What REALLY happened in Afghanistan?
We’ve all read the headlines about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, but Habib Khan Totakhil saw it all first-hand and wrote about it.
Totakhil is the founder of Afghan Peace Watch and former Kabul-based reporter with The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Afghanistan Times daily newspaper. He received a Rumi Award for “Best International Journalist in Afghanistan” in 2014 for his coverage. He’s even reported while embedded with the Taliban and learned some lessons doing so.
In this far-ranging interview as part of the Forbidden Conversations podcast series, we discuss the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, its impact on society, the role of journalism in conflict zones, and the importance of supporting Afghan resistance and not normalizing Taliban rule.
Follow his work on X at: @HabibKhanT
The FORBIDDEN CONVERSATIONS Podcast is a series that takes on topics that don't always get attention or are more challenging to tackle and seeks to address them through civil discourse and nuanced exploration. To view all episodes so far, visit here. Please subscribe, like and comment. You know, all the YouTube things. It helps a LOT!
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Just finished this, this was a very interesting interview. The situation in Afghanistan is very tragic, I feel very bad for the mass of people particularly disadvantaged by the Taliban’s return (women and girls foremost, but also secularists like this man). I wonder if this is how people ahead of the curve felt living in prior ages, like say any medieval or ancient society. But I suppose at least some Afghans can escape. It seems some modern people are unfortunately living near some others with a near Stone Age mentality, and many were teased with the prospect of a better life.
His discussion near the end of a whole new generation of jihadists being trained is very worrisome. I’d be interested to hear more about that.
I’m not sure what to think about the collapse that occurred in August 2021. I can understand that the Afghan national army had not been paid in most cases in a long time, and I would not fight for free. Yet I also think it was reasonable for the US to expect something better than total and immediate collapse with the amount of investment in their armed forces we’d put forward over so many years. Unfortunately their macro economy just never became a functioning economy so it seems it was doomed to collapse without propping up. Many very tragic human stories here.
Russia and the UK failed in Afghanistan. All we had to do was look what happened to them to know we shouldn't have touched it with a 10 foot pole. Here's a place where if a girl, a 10-year-old girl, or a woman who is only 15 gets raped it is her fault and her father and brothers will kill her and it's OK!! Wake up! It's also a place where warlords in their 50s and 60s take nine-year-old boys and rape them. And it is OK OK. And everyone is saying praise to God and women have to walk around in 100° heat bundled up in a bee keeper outfit. It's a place where when we first went in there on the front page of the New York Times was a photo of a man torturing an animal in a zoo because he had nothing to do --throwing rocks at the animal --and I could go on and on and on. When people are not raping women and then killing them because because of their HONOR, they grow OPIUM!! So why did we go in? Not to catch terrorists but because every single mineral anyone could need or want is in that barren country --it's a good idea to really face the music and recognize that we are phonies. Our great ally Saudi Arabia paid for the plane hijackers. Did we say anything ? NO.