relying on them. You know, a
strong RSO and a strong RSO contingent is completely tie in and has the context.
So when you need to evacuate somebody from a country when there's a real
crisis, that person being able to do it. And you know, my
colleagues are excellent. The other thing is is that they are tasked with and
you guys know this. If you look at threat streams, we would close
everywhere because you're constantly under thread, right if your focus is on threatstreams,
and the RSO has to have the judgment, and they do. We have
exceptional RSOs throughout the world who are looking at these threat streams that we're all
seeing in different channels and they have to go to the ambassador, the chief
of mission and say, hey, we got this or it's time to go.
And so like in Liberia, if you can imagine the pressure that Ted
Collins and Brad Lynn are rs and aarso we're under. You not only have
the Washington pressure, but it's if I give the ambassador the wrong advice,
I don't think we can hold that. If I say I think we can
hold this compound, the compound's overrun, right, I mean not only do
I maybe get killed, I get the ambassador killed, but I've you know,
destroyed the US credibility in the region. We've lost a platform, I
mean huge ramification. The ambassador, as the chief of mission with the authority,
will make the final call unless it's taken away and Washington decides we don't
think the ambassador has it right. We're gonna We're gonna order the ambassador out.
But the RSO is the critical counsel to the ambassador on how to handle
the riot that is out front of your embassy, how to handle uh,
you know, the civil war uh that that's broken out. You know,
what does this mean for the security of our personnel? So I can't say
enough positive things about it because you don't see, you know, all of
the things that are prevented on a daily basis by that, you know.
Uh, I again, thank you very much. Hit the likes, guys,
let's get to that one hundred. Hopefully we got there already. Thanks.
Thanks again. We appreciate Collie. Thank you very much. Does the
United States government facilitating private hostage negotiations example of the Burnham's undermine the stated policy
no negation, no negotiation with good question? So this is a really good
question. I really have to caveat it that it's you know, I'm not
familiar with that particular example in terms of what what that means the facilitation.
I'll say this that, uh, it's a very that you know, hostage
negotiation stuff is very, very difficult. We have a commitment as a government
to recover our people safely, right, but there's a moral hazard every time
you're doing it, and you're dealing with the emotions and lives of family members
and communities. But you're balancing that against the reality that the more you pay
into a system, and I don't mean monetary, but whatever transactions you do
on hostage release can introduce more hostages. So these are very very tough calls
on whether or not that's right. So in terms of is there moral hazard?
And I can't answer that specific case because I don't know it, but
as a general principle, you know, negotiations introduced that and then you know,
we have to The Burnhams were in the Philippines and it was a big
deal in the early two thousands getting them out of there. There were missionaries
and when they were finally rescued, I believe the wife made it out.
In the husband I believe was killed if I remember correctly. Yeah, I'm
not. I'm not familiar with it. I will say that, you know,
there's some you know, again not my area of expertise, there's some
areas of policy that are you know, under consideration because we I think we
used to have a law that private citizens couldn't do their own negotiation. You
sort of understood it because again it was to try to prevent the moral hazard
and try to prevent people from getting deeper into a situation that they're unfamiliar with
and you know, producing something. But you know, a change in policy
there would make some sense in the sense that, look, if a family
member wants to try, they should be aware of the risks that they're undertaking.
But we as a government shouldn't you know, I think there's a strong
case to be made that it's not our role to stop it, right,
but you know, but it's because of those kind of very very difficult situations
that the policy gets gray. Sure, tell us a little bit about where
you're at now, you're the Director of East African Affairs at the State Department.
What does that entail. That entails you know, an office within the
State Department, in a what we call a regional bureau, is sort of
your primary touch point for the embassies in the reporting back. So when an
embassy reports what's going on in a country, you know, they will you
know, feed their views and that information into a policy process on how we
respond to whatever the country is doing. If somebody wants to you know,
join bricks, do we have a do we have a policy response? Should
we encourage them not to? Should do we have an alternative for them?
You know those kind of things. So the office is the primary pooler and
gatherer of information for the embassies. And then the second thing is is where
the you know, we provide a regional and country specific perspective into interagency deliberations
over whatever policy is being cooked up. Hey, we want to you know,
we want to train police. Okay, good ideas. Should we be
training these police? Right? You know, how are we balancing the human
rights considerations with the hardcore national security considerations. So it's a lot of it's
a lot of internal conversation. And then of course we are a touch point
for the embassies here from the foreign missions. You know, in places where
we have intensive negotiations, we may support those negotiations. Maybe there's a trade
treaty, there's that they bring in our expertise on. Maybe there's some other
kind of bilateral dialogue. We support a lot of things like that. You
bring their foreign minister over, we bring the secretary together and we discuss the
issues. So you're trying to manage the relations with countries where there's sort of
primary regional policy expertise on that. And folks out there that are interested in
your book, which I mean, I think you described it to me before
that it's really about what it's like to be existing in a crisis in a
US embassy abroad. In this book. Where can people find it? They
can find it on Amazon. The book is the Embassy Story of War and
Diplomacy. Just a couple quick points on it. It is designed, it's
written in narrative nonfiction. There's a brief section that you've got to get through
and intro. You don't have to read it on history a little dry.
What I do is the reason I wrote it is to put you in an
embassy in a crisis. So it was based on my own personal observations and
experiences. But I also did extensive interviews with everybody that was involved in the
crisis at the time, and I was sort of at the nerve center.
So you've got, you know, chapters built around the perspective of the rso
more or less chapters built around the perspective of the ambassador, of a local
staff member, and they're woven together to take you through an extraordinary summer in
which again three rebel attacks, the X, the end of the Charles Taylor
regime, and a peace agreement that has endured to today. That's fantastic.
I don't know if I've ever heard of a book of that nature work.
Coolly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And
is there anything else that you want to plug? Is there where can people
find you? I know you're currently a government official. Do you have any
sort of public faith seeing places that you want to direct people at the shop
or yeah, no, no, I might you know, if you if
you want to see the uh the travel version of the Foreign Service and see
some you know, travel photography, you can go to my Instagram account parody
so d X if you just want to reach out to me and you have
further questions. You know, I think one of the things that your platform
does is give people a chance to connect. So you can just find me
on LinkedIn under my name, because you know, I'm always happy to engage
people and you know, build the community of interests for for people who might
be interested in pursuing the field of foreign service. What like what's a good
age to start that, what are some good in roads and what does the
Foreign Service look for in candidates? Yeah, I mean the Foreign Service.
There are a couple of ways in I'm not that familiar with the sort of
non traditional mid career ways. They're trying to open up that process and make
it a little more flexible. The traditional way is there's a Foreign Service exam.
You should find out from State gut doug gov where you can you can
find the information on the exam and it's a written exam, followed by an
oral exam, followed by security and medical clearances if you pass it. You
know, the preparation for the career can be varied. Obviously, Folks with
you know, military background is excellent. We're fortunately getting a lot of folks
that are using it as a second career. You can enter at any point.
The retirement age is sixty five. You know, you're going to have
to come in, you know, in your late fifties if you want a
couple tours overseas. The thing is is that you know, you're not going
to become an ambassador if you start when you're fifty five, right, because
it's just you're not going to be have the time to work your way up
through the system. But there's a tremendous number of uh, you know,
great assignments out there. There's a lot of different aspects to foreign service life.
So, you know, I'm a political officer by you know, by
they call it cone. What do you what do you guys call it skill
code? Right, political officer that's you know, essentially reporting on the political
dynamics in a country. But there are also management officers that just sort of
run the affairs of an embassy. You know, make sure that we have
our motor pool set, you know, make sure that your financial stuff is
being run. We have public affairs officers and of course consular officers. And
if you know, immigration is your thing and you want to help, you
know, bring people to the States, you want to keep people out of
the states. You know, you're going to be working on visas, You're
going to be working on family reunification, and the critical component of American city
and services, which is, you know, when somebody's in trouble overseas,
you get thrown in jail, the embassy is going to visit track you.
We can't run your court case for you, but it's it's those kind of
things, sort of helping Americans through evacuations, in extremists and all that.
Those are all aspects. And then there are specialized roles, which is you
know, like diplomatic security. Those are you know, folks come in in
diplomatic security or it t people you know, if you have a general interest
in living overseas representing the country, but you know, are not as as
interested in the the core diplomatic sit in the meeting with the foreign minister and
write reports on that. Then you know some of those other roles or ways
to contribute, you know, you know, to the inner agency platform.
And I want to you know, shout out everybody that is part of an
embassy team, because State Department provides the core platform, right, but a
country team at an embassy, you know, like if you go to Thailand,
it's like fifty four agencies. I didn't even know we had fifty four
agents. Yes, right, I'm like, I don't know there's d A.
I can go through the entire litany of the US government and apparently and
find it in Tily. You go to a smaller embassy, you know,
you're going to find two or three agencies. Usually you're going to have a
Defense attache there and you might have a USA I D person or whatever.
So it really depends. There's a lot of you know, folks that are
doing foreign affairs and doing embassy work, so they should all get credit for
that. Dante, thank you so much for coming in to do this interview
tonight, even if you came in under an alias, that's okay. I
really appreciate it. And we will be back on Wednesday with Adam Gamal,
the author of the unit. So that's Wednesday at noon, so it'll be
a neon interview. It'll odd for us, but I hope you guys will
check out the embassy. The books available on Amazon, and there's going to
be a link down the description as well. You guys can go and check
it out. Thank you, And you know, I hope that we can
have you back sometime in the future because there's a few other things here that
we didn't quite get to tonight and could probably yeah, no, it absolutely
could. And you know, I have no idea maybe you'll have another book
to come and talk about as well. Yeah, it's great. It's a
it's a real honestly and honor to be here. And you know, you
guys have you know, phenomenal guests. You know, love this love this
program, and it's thank you. We all learned, we all learned from
it. Yeah, thank you, appreciate it. And uh so that's it.
We'll see you guys on Wednesday. Take care out there, have a
nice weekend.