 It seems to me the history of the United States, tragically, I mean, you'd think that somebody would read the after-action reports, they're all written, I know they're written, but nobody ever reads them, you know, it's just like Jesus Christ, we just keep doing the same old shit. I can assure you that given the international political economy, this will not be the last time either, it's called non-stop imperialism. That's why it's so important that we don't let these assholes, pardon my French, to all 250 people that are on already go to war again. I mean, we've got to stop all of this crap about China as our enemy, Russia as our enemy, that we got to have all the military to counter all of that, you know, the rhetoric that's coming out of the politicians and the guys that make the money, all these big defense industries. You know, and that's the other thing is that we have all these hidden wars that are going on, all these secret wars, all these wars that are conducted by special operations and CIA forces and drone forces that are classified, they're officially covert actions. The US government doesn't even have to lie about them, they're obligated by law not to talk about them because they're secret activities, they're covert activities. And so you can imagine that if the United States didn't have to have this announced presence of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, didn't have to make a show out of withdrawal, conduct the retreat, etc., no one talks about it, no one cares. I mean, these wars are going from west coast to Pakistan, all the way to, I mean, sorry, the west coast of Africa, all the way to Pakistan and no one notices. So I mean, that's something that these wars are going to continue. The US military has learned its lessons, the lessons it's learned, though, have been nefarious and insidious. Biden's on TV, so Ariel, if you want to put it on our screen. Including the rapid collapse we're seeing now. I'll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we're taking, but I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America's interest are in Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him. That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be a nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital last interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing an terrorist attack on America's homeland. I've argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter-terrorism, not counter-insurgency or nation building. That's why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president. And that's why I was president. I'm adamant we focused on the threats we faced today in 2021, not yesterday's threats. Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. El Shabab and Somalia, al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counter-terrorism against terrorist culpable countries where we don't have permanent military presence. If necessary, we'll do the same in Afghanistan. We've developed counter-terrorism over the rising capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States and the region, and that quickly and decisively if needed. When I came into office, I inherited a deal the President and Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001. The choice I had to make as your President was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hardware that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That's why we're still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency, but I always promised the American people that I would be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed sometime without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force with some 300,000 strong, incredibly well equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something that Taliban doesn't have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future. There's some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. And if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance of the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years, the U.S. military boots in the ground would have made any difference. It was what I believe to my core. It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan's own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention in the stabilized Afghanistan in death. When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically. They failed to do any of that. I also urge them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement to the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong. So I'm left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay. How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war and Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones in the Arlington National Cemetery? I'm clear on my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past. Mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore. I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes we're seeing in Afghanistan are gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan and for Americans who have fought and served in the country, serve our country in Afghanistan, this is deeply, deeply personal. It is for me as well. I've worked on these issues as long as anyone. I've been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on, from Kabul to Kandahar to the Kunar Valley. I've traveled, there are four different occasions. I've met with the people. I've spoken to the leaders. I've spent time with our troops. And I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan. So now we're focused on what is possible. We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We'll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We'll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls. Just as we speak out all over the world, I've been clear the human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It's with our diplomacy, our economic tools, and rallying the world to join us. Let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan. I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 US troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of US and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights. We're taking over air traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well. Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We'll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel, a civilian personnel of our allies who are still serving in Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refugee, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, US military will provide assistance to move to move more SIV eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan. We're also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who work for embassy, US non-governmental agencies or US non-governmental organizations and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk in US news agencies. I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discourage us from organizing the massacres to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence. American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do, but it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban, if they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the US presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary. Our current military mission will be shortened time, limited scope and focused in its objectives. Get our people and our allies as safely as quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America's longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed. The events we're seeing now are sadly proof no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What's happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future. You have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps, many, many missteps over the past two decades. I'm now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan, two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibly on, responsibly on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share responsibly for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America and the buck stops with me. I'm deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America's war in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism missions there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success for decades long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not. And I wrote and believed it never could be. I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight endlessly in another country's civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interests. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve. I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for president, that I would bring America's military involvement in Afghanistan to an end while it's been hard and messy and, yes, far from perfect. I've honored that commitment. More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who served this nation, that I wasn't going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military accident should have ended long ago. Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan. I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism and pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one, because it's the right one. It's the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation. It's the right one for America. Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all brave Americans serving in harm's way. Okay, so I think we can start our webinar. My name is Medea Benjamin with Code Pink. Sorry for those of you who found it painful to listen to Biden, but we have to know what the president of the United States is saying. And now we have a chance to hear from our panelists. There's a lot to discuss, and I want to start with just asking them about the reaction to what Biden had to say. I want to introduce our three panelists, and we were lucky enough to be joined also by Phyllis Benes. So let me start with Matthew Ho. Then we're going to hear from Zahra Wahab and Wright, and then Phyllis. Matthew has nearly 12 years of experience with America's wars overseas. He was with the U.S. Marine Corps, Department of Defense, and the State Department. He's been a senior fellow with the Center for International Policies since 2010. And in 2009, he resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over the American escalation of the war. So, Matt, I know you have a lot to say about this. Let me first say that people are welcome to use the chat to put your comments, to ask your questions. Please try to be civil. We've seen some not very civil remarks so far in the chat. We might not agree with a lot of the things even our speakers have to say, and we certainly won't agree with a lot of things that Biden had to say. But let's try to have a constructive, civilized discussion, and thank you, Matt, for starting us off. Thanks, Medea, and thank you to Co-Pink for putting this together. And it's great to be here with Anne and Phyllis and Dr. Wahab. Three people I have learned so much from, and I feel like I could just spend the next hour to telling stories about how I learned from them. With regards to the President's comments, you know, is it too early to start drinking, basically, is kind of how I feel right now after listening to that. You know, he just launches in with, and I'll try and keep my comments brief, but what struck me was just the way he opened with lies, with lies about the war. He says he opposed a surge. He did not oppose a surge. Under President Biden's plan in 2009, the United States would have had 100,000, would have had 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, as opposed to the 100,000 it did. What Biden offered in this fall of 2009 to Obama was a plan for 20,000 troops on top of the 40,000 troops that Obama had already sent that year to Afghanistan. Obama chose to send 30,000 more troops. Somehow for Joe Biden, that difference of 10,000 troops out of 100,000 total means he opposed the war in Afghanistan. What bothers me more than that lie is that we didn't watch the press conference, but I guarantee you nobody would say something about that. No one would bring it up, and in the coverage in the Times, the Post, CNN, Politico, et cetera, tomorrow, no one will discuss that. You may say that's a minor thing, but I think it's that type of willingness and ease to lie and the getting away with it, never being called out on it, never being confronted with it that has allowed not this war, but the wars all throughout the Muslim world to continue, and not just to continue, but to evolve to a way that they are hidden in secret wars now, but not, of course, secret and hidden to the people who are suffering through them. Another thing is, he right away says it was never about nation building. He just, by saying that, hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million young men and women in Afghanistan, with the express orders to nation build. They went over there and they killed. They went over there and they were killed. They saw their friends killed. They killed women and children. They came home missing limbs. They came home psychologically scarred because they were nation building. So for a man like Biden to stand up and say something like that to lie like that, it just shows the calculations that these people have, that they're psychopaths. They're sociopaths. And again, they're emboldened by a system that allows that because they never get confronted with it. I'll wrap up my comments because I think there's a lot of questioning about why Biden said a month ago, Kabul will not collapse, right? Kabul will not be taken. We're in the Afghan government, it's not going to collapse. We've got this army of 350,000 soldiers. I really do think that Joe Biden only knows what he is told. The president only knows what is put in front of him. And I say this because when I resigned, Chuck Hegel and David Boren, two former senators who were co-chairs of the president's intelligence advisory board, had me come in to testify to the president's intelligence advisory board. This was winter of 2010 by the time it happened. And the reason why was because senators Hegel and Boren both said, we are very concerned that the things you are saying, the things that we hear, because both of them were at universities and both of them had military officers in their classes and things like that, that the captains, the majors, lieutenant colonels who are attending our universities are saying about the wars are completely the opposite of what the president is being told. I mean, these were men who saw what these soldiers, these officers are saying about the war and then who saw what the president was being told. They had, they read what the president was being told. That was part of their job. And so how come what, what things were being said about the war by people who were fighting it were completely the opposite of what the president of the United States was being told about the war? And I think that's the answer to this question about why did Joe Biden say that Kabul was going to fall? Well, because that's what he was told. And, you know, I mean, in the fact then, of course, that nobody has been fired and nobody will be fired, of course, for this, you know, is another real concern we should have because there's nothing in place. We have no mechanisms at all. There's nothing that's, that's going to prevent another Afghanistan, another Iraq, another Yemen. In fact, and I think we can get into this comments was something I like to talk about later. In fact, actually what has occurred is the US military, the national security establishment intelligence agencies have evolved to allow for more wars to continue, not less, even in spite of the American defeats in Iraq, the American defeat in Afghanistan, the tragedies of Yemen, Syria, Libya, you know, et cetera. But I appreciate everyone coming and listening to us this afternoon. Sorry if it's going to be an upsetting or triggering or grim assessment, but I appreciate everything that everyone does. So, so pleased to see so many people caring about what's happening to the Afghan people. Well, thank you, Matt, for the sobering response. And I think what stood out for me of what you said is that we have no mechanism for accountability. And that is something that I think we have to discuss more because we're not going to get anywhere as a movement that wants to stop these wars if we don't have any mechanism for accountability. Next, we're going to hear from Zahra Wahab, who was born and schooled in Afghanistan, the first person in his family's history to attend the village school. He later left the country, got a BA in sociology from the American University in Beirut, a master's degree in comparative literature and anthropology, a PhD in international development education from Stanford. And then he served as senior advisor to the Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006. So Dr. Wahab, you know a lot about Afghanistan, a lot about education. We'd love to hear your thoughts about what President Biden said and your thoughts about the present situation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Medea. First, I'd like to thank all four of you and Medea, Matt, and Phyllis. I keep reading you. I keep reading about you. And it's wonderful to see you. And I thank you very much for your struggles on behalf of the oppressed and the suffering people throughout the world and not just in Afghanistan. So keep the good work. In response to, well, President Biden spoke as an American president and at a time when he is in deep, deep trouble. If you saw the pictures of the people actually climbing on top of an airplane in the U.S. war planes at the Kabul airport yesterday and now you will see that in fact this scene repeats the, you know, 1975 Saigon or Ho Chi Minh scene where people were climbing onto the helicopter on top of the U.S. embassy. So President Biden, I think, is in deep trouble. I'd just like to respond very briefly to some of the points he made. First, Afghanistan as a country had nothing too little to do with 9-11. Second, you don't end terrorism with war, especially the terrorist activities or crime of a few individuals and then punishing, applying collective punishment to a whole nation. If this could be done, then we should be occupying a lot of other places throughout the world, including the parts of the U.S. and Europe. Next, yes, there were no goals and objectives for the initial assault in occupation of Afghanistan, but because it was mindless and senseless, the then President Khalilzad Ramsfeld, you know, President Bush, these other people had to come up with some code goals, which was, you know, the liberation of women, bringing peace, prosperity and progress, democracy to Afghanistan, ending the narcotics, stabilizing the country, stabilizing the region, ending terrorism, etc. These were the goals, and in addition to other goals was, if the United States did not have any goals, what was the reason for establishing the provincial reconstruction teams, which were about 30 at a time, and specifically the PRTs were designed actually to nation-build and develop the country. Next, when the money was spent, the trillion dollars, yes, the United States spent a lot of money and blood, but the money, most of it came to the United States, it came back to the military industrial complex. And now it's not just military industrial complex, but it's also the military industrial media, intelligence and academic complex. So, he should not be blaming the Afghan people who are suffering from starvation and hunger, but, you know, the military industrial complex, but also the people, the ruling elite in the thieving class of Afghanistan who stole the money and deposited it in Dubai and the United States and other places. It was wrong to blame the Afghan, just the Afghan national defense forces or even the Afghan government, guilty as they are. We have to ask the question, why did things come to this? You know, why did the Afghan military failed, given all the training, the technology, the expenses and all that? And why a president, a government that we put in power, illegitimately, who was illegitimate, inefficient, ineffective, why and how he escaped without telling anybody his own country or his sponsors in Washington with truckloads of money. So, the money was stolen by these people. The Afghan, and I would say it shows the failure of the American intelligence, the American military, the American policy and the American diplomacy. Why is it that things came to this? And why didn't Washington actually know about all of this and prevent this, this catastrophe? Human rights in Afghanistan, I would say we should first secure and guarantee human rights to all people in this country. He shouldn't be insulting our intelligence and integrity. We know what is going on in this country and throughout the world and perhaps we should fix things here and then reach out to other places. Next is the graveyard of empires. I think, and he said there was no good time to withdraw. I would say the best time for the United States. First, they should never have attacked Afghanistan. It was illegitimate, illegal, immoral, inhuman. When it did, it should have left as soon as the Taliban had been discharged. That is to say, the United States should have left in 2002. Why it stayed? We know because, as I said, it's called imperialism by different name. And finally, the issue of the special immigrant visa. Yes, I can understand why people are worried because people remember what the Taliban were like the first time around, although I should say the Taliban now are going out of their way to ensure and assure people that everything should be okay and we're not going to be harming people. But I still understand there are Afghans who are frightened. They don't want to be there. They're afraid for their lives, for their property and for their honor, and people are trying to leave. My question, though, is that if we take out, say, 20,000, 50,000, or even 100,000 Afghans, what about those 35 million other Afghans that we are leaving behind? If we're not doing anything there now in terms of bringing law and order stability, security, et cetera, what is going to happen to the 34 million Afghans when we take these people out? And this is what we should be thinking about. And I'm hoping that later we will try to talk about some of the ideas where we go from here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Wahab. And thank you for making the comment that it's important to start out with, which is the U.S. should never have invaded Afghanistan to begin with. And we want that to be foremost on the minds of the American people. And next we're going to hear from Anne Wright, who is a retired Army colonel, a diplomat in the State Department for 16 years, serving in U.S. embassies of Afghanistan and many other places around the world. And she was actually on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001 and remained there for five months. In March of 2003, she sent a letter of resignation to the then Secretary of State Colin Powell because of the invasion of Iraq. And ever since then, she has been working for peace, writing, speaking all over the world. She's returned three times to Afghanistan, writes extensively on Afghanistan and other issues and also works with groups like Code Pink and Veterans for Peace and many other peace organizations. Thank you for joining us, Anne. You're amuted. Thank you, Medea. It's a pleasure to be with everyone. It's quite a scene that we're seeing now. And I just want to, I'm going to do a quick little screen share here. I just wanted to mention, you know, a reopening the embassy. This is a picture of the reopening of the embassy in 2001 after the Taliban had been in power for five years. Here's December 17th, 2001. This was a special envoy at the time. And then we go 20 years later, and we have the Taliban in the presidential palace. I was there many times in the very early days when Hamid Karzai was still the interim president and then later the full president. And then we go on to what we have seen over the last days, which is the total evacuation, the remarkable, remarkable views that we're seeing of primarily men climbing on to these. But what are we thinking more about? We're thinking a lot about the women, the women. What have happened to the women? And this is a report that was done in 2001 by the State Department, the Taliban war against women. And we're certainly hopeful that that will not happen again. And the Taliban makes some comments about, well, some women can still go to school, but not universities. But they've already taken women out of parts of the business sector, reports that women are not able to work in banks, things like that. And then just some beautiful watercolors I brought back from Afghanistan that really bring the humanity of what the people are that we are thinking about. And some of these are little, maybe they're not the most modern in the world, but they do reflect 75% of what Afghanistan is, which is a rural environment. It's not an urban environment that we see most about. And it's in these rural areas that we see that the conservatism of Afghanistan is alive and well today. And in fact, the studies that have been done most recently say that the men of Afghanistan are very conservative still in the rural areas as well as in the urban areas. So on one level, one could say maybe the money should have been spent in a much different way of much more education of men instead of trying to kill them. How about educate them? That would have been a novel thing. But we did educate. There were a lot of people that were educated during this period of time. And I don't want to diminish some of the progress that was made during the tragedy of a military involvement there. There were strides that we hope can continue in education and certainly in health. The COVID situation is very difficult there. And we hope that the, or I hope that the Biden administration will not do what normally is done, once defeated, we try to beat the crap out of the country that's defeated us by breaking diplomatic relations, have nothing to do with it and putting sanctions on it that will only hurt the people of the country and not necessarily the leaders that usually are targeted. Now, what Biden said, I mean, one of the things that struck me that I would certainly want to push back on him is this statement that China and Russia are looking to destabilize the region using Afghanistan. Well, let me just say, I think that's totally wrong. I mean, the Russians have already been beaten in Afghanistan. The Chinese have a different way of going about warfare. And it's certainly not military warfare. It's economic warfare where they are beating the socks off the United States with its belt and road. And they have the belt and road that's going around Afghanistan right now. I mean, it's already down into Pakistan. I think the Taliban going to China just last week to tell the Chinese, OK, we will not support Uyghur destabilization coming from Afghanistan. That's apparently what they told them. There are a lot of Uyghurs that are in Afghanistan. And I think the Taliban may have a challenge on its hand if they really mean that. Certainly the Russians are not going to get involved again. They've already had the tar beating out of them by exactly the type of men who have weighted the U.S. out, really. It was called the Mujahideen back in the 1980s that the U.S. supported. And then the Mujahideen morphed into the warlords, which then became part of the government of Afghanistan. I mean, one of the worst warlords that there was, General Dostom became the Minister of Defense and one of the vice presidents of Afghanistan. And he was he was the guy that sent his militias out into the deserts in northern Afghanistan. And then the Afghan convoy of death documentary you can see online killed 3,000 Taliban. So if you don't think there's going to be retribution for some elements of the Afghan public by the Taliban on the militias, particularly the warlords militias, then you haven't really know much about Afghan culture. And the other part of Afghan culture that I was informed about once I got into Afghanistan 2001 was that there there seems to be a tradition that if if the fighting forces that you are on are not winning, then you live to fight another day by putting up a little white flag and saying, okay, I surrender, I'll go over to you guys for a while. And it's not that everybody fights to the death that they move from one part to another. And I'll just end my little oration on, well, if we're so concerned about countries destabilizing the area, why the hell hadn't the Biden administration or the Trump administration or all of them gone after the hotbed of destabilization, which is Saudi Arabia. Thank you. Beautiful. And thank you so much for doing everything from bringing the humanity of the Afghan people and culture to the global aspects of it, of Biden trying to pin blame now on China and Russia. And we want to hear now from Phyllis Benes, who runs the new internationalist project at the Institute for Policy Studies. You've probably seen and heard her over the years, writing and speaking on the Middle East and on Afghanistan. I remember Phyllis, your 2010 primer on Afghanistan being the absolute necessity for people who were working on these issues. And now we have your piece that came out today in the nation called Washington's War on Afghanistan is over. What happens now? So thank you for these years of work to try to get us to understand what the empire is about and what it's doing around the world. We're so glad you could join us. Thanks, Medea. And thanks, all of you. This is an amazing team to be part of. I'm delighted. And thanks to all of you who are joining the webinar. Let me start quickly with two quick historical points. One that I think and referenced as well, the U.S. involvement in the 1980s in Afghanistan during the years of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, the U.S. was not just standing back and cheering on that war. They were involved in arming and training and identifying and building the Mojahedin with Pakistan's military and Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency. And that set the stage for a lot of what came next. So we can't afford to keep thinking that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began in 2001. It goes back 20 years before that. The other historical note is this question of 1975 in what was then Saigon in Vietnam. And one of the things that I think we have to be clear on as a movement, as an anti-war movement, a solidarity movement, is how much harder it is now than it was then. It was really hard to build the kind of giant anti-war movement that existed around Vietnam. But politically, it was easier in one important sense, which is that within that broad movement that was saying the U.S. should get out, the U.S. should end the war, end the war, end the war, there was a smaller group within that said we actually support the other side. We support the Vietnamese because they are struggling for their liberation. We support the social program that they stand for. It doesn't mean we agree with every single thing they do, how they carry out the war. But we stood on that side. So it was a moment of jubilation. It was a moment of excitement and cheering when the U.S. pulled out and the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front in the South drove into the gates of the U.S. Embassy. It was a huge victory right now. And if we look at the armed actors in Afghanistan, there's no good guys. There's no good guys here. There's no cheering. This is a much harder reality. We're trying to minimize the harm that our government has been causing. It's not going to end the war. It's not going to end the war, but it's going to end the U.S. involvement in the war, we hope. So we have to look at it that way. I want to just come to something that our friend Malala Joya, who was one of the first women elected to the parliament when the U.S. set up its government in Kabul, and she was the youngest person in the parliament. And she has said for many years something I think is very important for us to keep in mind. She said, you know, we women in Afghanistan and we in civil society in Afghanistan, we have three enemies. The Taliban is our enemy. The warlords disguised as a government is our enemy. And the U.S. occupation is our enemy. And she said, if you in the U.S., if you can get rid of one of them, if you can pull out the U.S. troops, we'd only have two. It was very pragmatic and I always sort of appreciated that understanding. Our role now, I think what we as a movement need to be looking at is the need for accountability. It's not going to happen because the government decides to pull themselves accountable. It will only happen if there is a political price that is too high not to do it. And that means we need to work even harder than we've worked in the past to get the troops out and to stop the bombing raids and stop the drone attacks. We need to fight for accountability and we need to be clear about what the U.S. did and didn't do. All this talk about how the U.S. made possible the liberation of women in Afghanistan. Well, yeah, there were some women in the cities in Kabul and Kandahar who because certain rules and laws were enforced by a foreign occupation, they were able to take advantage of that and that's been hugely important and they will stand potentially to lose some of that. That's hugely important and it's a huge wrong. But if we look at the vast majority of people in Afghanistan where 75% of the population does not live in the city at all, big little or in between, they live in tiny villages scattered in rural areas, what has it meant for women there? Well, at the time that the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan, the country of Afghanistan was number one for infant mortality in the whole world. It was the worst place in the world for a child to be born and think that she would live to her first birthday. Today, after 20 years of U.S. occupation in a war that they claimed was partly being fought to protect women's rights, which we knew wasn't true, but that was the claim. Afghanistan is still where? Number one in infant mortality. It's still the worst place in the world for a child to be born and think she's going to live to her first birthday. That is what women's rights has meant under years of U.S. occupation. So we have to be clear about what these accusations are about. The accusation is wrong about, oh, did they have bad intelligence on the Taliban being so strong? The Taliban wasn't so strong in these last 48 hours. They didn't have to be. They didn't have to be because the Afghan military didn't fight. Why didn't they fight? Not because they didn't have good training and fabulous arms. They didn't have 300,000 people. That's a lie. But yeah, they had plenty of good training, plenty of all the good arms. They didn't fight because they were being asked to fight, not for their country. They were being asked to fight for a government that they had no support for. And why was that? It was because when the U.S. created that government and imposed that government, it created a government that was completely opposite what Afghan tradition had called for, which is power that rests in the family, the tribe, maybe in the village, but does not extend to the national capital of a modern nation state. That didn't exist. And it still doesn't in Afghanistan. That's not where the loyalties lie. So not surprisingly, with a government that had no support, no legitimacy, was known only for corruption and incompetence. Then we were asking Afghan soldiers to fight for that government. Why are we surprised that they didn't fight? That they stood back and said, you know what? We don't need to do this. Take my weapons. I'm out of here. That's what we saw. This was not the Taliban being so strong and we didn't know it. So lastly, I just want to come back to what we need to do as a movement to fight for accountability. We need to find, we need to focus on our obligations to the people of Afghanistan, to the women of Afghanistan, to all the people of Afghanistan. That means focusing first on the humanitarian crisis that's underway. It means we need to fight for a vast expansion of the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers that are welcome in this country, making it easier for people to apply, expanding the categories and expertise and right who managed in 1975 to take care of, and am I right that it was like 15,000 refugees through Fort Chafee in Arkansas that you managed to get them housing and food and clothes and on a plane out to where they would find a welcome somewhere else in this country with no computers and with a clipboard and a pencil and right could teach them what it takes to resettle refugees. We need to fight for a permanent end to the bombing raids and the CIA death squads that have been circulating throughout Afghanistan in these last weeks. We think that maybe the bombing raids have ended but that's not even clear and we know that that's not a permanent commitment. That needs to be part of our fight. We need to support and we're going to have to fight for the support for the United Nations and other international efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor so that humanitarian aid workers and fresh water and food and sanitary supplies can get to the hundreds of thousands of people now stuck in Kabul and in other parts of Afghanistan with nothing that are desperately in need. We need to demand that the US fund an enormous emergency COVID assistance program for Afghanistan. We've all seen the pictures and the videos of people crammed together. There is going to be a huge outbreak of COVID in the next weeks. We see it coming. We know it's coming and finally we need to begin the process of demanding the preparation at least for something that's going to be very very hard for the people in power in this country and that is to begin to pressure for the acknowledgement of our responsibility, United States responsibility for the war's impact on the people of Afghanistan including the war crimes that were committed. The Afghanistan papers that were released in December of 2019 that I think Matt it was you who mentioned it earlier that this was a huge expose of the lies, the lies that went on throughout the 20 years of war and unfortunately the timing meant that two weeks after it was released came COVID and it left the front pages and it hasn't been back since. We need to reclaim that. Some things haven't changed. There still is no military solution to terrorism. The military budget is still higher than it ever has been and it continues to rise. This is what shapes our responsibility going forward as a movement. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you so much. You've given us so much to think about in terms of where to go from here and I'm also putting in the chat that Code Pink is part of a group that is raising funds for women who need to get out of Afghanistan and Code Pink has always been supportive of women organizing in Afghanistan and now we want to make sure that the people who feel that their lives are in danger have a way to get out and so if we can post again that post that Jodi had here, the connection is codepink.org backslash women refugees. That's a donation link in it. We are explained that for each of the women we're trying to raise between $1,505,000 just depending on where they're taken in, where they're settled and anybody who wants to help in that we would be greatly appreciative for whatever you want to donate to that. Before we continue on this accountability and where we go from here I want to go back a minute because there have been a number of questions in the chat and I think Anne maybe you can answer some of these and then whoever else wants but it is don't we have to give Biden credit for agreeing to withdraw the troops and do you give him credit for that and then wasn't there a better way to do this and for that Anne I want you to go back to when Trump was negotiating well Zalmeh Khalilzad negotiating with the Taliban without the Afghan government maybe start from there and work the way up and I see Zahar you shaking your head as well so maybe you'd want to comment on this as well because I think it's important for us to say yes we support the the decision to withdraw but this was not the way so Anne can you explain what would have been the way well that's right I mean we we we've always been wanting the U.S. government to get the hell out of Afghanistan I mean that's been our position the method that it's done of course is is the the great challenge and you know Medea you and I were and Jodi were in Afghanistan in like 2006 or seven and we met with some Taliban we met with the the commission on reconciliation which was already taking in Taliban that said I don't want to be a part of the Taliban anymore you know over the years there there have there have been contacts lots of contacts with the Taliban and as somebody in the chat said earlier even in 2001 after 9 11 the Bush administration was in contact with the Taliban and there are reports that the Taliban said yes you know we we will not stand in your way or we'll facilitate or whatever it was well you know in the in the U.S. way of doing things we'll just go ahead and bomb the hell out of we won't go in for this diplomacy to try to have maybe a you know a different way of going after terrorism rather than the full force of the United States military which we all kind of agree now we there were better ways to go after terrorists usually you don't go after terrorists with a giant mob of people back to the old Taliban and Zalameh Halazan who was I met him first in 2000 2001 when he came in as the Bush special presidential envoy and even we flew up to Mazar Sharif to talk to two of the warlords up there Ata and Dostam we talked to Ismail Khan Zalameh Halazan probably of any person has the most experienced he is Afghan Afghan American he came to the United States when he was 15 but he has had an extensive time with the Taliban as special envoy then he became U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan then ambassador U.S. ambassador to Iraq then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then Trump brought him back as the negotiator with the Taliban and of all people one would have thought well he's Afghan he can get all these groups together at one stage there is and talk about him running as president of Afghanistan because he he had he's an ethnic Afghan well unfortunately under the Trump administration the decision was so we will go ahead and negotiate with the Taliban without the national government of Afghanistan now some reports are that the national government refused to negotiate period with the Taliban and so Zalameh was kind of left with the with the proposition that Trump had run on president of I'm getting out of Afghanistan and if you talk about somebody that really didn't know anything about anything I think it was Trump he didn't have the background that Joe Biden had had over decades Joe being in the in the Senate and everything but but Trump wanted one thing and that's get me a peace deal with the Taliban and I can get out and that will fulfill my print my presidential promise that will get out well what happened was the the deal that was struck only really centered on the United States like Taliban don't fire on us when we evacuate and agree not to use this as a terrorist base but it didn't say anything about power sharing or anything like that and then when finally the government of Afghanistan decided it would have some negotiations they didn't go anywhere there was no real meeting of the minds on anything is by understanding and so the Taliban is kind of walking around with grin on their face they got everything that they they wanted and as Phyllis and others have said the fact that the government was not a government that the rank and file of the the people in the countryside really had much dealings with really as as the rural area then the Taliban kind of had a not so hard time of moving very very quickly and consolidating its power finally with the virtually walk in to Kabul thank you does anybody else want to comment on that that Harry you look like you want to say something yes I don't think we should dwell on Mr Khalilzad we should know that all along he had an agenda to be president of Afghanistan many people in Afghanistan including his friend Ashrafani knew about this and know about this in the man has no credibility as far as I'm concerned you remember I don't know what he would tell the Trump administration or now the Biden administration I don't know what he told the Taliban or then the government of Afghanistan and what his own thoughts were and that's why at one point he was subpoenaed by the congress to say what exactly you are up to I think you should be not just subpoenaed by congress now but I think you should be prosecuted for the distortions in his shenanigans the thing is that is pointed out I was listening to a senator Jim McDermott saying we paid for the Taliban and we created them so the point is that the United States along with its allies Saudi Arabia in particular in Pakistan in some other countries have intervened in Afghanistan repeatedly and some people would say that foreign powers have repeatedly intervened in Afghanistan to prevent it to become a modern nation state this intervention started in the 1920s it happened in 1974 it happened in 1978 when the PDPA took over and it happened again after the the Mujahideen and of course it intervened now now so it's not the first time that the west has intervened in Afghanistan not to let it become a modern progressive nation state because again the world center needs the periphery nations to be dependent to be weak to be helpless and to be underdeveloped so this is important I think to to point out the point now is that Ashraf Ghani is gone and he it's amazing that the United States with all these tens of thousands of experts for example trillions of dollars and so forth didn't quite know that the geography the anthropology the society the culture of Afghanistan so now everyone is saying you know we were not prepared for this we didn't quite know what would happen and when this will happen it's astonishing I mean will people be held accountable in Washington but also in Kabul for their ignorance or for simply turning the other way or not preparing for this right now we have a sort of a vacuum we know the Taliban militarily have occupied all of Afghanistan except Panjshir and in Panjshir there's a massive resistance movement being built and I am afraid at this point that Afghanistan could be moving toward a massive civil war between the north and the south something needs to be done right away now the Taliban are militarily in Afghanistan but their leadership is in Doha and there's no Afghan government the Afghan government official gave the keys to the palace to the Taliban and that's odd but we know that there are preparations there are people who are getting restless and are afraid all over the country the Taliban keep trying assuring people that everything would be okay and everyone is free and we encourage people to go work etc but we know that 75 percent of the Afghans right now are hungry there's a massive drought underway and there's a corona virus with no support there's no government there's no one to take care of the people the people are sleeping out in the streets children I don't know if you saw this image of a seven month old child left in a basket at the airport his parents trying to or her parents I think trying to get on the airplane so the situation is really dire and as I said I am afraid that a massive civil war could happen right now things to be fairly calm under control and so forth but people warlords old warlords etc some of whom have escaped others have surrendered others are trying to organize so I would say we mobilize a massive UN peacekeeping force along with development force and humanitarian assistance force this UN force should be put in place right away because to prevent war and massive starvation in human misery and we can talk about this later because otherwise something awful is going to happen Phyllis you wanted to comment yeah just two quick things one I think I think there is a serious need for for international engagement I'm not sure a peacekeeping what would be called a peacekeeping force is what's needed because I think too often those are have become cover for direct military interventions by by powerful countries but certainly the UN needs to be more centrally in charge at this point of the humanitarian issues some of the other questions there is a different set of circumstances right now facing the Taliban coming into power than what faced them when they came into power in 1996 they Afghanistan is not nearly as isolated as it was then and the surrounding countries as well as international powers have a great interest in stability so Russia and China and Iran have all engaged in open public diplomacy at a quite high level with the Taliban in the last month or so and and one of the things they have all focused on is the need for stability that's going to be a huge concern as well for the surrounding countries for Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan for all the stands for Pakistan even for India all the countries in the area are concerned for their own reasons that nothing spill over but they also don't want to have an a destabilized Afghanistan at their borders so I think that we do have to support the idea of UN engagement on these humanitarian crisis issues like a humanitarian corridor that would that would be guaranteed access for humanitarian workers and then one other quick thing which is about this question about do we you know should we support Biden's decision I think yes it was the right decision what I was glad to hear in his speech today which was mostly not particularly anything new and different that he was reiterating his commitment to the withdrawal because if we remember Obama also withdrew from a couple of countries and ended up sending troops back now that's not impossible even having said this that that Biden won't do the same thing but it is an issue where politically it does take a certain kind of courage it should not it should never take courage to end a war it should be much easier to end a war than to start a war but we know in this country it isn't that's just the reality so he did the right thing pulling out he did it badly we're seeing the consequences of that now we need to condemn that and support the fact that he did pull out it seems to me thank you Matt you want to make some comments you're on mute yeah thanks going back to the negotiations you know there was a period of 18 months between the Doha agreement being signed and now and that was the period that intra-afghan negotiations were supposed to occur so the idea behind the peace process which is I'm not supporting it just explaining it right it's a phased process it was totally flawed but it was a phased process first phase US and Taliban and then Taliban and Afghan government you have to ask what happened during those 18 months what what occurred and one of the things that occurred was that you had US military and CIA officials as well as diplomats telling the Afghan government we're not really leaving you had this this this confusion occurring in Kabul with the Afghan government receiving mixed messages not knowing what the president was not knowing what was going to happen after the election depending on who won because there is no I don't think anyone believed Donald Trump was doing this for any other reason then for the elections in November 2020 so very easily he could have abrogated that deal if he wanted to but also too Joe Biden was you know was was fairly wishy washy I think and what he was going to do and he comes into office it takes him months to say anything about it but you have this period of 18 months and what also occurs is Joe Biden shows up becomes president and he is told that the US military has not done anything to prepare for a May 1st pullout you had basically US military besides uh saying to their counterparts in Kabul that we're not really leaving you also the US military leader the US military basically defying the commander-in-chief the commander-in-chief had said we have this agreement we are leaving by May 1st 2020 the US military throughout 2021 the US military throughout 2020 in the beginning of 2021 doesn't do anything they say we're not doing anything we're not planning for we're gonna wait it out and see what happens defying the commander-in-chief now then when Joe Biden comes in they say we can't be out by May 1st it's too logistically difficult it will take months and months uh and we and for our own safety we can't move that quickly and then what happens Joe Biden says on May 1st we're going to be out by September 11th the US military gets it done in two months and they say things like speed is safety right so lying to the president about what can and cannot be done the bigger thing I want people to realize and appreciate about this this is not a sole occurrence you had the United States military the Pentagon lying to Donald Trump and again say to you about Donald Trump but he is the commander-in-chief he represents civilian control of the US military lying to Donald Trump about how many troops the US military had in Syria and Iraq because the US military disagreed with the president again whatever you want to say about Donald Trump that is the dangerous dangerous thing for this country we just had in the last couple weeks and there are other examples I can give but just to keep it short in the last couple of weeks you White House had issued guidance no drone strikes in Somalia no drone strikes really anywhere without White House approval what did the defense department do they launched a drone strike in Somalia without White House approval incomplete defiance of the White House order and the thing no one was held accountable no one that I know was fired everyone in that chain of command if you spent time in the military and I'll tell you this something like that happens everyone that's trying to come in should be fired if not court-martialed and so we have a very dangerous a a near crisis I believe in terms of our military and our intelligence services doing what they want this extends to I think what Dr. Wahhab was just talking about with a potential for a greater civil war I think right now with Afghanistan we have there there's a path you could have a cruel and unjust peace where the Taliban have taken power violence diminishes reduces they control the country but at least as a piece and now because there's not a war people aren't killing each other the cycle of violence has been halted to a degree you can have some degree of progress and development things can be rebuilt you can have a reconciliation process the other past is as was was stated by everyone else on this there are warlords who are still out there Dostoum and Muhammad Adhanor are outside the country these are men who have never given up they are survivors what is the and these are also the men that have had allegiances and alliances with the CIA for 40 years who is the CIA lied to they're a lie to their warlords they're certainly to learn a lie to the afghan government and they're certainly not allowed lied to a political president so this is a very dangerous thing we could be realizing here where and because of the nature of these wars where these wars the wars in the muslim world again I said this earlier on but the wars in the muslim world are secret wars now they are run by the CIA and special operations community there is no oversight not that congress would do any oversight but they have no oversight on this everything about these wars is secret it's CIA special operations and drones that means they are all classified activities they are all covert by nature the US government has no obligation to lie about these laws about these wars because by law they are not to talk about them because they are secret I mean so you have this circumstance where you have these warlords who have worked with the CIA for decades now outside the country you have a humiliated military in the american military you have an american military intelligence service that have maybe with the intelligence services shown a history of bucking civilian control but the military is now showing that as well so you have this circumstances where is it possible that as Dr. Rahab said you have this expansion of a civil war and that's what really frightens me and that gets to the point of you know the second half of this webinar the title accountability how do we get these mechanisms accountable how do we bring the military and intelligence services of the united states back under control and that gets to Dr. you know Phyllis's point about supporting Biden we have to support Biden I don't care what you think about him in terms of for Medicare for all and everything I'll tell you I just like the guy as everyone else does but on this issue what do you think Biden's going to do when the Taliban delegation shows up at the united nations you think he's going to allow that there is no way that the president that the white house is going to allow the delegation from the Taliban to take a seat at the united nations and that's exactly what has to happen because the Taliban have won it's exactly what has to happen in order for there to be any rebuilding in reconciliation but the right the photo of that the video of that there's no so we have to provide support to Biden because if he's put into that corner what's he going to choose you know so I think we're at a very dangerous point here and I say we are sitting here drinking my sparkling water you know with my dogs in North Carolina this isn't about me it's about the Afghan people but you know it's a very dangerous position for them I want to say that the united states and its allies are responsible for ruining Afghanistan and it's morally responsible not to leave it and abandon it but at the same time Afghans no matter what they're standing they don't like foreigners coming telling them or ruling them so that's why I would say we should not re uh introduce re-inject another country whether it's the US or China or Saudi Arabia or whoever that's why I would say the world community the United Nations Security Council of the UN should be empowered and enabled and financed funded sufficiently to put together a force to establish law in order and prevent mayhem in bloodshed but also to meet the needs of the people because there's an enormous I was there last October you know in the last 20 years I've spent 12 years in Afghanistan I know their languages I talked to I saw it you know people are suffering and it's the country's culture it's politics it's institutions it's infrastructure its whole system is ruined it's wrecked beyond beyond beyond belief and that's why I would say we're responsible to do something to fix it but more importantly immediately we need law in order stability in the prevention of a massive bloody civil war where it would re-invite foreigners again to intervene and that would never end and then we will have this discussion again maybe I don't know how many years from now I have a question I'd like to propose uh there there have been reports in the um in the press that Hamid Karzai and the old warlord Hekmatyar have come together and they are approaching the Taliban to have some sort of a power sharing you think that in Abdullah in Abdullah too Dr Abdullah ah okay three of them yes we should be clear who Gulbadeen Hekmatyar is wait not a person to be trusted he was one of the early warlords he was supported by the US in the 1980s but in the 1970s when he was a student he was the person who invented the lovely tactic of throwing acid in the face of young women who had the temerity to think that they deserved to get an education so this is not somebody who we want to be very uh excited about in terms of what he represents oh if he's now speaking for the Taliban which I sort of doubt because I don't think they had much interest in him no uh that could be a different situation but this otherwise could be quite dangerous well right now yeah right now there's a vacuum and there are these ambitious people Erzai, Abdullah, Hekmatyar, Atah, Muhaqit, Khalili etc etc they're all you know some of them are running to Islamabad on their own those three of them are staying in Kabul they're all opportunists they're warlords in every way and they're not to be trusted you know this generation has to go somehow we need to find more a new generation of Afghans whatever they are in their arts you know we need to empower them and protect them and you know support them and did you want to make a further point about that well it was interesting this coalition and I totally agree with Phyllis when I saw the name Hekmatyar associated with Hamid Karzai it was like what's going on because Hekmatyar has been fighting against everybody and for them to be coming together and and then Abdullah Abdullah who was the co-president so to speak with Afshafdani to have those three together well it is well whether or not the Taliban will actually accept three or two out of three of those being the old guard so to speak members of the of the governments Abdullah Abdullah I remember meeting him in 2002 he was the foreign minister of the of the of the Hamid Karzai government and so this is it I don't know but it's something to watch I guess no no it says this these people have to go I I do want to say how amazing it is to me that Kabul was taken without a shot without violence how the Taliban have asked the mayor of Kabul to stay on and how I think Zahar you know a hell of a lot more about Afghanistan than I do or ever will and I take seriously your concerns about a civil war but it is amazing that so far and we're only in in a couple of days in we know how this can all change dramatically but how little fighting there has been so far is quite astounding yes because the people know both sides and they don't really like either one of the sides the people as I said despise the Ashrafani government they did not trust them they considered him illegitimate they consider him phony inefficient ineffective careless and uninterested and and so the Taliban came and surrounded the capital at that point on Saturday and then Ashrafani realized that it was time for him to to go you know because he had no support he was all alone and he also had been he went out of lying so he made this two and a half minutes tape saying in a sense telling people oh I'm concerned about the law in order of stability your safety and security while he was packing his suitcases and right after that speech he and together with three or four of his very close people you know board the plane and goes to Tajikistan they don't let him land there he goes to Uzbekistan and he doesn't land there and then he goes to Hulman so now they are in Hulman after that when they left there was nobody in the palace there was nobody in charge the Taliban then according to the Taliban decided to move in to provide for law and order since then and that's why there was no fighting but there was no fighting because all of the police in Kabul like in other places the army etc they gave up their posts they changed their uniform through civilian clothes and left they all in other words abandoned their positions so the Taliban's with what they say is that in order to have law in order prevent looting and fighting and so forth they moved in on the capital and there was no opposition it is interesting that no one in the capital is opposing and then I have Taliban they issued at 13 point the proclamation and then they also issued a special letter in Farsi to the higher education people saying you know please we want you to say we want men and women this is what they say we want men and women government workers students engineers etc to go to their work and we guarantee the security of your personhood your property and your honor and this tell their forces not to go to people's houses without being allowed so the Taliban are every hour you know they have some kind of a statement reassuring people and in Kabul things look normal people say this like there's nothing Taliban look like their guests they're simply protecting law and order and in provinces sometimes they you know they beat people up and so forth but this is what's happening because and as I said Ashraf Ghani had ran out of any kind of support and then he had to leave but I think he should be held responsible and he should be turned over to the Interpol and return the money for one thing so the people are not missing the old government because the old government hardly did anything for the country the people don't like the Taliban but the Taliban can be brutal you know and so they're putting up with the Taliban and in fact in Ghazni I was told that it's a better time now the open shops are open till midnight because people are not afraid of suicide bombings assassinations etc that there's complete law and order and safety and security this is what's happening but in the meantime people are getting ready for a massive civil war and this is what I feel so we're going to start the wrap up by going around and getting your final thoughts and if in those final thoughts you have some ideas for accountability I know some of those issues have been brought up already but it would be good to go over what can we people who want to see some accountability some well certainly care about the Afghan people what can we be doing so let's start with you fellas well thanks this has been an extraordinarily rich discussion I've been grateful to be part of it I would wrap up by coming back to what I said earlier about our obligations to focus on the needs of Afghans right now our government is responsible for so much suffering in that country for 40 years and especially over the last 20 years and it means we owe an enormous debt we owe compensation we owe reparations we don't owe military occupation and it means we're going to have to fight for that it's not going to be easy but we do have the basis to fight for it I think we start with fighting for the rights of Afghans who believe that they need to leave and they need safety so that means massive expansions of the numbers of people who are eligible to apply for refugee and asylum status and it has to be easier and safer for people to make those those applications we have to fight for an end a permanent end to the US bombing of Afghanistan we have to fight for the creation of a humanitarian system that will include a humanitarian corridor for access and massive funding you know with with one tenth of the I think it was 18 billion dollars in 2020 that the US spent on the war in Afghanistan that would be enough to settle 1.2 million refugees we need to fight for that kind of a shift away from military spending and towards the needs of people we need to fund a massive COVID system for Afghanistan and we need to start to fight for acknowledgement of the role of our government with our tax money in our name for all the harm that it's done to the people of Afghanistan and begin to take responsibility for those terrible acts beautiful thank you so much Phyllis let's see Matt you want to go next sure and thank thank you again for this and and and also too for the 500 nearly 600 people we had on here who care about this I mean I appreciate that and I can tell you a lot of people who are living in Afghanistan would appreciate it too if they knew this was occurring if people cared like this I so I think that's one thing we can do is we can let people know we care you know might not seem a lot but if you know people who are in Afghanistan who are refugees I mean a lot of us have contacts and a lot of us know people and just letting people know we care I think can do a lot because there are a lot of people in Afghanistan right now who feel abandoned who feel hopeless who you know they know this better than we do you know in a sense of what the circumstances are like and what might happen you know so just let them know that you know you're thinking of them and then find organizations to help and support there are a number of and I'm sure you know there are a number of organizations that are trying to help and I'm not sure if co-pink has a registry of those or if they can make something like that available to all the people who are on this call but some way to help some way to whether it's with visa processing or or you know as Phil's was talking about making sure food and water are getting in you know I think we have to there's an account you know back at the count accountability of this we have to hold the media accountable um you know you have to hold again if you listen to the American media right now the major American corporate media right now the story is that Joe Biden pulled 2500 troops from country the size of Texas and that's why the country collapsed I mean it makes no sense if you spend more than a second thinking about it it makes no sense meanwhile the real stories you know as you know was being brought up these these people changing sides what the warlords are doing we have heard nothing about the CIA has an army in Afghanistan its own army in Afghanistan between 10 and 25 000 heard nothing about what they've done I've heard nothing about the CIA strike forces again 10 to 25 000 men and competent capable incredibly brutal but a competent and capable fighting force I've heard nothing about them in two months I mean why because you know the Washington Post and the New York Times doesn't care about that enough you know I mean so we how do we hold the media accountable you know again the switching of sides this didn't occur overnight I was just saw that the the deputy speaker of the parliament a man named Hayum Hayum who is the was close with Ashraf Ghani is now the police chief of Kabul how did that happen overnight that's something that takes place over months if not years there's a story here there's there's depth and an explanation to this war that our media doesn't prevent be present because maybe it's a little too complicated maybe you can't fit it into a three-minute news cycle maybe it goes against the Washington consensus which god forbid you know as everyone on here knows try and publish an op-ed in any of these major periodicals and you have to like honest to god you end up having to provide your birth certificate to prove to fact check your name that's what it's like meanwhile you know all kinds of stuff is published that just carries on these narratives and myths so how do we hold the media accountable and I think one of those things is we have to open up our wallets we have to provide money to people who are trying to do independent journalism we have to provide money so that people can do the journalism that educates people and lets people know what is really happening and the other side is politics how are we going to get people in the politics who are going to stand up against these wars stand up against militarization I mean you know anybody who's watched an armed services committee hearing either from the house or the senate on c-span right you watch the hask or the sask what does it look like whenever these generals are sitting there it's like a collection of bobblehead dolls listening to them all these senators and congressmen people do is nod their head in agreement how are we going to get people there who are going to oppose these wars oppose this militarization who are going to have the guts to do what is not just in the best interest of the american people but in the best interest of the people that we have been bombing for decades so again I mean it comes down to people you know we need people to roam we need people to work on campaigns but we need people to open their wallets and that is not a not so subtle pitch to help out co-pink as well in organizations because without organizations like this how do we even get together and work together if we don't have organizers like Medea and Jody you know uh you know so um and you know Emily Durrell who's on the background in aerial gold and people like that you know so we need to support all at our levels what we see around us in order to influence things that are happening overseas but thank you all for this and thank you so much Medea and Phyllis and and and Dr. Wahab thank you so much Matt and let's hear from Dr. Wahab okay thank you very much excellent points have been made one we have to stop this war by other means even President Biden said today this war over the horizon and I was on the phone last night with somebody and he said listen listen B-52 is circling around my house so the B-57 B-25s the helicopters the drones and the AC-17 they continue to bomb day and night and you know what bombing means you make mistakes and you kill innocent people this has to end and two there has to be investigations in Washington and in Kabul and in third places uh of the people who were responsible for making policy regarding this war it both ends uh in the United States but also in Afghanistan these people should be investigated we have to get a hold of the Afghan thieves people who stole enormous amounts of money including Dr. Ghani that we should activate the Interpol and go after these people arrest them but also the money should be repatriated to Afghanistan the United States and its allies should pay reparation to Afghanistan in the form of food medicine you know education agriculture etc in this country as I said the Afghanistan fiasco is not the first one it will not be the last one either Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua you know you can go on this is not the first case and it's not going to be the last one we need to continue to build a strong anti-war anti-imperialist movement in this country and we need to teach for the United States ruling elite to sort of live among other people like just like another country thank you thank you so much wonderful hearing from you and your students are very lucky to have a professor like you and Anne why don't you give us your final thoughts well this would not be this would be a first in the history of the United States but how about no retaliation or retribution against somebody that actually beat us you know we do that again we've done it against Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Vietnam, North Korea and Venezuela how about this time if you really care for the Afghan people don't put sanctions on the Taliban because if you do then we can't get the humanitarian assistance in so for once for once don't retaliate just because you got beat you know let the Taliban try to govern I mean they are now the government let them try to do that going on what Matt said and Zahir the Panjir Valley is a very important valley to watch because that is a place of resistance and that's the place where the CIA has led long long ties with Masoud and now Masoud's son so saying no death squads no CIA death squads and get the CIA out of support for for organizations because they will continue and they will cause trouble no bombing of course and then now here's a here's a kind of a controversial how about let's reopen our embassy you know when the security environment is such it looks like it's okay right now it's the calmest cobble has been the streets of cobble according to all the international reporters are calm as it can be the place where there's chaos is at the airport well if we intend to help the people of Afghanistan we've got to reopen the embassy so that there is a platform for US US projects and US affiliated organizations that of course will be very controversial because normally after we get beaten some ways it'll be decades before we'll reopen our embassy so those are four little things I think we could do thank you fabulous I love the suggestions and the opening of an embassy you know I don't know that that's so out of the question because when Anthony Blinken was asked about this he said well if the Taliban respect human rights as if the US you know only has relations with countries that respect human rights and they agree that they're not going to attack us then maybe we could so there are countries that are not leaving the Russian the Iranian the other embassies and the UN agencies they're all staying you know and the Taliban keep telling everybody the foreigners we will not touch you we will protect you and we support your work and we should hold the Taliban to their words you know we should see if they're honest and if they would deliver on what they say I'm sorry no no excellent and you want to add to that and there is a part of the international airport has a core group of US diplomats that are still there so they have left right right instead of but operating from an airplane well in my understanding my understanding is that this afternoon the Taliban took control of the civilian side of the airport so you've got coordination going on between the Taliban and the US military and US government there there's a again the the idea that this occurred this this all comes from the offensive that started nine days ago but that's the story we're getting you know and the whole the plot holes like so much of all these wars right the plot holes keep popping up like oh wait but hang on that doesn't you know you can't how do you get from A to B to F you know I mean that's what these wars so often are like but yeah I know the idea that you know and if we could if the United States can hold its nose and allow the Taliban to take power is it possible for rebuilding and reconciliation to occur and I think that one of the main things is you have to make Afghanistan a truly neutral state no one can send weapons in the only thing I can go in is food and medicine history is so important James Baker who was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State in 1989 when the Soviet Union left now paraphrase Baker but Jim Baker said James Baker says the Mujahideen are not interested in freedom and elections and neither are we you know that was that what the US wanted victory you know and this has been a victory strategy since 1979 and where has it gotten you know the Afghans and let alone you know so yeah but no I think the chance to work with them is there and as has been said yeah we work with plenty of other awful places and maybe somehow we can by not choosing to bomb people by working with them we can make things better for their people you know. Wow wonderful and I see that you know we've had such a rich discussion on the chat as well with so many ideas that people had and we're sorry we didn't get to all of the questions but if you have ideas on what we should do please write to info at code pink.org and give us your ideas and if anybody's interested in doing something like a citizen's tribunal while we try to get some accountability in our congress which is very difficult to do we might as well do it ourselves. Write to us and let us know you want to help organize a lot of code pink's work is done by volunteers and at times like this when we have no staff that's dedicated just to Afghanistan we really do appreciate volunteer help so we welcome your ideas and your time as well as any donations especially for the refugee crisis. So let me just thank Matt and Ann and Zahra and Phyllis and behind the scenes we have Ariel, Emily and the whole code pink team for in one day's time putting together a incredible webinar that had at our height about over 600 people on it and it's on YouTube where hundreds are watching as well and we will be putting it into Facebook and other places so we will reach thousands of people with this we thank you so much for taking your time to be with us and for everybody who has attended I don't know Emily if it's possible to unmute everybody to give our speakers a round of applause. It's not on a webinar unfortunately. Not on the webinar oh okay yeah all right so I'll do the round of applause thank you so much it was a fabulous discussion we've been asked to have another one soon so we might be coming back to you for a follow-up but thank you for taking the time and for all the people who have been listening and watching bye bye thank you all thank you thank you thank you Phyllis, Matt, Ann, Lucia, Phyllis, Medea, thanks Medea.