 Hi, this is Matthew Ho. I appreciate being invited to give my testimony here. This is a pretty somber point to reflect upon. I was born in 1973, I graduated high school in 1991. So I was 15, 16 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. And this is certainly not the world we are supposed to have had. I was asked tonight to speak about Afghanistan and specifically Afghans as pawns. And the Afghan war begins in the 1970s. And so the Afghan war is, it begins during the Cold War. But as it still continues, that still goes on, it's a living legacy of the Cold War. In the 1970s, the Afghan government, depending upon which perspective you wanna look at, they were playing off the Soviets, first the Americans or the Americans and the Soviets were trying to gain leverage within Afghanistan. But throughout the 1970s, you see in Afghanistan all degrees of American and Soviet influence as each nation tries to curry favor with the Afghans. And at one point, the Afghan Prime Minister says something along the lines of, I like my American cigarettes with Soviet lighters, recognizing this relationship between the three series events that soon turns this competition into revolution and into violence and into use of use of Bayesian. And then of course, the invasion by the Soviet Union in December of 1979, it's important to note that prior to that invasion, a lot of people like to think that that is the beginning of the Soviet Afghan war. It's really not, it's Soviet Afghanistan by the time the Soviets invade in December of 79 has already had about 100,000 dead in fighting before the Soviet center of the war. And as many people know, as Zignu Brzezinski has explained, Bob Gates has explained, the United States was funding insurgent groups in Afghanistan at least six months prior to the Soviet invasion. Zignu Brzezinski of course, very famously said he wanted to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam. Here we are now of course in 2021 and Afghanistan, its people are still living through that nightmare. The suffering has been immense for 40 semi-gears and the entire country has been devastated in some way. Even parts of the country that have not seen violence in the last 20 years are still dealing with the scars, the trauma, the fallout from the previous violence that enveloped them. And of course, much of the country has only seen violence for the last 40 years. There are parts of the country that have not known a single month to go by in 40 years where there hasn't been some form of violence or severe oppression by the government, by warlords, by militias, et cetera. So it has been a living nightmare for the Afghan people. And for us as Americans, the role we're playing that is of course, we're the ones who orchestrated it. The United States is responsible for this catastrophe of the Afghan people we have kept it going and we have sustained it. And what you see in Afghanistan in relation to the Cold War is that it is a mirror of it. It is this living legacy of the Cold War reflects the Cold War and it shows America, the United States in its worst image possible. What you see is the United States going from the crusade against communism to the crusade against radical Islam, which is really just a crusade, a war against Muslim nations. You see the killing. Millions of Afghans have died over these last 40 years. Tens of millions of lives there have just been, to have just been ruined. Afghans for decades were large, world's refugee population. They were only surpassed in number of refugees by the Syrians. Another war, the United States is very responsible for starting the war and sustaining that war. And now as the Syrians have started to go home, Afghans I believe are again, the largest refugee group in the world. Anti-democracy, the United States likes to herald its credentials as the world's oldest democracy and as sending its men and women abroad to defend and fight for and spread democracy. And what we have seen just as in the Cold War, just as in places like Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, et cetera, repressive, corrupt, thuggish governments have been put in place. Look at South of the United States, Mexico all the way south to Chile, throughout the Cold War in one place or another, there were these authoritarian, undemocratic, human rights violating governments that the United States would not only allies with but kept in power, provided military assistance to oftentimes put in power via coups. You have this in Afghanistan. The Afghan government is one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Transparency international routinely ranks it in the top three or four most corrupt governments in the world. It is every election in Afghanistan since the United States invasion and occupation, particularly since the election in 2009 has been incredibly fraudulent. In 2014, the presidential election was so fraudulent that an extra constitutional solution had to be implemented. Basically, John Kerry at the time the United States Secretary of State goes there and creates a new form of government for the Afghans because they're deadlocked because again, the elections are so fraudulent. This has continued. Ashraf Ghani, the president, both elections he has won are just absolute forces and then the same occurs for the parliamentary elections as well, the level of fraud is immense. Yet we claim we are there to help the Afghan people support themselves. We claim when we speak about why we can't pull our troops out of Afghanistan that we have to have our troops there in order to protect the government in order to strengthen the Afghan government because that is a government of law and democracy and couldn't be farther from the truth, of course. The same goes with human rights. The United States supported human rights violators was a human rights violator itself all throughout the Cold War. That legacy carries on through Afghanistan. You see it whether it is the fact that all the Afghan security forces whether it be the intelligence service, the military, the police, whatever all torture as a matter of routine that is reported every other year by the UN. Nothing changes. The United States doesn't even acknowledge that. You see that with the victimization of women. The Taliban, of course, were brutal in their treatment of women. The Afghan government maybe not as publicly brutal but women in Afghanistan still suffer terribly. The rates of suicide among Afghan women are the highest in the world. Health care ability for women is still incredibly low. It is still a misogynist nation and the United States supports that. And of course, you've had all kinds of various scandals. The sexual trafficking of young men and boys by warlords that the United States keeps in power with its troops and its money has been exposed over and over again. You hear a lot of American veterans speak about that. The other aspect too, of course, is the drug trade. You have this explosion of opioid use throughout the world, devastated communities in Europe and in the United States. We had as high as 70, 80,000 people dying a year from overdoses here in the United States over the last several years. At the same time, you have the resumption of Afghanistan as the world's leading opiate producer or an illicit opiate producer. Afghanistan goes from, first of all, it was the CIA that brings the drug from India and Pakistan into Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to produce revenue to support the insurgency. Which is very similar to what both the French and the Americans did in Southeast Asia during the Cold War as well as too, just being involved with the drug trade. That goes back as well to the years after the Second World War where the United States government through the CIA was heavily involved with the Mediterranean drug trade in order to combat communism, particularly in the port cities of Italy and Southern France. So you have this complicity, this tie-in, this relationship with illicit drugs with narcotics trafficking. And of course, you have this wholesale slaughter of Americans via overdoses. I can go on and on with these comparisons about how what was occurring in the Cold War transitions through and remains in Afghanistan. I think it just devastatingly shows the bankruptcy, the moral bankruptcy of the United States. There is, I don't want to take much more time, but Afghanistan is that living legacy of the Cold War. All the worst qualities of the United States, representing it through the 20 to 30 million people killed in the US of wars during the Cold War, the support for authoritarian regimes and dictatorships and thugs, the ties with organized crime and drug trafficking, and then of course the human rights violations. And then finally, I just wanted to share with the lies, with the constant lies, the lies that have extended all through the Cold War as have been testified to by so many of the great panelists in this event, but also in Afghanistan, it is a war that begins with lies. What else is covert action? So the supplying of the Afghan Mujahideen by the CIA before the Soviet Union even invades, this starts with a lie. And then of course, after 2001, it's just sustained year after year with lies about whether it's about progress, whether it's about how many women or how many girls are going to school, whether it's about whether the elections were free and fair, all those things relies. And so now here we are, right? This living legacy of the Cold War still exists. And at this moment, Joe Biden is unsure what he wants to do about it. So thank you for allowing me to provide this testimony. And thank you for your work with this truth commission.