Kyle here - it largely depends on who you ask. When the prior government was overthrown you saw a lot of citizens trying to escape. There was a recent story where a rumor went around that Turkey was needing volunteers following the earthquake and Afghans showed up to the airports in droves hoping to be selected to go to Turkey. Those rumors about seeking afghan volunteers were false.

But the Taliban has both a loyal following and a great portion of the population that exists almost beyond the idea and reach of any kind of central government. A lot of the educated Afghan populace and certainly any Afghan with ties to the coalition’s military force don’t want to live under Taliban rule. For most, life will continue as it always has with subsistence farming in their local community. Even under the former government the rural Afghan’s life was almost unaffected unless caught in the war. Even when the US was there, the Taliban were the de facto rulers in much of the country. It’s just speculation, but the backlash you see against the Taliban government largely comes from Afghans with access to news and social media and telecommunications and the internet. Much of the population just wants to be left alone.

TL:DR: it depends on who you ask and for most life will go on as before.

Kyle here and that’s a great question. US occupation spurred the creation of many cell phone networks. Most Afghans, with the exception of the most rural, have cell phones and SIM cards. In 2016 3G was fairly rare except in the very populated areas. I’m not sure if the Taliban is working to restrict internet access or prohibit certain sites, but I can assure you Afghans on all sides of the conflict are very active on Twitter, but you need to follow the English speaking Afghan accounts which generally lead you to the Pashto and Dari posters if you’re not familiar with the language.

Education was slightly improved under US occupation for those in more populated areas. It expanded middle and high school to girls. Despite this, most estimates place literacy rates around 40% which is well below the world average. Illiteracy was very much taken advantage of by corrupt Afghan military and police commanders who were literate. Now the Taliban has banned girls from attaining education beyond elementary school, but there is infighting within Taliban leadership about this. Hope that helps and take care.

Zach - First, thanks for following. As for your question, I'm not sure if anyone can relate to the reality of an everyday Afghan except for Afghans. We have an understanding of some of their cultural views and practices, and may even understand why they make certain decisions. But we can't say we have the same lived experiences. I think we saw the middle ground of the country if we saw it at all. Most of our time was relegated to being on a base or in an airplane. As for languages, everyone picks up a phrase or two, but for the most part we were heavily reliant on translators. Kyle does know Russian, which is more useful than one might initially think.

Well, the Taliban is running the show in Afghanistan again and thousands of people are dead. So there have been a few consequences. But none for the leadership that did the lying.

Kyle - Kabuli Pulao

This is Zach. Chopan kabob is an all timer for me.

Zach - Internet access is available in all provinces with varying levels of stability. All the figures we have found suggest only about a quarter of Afghans use the internet, specifically on their phones. We have followed certain Afghans who do exactly this, using technology to help provide education to remote and/or underserved areas of Afghanistan. I great account to follow for such activity is The Helmand Journal. He is doing a lot of good work and has opened at least a half dozen schools that I can think of. But he's only one person.

Kyle - I went in during a really big unemployment crisis in 2011. I was young and had no idea what to do with my life and thought I wanted to see what the Army is about despite reading all the famous war novels warning against it. I really just wanted to try it and go and have the experience. They were offering a bonus to linguists and going to study languages in Monterey CA seemed nice. And it was nice and it was difficult and at the end of it I could speak Korean. Well, Kim Jong Il died at the time and the army asked any native Korean speaker to switch to a linguist job and they’d promote them. So I finished school and since everyone had been promoted into the slots above me, my only chance at promotion was to switch jobs. Lol. Hard to explain but that was the first sign it was a shit show. Then I was assigned to fort hood which is a terrible place to be. Then I worked the Afghan mission in spy planes or remotely with drones. I met a lot of good people who are my friends to this day, but you quickly realized all the missions didn’t really matter because at the time no one could tell you why we were even in Afghanistan. I knew I wanted out so used my security clearance to do more Intel work when I realized that everyone knew the war was a failure and we just had to keep going through the motions. See documentary: hypernormalisation. We all knew it was a sham and kept going. I realized I wanted no part it in it, quit, went home and became an RN and got my masters degree with my GI bill. All that killing and death and hard work for a mission everyone knew didn’t matter.

Zach - My parents both retired from the Army and tried to steer me away from joining. After pissing away an academic scholarship, I went to the recruiter. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do but I knew I wasn't ready to continue trying to be a student. I took the ASVAB, scored really high, and joined. I don't know if I had a choice but to support the military when I joined, considering its impact on my upbringing. It's safe to say I certainly became disillusioned by the time I got out, but not necessarily with the military, but rather with senior leaders and policymakers.

​

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Zach - It seems the military as a whole is losing the race to attract good talent. I got paid about 5x more to do my job as a contractor than I did as a soldier. Why stick around when I know where the payday is? Furthermore, I now work in a completely different field in the civilian world. There are overlaps to my time as an analyst but I did not get my job because I was an analyst. I got my job because I had experience leading people from my days as a squad leader. That's becoming more common, at least among my friends. The military, specifically the Army, is starting to learn you can't treat soldiers like shit for $35,000 a year and expect them to stick around. If not for contracts, the situation would probably be worse.

Kyle - That’s a good point, but for many who want to get into the Intel field the military is the only way they can. And it’s weird to think of Intel being privatized considering, outside of corporate espionage, intelligence is in service of the state and I think it’s strange any of it is contracted out to private entities. True intelligence is conducted by the guys on the ground, often local nationals, who risk life and limb to tell us things for either patriotism or the USD. The “analysts” are just bureaucrats with a job title that sounds cool to people who don’t know and the roles in the Intel agencies are better suited to Mormon types who are squeaky clean and idealistic and believe in the cause. Because I never believed in the “cause” I’m not a very safe asset for the state to keep around. I work in a totally unrelated field now.

Nobody wants to be the guy holding the bag when the bottom falls out. Duffel Blog for reference.

​

Politicians holding up a bill to help those who helped us sounds about right.

Oh boy, where to start? The decision to evacuate from Kabul instead of Bagram was heavily criticized, and unfortunately we all learned why. Removing servicemembers from Afghanistan before diplomats was also a poor decision. Acting as if everything was okay up until nothing was okay might have been the worst real-time decision. There were reports of State Department personnel acting as if everything was business as usual while the Taliban marched into Kabul.

​

A withdrawal should have started much sooner and been conducted out of Bagram. The Departments of State and Defense should have begun identifying and moving out SIV holders earlier. But that would have required an objective understanding of just how bad things were on the ground.

Kyle here - thanks for the question. I was 100% in support of withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was clear, probably around 2011, that US nation building had failed. I think Biden should be applauded for pulling out of Afghanistan, but withdrawal should have been conducted from the more defensible Bagram Airfield as opposed to HKIA. I find it despicable that the leaders in charge of conducting the withdrawal are still in charge despite the loss of life and clusterfuck that was the withdrawal.

As for saying the war is your only life experience, I’m sure it wasn’t and it wasn’t ours, either. If you’re accusing us of profiting from it, I can assure you we make no money doing this and it only costs us money with server space and recording software. There are no ads for square space or blue apron. For sure I made more money in the war after I got out, but only for a short time until I became a sort of hippie and near-pacifist. Went back to school and work in a totally unrelated career field. We do this as a way to stay in touch and bring on experts to talk about a topic that doesn’t get a lot of play in the mainstream news cycle. Kind of amateur-hobbyist journalism and history. As for hobbies, I like to fly fish, write, play video games, mandolin, practice jiu jitsu badly, and read. I can assure you I don’t identify very strongly or at all with the vet bro community which is often obnoxious. Take care, man.

This is Zach. I supported pulling out of Afghanistan. With that said, the way it was done was absolutely horrendous. After the Doha Agreement was signed, it was open season on ANDSF. The longer we stayed, the worse off things would have become. President Obama campaigned on leaving Afghanistan only to do an about-face when he entered office. President Trump campaigned on leaving Afghanistan and kicked the can down the road. Our belief is that military leadership kept telling them the war was winnable. President Biden's share of the blame comes from not having a withdrawal plan. With the Doha Agreement signed in February 2020, he had plenty of time to get a team together to work on such a plan. You can't campaign on your foreign policy expertise and then not have a plan. Per the Afghanistan papers, the war was essentially unwinnable after 2004.

​

As for money, our podcast makes none. We do this for catharsis. And I have a borderline unhealthy infatuation with golf.

The Afghan people continue to receive aid through NGOs, albeit at a greatly reduced scale. And Afghanistan continues to trade with its neighbors. Despite public calls to outlaw opium production, that has not been the case, which provides an illicit and covert money supply for Afghans and the Taliban. If you're asking about the frozen funds designated for Afghanistan, we don't see that getting released any time soon.

This is Zach. I'm a casual observer in the r/army subreddit. And ol sarmage is a hero and an inspiration.

Kyle - Only guy I’d call a hero was an airman on board one of our ISR planes. They were setting up a strike on a high value target. Everything was ready. They’d been after this guy for months and wanted him dead. They clear the strike on this dude’s car. Missile goes off the rails time to target is stated. This airman sees one or two kids in the backseat. Calls for a strike cancel and they send the missile to another laser on the side of the mountain. People were pissed bc they didn’t get their guy but he saved two kids lives that day. Absolute hero.

Deployment cycles certainly had an effect on the war's winnability. Wesley Morgan's book The Hardest Place directly addresses the difficulties faced in the Pech Valley due to our rotations. We consider theater-level changeover to be a bigger issue. A new ISAF commander would show up and they would have a new plan, which means it's time to scrap the old one. Any progress made over the previous year would be halted to pivot to the new priorities. And an even bigger contributing factor, probably the biggest, to the war being lost was the inability to build a stable government. That responsibility fell on the State Department.

This is Zach. I didn't make it out to Kandahar until 2016, and I'm not sure there were any Brits in TAAC-South. But, we did have a situation where an Australian major (he's a cousin to us after all) was trying to tell an American civilian to calm down and called her a cunt. Cultural differences are a son of a bitch. I'll never forget that.

Contracts in general varied from year and job. I made upwards of $180k when I was there. The largest contract I heard of was for logisticians. Some of them were still clearing north of $300k a year at the end. I met one such person in 2016. He’d been contracting for 12 years and was heading home for good. He had a house in Dallas and 2 cars paid in full with no additional debt. He was retiring at 33.

Kyle - I always wanted to destroy the earth and kill innocent people. Sometimes I’d find M1 Abrams tanks in the motor pool and start them up just to let them idle and burn fuel. Once they taught me the startup procedure for the F16s id let them idle, too. Severe psychopathy and other diseases of the DSM V restricted me from most other jobs, but a few lies to the doctor at MEPS and they put me right into military intelligence. Of course now that I left the military industrial complex I am homeless. I use public libraries to do research for and record this podcast. I rob people and panhandle to get by. Thanks for the question.

I'll try to answer all of these.

1. The US initially went to Afghanistan following the events of 9/11 to eliminate Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida.
2. Contractors became a useful tool to bypass troop limits in war zones. $108b, per the Costs of War.
3. Civilian deaths had numerous causes, most commonly from drone strikes, crossfire, and botched missions. Estimated civilian deaths from the Costs of War are around 70,000 people.
4. The US didn't decide it was okay to torture. Certain individuals did. Torture is wrong.
5. Conducting patrols through poppy fields was common. Guarding them was not.
6. The US is trying to pressure the Taliban government to become more tolerant and inclusive before releasing additional funds. Mind you, our government is still sending them money, just not as much.
7. We don't have a good number but there are quite a few Americans still in Afghanistan.
8. That money isn't for reparations. And it's being withheld from the government for the above stated reasons.
9. American foreign policy has certainly become more expeditious since World War II and that creates myriad problems. Problems that are not well known to people who enlist at 20 years old.

Not the AMA guy but this wasn’t done by them. Those decisions are made far, far above the level anyone of these guys worked at.

1. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and then fled to Pakistan.
2. I don't know what you should do with rejected Afghan asylum seekers. I couldn't tell you the first thing about your country's laws.

Kyle - Hey European! Sorry for the refugees, but I can’t speak for why the EU continues to accept them. Afghans have been a refuge seeking people since prior to the Russian invasion, so there has always been an Afghan refugee issue. I think the US is obligated to help those afghans who helped us and the other NATO countries during the war effort by providing safety, housing and some job opportunities. But, as you know especially in Europe, those things are sadly hard to find anywhere even by native citizens of the west. Don’t think it’ll get better. Much of the world has been destabilized and people, either to escape war or as opportunists, will use whatever loophole they can to reach the glorious welfare states of the west one way or another. As for whether it is our fault? Yes, I believe a lot of it is the US’ fault. I’m sure it’s nice to live in Europe, though where there is no history of meddling in the affairs of poor countries.