 my name is Andrew Zimmerman. Thank you very much for tuning in to our second episode of China, Hawaii, and you. I'm really excited about today for two reasons. Number one, this is going to be our first live episode. So the very first one we filmed with Tony. He gave us a really interesting rundown on the Evergrande crisis, but Tony lives in China and so we had to pre-record that. But this is going to be our first live episode. So if you've got any questions that you want to put it in the chat, we're really excited to sort of interact with the community. And the second reason I'm really excited is because our guest here today is an absolute python of a man. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about him. This is my very good friend of mine, Robbie Dooby. He is a lawyer that's working in Minneapolis, specializing in government contracts. He also has a really, really interesting background in history. He is an absolute intellectual titan and a sigma male. So did I miss anything there Robbie? I don't know about sigma male, but I am happy to be here and I did live in Hawaii for a little bit. Hence the aloha shirt I was able to find and put on. But yeah, I'm in Minneapolis now. Yeah, what did you do in Hawaii again? So I clerked for the Hawaii Supreme Court specifically for Justice Pollock, who's retired now as one of his judicial law clerks, helping him as he crafted his judicial opinions and determining what cases the Supreme Court would or would not hear. And how did you like that relative to being a lawyer in Minneapolis? I loved them both, quite frankly. Being a clerk and handling constitutional issues that are going to determine what the law of the entire state of Hawaii is is fascinating and intimidating and really fun. And Justice Pollock was the smartest man I've ever met in my life and was very tough on me in the best way in terms of he demanded a lot. But I love being a lawyer in Minneapolis, too. I love being an associate. I get to do just a phenomenal range of work in cases all around the country and federal and state. And it's it's cool to get to put this education I spent a long time getting to work in something that I find really fulfilling. Yeah, that sounds that sounds really, really exciting. So much as we could talk about, I'm sure all all day easily about the kind of law that you're doing. There's a really specific kind of policy consideration that has been on my mind recently. In the very last weeks of my time in China, one of the big things that even people just native Chinese people were asking me was about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American withdrawal 20 years after the line. I remember still being like five years old and being a little bit confused at the concept 9 11 and the war, right? And it's finally ending. And it seemed to me like there was a really, really large Chinese interest in not just what's going on, what's going on for America and how they're sort of interacting in their own foreign policy, right? But just generalized foreign policy and how America acts with all sorts of countries across the earth. And so my first question for you, right? For sort of our listeners that may or may be a little bit new to foreign policy, or maybe they haven't had a lot of time to keep up. Can you tell us what's made the Afghanistan situation so dire? And then we'll talk a little bit more about what's China's angle on this. But first, I want to sort of give a given over overview of like what's happened in Afghanistan. Sure. So may a lot has happened, but the basically chain of events is, you know, the United States invades Afghanistan back in 2001 to take up the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden escapes into Pakistan and we stay in Afghanistan. The mission evolved from rooting out the Taliban to nation building, which frankly is not a role the U.S. military is well suited for. You know, the role the U.S. military is to fight America's wars, not too necessary to build a country. America attempted to build a Western style democracy in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan's kind of entire political structure and cultural structure is tribalism and through tribes. And so the way that America tried to make this work was through giving millions of dollars to different tribal leaders to keep them on America's side. But what this ended up doing was breeding a culture of corruption within the Afghanistan government that made it pretty ineffective. And so by the time Donald Trump, President Trump at the time, negotiates the agreement to withdraw with the Taliban. And then by the time Joe Biden eventually executes that plan, you had a government that did not have the support of the popular people. Now, to be fair, the Taliban did not either, depending on which region the country you're in. But many people felt that the government was corrupt and did not represent them. At the same time, the United States had tried to build an Afghan army based on an American model, which relied on overwhelming air superiority. We were supporting the Afghan military through the use of our drones and our planes for a long time, but about two weeks prior to the fall of Kabul, which was the capital of Afghanistan, we withdrew our air support. Following that, the Afghan army completely collapsed because they did not have the military tactics and strategies that they had been taught to rely on by the United States military. So you take a corrupt government that doesn't have the support of the people, a military that's been trained to fight in a way that America is no longer supporting it to do so. And you have a recipe for the collapse of a government and the takeover by the Taliban, which it did in fact do in which the military knew was going to happen if we withdrew. There was no questions or qualms about whether the Kabul government was going to last. The Taliban was going to take over. It was just a matter of how long. Yeah, and one of the things that I think people didn't really expect was you're right. It was a question of how long, but I think even the highest brass didn't expect like it would basically be what America wasn't even fully finished with drawing that the Taliban just started completely rapturing the whole country into their palms. But one other thing that I wanted to talk about right is, and we discussed this a little bit outside of the show, but I was under the impression, especially because we had been fighting a literal war with them for how long, that the Taliban was just naturally designated as a terrorist group. But I found out later that that's not actually true. Right now, as it stands, the United States Department has a very long list of like, here are the active terrorist groups in the world, and we'll talk about some of them actually later in the show. But I was shocked to find out that the Taliban is not marked as a terrorist group. Senator Marco Rubio is currently trying to pass some legislation that marks them as a terrorist group, because as Congress, you have the authority to directly pick a group and say, you're going on the terrorist list, you're going off of the terrorist list. But do you think that now that they've basically gripped the power of a country that this kind of recognition of this kind of recognition of them as a terrorist group is basically impossible? I think it makes it very difficult. Frankly, the Taliban is the most wealthy and best funded terrorist group in the world right now with the control of the lithium reserves that they have in Afghanistan. And it does become difficult when any sort of radical group takes over a country. I mean, frankly, we recognize North Korea as a country, we recognize Iran as a country. We recognize Cuba as a country, and those have all had violent revolutions or extremist groups that have taken them over. I think that because the Taliban realistically controls the country at this point, and because we are actively working with them to fight the Islamic State Corazon, that it becomes every day more and more difficult to deny their existence as a state. There's certainly moral reasons to say that they're a terrorist group. The headings, the chopping off of people's hands, the oppression of women and young girls in the country gives a lot of fodder for it. But I think this is a situation where real politic, kind of a long term, what is more economically beneficial for the United States is going to win out over human right concerns. And the securities concerns presented by ISK currently I think the government consider those higher than the securities concerns presented by the Taliban. Now, what's your general impression on how China looks at this kind of new power? Because not a lot of people know this, but China is actually directly on Afghanistan's border on a very small sliver. And so I imagine for them it's been an interesting 20 years having half the American military all slumped into this one mountainous desert country. I imagine that's been a really interesting thing for them. What is your general take on how the Chinese have looked at this sort of military incursion? And what do you think are going to be their immediate next moves now that we've had this transfer of power? I think on the one hand they are kind of celebratory that the Taliban has taken over. It's in the same way that the United States was pleased when the Mujahideen beat back the Soviet Union. There's a sort of global power smugness that comes when your rival seems to have been beaten back. China has a lot of security concerns with the Taliban. First off ISK, Islamic State Coruscant has made it very clear that they want to launch terrorist attacks into China. China has its own terrorist groups within the border regions with Afghanistan that it's dealing with and the Taliban itself is a radical group. And so I think China certainly has concerns, not that it could be beaten militarily in a direct war with the Taliban, but that it could lead to terrorist attacks and terrorist incursions. But also China sees a massive economic opportunity here. 80% of all the United States rare metals come from China and Afghanistan is sitting on the largest supply of lithium in the world. They are the Saudi Arabia of lithium for all intents and purposes. And so if China can gain access to those lithium mines and lock them down, they will control the rare metal supplies of the world and that will give them control as we move to a green economy and as we move to a computer economy that is increasingly relying on rare metals, rare metals, I should say. Yeah, no, definitely. It seems like a really, really large economic opportunity for them. One of the things that China has been doing a lot actually to kind of go off of what you said is when it comes to expanding their own economics here of influence is using the Belt and Road to try to build out these new economic initiatives and not just Africa, but really all kinds of parts of the world that wouldn't necessarily get traditional investment, right? Historically, the name we had for European investment into Africa was colonialism. But South America doesn't typically get nearly as much of an American, or you will say United States investment as we would have previously thought it would, but China's really kind of stepped in there too. So how do you think that they're going to sort of use the Belt and Road to capitalize on the new transfer of power? Well, I think that's exactly how they're going to build the relationship with the Taliban control Afghanistan. Under the Karzai government, the previous government, China already had a $30 million deal to mine lithium out of Afghanistan and they've already met with the Taliban to try to keep that deal alive. So I think you're going to see a lot of this debt diplomacy, debt trap diplomacy that China has been using, they're going to try to get the Taliban indebted to them through the Belt and Road because the Taliban does not have the infrastructure to extract these resources, nor does it have really any semblance of an economy at this point now that all the United States funding has been withdrawn, but also international funding has been withdrawn. So I think this is exactly the kind of situation China likes to see, which is a economically impoverished country that will take a deal that gives them money in the short term for 100 year long leases and terrible terms that gives China effective control of the economy in the long term. And I think we've already seen this in Africa, where they've trapped a lot of African countries. I would push back some on the Latin American aspect. Peru has gotten closer to China, but the United States has also increased its investments significantly, I think in recognition of the threat that China poses in kind of poaching off some of these Latin American countries that America thought was in its sphere of influence pretty comfortably for a long time. Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't acknowledge that there's a sort of I would rather I would absolutely agree there's an economic arms race that's kind of going on and it would seem to me that Afghanistan, you know, is as a new player in the field, you know, and by some by some measurements, you could argue it's the youngest country on earth in the sense that we have this new establishment. And it's not like, you know, you're going to see Exxon Mobil moving into Afghanistan after 20 years, or, you know, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't the Taliban wouldn't really be happy about that. But certainly, you know, what they're what they're looking for in the short term is some kind of immediate economic stability that not just China can provide, but probably only China would provide on earth. As long as they remain a non recognized country on the world stage, the IMF will not be giving them the International Monetary Fund will not be giving them any money, the World Bank will not be releasing the funds that were previously approved. You're certainly not going to be getting us investment to the terrorist group we fought for 20 years. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is the IMF when it when it gives out money, there's usually very specific, you know, market liberalization terms that get attached to that. And the Taliban might just say, no, this goes against the Quran. So we're not we're not following these kinds of regulations. So the economic things is a really interesting angle. And I think we could talk about that a lot more. But the actually other thing I want to talk about is how you think the terrorism problems that both China and the U.S. and not that you excuse me, both China and internal Afghanistan have been facing part of that is with ISK as you've touched on, but also part of that has been showing up with, for example, the ETIM. What do you think China's anti terrorism angle is going to be when it comes to this new government? So I think that the two points you raise are kind of the key ones. Something interesting to watch out for is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is some of the people have equated it to a Eurasian NATO. That's not really accurate, but it is a security focused group. That would have been the best signal as to whether China was going to be able to put aside its wariness and work with the Taliban to fight ISK and the Turkistan movement. But they actually did not come to a resolution on what to do with the Taliban in their most recent meeting about two weeks ago. A big part of that is because Turkmenistan and Tajikistan are adamantly opposed to the establishment of the Taliban government. They do not want what they see as a radical Islamic government on their border, given that they have such a secularized police state kind of oppressing a lot of the Muslim population there. So I think China is going to step carefully to not upset Turkmenistan or Tajikistan, but I do think that they will see the Taliban ultimately as allies. That ISK is willing to act internationally. It's willing to, you know, the IS Islamic State umbrella is willing to do attacks ranging from Libya all the way to the Philippines and everywhere in between. Whereas the Taliban, especially the Afghanistan Taliban has more strategically limited itself to Afghanistan. And I think that will not change. I don't think we're going to see the kind of Shia militia Iran type system that you have with Afghanistan. And I think China will push for them not to do that. And I think they are very wary that they do not support the Turkestan movement that, you know, the weaker Muslims and the ones who have been designated terrorists by China in that group do not get financial material or manpower support from the Taliban. So I would not be surprised if you saw joint military action with the Taliban and China against ISK or if you had Taliban helping with that mountainous region that is their border with China, helping the Chinese military understand that region better and use it to fight against the Turkestan movement. I don't know if you've known this, but I did actually have a lot of time to read this read up on this end. One of the things that I found out was that there were a bunch of cases of Uighur radicals coming out of Xinjiang that got radicalized and actually ended up joining the Taliban. Some of them actually were captured and there were a couple that spent a long time in Guantanamo. One of the things that I've kind of wondered to myself, right, is if the Taliban are kind of going to choose what would technique what would absolutely like just from a secular perspective, what would absolutely be their best long-term play, which is make good friends with China because China is the closest superpower that can give you all of these resources, right? But I've also been wondering, you know, with ETIM so close and that would potentially make for another really powerful Islamic ally, I've wondered to myself if the Taliban kind of might try to play both sides of that question because it's very clear to me that the society that the Taliban want and the society that something like the East Turkistan Islamic movement would want are really not that different. And I know you've got your answer, but I want to say one thing because I think we should have explained this earlier. Some people are wondering, what is the ETIM? I'm sure. So I'm going to tell everybody really quickly about it and then we'll give you a chance to respond. I can repeat my question if you forgot. So the ETIM is a terrorist group that's broken out of Xinjiang, China. Their ultimate goal is a separated off Xinjiang to become an Islamic caliphate. They were marked as a terrorist group by the US State Department, but in 2020, they were removed by the US State Department. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. So I want to repeat my question to you, Robbie. Do you think that the Taliban will ultimately end up siding with China and the economics or will they pick the ETIM and these kinds of Islamic movements when it comes to the religious side? What do you think that they're thinking? I think the official Taliban government, well, not that it's been officially recognized, but the Taliban government in Kabul will ultimately side with China. And I think you can look to Turkey as the best example of that. Erdogan has been trying to do a lot of Pan-Islamic nationalism to kind of pump Turkey up as the defender of Islam as a counterpoint to Iran and Saudi Arabia, but he pointedly will not comment on the weaker concentration camps. And I think the Taliban is basically going to take the same approach, which is you will have members of the Taliban who will go and fight in China. You will have breakaway groups, but the leadership structure of the Taliban will be pointedly mum about it and will be strategic to get the Chinese resources. And that's already been shown by the fact that now that they're empowered, they have said almost nothing about the ETIM. And so I think that we've already seen their decision, which is we're not going to get involved with Islamic groups in the Chinese Western territories. But I think that is another reason why ISK is such a big threat to China in their mind, is that ISK has had no qualms about saying that they would be involved in Islamic terrorist movements no matter where they happen to be. And so I think that is just further reason why China wants to have strong relations with the Taliban because they are more worried about ISK and what it will do than what the Taliban will do. You know, predating the situation in Xinjiang was with all these police crackdowns, mass Uyghur arrests that happened, that was I think peaked in 2014. And according to at least official numbers, arrests of Uyghurs have been sort of easing down on some stuff. But one of the things that I was really wondering was why on earth would the State Department like remove the ETIM as a terrorist group? And my first most, we'll say maybe my more cynical idea would be, well, that might be, which is if you remove them from the list of terrorist groups, then anyone that gets caught sponsoring them or any kind of support that goes in, it's not really anything, it's not, you no longer would get classified as a state sponsor of terror, right? So what do you think would explain taking the ETIM off? Because it's like these people are very clearly willing to kill a lot of people if they were going to get the break off in Xinjiang State. So I think the first thing I would say is the official Chinese numbers on whether arrests have gone down or not, I take with a handful of salt because I don't trust them. And I think that China has fudged a lot of these numbers with their treatment of the Uyghur people. Now that being said, I looked into why the State Department had canceled it, the officially stated reason is that they could not confirm that it was still in operation. Now, even all the way back in 2009, there was actually congressional hearings about whether this group even existed or whether it was basically just a group that put out statements that didn't do anything. Was it an al-Qaeda front to distract resources? Was it a Chinese front, create a fake terrorist group so you can crack down on it? There was a lot of confusion about whether this existed. The NATO, the UN, they all still say this is a real act of terrorist group, but the Trump administration did choose to declassify it as one based on lack of evidence that it still existed. Obviously, we don't know what the internal discussions and deliberations were that led to that decision, but I do think that there is some credibility to the idea that if people are going to give funds to that, then they are not criminally liable for violating laws against supporting terrorist groups that the United States could potentially get away with it without being a state sponsor of terror. I think there is potentially some truth there, but I think, do we have a 1980s fund the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union kind of situation? No, I don't think that we're at that level, but I do think as part of a broader attempt to show the United States' pleasure at the Uyghur concentration camps and the Chinese human rights violations that this is probably a signal to China that the United States would be willing to potentially fund this group or at least not actively oppose it, at least in bluster, whether in actual reality. In fact, I don't think we've seen any evidence of that. That very well might be. One of the things that I have noticed is that, like I said, shortly before the, I'm just going to use the official numbers, you're very free to dispute them and we'll get into that later, right? But shortly before the, we'll say, peak of Uyghur arrest according to the official Chinese numbers was there was an actual very significant number of terrorist attacks and after the Xinjiang crackdown, we did see a dramatic decrease of them, not that they actually fully vanished, right? So even as recently as July of 2021, I was able to find a Pakistani attack, which involves the death of 13 people, including nine Chinese engineers, it was part of the Belt and Road Initiative. So it's obvious to me that like, there's clearly at least some terrorism movements going on, whether or not that's the ETIM or maybe some entirely new unfound or like establishment or a new organization we haven't even found out about yet, that's up in the air, right? But at least from China's perspective, after they did the after the after the Pakistani investigation went out, they blamed ETIM for the attack. So it seems pretty clear to me that there's somewhat of a political football going on here, but I would agree with you that more than likely the Taliban sort of have the wherewithal and the real politic to know that even if they would basically ideologically agree with how the new Xinjiang break off state would look, I don't think that they're going to be providing support in really any capacity to to this movement. I think that they I think that they spent the last 20 years trying to get back in control of Afghanistan and then they don't want to spend another 20 years trying to kick the Chinese out and so they're not going to poke China if they don't have to. So I'll talk about one last thing and then and then we'll make our we'll make our close out we'll make our close out time. Now one of the things that you talked about was the spread of ISK in the China. You said that ISK has made it very, very clear that they intend to continue with attacks on China. So what do you think ISK is ISK is sort of long goal is and do you think that they're basically a doing organization? So the long term goal would be to create an Islamic state of course on course on being an old state from gosh well it's a region in general but kind of you can look at the Khwazir mean empire back in the 11-1200s that's kind of the template they want to recreate so a large. Can you give me an idea of where it exists on like the map? Yep so it'd be basically Afghanistan into Zhangjiang some of Turkmenistan to Jikistan Uzbekistan there's a very central Asian power wiped out by the Mongols. A huge long story there that I love to talk about but we don't have time. That would be their long term goal. Is it a doomed organization? I think if you had asked somebody in the 1990s is Al Qaeda a doomed organization they would have said yes they're still here. I think if you would have asked someone in the early 2000s is the Taliban a doomed organization yes they're still here. So will ISK ever reach the level that ISIS did in establishing a large state? I hesitate to say yes I think that is unlikely. Will they ever be wiped out? I think no because I think that you have a Taliban government that will prove incapable of governing Afghanistan that will breed popular resentment and part of the channel for that in the Afghanistan area of the world right now is through radical Islamic terrorist groups. I do not think ISK will ever have a shortage of recruits. Yeah well maybe not a shortage of recruits but it seems to me like they don't really have much of a place that they can make a play for right because Afghanistan I think for now has a pretty strong hold over has been the Taliban have a pretty strong holder Afghanistan and the Chinese are going never going to give an inch of Xinjiang they will they would they would they would burn the whole country down if that's what it took. They're very very safety oriented country and a lot of people say it's like they use these safety concerns they'll say to justify maybe things that they really don't like. Now one of the things that I want to do before we before we get out is I want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find you if they're really interested in what you've had to say and anything else that you wanted to show. Sure well I mean I guess I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn and people want to send me a message. I like I said I work at a law firm in Minneapolis it's called Eklen and Blando. I want to be very clear that the views I'm expressing are not the views of Eklen and Blando one way or the other these are my personal views but we are very professional lawyers very specialized in what we do and so I think if anyone has is a government contractor that they have any sort of government contract needs or just regulatory needs we're very well equipped to handle that as well as general business commercial needs so if you have a legal issue that you would like help on then I would encourage you to look me up on Eklenandblando.com and you can find me in my profile there. I'll make sure people know about the book you're writing to once that's done. Sure yeah hopefully next year. Hopefully next year all right we want to thank everybody for tuning in to China, Hawaii and you it was a fascinating conversation thank you very much Robbie for popping in today. Yeah thanks for having me. Yeah thank you very much. Loa.