Ambassador Dennis Ross
Assessing the Unfolding Situation in Afghanistan and Wider Issues Facing the Middle East
Ambassador Dennis Ross - Assessing the Unfolding Situation in Afghanistan and Wider Issues Facing the Middle East
- Hi, Dennis. Hello. Hi, Carly. Welcome back, everybody. Well, today the distinguished, smart, charming, accomplished, lovely ambassador Dennis Ross will be joining us to assist the unfolding situation in Afghanistan and reflect on the wider issues facing the Middle East. Thank you, Dennis. It’s really a great pleasure to have you with us. Ambassador Dennis Ross is Council and distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Prior to returning to the institute in 2011, he served two years as special assistant to President Obama, and National Security Council Senior Director for the central region, and a year as special advisor to Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton. For more than 12 years, Ambassador Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East Peace Process and dealing directly with the parties in negotiations. A highly skilled diplomat, Ambassador Ross was U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He was instrumental in assisting Israeli and Palestinians to reach the 1995 interim agreement. He also successfully brokered the 1997 Hebron accord, facilitated the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and intensively work to bring Israel and Syria together. Since leaving government at the end of 2011, he has authored many op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other papers and magazines. In addition, he writes monthly columns for U.S. news and War Report, and the New York Daily News. So once again, Dennis, thanks a million. I know you’re a very, very busy man. Thank you for being such a good friend and devoting an hour to us. And now I’m going to hand you over to Carly Maisel, our very own Carly and the two of you’ll be in discussion. Thank you.
Pleasure.
Thank you very much, Wendy. So Dennis, we’re going to see how much we can pack into this hour. And thank you for agreeing to come on at a short notice because a week ago we weren’t necessarily going to know we’d need a session on Afghanistan today. So I wanted to first of all ask you to take a step back and reflect on how we got here. 2001 the U.S. and NATO allies began what turned into the longest war in U.S. history, and over the last week, the swift U.S. withdrawal and speedy Taliban overthrow of the Afghan government has surprised many, arguably, including the U.S. administration. So, before we dig in on what’s next, how did we get here?
Well, Carly, as you point out, this is 20 years that we’ve been involved in Afghanistan. Through a variety of ups and downs, I’ve seen those who were convinced from the beginning that we had not just a counterterrorism objective in Afghanistan, but we could have a nation building mission in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was often known as sort of the death nail of empires. The British discovered it the hard way. The Soviets discovered it the hard way, and obviously we are discovering it very much the same. I want to explain kind of where Biden has come from as a way of putting in context his decision. And I want to draw a distinction between his decision to withdraw and the way it was done. These are two really different issues, but let me answer the essence of your question by pointing out that when President Obama came in in 2009, you’ll recall that he ran in the campaign and he sort of described Iraq as a war of choice, whereas Afghanistan was a war of necessity because Al-Qaeda had attacked us from Afghanistan. So in a sense, he was saying Afghanistan is a good war and Iraq is a bad war. He spent his first year going through a review and deciding what should we do. In the debate over that review, Vice President Biden had a very singular voice. He said we have only a counter terrorism interest here. We should have a minimalist presence that’ll allow us to deal with the counter of terror threat. We will get bogged down and never be able to get out of Afghanistan if we try to play this larger role. And he lost in that debate. The president made a decision at the time that we would surge. This was a decision that Biden, as I said, argued against. And arguably his point of view really never changed from what was in 2009, to 2021. Now, in the intervening period, the Trump administration and President Trump made it very clear he wanted to get out. This was what he described as one of the forever wars. He wanted to get out.
He claimed, in a sense, we would get out. He mandated Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate with the Taliban. And Zalmay negotiated not a peace agreement but a withdrawal agreement. The one thing that happened during the implementation of this, as we began to draw down further and further, was the Taliban didn’t attack us, but they didn’t live up to anything else in the deal. They were supposed to stop gradually attacks against the Afghan government, the Afghan forces. They didn’t. There was supposed to be a gradual ceasefire. There wasn’t. There were supposed to be serious negotiations. They weren’t serious in the negotiations. But what they didn’t do is they didn’t attack us. Now when, by the time that Biden came in, we only had 2,500 forces left in Afghanistan. This was down originally from a high, we had close to 150,000 at the high point. By the end of the Obama administration, the two terms, we were down to about 15,000 forces. So during Trump, we drew down from 15,000 to 2500. He announced that he wanted to be out actually before the end of his term. We didn’t get there. But in a sense, the die, in many respects, was cast. So Biden comes in, he has this legacy in his own mind, but he’s also inherited an agreement. And the agreement is that by one, by May one, we will be completely out. Now he knows, and the Taliban is made it very clear. If we don’t withdraw by May one, they will begin attacking American forces. Again, as I said, once the deal was done for withdrawal, the Taliban stopped attacking our forces. They continued to try to insinuate themselves. They continued to try to grab more territory, more provincial capitals.
They continued to do that, but they didn’t attack us. So as of May one, had we not gotten out, had it been clear that Biden had made the decision to stay, we would’ve begun to suffer losses to American troops. People can say you can challenge the decision, but you have to be honest about what the consequence of that decision would’ve been. We would’ve begun to lose American forces. Now for Biden to lose American forces in a place where he felt we should no longer be, was an anathema. So he basically said we won’t get out by May one because we can’t do what we need to do in that time period. Now the military, meaning Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defence, and General Milley, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, they both argued against our withdrawal. They both argued for us maintaining what was a presence along these lines in the 2500-3000 area. Maintaining our air presence as well, our logistics support, our intelligence and all of that. And Biden made the decision, if we stay, we’re going to start suffering casualties. And so he said, you have to go. And he said, I want us out by September 11th. He made this decision in April. Now the military, Austin and Milley, they defined their approach in the following way. They said, okay, we don’t want to get out, but we’re saluting. We said, yes sir, and we’re going to get out. But what they did is they focused exclusively, their only mission, notwithstanding what the administration is now saying, the only mission that was in the plan that the military, that the Pentagon developed was a mission in which we wanted to be sure that as our forces were shrinking smaller and smaller, by definition, they would become more vulnerable. So they wanted to be sure we wouldn’t leave under fire.
They wanted to be sure our forces, our military forces, would be secure throughout this process of withdrawal. As I said, they would become more vulnerable as their numbers became even smaller. And so we did it stealthily. We didn’t coordinate with the Afghan military, partly because we didn’t trust the operational security. So when we got out of Bagrum Air Force Base, we didn’t coordinate it with them at all. They didn’t know we were doing this, and suddenly we were out. Now this contributed obviously to what I will describe as a loss of morale, which is not to say that they had such great morale in the first place because one of the fundamental problems was the level of corruption in Afghanistan was something endemic. I can tell you through the different years, different periods, including when I was peripherally involved, the fact is that we were making an effort to deal with that, with the corruption, and we never succeeded. One of the big problems was we invested 85 billion dollars in the Afghan military over the 25 years, 85 billion dollars. Much more investment in the kind of civil economic development of the country. 85 billion dollars. Frequently Afghan forces weren’t paid, even though we were providing monies for them to be paid. Frequently they didn’t get the logistics support or the material support. Oftentimes these outposts would run out of ammunition. They were skimming off the top throughout the whole security establishment.
There was poor morale within the forces because they didn’t always see the leadership. There were units that were quite effective, but they were mostly the specialised units that we trained and who worked very closely with us more than others. So in a lot of ways, when we said this was a 300,000 force, it was never a 300,000 force. Partly because it was a hollow force in many respects, to be fair, they took very high casualties. But part of that was also the strategy. And when there was a sense that we were going to be gone, the imagery of not having our support with the pressures that the Taliban was making, they were coming in and offering, if you surrender, we won’t kill you. You don’t have to worry, you can just leave. And so more and more, those deals were being struck. So what you have is a backdrop to what we’ve now seen as a disaster. The decision to withdraw, you can argue the merits one way or the other. As I said, you can’t make the case that this would’ve been cost free for us. You have to be honest that in fact, we would begin to separate casualties. But every foreign policy decision has within it, almost by definition, choices that you have to make.
And the choices are frequently not between wonderful gains and losses, but between relatively lesser losses and relatively more losses. Here was a choice, and Biden made his choice. The mistake that was made was not necessarily the decision to get out. The mistake that was made was to allow the Pentagon to shape a process that focused exclusively on the security of our forces and not the larger obligations we had to A, ensure that all those who had invested in our effort and who were therefore vulnerable, we could get out of the country. That meant we had to preserve a long enough timeline for us to get out, with warnings to the Taliban saying, we’re getting out, but we need more time to be able to do it. And there’ll be a price that you pay if you attack us. We needed to create a longer timeline. We needed to maintain a presence throughout the country so that we could get everybody who had a dependency on us and who we owed a moral obligation to. We had to be sure we could get them out.
We had to basically build into this set of plans, a capability to be able to take out of the country, about a hundred thousand people. That is not the plan that was developed. And here we are in this remarkable situation where we literally were down to near zero, and we had 2500 forces when the Biden administration came in, and we’re now up to about 6,000 forces in the country to manage what is the evacuation that is exclusively out of the Kabul airport. We should never have gotten out of Bagram Air Force Base. It was the biggest single Air Force base we had there. We should never have gotten out of it until the process of evacuation was completed. But the problem was, as I said, not the decision. The problem was a plan that was focused exclusively on doing it stealthily and focusing only on the protection of our forces. Something that by definition was important, but it could not be the whole mission.
So where have the Taliban been for the last 20 years? We’ve seen them with an office in Doha and it was a Qatar Airways flight that returned many of the Taliban leadership to Afghanistan. But they’ve certainly been continuing their efforts and their focus over the last 20 years. So where has the Taliban been?
Well, they never left. They melted away. I mean the interesting thing to bear in mind, do you recall how quickly we defeated the Taliban in 2001?
It took a couple of months, I think.
[Dennis] Six weeks.
Yeah.
Okay. Six weeks. Now, did we destroy all the Taliban? No. Basically what we saw here is exactly the same thing. What we saw the Taliban is what happened here. Once they saw the way that the wind was blowing, they just melted away. The same thing happened here. There’s a tendency within Afghanistan to go with a winner. In this case, the Taliban never disappeared. We made an early mistake. The Bush administration was very successful very quickly, but it could have done much more to cement the security realities. And within two months after we had succeeded in the Taliban following, we were already shifting our forces out because the president was beginning to focus on Iraq. That was a huge mistake for all sorts of reasons. But one of the reasons was the ability to do more to cement the nature of the wind would’ve, I think, put us in a better position. Now, having said that, unless the way we work to develop the new institutions there dealt very clearly with a lot of the corruption that became endemic. It was going to be very hard to ever succeed.
Now, as the Taliban was able to reconstitute itself, because our attention was elsewhere, they also had one thing going for ‘em. Most of the Taliban had connections to local areas. The Taliban it’s not this one cohesive homogeneous force. It is very much localised all over the country. It has different groups within it. That localised set of connections also created more of a built-in Afghan identity. And they certainly didn’t look like they were a foreign implant. Too much of what happened with the emergence of Afghan governments was that they looked too much like a foreign implant. And foreign implants are always going to have more difficulty in terms of credibility and identity. But the short answer to your question is the Taliban never went away. And over time they gradually rebuilt themselves. And it was pretty remarkable. Look, when President Obama surged in 2009, he raised our forces in Afghanistan to 150,000. So we gradually drew them down. So after eight years, we were down to about 15,000.
But the Taliban basically slowly insinuated itself around the country. And the Afghan government was never particularly effective. It certainly wasn’t good at governance. And the military was a mixed bag. I can tell you, I don’t want to belabour this, but when I was in the Obama administration and I sat in, when I was six months into the administration, the president asked me to come over to the White House and sort of run all the broader Middle East issues. You mentioned, I was head of the central region. They created that position for me. And the central region included Afghanistan-Pakistan, it was basically Morocco to Bangladesh. And so in addition to Iraq and the Arab-Israeli issue, I also had under my purview Afghanistan-Pakistan. And so I was part. I came in belatedly into the review. And one of the things I was struck by, was, in a sense, we were creating all these metrics. That always struck me as being fine in the laboratory, but not particularly credible on the ground. I was actually much more partial to the Biden argument that our interests in Afghanistan were narrow, not broad, and they could best be protected by focusing on a counter terror mission. I wish, honestly, that Biden had maintained our presence at 2,500. Yes, we would’ve paid a price, but the price we would’ve paid will be less than the price we’re now going to end up paying.
What do you think that that price looks like? Over the last 72 hours we are seeing horrific photos and the stories coming out of the areas around Kabul Airport as well as Afghanistan are heartbreaking, especially for those who have visas that should have allowed them to leave. So what do you see as the next couple of weeks looking like, as Biden himself said today, we’re going to need more troops and perhaps longer than we anticipated. Does the September 11th deadline slip?
I think, yes. The September deadline had been moved August 31st. 'Cause in the end, I think there was a recognition, the symbolism of getting out on September 11th wasn’t really a brilliant symbolism. My guess is it will slip and maybe it’ll slip to the end of, I don’t know. It’s hard to say 'cause it depends on what’s the point at which we decide we’ve gotten out everybody we need to get out? I think that’s a very hard call right now because a lot of the people who we need to be able to get out are people who are not in Kabul. And they won’t be able to get to Kabul. And that the Taliban right now is blocking access to the airport. They’re not blocking access of everybody, but they’re blocking access of a lot of the Afghanis. They’re not blocking any access of foreigners, of the Americans. So we will be able to get the Americans out, we will be able to get some of the Afghans out. Will we be able to get all of those who we should be able to get out given the moral obligation we should have in them? I’m sad to say I don’t think so. So I don’t know how much it’ll slip. It’ll slip somewhat. we’ll probably end up getting around 50,000 out. That’s less than the number that we need to get out. One price is just what we’re going to see in Afghanistan. The Taliban is saying women can work, women will have rights consistent with Sharia law. Sharia law, it depends on how you interpret it. There are those who defined Islam quite differently than the Taliban.
The Taliban ideology is a restrictive ideology. It’s an intolerant ideology. It is certainly one that profoundly limits what women can do. It may be the approach to, women will differ province by province. That’s what appears to be the case right now. But what we’re going to see is that women are not going to have the rights that they had and the price we pay in Afghanistan, even in terms of our ability to monitor what the Taliban does with regard to allowing groups that share the Taliban’s ideology to reestablish themselves within Afghanistan. ISIS remains a kind of enemy of the Taliban because the Taliban has established the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan. It’s a competitor with the Islamic state, which says they set up a Caliphate. So they see them as a competitor, but Al-Qaeda’s not a competitor. The commitments they made about not allowing these groups to reestablish themselves, I wouldn’t believe them for a second. So we will not, it’s just a fact of life. We won’t have the same intelligence assets there that will put us in a position where we’ll know exactly what’s going on.
That’s a risk over time. There’s another risk. The risk is the recruitment for these groups will go up right now, because we’re talking about booster shots right now for Covid. This is a booster shot for the radical Sunni Islamists. If you go on their sites right now, they’re talking about what a great victory this was. They will use this to recruit new followers. And we’re going to face new efforts on the part of these groups for station identification to show that they’re back in business. So we’ll have to be on guard for what I think will be more efforts at terror. And we’ll have to see what the Biden administration feels it has to do to show, to demonstrate it’s not weak that it lives up its two commitments. Does Israel feel it has to take additional steps right now. We we’re looking not just at the immediate consequences of Afghanistan, we’re looking at what is a wider fallout.
Let’s take a little bit of a world tour and assess the impact on some of the other countries. First of all, the role of Qatar in this situation, that the Taliban has been there for nearly a decade, with many of their key figures there. How does Qatar fit into this?
The country has tried to define themselves as being this bridge between the Islamists and everybody else. So the Qatar, as I like to say about Qatar, they never met a Muslim brother they didn’t like. And that is a role they played. Look, they go between Israel and Hamas. In Gaza. They were the host to the Taliban who negotiated with us. To be fair to them, they’ve also made it clear that they’re trying right now to help in terms of the evacuation of those out of Afghanistan. And I think they’re actually probably playing a helpful role in this case, both practically and in terms of the advice they’re giving to the Taliban.
Look, the Taliban is going on a charm offensive to try to show they don’t have to be this threat, The rest of the world doesn’t have to cut them off and so forth. It’s a charm effect. Maybe they’ll be a little bit more clever than they were before. They’re not redefining who they were in terms of their ideology. So I suspect that Qatar is trying to give them advice even as they are helping with evacuations. And that’s a good thing. But I would not expect the Qatar to suddenly in any way cut off the Taliban to put any real pressure on the Taliban. Qatar operates on the principle of sort of almost being an advocate for these groups as a way of building, in their argument, as a way of building their leverage to try to extract something from them. It remains to be seen whether they actually can extract anything from them.
So continuing around the region, Iran obviously welcomed the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. Many others around the world are watching the Iranian posturing and wondering what this situation in Afghanistan means, not just in that part of the world, but more broadly looking at the potential revisiting of the nuclear deal with Iran and how Israel looks at the Iranian threat. Could we spend a little time looking at Iran? I’m conscious we’ve got a few topics to tackle there. But let’s start with Iran and Afghanistan and then zoom out.
All right, so it’s always a danger to get me launched on Iran because it’s oftentimes hard to stop me, but I want to do it at a couple of different levels. First, there’s a legacy here of a great deal of hostility between Iran and the Taliban. In 1998, they almost went to war. The Taliban killed nine Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan. The Islamic Republic mobilised 200,000 forces on their border, and they almost went to war, and they didn’t, but they almost went to war. So you have number one, a legacy in that. Secondly, there’s also the ideology of the Taliban. These are Sunni [Indistinct] who view Shias as heretics. Who have a long history of putting them to death. And the Taliban was completely intolerant of the Hazara Shia within Afghanistan.
So the legacy here is a pretty difficult one. Not to mention the fact that how did the Taliban make its money over the years? With the Ethiopian trade. Growing poppies in the Ethiopian trade. And what is one of the biggest problems that Islamic public has had for a long time? Drug addiction. So this was also another source of problem for them. Now, having said all that, which creates at least a legacy of some suspicion, the last couple of years, the Iranians sort of seeing the writing on the wall, built their relationship with the Taliban and actually were providing arms to the Taliban. Engage some safe haven for them. Not like Pakistan, Pakistan provided them sanctuary. But in the case of Iran, in the last couple years, it’s been characterised by a different kind of relationship than it was before. I don’t think any of the fundamental suspicion goes away, but I do think in the near term, what both the Taliban and the Iranians shared was a desire to see a defeat of the United States. First of all, the Iranians want a defeat of the United States everywhere. So here was a chance to see a defeat of the United States and even better kind of humiliation of the United States. So they were part and parcel of that.
And if you look at their commentary right now, it’s filled. With this and gloating about the defeat of the United States, and all those who are connected to the United States. So that’s kind of the setting. Now as it relates to everything else with Iran right now, first of all, we have a new Iranian government. The idea that the Raisi, who is now the president, is simply a clone of Rouhani isn’t true. He’s a clone of the supreme leader. We have always had elite politics in Iran. There’s been a kind of rivalry. Now, it’s not a debate between Rouhani and Zarif, and Raisi and Shamkhani and all the principalists in the sense that they differ over the survivability and commitment to the Islam Republic. What they have differed over was people like Rouhani said, we shouldn’t be in confrontation with the rest of the world because it imposes a price on us. We can still pursue our objectives, but it’s better not to do it in a confrontational way because that may impose a price on us to people like Raisi who reflect the supreme leader feel that being true to the ideology requires more confrontation because it also justifies more strict internal controls. This is a way to, in a sense, to ensure that the principalists are able to maintain the purity of the ideology. There’s always a danger that the ideology becomes fuzzed if you start dealing too much with the outside world. So now you have a government that has a bend towards greater confrontation with the outside. They will try to redefine the approach in the redefine the approach to us. The supreme leader has always emphasised he wants self-sufficiency. So what they will do is they will come back into the negotiations on the JCPOA and they will adopt a harder line in terms of what they’re requiring from us.
What they’re saying is they’ll go back to the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. That’s what they’re saying. But what they require is that we have to come back and what they really want is what I call more for less. What I mean by more for less is the following. They want us to commit to greater sanctions relief than we are required under the terms of the JCPOA and they want to give less. The reason they want to give less is that they can’t get back to where they were on the numerical limits of course they can get back. But they have acquired, because of what they’re doing in terms of the level of enrichment, because of what they’re doing with advanced centrifuges. They have acquired a knowledge base and experience that they weren’t supposed to get until basically 2030. They’re way ahead of where they were supposed to be. So even if we get them to go back to the numerical limits, which at a certain level I say would be important, we’re not going to get them to go back to where they should be. But what they’re seeking from us is not only for us to lift the sanctions we’re obligated to lift, but they want us to lift a much wider array of sanctions and they want us to guarantee that we won’t snap them back under any circumstances. Now, there is no way the Biden administration or any administration could agree to that because if they violate, we’re going to snap back.
Not only in that, if in fact they continue the kind of behaviours they’re engaging in in the region, we are going to put pressure on them. And they will cry foul. So that’s why I say they’re pushing for more for less. I want to make two more points because as I said, I can go on for long periods of time with this and I’ll try to discipline myself. They have now started a second cascade of centrifuges enriching the 60%. The JCPOA require them to limit the purity that they enrich to, they enrich uranium to 3.67%. Higher enriched uranium is 20%. Weapons grade uranium is 80 to 90%. To go from 60% enrichment to to 80 to 90% enrichment, weapons grade, takes you a week. There never should have been a tolerance for them to start enriching the 60%. What they are doing is, first of all, they’re creating new baselines that are completely illegitimate. They’re also now not just doing R&D on, they’re also producing uranium metal. The British, the French, and the Germans publicly said there is no civilian purpose for uranium metal.
The only thing uranium metal is really good for is for creating the core of a bomb. So what they’re doing is, their approach is not just to sort of try to negotiate more for less. They believe that they can put additional pressure on us by looking like they’re rushing, not looking, in fact rushing in their nuclear programme, which will put us in a position where if we can’t stop them diplomatically, we face a very real risk that they could be rushing to a threshold nuclear weapons capability. Now, Israel won’t live with that kind of a capability, and we will have to decide what do we do about it? This group of hard line Iranians are betting we so don’t want to have to use force against them that they will succeed. I am one of those who believe this is all about tactics on the Iranian side. I still believe they’ll come back into the JCPOA, but I think it’ll be a couple of months before that’s a possibility. Others think no, that they really intend just to stay on this track that doesn’t fit their traditional behaviour. They’re very good at what I call playing hardball and hard bargaining. I think they want sanctions relief, but they want to try to prove to us that they’re very patient about that and we don’t have the patience as they continue to push in their nuclear programme in ways that should create concerns for all of us.
You touched earlier on about the role of Pakistan in terms of providing sanctuary. Over the last few days, I’ve read a lot of different commentary about how pleased or excited Pakistan really is about the resurgence and reemergence of the Taliban. How do you see this affecting Pakistan, both sort of in the government, but also in the empowering of their jihadists to seek new power?
Look, Pakistan has always played a double game. The double game has been, they provided sanctuaries for the Taliban and they claim they were against the Taliban. The Pakistan Taliban carried out these awful terrorist acts including attacking schools in one case, killing 145 school children. And the Pakistanis have lost large numbers of soldiers. It’s true. And yet they played this double game where they allowed the Afghanistan Taliban, the cousins of the Pakistan Taliban, this kind of sanctuary. Why do they do it? First because everything with Pakistan is seen through the lens of India. And the Indians had established themselves in Afghanistan. And they wanted to undercut the Indians in Afghanistan, and they saw the Taliban as being an instrument of doing that. So, on the one end, they see the Indians largely evacuating Afghanistan now. So the Pakistanis feel, okay, we force the Indians out of Afghanistan.
But it’s a pure victory because the very groups that the Taliban will let into Afghanistan will be groups that will end up working with a Pakistani Taliban as well. The Pakistan is a Pakistan is a country that has a large number of nuclear weapons. It has a very significant population that is highly attracted to the Islamists. The last thing they should want or should be doing is building the credibility of those who are the purveyors of this extreme austere form of Islam. Because it’s going to build the momentum of these groups and the power of these groups within Pakistan. The reality is it should be a source of concern to all of us. This is a country that has between 150 and 200 nuclear weapons. The one thing we want to be sure of is that none of these groups ever get hold of it. Now, do I think the Pakistani military has this under control? The answer is yes for now.
So talking of countries who can play a double game, how does Russia fit into the situation in Afghanistan? They’ve obviously got a long history in the region and been able to perhaps take advantage of instability in a way that others can’t.
Same for the Russians. The Russians, by the way, have not rushed to recognise the Taliban, which is interesting. The Russians and very publicly have said they’ll wait and see. They kept their embassy open just like the Chinese did. But they’re saying very clearly that they will adopt a wait and see attitude. In the meantime, in Tajikistan, they’re running big exercises, military exercises. That cannot be an accident. This is a message they’re sending to the Taliban. For Putin, the fear of contagion into Central Asia is a genuine concern because it means sooner or later it means they’re much more on the front lines when it comes to terrorism emanating out of this part of the world than we are.
And so for Putin, much like the Iranians, he will celebrate every American defeat. Because he is in a competition with us in many ways it’s a zero sum game. But this is also not an unalloyed benefit for them. And as I said, the fact that they’re running a large military exercise right now in Tajikistan it is probably not a coincidence. This is their way of saying, we’re ready for any contingency, don’t mess with us. They will try to take advantage of our being out of there. But I think it’s somewhat a dicey proposition for them. So, whatever they may celebrate about us, there’s obviously a level of some unease about what they could face.
Afghanistan has some of the world’s largest deposits of lithium, between one to three trillion with the American troops pulling out, does that hand this deposits to China and or are there other potential victors in this process?
Well, everybody assumes that Chinese will try to take advantage of this. And there’s no doubt. Many have always said, why is it we are the ones who pay the price, make a huge investment, they can come in afterwards and take advantage of it? But the truth is, to be fair, to be able to exploit the deposits of lithium there will take a huge investment. The infrastructure doesn’t exist. It has to be developed. And the Chinese, this is also a double edged sword for them. The fear of contagion is very big. Tajikistan Liberation movement and Islams movement that was very active in CINCAN. There’s deep worry about the possible effect on the Uyghurs. This is again, the Chinese are highly mercantilist for sure, but they’ve obviously decided they’re trying to somehow control any attraction of Islam within China. And so, again, anything that gives the Jihadi movement this incredible boost of momentum is going to be a source of concern to them. At the same time, the Taliban has an awful economic situation. If they want to deliver any governance, they’re going to need help from the outside. This will be part of the Belt And Road Initiative. Chinese are great at basically building country’s debt, literal financial debt in Belt And Road. I suspect the Chinese, we’ll see what they can do in terms of developing the infrastructure. But, the Taliban, we’ll have to see how much they’ve developed. We’ll have to see how much they’ve evolved. This is a group that believes in its ideology and for us to think that this is just an instrument for them. I don’t see it that way. So do I think both China and Russia will try to take some advantage here? I do. Do I also think that they will tread somewhat carefully because they have profound suspicion to the Taliban? I also think that.
So looking at some of the effects on U.S. allies around the world, be it Taiwan, be it Israel, be it the potential ramifications of Iran’s announcement and Hezbollah’s announcement yesterday around Lebanon and the need for oil. How does the U.S. reassure its allies and the world that it’s still someone to be relied upon?
Well, you start by making it clear that we spent 20 years in Afghanistan. That was a generation. We spent a generation in Afghanistan, we spent a trillion dollars. That’s not exactly an example of someone who was short of breath or didn’t have staying power. You make the point that we will compete. One of the points that the president and Tony Blinken have made, which is a fair point. The Russians and the Chinese love the fact that we were tied down in Afghanistan. So this frees us up to be focused on areas that are more important. Now for that to be the case, we can’t just say that. There needs to be some examples of what we’re doing to beef up our presence in these places. And we can then say, the reason we’re doing this is precisely because Afghanistan was not a vital interest and we’re focused on those places that are. That’s number one. Number two, it won’t just be words and it won’t just be deployments. We’re going to have to do some things that make it clear when we say there are areas that are important to us, but we mean it. Now here, even though the administration has downgraded the importance of the Middle East relative to the broader competition with China, there is a need to demonstrate that we still stand by our friends.
Two weeks ago the Mercer Street was this tanker that was not a tanker. It was a commercial ship that had multiple management and ownership. One of the owners was an Israeli. And the revolutionary guard directly. So it wasn’t through a proxy. They directly sent drones and they killed the captain of the ship. They hit where the captain and the personnel of the ship were. This was a freighter and killed the captain and killed the lead security guard. The captain was Romanian. The main security official was British. This was a direct attack on freedom of shipping. And the U.S. we identified the Iranians as being responsible. The kind of thing that should be done is there should be not sanctions. We should attack the base that was responsible for launching this. Now, what we should do, we should take a page from the Israelis. The Israelis have probably hit 1300 targets in Syria. They have acknowledged almost none of those. We should take a page. When you take credit for an attack, then you force the other side to do something. What we want to do is want to send a message to the Iranians and everybody else without necessarily taking credit for it. They’ll get the message. If we hit the base that launched these drones, the Iranians would get the message. You do it in the middle of the night and you don’t say anything. They’d get the message. It doesn’t put an onus on them to respond. We always seem to be very concerned about if we act that’s going to produce retaliation. We have had after more than 30 attacks against bases by Shia proxy militias of Iranians interact, we have retaliated twice. The nature of our retaliation was extremely constrained. The constraint, the sheer calibration was a message. We didn’t want to see escalation. Now I understand we don’t want to see escalation, but you actually don’t make escalation less likely when you show how constrained are with what you’re doing. There has to be a fear. The other side should be concerned of our escalating so they should be careful. By being so constrained we sent exactly the opposite message. There was some punishment, but the Iranians have always been willing to fight to the last of their proxy militias. They’re very sensitive when they take casualties. So one of the things you do is you hit them. But don’t admit it.
Don’t acknowledge it. There’ll be all sorts of speculation. International relations is full of fictions. This is one of the things that should have been done. I can tell you when I was still in the Obama administration, and we weren’t yet in negotiations with Iranians and we were worried about the pace of their nuclear programme, let’s just say that others weren’t prepared to accept this argument. I said, there are 30 targets in Iran that are very connected to their nuclear programme. Many of them, by the way, are not in populated areas. If in the middle of the night one of them blows up, they’ll get the message. That our patience has limits. You can be smart about how you use power. One of the things that we’ve seen is that we haven’t always been smart with how we use power. We will need to look for opportunities where everybody gets the message that it isn’t just words. If it’s just words right now, frankly, they’ll ring hollow to almost everybody because we had good words about Afghanistan too. So we have to make certain deployments of weapons and forces in places that show, okay, we’ve been freed up because of Afghanistan. We need to make certain words for sure, but we also need to make certain things happen. We don’t have to take credit. Everybody will get that message.
So there’s been a story doing the rounds in Israel for the last few days around John Kerry positioning Afghanistan as a success story that he used when he talked to Netanyahu about the potential for Gaza and the West Bank. Unfortunately John Kerry’s had some bad headlines in Israel 'cause they also replayed on the anniversary of the Abraham Accords. His opinion that the Abraham Accords themselves weren’t very likely. But as the Israelis look to what’s going on in Afghanistan, do you think this has any effect on their calculations? The Americans have recently topped up the Iron Dome and shown, financially at least, their support for Israel security. But what do you think the Israeli security establishment is thinking at this point?
The Israeli security establishment is assuming a number of things right now. I might just digress for a second. I know a lot about exactly what Kerry offered because at the same time I was running the back channel, I was outside the government, but I was running the back channel for the administration. And I know exactly what he was arguing. And he was trying to say that the key issue was over. Did Israel have to maintain a presence in perpetuity in the Jordan Valley? And Bibi and Bogie Ya'alon at that time were saying yes, they added, no one could substitute for us. And what Kerry and John Allen were going to show them in Afghanistan was the early warning systems we had. Not that were manned by the Afghanis, but were manned by us. The way the story came out in Israel was Kerry was trying to make the case see what we trained the Afghanis to do. That was not the case that they were making. The case that was being made is the kind of layered early warning defence that we were running. Not that the Afghanistan were running. So it’s a bit of a distortion. Now, having said that, because we just withdrew, even though you can say Israel’s very different than Afghanistan, and I think that’s true, what this has told everybody is that you better be able ultimately to depend on yourself. Maybe the U.S. will be there to back you up in other ways, but you better depend on yourself. And that’s, by the way, has always been part of the Israeli ethos.
The Israeli ethos has always been, we are never going to ask Americans to die for us. That’s always separated the Israelis from everybody else. And so this obviously makes the Israelis much more focused on what do they need to be able to do on their own. I’ll just tell you, when I was negotiating in the back channel, the measure of the security arrangements that were going to be required, were driven by the following formula. The security arrangements have to permit Israel to defend itself by itself. That was the essence of the formula. Always. Well that will always be the way the Israelis see any arrangements connected to any subsequent agreement has to be one in which Israel doesn’t depend on the outside for its security. It depends on itself for security. That’s only been deepened by this experience. Now, one other point here, the Israeli security establishment now wants us back in the JCPOA, not because they think it’s a good deal. They do not think it’s a good deal, but they want us back in the JCPOA because when Bibi was prime minister, he didn’t devote the investment in to building the Israeli military option to deal with Iran. Not withstanding all the words. If you talk to the security establishment now, they say A, they don’t expect they’ll ever be a longer and stronger deal. B, they believe the use of force will be necessary at some point. C, they need five to six years to develop that capability now. So even though they think it’s a big deal, they want the five to six years, they want to buy the time that the deal provides them. So it’s a kind of, it’s certainly is not warm and cuddly embrace of the JCPOA, but it is a very hardheaded no nonsense view that if you don’t have the JCPOA, the need to act militarily is going to come much sooner. And we’re not in the position to do it. And there isn’t an assumption that the American administration will do it.
In our last few minutes, if you were to look back over the last 20 years, at least 40,000 civilians killed, 64,000 Afghan police and military killed, three and a half thousand international soldiers. And the Taliban is back in charge and, as you say, they may be putting a charm offensive, but if I was a woman in Afghanistan right now, I wouldn’t be reassured by their charm offensive. Has anything really been accomplished over the last 20 years or tragically is Afghanistan no better off than it was before?
Well the paradox is obviously Afghanistan is different than it was. Women have come to have a set of expectations. Actually most of the society has come to have a set of expectations as well. Islam was always an important part of the culture. And so there’s always been varying degrees of observance of Islam. The real question is going to be, does the Taliban face real resistance If it tries to recreate what was there before? We’re already seeing, by the way, signs of resistance. And already been demonstrations against it. And one of the things we’re going to have to watch is are they unified? I mean, we know there’s different within the Taliban. The Taliban is made up of different constituents and forces. Now are there some who realise they may face a perpetual battle within Afghanistan unless they make some adjustments? Or do those who basically are the most extreme, are they prepared simply to fight within? We end up having some kind of civil conflict within the Taliban, which produces a kind of civil conflict within Afghanistan. My own senses were likely to face a mess for some time to come. And I would love to be able to say something has been achieved in Afghanistan given the price that was paid. I do think there is a different baseline, and it won’t be the Taliban baseline that existed before, but it will still not be a baseline that will give women any comfort. The clock will be turned back, even if it won’t be turned back as much. And we may end up seeing what is an ongoing civil conflict within Afghanistan where the price that is paid there is unfortunately an ongoing price.
And other than your kind of traditional inquiries and senate and congress hearings, do you see any damage to the Biden administration? Is this something that affects the way Americans may consider voting in midterms or is this a very long way away and not a priority in the mind of Americans?
I think it’s a hard call. Anybody who thinks they know one way or the other, I think, first the most recent polls, by the way, still show the majority of Americans support the decision to get out. And if, for example, over the next several weeks, suddenly the stories look better. The initial stories are obviously horrific and the imagery is just horrific. But if the stories begin to be alright, we’re getting all these people out and it’s being done efficiently and the Taliban has no interest in disrupting that, that will begin to temper some of the worst aspects of these story in the images. If the domestic policies appear to be effective, if the booster shots prevent us from having the kind of surge that Israel is suffering with the Delta virus, meaning not only the boosters, but the social distancing, the mask. If all of this allows, again, continuing recovery and not forcing a kind of retrenchment and if the infrastructure bill is adopted and again looks like a success, Biden will be able to campaign on something that is more promising. If in fact, the imagery doesn’t recede, if we have another surge of Covid and it requires, in a sense, more lockdowns, this I think will ultimately determine what happens. I will say with the foreign policy, if we have any other disasters, it’ll be a problem. One of the big appeals of the Biden administration was we were going to see competence again after the incompetence and chaotic chaos of the, chaotic dysfunction of the Trump administration. Well, it doesn’t look like we’ve seen such a great degree of competence right now. So they’re going to have to recoup. There’s a political price that will be paid for this. But there may be a long enough time between now and the midterms even, that there’s the ability, I think to recoup, but the administration’s going to have to prove that it is recouping and the administration’s going to have to prove with some signs of success. One of the ways you counteract the image of failure is by producing some successes. They’re going to need some successes in foreign policy.
Dennis, thank you. I suspect we could have kept going. We barely scratched the surface on a number of areas, but we’re incredibly grateful for you in stepping in and helping our audience understand a little bit more about what’s going on in the region. And I’m going to hand back over to Wendy.
My pleasure. Glad to do it.
Dennis, it’s always a real privilege listening to you. Thank you so much for this excellent and informative session, and thanks for your time and your insights on such complex and ever evolving topics. Oh, and your explanation on these major issues has really given us much more of an insight as towards the ramifications of the draw from Afghanistan is, and it is really very, very, very worrying. This seems to be my swan song, the ramifications of these events will only become clearer in months to come. We’re seeing it over and over and over again. It’s just, we’re just facing one catastrophe after the next. The world is in such a mess, I must say. I just feel, I do feel very distressed about what I’m reading, but what I wanted to say is thank you again for tackling this issue with Lockdown University and we look forward to reading your op-ed on the topic. Thank you very, very much. And to you Carly. Thank you very much, as always, and to Lauren and thank you to all our participants for joining us. So do you have anything optimistic to say? Can I give you the last word, Dennis, please?
Well, yeah, I’ll say one thing that I think creates some possibility. One of the great ironies is precisely when the United States becomes seen as being less reliable. One of the reasons you’ve seen this gravitation of the Sunni Arab states towards Israel is because Israel is seen as being much more reliable.
[Wendy] Right.
So the ability to build the normalisation process isn’t going to lessen. It will take an act of American brokering. But at a minimum, the convergence on threat perception and the perception that Israel is reliable, that actually that creates a strategic underpinning to the relationship you’ve seen between the Sunni Arab states and Israel. The irony is these circumstances actually give that more grounding than they would otherwise. So there then, now I don’t have to pass out antidepressants.
Okay. Building trust. Trust is imperative. Well, on that note, thank you very, very much. My sister Linda with me and she sends you her very warm regards as well, and from all of us, take care and thank you. Thank you.
You too. Be well.
Thanks. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.
[Dennis] Bye-bye.