This week's episode marks the start of a three part series focusing on Afghanistan from a historical and cultural perspective, both as a region and later, as a country. And of course, as is the theme of our podcast, we will be discussing in detail the history of war and the role of outside players, namely Britain, Russia and the United States.
This series is also the first of our "Close Look" groupings where we delve deep into one subject matter over the course of multiple episodes.
Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor.
Works cited:
- Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East
- Bergen, The Longest War
- Carter, “Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence”
- Crosby, “The Real White Man’s Burden”
- Coll, Ghost Wars
- Deudney, “Sphere of Influence”
- Goodman and Coll, “Ghost Wars: How Reagan Armed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan”
- Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”
- Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
- NSA Archive, “Excerpt from Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker, February 9, 1990”
SNAFUBAR is part of the Cal Poly Humboldt network and is hosted by Dr. Jeff Crane (Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) and Dr. Sara Hart (Chair, Applied Humanities Department).
Transcript:
Afghanistan I: America's Great Game
>> Speaker 1: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade.
>> Speaker 2: The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.
>> Speaker 3: Only the dead have seen the end of war.
>> Speaker 1: We will accept nothing less than full victory.
>> Sara Hart: You are listening to SNAFUBAR at Cal Poly Humboldt.
>> Jeff Crane: Welcome back to the SNAFUBAR, listeners. I'm Jeff Crane, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt University. I'm also a historian of the environment and a peacetime veteran of the U.S. Army.
>> Sara Hart: And I'm Sara Hart, Chair of the Applied Humanities Department, also at Cal Poly Humboldt. I'm the daughter of a Vietnam Marine combat veteran. And I'm interested in the relationship between the American population, American culture, and war. And here in the SNAFUBAR, these are just the sorts of things we are looking at. Here we look to history to learn something about ourselves. We bring forward the stories of the past that might help to give us some perspective on our circumstances today, that might even help us to make some choices as we navigate those circumstances.
>> Jeff Crane: And that is one thing that history does for us, right? It provides us with a lens. It helps to remind us that we are all born into a context, even a longue duree. We don't come into our own historical moment isolated from what came before us. Past is prologue, of course. Or from the forces and actions and policies that shaped the world we were born into. History reminds us that we are part of a larger story than just the time we live in and through. Knowing something about that larger story, that longer timeline should and can help us to make choices right now in our lives and our policies. It can inform those choices in ways that we hope, really, really hope can help us avoid some of the mistakes that we see so easily in hindsight and even maybe even right now.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. I'm ever hopeful here. But, you know, hindsight is 20-20, right? It is tough. I maintain my optimism despite all evidence. But it can be easy to look back and identify points of error, all the snafus of those people who came before us. It's harder, I think, when you are standing in the present to see all the angles. But one thing that's clear and that the work we have done in putting together this show has really helped us to see is that it's better looking back when we see figures from the past making choices that are based on a clear and self-reflective sense of value and purpose. You know, even when their projects don't pan out well, it's just a better story. It's a more humanizing and inspiring story when the figures of the past make choices based on a clear moral horizon.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, and I think that's really relevant right now. You might win and you might lose, but your actions are more defensible when you are driven by motivations that align with a set of ideals or values that we agree with, that are shared. So what can we agree with, Dr. Hart? What moral horizon can we see from here in the SNAFUBAR?
>> Sara Hart: Great question, Dr. Crane. And here, I think that here, we hold some truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and endowed by the fact of their creation with certain unalienable rights. And that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
>> Jeff Crane: That's solid. I love the aspirational language is what we struggle to achieve. So I'm with you on that. And listeners, we might get more particular at times here in the SNAFUBAR. We are going to identify more specific points on our own moral horizons. And do this through the series that this episode introduces. Listeners, you might not agree with every interpretive claim we make when we are looking at history. This episode in particular, this series might even be a little more challenging than others. We don't even always entirely agree with each other, the four of us.
>> Sara Hart: We don't.
>> Jeff Crane: Yes, they all agree with me, whatever --
>> Sara Hart: At times [laughs].
>> Jeff Crane: And so we want to live in a world in which reasonable people might disagree on plenty of points of deep national import, crucial civic need, and all that. But we do share and bring with us to this show a solid foundation embedded in research, deep thought, and those self-evident truths we believe are foundational to a healthy democracy.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's true. This is a show where we stand on that foundation and we draw up stories from the past that might inform our experiences today. The stories we look at are stories of American war and American values, stories about how those two things often mutually determine one another. It's a dark topic. And we are in it to learn and to empower ourselves to do better. But we are also in it for the laughs. And so we sometimes bring a little humor to the gallows.
>> Jeff Crane: We do that a lot. Yeah. We crack some jokes. We poke some fun. We even get a little snarky sometimes. As my former student, John Ryan said, "I came for the history, I stayed for the snark." So if you enjoy snark, stay with us. But humor is a tool. It steals us against painful realities. You know, as we are going through moments of cognitive dissonance, it helps us keep doing the work we need to do, keeps our spirits up enough to maintain fortitude in the face of what can really seem like a cluster of lost causes that we feel powerless to address. Today is the first in our three-part series on Afghanistan. First, we will give a long run up from the early history of Afghanistan as a region to the immediate follow up to the Soviet-Afghan War. Remember what we said about context and longue duree. We will get through to Reagan today. We will land somewhere in that era. And this first episode is called "America's Great Game." And in episode two, the series called "The Path to Jihad," we will look at the post-Soviet history of Afghanistan and America's early involvement there.
>> Sara Hart: And America sort of picks up where the Soviets left off. Am I right about that?
>> Jeff Crane: No spoilers here. Come on. Let's do this straight linear narrative the way we like it.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: But yes. Yes, we do. And then in the third and final episode of the series, we will look at the attacks of 9/11 and what comes after. America and Afghanistan in the 21st century. That episode we are calling, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" which, of course, is a fantastic song.
>> Sara Hart: It's Jeff's favorite song.
>> Jeff Crane: Yes. Today, it's part one, Afghanistan, America's Great Game.
[ Music ]
>> Liam Salcuni: Listeners, if you are joining us, you are right on time. You made it to the SNAFUBAR, where we talk about war, militarization, and myth in America. Today's episode is the first of a three part series focusing on the United States's involvement in Afghanistan. I'm Liam Salcuni, lecturer with the history department at Cal Poly Humboldt. I'm here with Sara Hart and Jeff Crane. We are coming to you from Cal Poly Humboldt live. Let's hear what's on the agenda this afternoon.
>> Jeff Crane: So this is what's on the agenda today. In this Episode 1, we will start with some backstory, a sketch primer, just to get us all on the same page. And we could use this. We need this. Oh, my God, do we need this? So for example, there was a shocking poll that came out in 2018 reporting that 42% of Americans did not know that their nation was still at war in Afghanistan.
>> Sara Hart: Wow.
>> Jeff Crane: This is 17 years into the war, mind you. Now here we are in 2026. We have been out of Afghanistan for almost five years. America's withdrawal in August 2021, that was both nightmarish and a high point for American awareness of Afghanistan. But that awareness came largely in terms of the American experience and perspective.
>> Sara Hart: And I watched that unfold on the news in something like real time. A lot of us did. It was striking, the degree to which it ended up just visually looking like Vietnam through this iconic image of the helicopter trying to take off from the Kandahar Airport with people like hanging off the skids in what looked like human chains.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, I remember that image as well, and people on the wheels of planes taking off. Yeah, the image we are referring back to is from Saigon, April, 1975, when the Huey helicopter is trying to take off from the roof of the embassy. There is a whole line of people trying to get on it. And again, people don't know this as well, but, you know, they were getting as many people out of South Vietnam as Saigon fell as they could. Planes and helicopters are landing on ships. They are emptying them and they are pushing them off into the sea. Our extraction from Afghanistan looks a lot like that. So this side by side image of America's withdrawal from Vietnam and America's withdrawal from Afghanistan, that was something that flashed across the news screens at the end of August, '21. It was a sort of irresistible image in its parallelism, so much of what Americans remember about Vietnam is trapped in that image of the Huey on the rooftop. And the Americans fleeing Saigon in '75 and all the southern Vietnamese fleeing Saigon. And now that image is shaping how Americans saw and understood Afghanistan in 2021. And we will do a Vietnam episode and we will talk about how Vietnam affected the way we think about war in this country for a very long time, right? The Vietnam syndrome. And so similar questions have been pressing the 21st century American perspective about like Vietnam. Like what's the strategy? What's the exit plan, you know? And neither point was it a big part of our thinking, you know. We also didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the Vietnamese perspective or the Afghan perspective as we launched these wars.
>> Sara Hart: Right. And that's a little bit what we will try to fill in here to start us off with this episode. We will get in the Wayback Machine and try to get a bead on the history of Afghanistan. Afghanistan, folks, is a crossroads nation. It's landlocked between Central and South Asia, pressed between empires for basically the last couple thousand years. And it's been caught in a fray a lot because of this. It's governed by tribal allegiances, by the pull of kinship and borders are shifting all the time.
>> Jeff Crane: And it has this convenient little nickname that maybe somebody should have remembered in, I don't know, say 1979 or 2003. That nickname is, "The graveyard of empires." And particularly, this issue of tribal allegiances and conflict, all the history is there for any thoughtful government to think about before they make foreign policy decisions.
>> Sara Hart: Right. Like, do we want to go in there? That's a question that we might want to ask.
>> Jeff Crane: We are not like all the others. We will do better.
>> Sara Hart: We will do better. We will. History is irrelevant. But if the answer is yes, then maybe knowing something about the tribal allegiances before we go in, that could be a good idea.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And we can't remind ourselves enough how much the borders that we see drawn on the map of the Middle East, all these straight lines across mountains and deserts, how much these borders are fabricated, completely constructed, completely abstract, forced on peoples and cultures by European imperialism. And how much they do not represent the past or the will of the Afghan people or the African people or anyone in the middle. I mean, it just goes on and on, right? These borders, in this case, were drawn by the French and the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And yeah, we will totally get there first, though. The name Afghanistan means something like place of the Afghans or place of the Pashtuns. It was a kind of general regional reference with fluid boundaries. And it was that for a long time before it was that modern nation state with straight lines. The Pashtuns remain the largest ethnic group in present day Afghanistan, something like 40% of the population. The Taliban is a Pashtun group. Presidents Karzai and Ghani were both Pashtuns, as were a lot of the warlords who played crucial parts in American counterinsurgency operations.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, the Pashtuns are a powerful force in terms of American action in Afghanistan, but it's also a tribal name that I bet most Americans have not heard.
>> Sara Hart: I think that's true. You know, it's not a name that our media has given us, by and large. But the Pashtuns played -- you know, they did play a huge role and continue to in shaping what's going on in Afghanistan. And they have been around for thousands of years, living in what's now Afghanistan, back when it was the heart of the Silk Road, connecting cultures and empires from Africa, Asia, and Europe.
>> Jeff Crane: That's old school, right there.
>> Sara Hart: That's old school. And Kabul, Kabul was like the Grand Central Station of the Silk Road, experiencing more diversity than just about any other place on the planet.
>> Jeff Crane: And transmission of culture and biology. And one of the ways plum trees got from China to Europe was the Silk Road. Yeah. Anyways, I will just keep interrupting you with random --
>> Sara Hart: Yes, I know [laughs]. My mind journeys to plum blossoms. Okay. So like Buddhism, Buddhism was in Afghanistan before it was in China. Afghanistan has been home to a wildly diverse bunch of beliefs and practices. Another kind of thing that comes along these transmission zones, these roads, you know, besides Buddhism, there was Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, classical Greek religions and a whole lot of ancient local tribal traditions, eventually Islam and later Sikhism. And during this time, there was just such a remarkable pluralism that existed in Afghanistan.
>> Jeff Crane: And I think that as Americans, we look at Afghanistan, say Muslim, right? And this is simple. And even then, we don't understand the complexity of Islam. We can't differentiate between Sunni and Shia Islam. We don't know what Sufism even is, right? And that the phrase Whirling Dervish comes from that. So we don't understand these more complex, varied, different ethnic groups either. There is a lot of religious and ethnic diversity here. But Americans had an almost total lack of knowledge about this. Lack of knowledge about the religions that are there and been practiced in this place when we entered the region. Lack of knowledge of the different ethnicities. Prior to our engagement in Afghanistan and support of the Mujahideen after the 1979 Soviet invasion, literally my entire knowledge of Afghanistan came from the novel Caravans by James Michener. This is an early novel of his that he started before he started writing the super long historical fiction books like Alaska and Hawaii. And it was a fun little novel. It was super romantic. It made Afghanistan sound like a place I really wanted to travel to at some point. That was one of my goals when I was young to sometime travel to Afghanistan. So that's all I knew about Afghanistan. And our ignorance of Afghanistan is something that we want to keep touching on. It is critically important that we try to get these histories right, that we try to understand them. And this failure of knowledge is one of the reasons we keep having so many foreign policy snafus and also then military snafus. The war, unfortunately, does make us more knowledgeable about other countries and cultures. People know a lot more about Iraq now. There is probably a significant portion, I'm not going to say majority, but portion of Americans who can maybe basically explain the difference between Sunni Muslim and Shia Muslim.
>> Sara Hart: And I'm not opposed to that inclination. I think when we are bombing the bejesus out of a country, yeah, we should know something. I mean, maybe before then, but like this is how a lot of our knowledge, I think, as humans comes to us is it's forced on us by some kind of crisis or some kind of external cause.
>> Jeff Crane: In a functional democracy, one of our jobs is to understand these issues so we can tell our representatives and our senators to act appropriately in deciding for or against going to war. That is not what's happening.
>> Sara Hart: Right. Yeah. No. And so learning more is good. We are going to try to learn just a little bit more here. Back to Afghanistan. So let's go geographical for a second. Like how many of us can pick out Afghanistan on a map?
>> Jeff Crane: I can.
>> Sara Hart: I can.
>> Liam Salcuni: I can.
>> Sara Hart: Okay. That's good. We are doing good in this room. More now, I suspect, than 20 years ago, more of us can, I'm sure. But it's worth finding it. Listeners, when you get a chance to look at a map, if you can't, it's okay, but go find it. You know, most of them are labeled. And what you will notice is this is a superhighway geography. It's cut through by two ginormous mountain ranges.
>> Jeff Crane: Ginormous.
>> Sara Hart: Ginormous. Yes, I think that's the official term, geologically. Ginormous mountain ranges, the Paropamisus and the Hindu Kush with valleys below and valleys above and valleys between. These are like big mountains, lots of valleys.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And you know, just for fun last night, I was reading the script and I pulled up Afghanistan on Google Earth.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: And yeah.
>> Sara Hart: It's a trip.
>> Jeff Crane: So many mountain ranges and valleys and ravines. So you know, perfect for easy pacification colonizations because mountains are always great for that.
>> Sara Hart: Blah, blah, blah [laughs].
>> Jeff Crane: I mean, you know, mountain ranges are one of the key spaces for rebel movements and resistances, right?
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. I mean, it's just really not good for easy pacification. But you know what it is good for? It's good for trade, for people who want to move goods before Google Maps was visualizing every supply line. It was great for movement. So this geography, that's how we ended up like at the heart of the Silk Road. The geography also lends itself to cultural fracturing to independent tribal identities. So geographically, it's a little bit like a mosaic for locals in a way that's supportive of tribal identities and cultural models of kinship. And yeah, also supportive of hiding from anyone who comes in.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, if I may, since I do environmental history, a mosaic landscape, it's like one of the best things ecologically. It's the most diverse. It's the most energized. There is the most fluidity. Maybe that's true for cultures. I don't really know. I haven't studied that.
>> Sara Hart: Maybe. Maybe if we could go in imperially and pacify them all and make them all the same, we could change that norm.
>> Jeff Crane: Well, that's what we do to landscapes.
>> Sara Hart: [laughs] That's what people keep thinking.
[ Music ]
>> Jeff Crane: Listeners, if you are joining us, you are learning a lot about Afghanistan today. You have made it to the SNAFUBAR where we talk about war, militarization, and myth in America. Today's episode is the first of a three-part series focusing on the United States involvement in Afghanistan. I'm Jeff Crane, and I'm here with Sara Hart. We are coming to you from Cal Poly Humboldt. We just wrapped up a little geography lesson on Afghanistan, lots of mountains. And now we turn to some essential background history of the country.
>> Sara Hart: Yes. Okay. Great, Jeff. So here we are going to fast forward just a little bit. We are going to leave the Silk Road, leave the geography lesson and hit the 18th century. Getting a little bit closer to today and Afghanistan starts --
>> Jeff Crane: I love our long windups.
>> Sara Hart: They are good, right?
>> Jeff Crane: Listeners, this is the place.
>> Sara Hart: This is it [laughs].
>> Jeff Crane: You are going to get all the history here.
>> Sara Hart: It's where the excitement happens. At 17 -- the 18th century, so in the 1700s, Afghanistan starts partially unifying under the rule of Ahmad Shah Durrani. So this guy is a trip, right? He is a successful commander plundering major cities at age 16.
>> Jeff Crane: I would like to see his resume. [laughter] It would top -- the top of all the scales.
>> Sara Hart: Plunderer. Young plunderer.
>> Jeff Crane: Very good at siege engines.
>> Sara Hart: Yes. He took power in Kandahar in 1747. His first successor and second son moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, and really did a lot to centralize and stabilize the whole region. And again, we are in the 1700s here. But succession was a problem, as it often is. And so there is some civil war going on when the modern empires really start pressing in.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, succession and civil war. That seems to be like always when it comes to monarchies. So there is a lot of history packed into that little bit that Sara read for us. If we are going to make sense of the Afghan experience, it's probably important to know more of their history as opposed to just jumping to European and American imperialism, right? So what we always want to do. We want to act like there is a one-dimensional figure there and then here is all our complexity. And this type of thinking is a real problem with American imperialism. And to quote Marilyn Young, who wrote an excellent book on the Vietnam War, and she said about our entry into Vietnam War, "We entered pristine of historical knowledge." So listeners, we are working on building our historical knowledge. Stick with us here. It's a great line, right?
>> Sara Hart: It is. It totally is. 18th century. Okay. The sun is nowhere near setting on the British Empire. The British were worried about their own emerging empire in India. Yeah. And they were worried about the Russians coming in from the north. And so listeners, if you are in the British --
>> Jeff Crane: Those Russians.
>> Sara Hart: It's the Russians, it's going to be a theme. If you are the British and it's old time-y colonial days, then in terms of the map, Afghanistan is between India, the jewel of your crown, and Russia, your enemy empire. So like it matters by the early 1800s, both the British and the Russians were super high colonial gear and out to get the world and like everything in it. They both saw the Afghan region as a potential buffer against the aggression of the other. And they both wanted it.
>> Jeff Crane: And I have to say, we are in high colonial gear, except it's like going west. We have to build like ships and stuff in the navy before we can start, you know, colonizing under --
>> Sara Hart: And by we, we mean America.
>> Jeff Crane: We mean America.
>> Sara Hart: The American nation at this point.
>> Jeff Crane: So we can't forget the centrality of India to the British imperialist economic system, even so much that it affected the British colonies in the United States and the lead up to the Revolutionary War and the relationship with the tea trade.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. English colonies must drink tea.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And the British were willing to put a lot of money and effort to protect that piece of their empire in India. Part of the reason for that is that India is also right there in the middle of England's relationship with China, where they are trying to access porcelain and other strongly desired goods. The spices, the silk, the wealth. It was a nation of great wealth that wasn't particularly interested in anything that anyone else had until opium came along. Well, until the British introduced the opium trade, right? So the British trying to trade with side, it doesn't really want anything they have to offer. So that's what opium is for.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. Okay. We are not going to China today. Back on track.
>> Jeff Crane: Sorry.
>> Sara Hart: Back on track. Through all this, Afghanistan is positioned geographically to matter in this imperial game. And so in 1838, in what comes to be known as the first Anglo-Afghan War, George Eden, also known as Lord Auckland, declared war on this fractured, tribally organized region and became the first Western power to invade Afghanistan since Alexander the Great.
>> Jeff Crane: Well, that's going back in time.
>> Sara Hart: It's going back, right?
>> Jeff Crane: So you are talking a solid 2000 years.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah.
>> Sara Hart: It's been a while. I mean, people have stayed awake. Graveyard of empires, maybe they took it seriously. I don't know. But with colonialism, all of a sudden you have got people, the British are going to do it. They are going to do it and they are going to win. This move initiates what comes to be known as the Great Game.
>> Jeff Crane: Dun, dun, dun.
>> Sara Hart: Dun, dun, dun. Between the Russian and the British powers. And they really did call it that, listeners. They called it the Great Game. We are not making that up. Afghanistan, mind you, is the game board. It's the playing field. Pick your metaphor. They are not considered a player.
>> Jeff Crane: So let's go present this for a minute in the middle of all this historical background, because we do this. We have these global goals in terms of our strategic interests. Those interests are economic, military, sometimes social. And we fail still to consider the autonomy or needs of a particular state, country or society when we view them through this kind of template.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. Often, we reject -- actively reject their autonomy.
>> Jeff Crane: We actively reject their autonomy and we use them as pieces in proxy wars. And of course, that's going to be the case with Afghanistan in this series. We might even say it's the case with another of our recent wars, Ukraine and Russia, for instance. Though we are not going to get into that --
>> Sara Hart: We are not going there.
>> Jeff Crane: -- too much right now. One complicated narrative at a time.
>> Sara Hart: Yes. Setting aside Ukraine. But don't worry, Russia will return.
>> Jeff Crane: Don't they always return?
>> Sara Hart: Don't they -- [laughs]. Okay. It's a pattern. It really is a pattern that's going to keep coming back. This Great Game model. To how many wars could we apply this phrase? I mean, to this one, at least, Lord Auckland in 1838. Things did not ultimately go well for the Brits on this one. They withdrew from Kabul in 1841, losing over 15,000 soldiers, the vast majority of their army in the process.
>> Jeff Crane: So a completely devastating defeat.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, totally. Totally devastating. Totally its own snafu.
>> Jeff Crane: So if you are a British soldier walking around at this point, you probably got a British version of situation, normal, all messed up, right? I don't know what that is. You should look at what do the British soldiers say.
>> Liam Salcuni: Bloody mess, that.
>> Sara Hart: Bloody [laughs]
>> Jeff Crane: Liam is laughing at my British accent.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, there is lots of disgruntlement. However, it's coming out for those who survive. And that number of survivors is small. It's a significant loss for the British in their empire game. And this doesn't happen a ton at this time. So it stung for sure.
>> Jeff Crane: They mostly win at this point in their history.
>> Sara Hart: They are mostly winning.
>> Jeff Crane: Certainly did in the Opium War.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. So does Mohammed Khan at this point takes over after this first Anglo-Afghan war and initiates a massive and pretty successful campaign of unification in Afghanistan. Now it doesn't last. The British get spooked again, thinking that maybe the Russians are coming. And so they pick up the Great Game again in 1878, still calling it that in what comes to be known as the Second Anglo-Afghan War. This one, the British sort of win. Afghanistan becomes a British protectorate and it stays one for decades, which are super influential decades. That's the end of the 19th century. It's during this time in 1893 that the Durand Line was drawn.
>> Jeff Crane: I prefer the Duran Duran Line.
>> Sara Hart: Of course you do. Definitely. It's Duran Duran.
>> Jeff Crane: Hungry like a wolf.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, hungry like a wolf. Are you crying for yesterday in that ordinary world?
>> Jeff Crane: I'm watching Rio and she is dancing on the sand.
>> Sara Hart: What's her name?
>> Jeff Crane: Just like that river winding through a dusty land. Her name is Rio. She is dancing on sand.
>> Sara Hart: Okay. But really, the Durand Line is named after the British civil servant who helped to broker the deal and it remains the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
>> Jeff Crane: So riddle me this. Is this going to be a source of conflict for these two nations later?
>> Sara Hart: What? Yes.
>> Jeff Crane: Inquiring minds want to know.
>> Sara Hart: Continuously. It does not end. The Durand Line was drawn with no respect for the Pashtun villages it cut straight through. The initial colonial disregard for the cultural spaces it sliced through has continued to cause all kinds of problems for people at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That colonial disregard for existing complex cultures will plague America, too, throughout the Middle East.
>> Jeff Crane: Sara, I'm giving you my surprise face.
>> Sara Hart: It looks like all your faces. This is in no way surprising, right? This is so incredibly typical of American and European colonizing history to draw these lines across ethnic and tribal boundaries.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. So like the Berlin Conference of 1884, where the European powers divvied up Africa. And then the way tribal peoples in America and the American West, but actually from the East Coast forward were moved around and joined with other tribes that they may have been enemies with on reservations, which is all the colonial powers did this, like literally in all the continents. Yeah.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, anyone who looks at a map and sees straight lines and thinks, "Oh, that's natural," is missing some huge cultural conflicts that led to that huge cultural conflicts will happen here, too. In 1907, an Anglo-Russian convention was held in St. Petersburg, and Afghanistan has, at this point, divvied up into British and Russian spheres of influence.
>> Jeff Crane: Spheres of influence, that's going to go well, too. Sure. Yeah.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, sounds like it, right?
>> Jeff Crane: That's my sarcastic voice. It goes with my surprise face.
>> Sara Hart: It goes with your surprise face.
>> Liam Salcuni: What could go wrong?
>> Jeff Crane: Most people are wrong. Yeah, it can go wrong.
>> Sara Hart: I mean, okay, so this is a phrase that's been used to describe what like colonial care.
>> Jeff Crane: Colonial care wrapped up in strategic interest and taking the form of large scale violence. So I did mention the Berlin Conference of 1884. And what I didn't mention was this idea that was influential at the time, the idea of the, and it's even painful to say, the White Man's Burden. Phrase comes from a poem written in 1899 by Rudyard Kipling, otherwise known for The Jungle Book and other books and other colonial discourse. In that poem, Kipling makes an argument for the responsibility of European and American society to colonize other regions. It's based on bad science, science that claims to show that White people are superior racially, intellectually, socially. And it reinforces these ideas that Protestant Christianity, specifically Protestant Christianity, and free market capitalism are superior forms of society. And that the world will be improved by spreading these ideas and these social structures to people who had little to no interest in them. Those are also elements of manifest destiny for those people who study American history more closely. So I'm going to read a quick passage from Rudyard Kipling's poem, White Man's Burden. “Take up the White Man's burden- Send forth the best ye breed- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild- Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.”
>> Sara Hart: “Half devil and half child.” So I teach this poem sometimes. And that's the line that sticks out most to my students. That's how Kipling and a lot of his contemporaries were seeing the people, the communities whose lands they were trying to colonize.
>> Jeff Crane: You know, and it goes all the way back to the character Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which was his effort to nail down the new world people that Europeans were interacting with. Okay. So there is more. It doesn't get better or less racist. And we have selected our passages carefully. So I'm going to skip to the end here. “Take up the White Man's burden- Have done with childish days- The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with hard-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers.” So he is saying that the superior British man or Russian man or American man, but he means British or American. He does not mean Russian. White man would step into this responsibility and do this work to better other peoples. And again, just to be clear, in case it's not super obvious, this is garbage. It's an ideology used to justify opening up markets, expropriating resources, suppressing people in order to expand and extend the wealth and power of European and American society.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And it's presented here by --
>> Jeff Crane: I hope I wasn't too subtle just now.
>> Sara Hart: That was really subtle. I'm going to have to think back on that.
>> Jeff Crane: I'm known for my subtlety.
>> Sara Hart: The nuances. Well, for Kipling here, this is presented as a point of maturity. It is what a mature Anglo does. Like if you grow up and you take on your responsibility, you go help these people. It's like irresponsible not to in this framing. And these people are not considered fully-fledged humans, not for Kipling, not here, half devil and half child.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And you know, he is not spending time actually trying to understand the people and their cultures. So he is thinking of -- you know, he is writing about the people that are going to do this work. He is thinking of the graduates of Eaton, an elite institution in England. He is thinking of landed gentry and elites, the money, the powerful, who are a part of this whole colonial infrastructure. And it's not just the British. We have seen that. At the time of Kipling's poem, which remember, was published in 1899, America was deeply involved in its own little colonial exercise in the Spanish-American War. Their America says it wants to liberate Cuba from the Spanish and for freedom, but also access to markets. And really the Spanish-American War is its own story with all kinds of SNAFUBARS in it, right? One of our arguments for going into Cuba was the use of their version of concentration camps. They use a different term where civilians were dying. Then we do something very similar. And in that conflict, roughly 200,000 civilians died. We use waterboarding as a torture technique. At one point, a general American officer issued an order for every male over age 10 to be executed because, you know, the people resisting in the Philippines are using very effective guerrilla warfare, right? Always hard to fight guerrilla warfare. The order was rescinded, fortunately, but this was not going well. What that meant was that in the United States, there was a strong anti-imperialist movement. This is really people are looking, saying, "This is not who we are as a society." Mark Twain was one of the key people in this anti-imperialist movement. And as part of that anti-imperialism, there is a great 1902 poem that's a parody of The White Man's Burden. So I'm going to read a little bit of that.
>> Sara Hart: What is this? This is poetry hour. What's going on here?
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, it's bad poetry hour, but we will do it. It's important to do this. As we pointed out, White Man's Burden by Kipling was published in 1899, in 1902, Ernest Howard Crosby, an American reformer and poet, wrote a very effective parody in response to it. It starts with, "Apologies to Rudyard Kipling." And then it goes like this, “Take up the White Man's burden. Send forth your sturdy kin, And load them down with Bibles And cannon-balls and gin. Throw in a few diseases To spread the tropic climes, For there the healthy word I will not use Are quite behind the times. Don't forget the factories On those benighted shores. They have no cheerful iron mills, Nor department stores.” And it goes on like this. And what he is addressing very specifically there, because I have my students do some analysis is, we are very openly talking about the need to expand in Asia because we needed people to buy our manufactured goods. We did it for markets. Less resources, more for markets.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. This is about the expansion of capitalism and market democracy.
>> Liam Salcuni: Yeah, I mean.
>> Jeff Crane: Move fast, Britains.
>> Liam Salcuni: Hawaii and the Dole, Sanford Dole and the Dole Fruit Company.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. Story reproduces itself over and over. So there is no authentic idealism here. This is really just acquisitiveness. This is what Crosby is saying.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And so the end -- and this is brilliant. I love this. I love reading this in class. “Take up the White Man's burden. And if you write in verse, Flatter your nation's vices And strive to make them worse. Then learn that if with pious words You ornament each phrase, In a world of canting hypocrites Well, this kind of business pays.”
>> Sara Hart: I wonder if it paid for Crosby. Burn, though. That's a zinger shot straight at Kipling right there. And at the same time period, this is three years later, super varying approaches to the colonial project.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And again, I just want to reiterate, it's important to know that we have these critiques that people at this time are engaging in these critiques. And as a society, this is what we have to be able to do.
[ Music ]
>> Sara Hart: All right. Listeners, if you are just joining us, where you been? You have made it to the SNAFUBAR, where we talk about war, militarization, and myth in America. We are continuing our discussion here on foreign interest and intervention in Afghanistan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So remember that the Anglo-Russian Convention held in St. Petersburg in 1907 chopped up Afghanistan into British and Russian spheres of influence.
>> Jeff Crane: Chop, chop.
>> Sara Hart: Chop, chop, chop. And those spheres of influence held until the Third Anglo-Afghan War began in 1919, right on the heels of World War I, in which, notably, Afghanistan remains neutral.
>> Jeff Crane: Probably smart given - considering --
>> Sara Hart: I know, right? This is not the worst choice, but in that Third Anglo-Afghan War, Afghanistan invaded British India, seeking, you know, sovereignty. They thought they would like to get out from under the sphere of influence.
>> Jeff Crane: Afghanistan, right?
>> Sara Hart: Yes, Afghanistan was looking to get out from under the sphere of influence that was over it. Everyone is pretty exhausted globally at this point. And this war ends with a Treaty of Independence, which is signed on August 19th. And since then, that's been Afghanistan's National Independence Day. So Afghanistan became an independent, sovereign nation in 1921, with borders defined by the Great Game between Russia and Britain.
>> Jeff Crane: Right. So which of course, following the end of World War I, there is that whole series of borders drawn across the Middle East, which we mentioned earlier, which have helped together with these borders to guarantee ongoing conflict and tension, right?
>> Liam Salcuni: It's a kaleidoscope of religions, cultures, histories. So this is arbitrary borders. This is not going to go well.
>> Sara Hart: This is arbitrary borders drawn across a complex landscape. And in 1921, the United States first recognized Afghanistan. America established a legation in Kabul in 1942, and elevated it to an embassy in 1948.
>> Jeff Crane: Okay. So real quick, the Truman Doctrine was?
>> Sara Hart: 1947.
>> Jeff Crane: Dr. Hart.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: Nice. Well done.
>> Sara Hart: Thank you.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. So '47, the Truman Doctrine, this legation, this embassy, it's going to be related to maybe, I don't know, containment?
>> Sara Hart: Containment, yes. Containment of?
>> Jeff Crane: Communism. Godless.
>> Sara Hart: Pinkos. Yes. The great 20th century bogey. This is all wrapped up together, folks. After its independence, Afghanistan's first emir-turned-king, Amanullah Khan, pressed for a great many modernizing reforms around education, labor rights, gender equality. Kind of moving his nation into the 20th century in terms of geopolitical norms. His reforms came maybe too fast, and he ended up abdicating the throne in 1929. And then in 1964, the nation established a constitution with a non-royal prime minister. That lasted until 1973, when in a bloodless coup, Daoud Khan, who had been prime minister, abolished the monarchy and became Afghanistan's first president.
>> Jeff Crane: And this is interesting historically in a couple of ways. One is that we have this view of Afghanistan as a deeply conservative Muslim state, right? Because we are very presentist in our understanding of other cultures. We talked about this earlier. That view elides a much more complex historical picture. But also, too, in these next six years, roughly, Prime Minister Khan is going to engage in this game of balancing the United States against the Soviet Union to pursue resources, right? Now this is a standard model, right? So both empires, or now geopolitical forces, increase our engagement in Afghanistan in an effort to sort of secure that area and to prevent the other global hegemon from making it part of its sphere of influence.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And for Afghanistan, there is really just a lot of change happening. I mean, culturally, in terms of government structure, like all of it, all these changes happening constantly at this point. And they are having to pay attention to and respond to the Cold War, and we are now calling it the Cold War, that America and Russia are engaged in. So 1978, communism took hold, and again, a very bloody coup, and the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or the Afghan communist regime, depending on your perspective, is born.
>> Jeff Crane: And just real quickly, and help me get this right, you all, but the Cold War runs from what, 1946 until 1989? Is that the fall of the Berlin Wall? And that's when we found ourselves in opposition to the Soviet Union in China and did not go into a direct hot war with them. So Cold War versus hot war, we tried to oppose them and contain them through a variety of strategies, which we talk about in different spaces, and this is one of them, and proxy wars and things like that. So it's just possible that we have younger folks listening that might not know what Cold War means.
>> Sara Hart: Okay. And this is good. So this is another fun fact that I think young folks, and many of us, actually -- I'm young. You are young. All of us, maybe.
>> Jeff Crane: I'm young at heart, but my knees are old.
>> Sara Hart: My knees are old. My eyes are going. Another thing that helps us understand the Cold War is we think of first world, we know that phrase, first world, and we don't often think of its root. Why do we call? What is the first world? The first world is language born of the Cold War era, and it's meant to describe -- used to describe capitalist countries. And the second world is communist countries. And the third world is what's "underdeveloped countries" that are the first world and the second world are fighting over.
>> Liam Salcuni: Yeah, the unaligned places.
>> Sara Hart: The aligned.
>> Jeff Crane: I don't even know that.
>> Liam Salcuni: They are open. The world becomes a great game.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. The whole world with the Cold War becomes a great game between the first and second world, which means capitalist and communist.
>> Liam Salcuni: The third world becomes prey in this unaligned sphere of influence. Places like South America, Cuba.
>> Sara Hart: Asia.
>> Liam Salcuni: Asia.
>> Sara Hart: Southeast Asia.
>> Jeff Crane: We got so comfortable saying third world. It's a very pejorative phrase.
>> Sara Hart: It is.
>> Jeff Crane: We would say like emerging economies. What do we say now?
>> Sara Hart: So a lot of folks, especially in the space of like post-colonial and Native American studies have started talking about the fourth world as unaligned and not playing this Great Game. The people who have independently developed according to their own economic and social models separately from the Great Game of the first and second world.
>> Jeff Crane: Costa Rica, maybe.
>> Sara Hart: Maybe, yeah. So a lot of places like indigenous places in New Zealand. I have heard about like they don't even tie to the regional boundaries of the modern nation state always. So anyway, that's a little bit of a backdrop for like what's going on with the Cold War. 1978, we are kind of in the middle of it. And communism takes hold in Afghanistan. So the coup orchestrated by Nur Muhammad Taraki ordered the executions of Daoud Khan and his family in Kabul and the PDPA or the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan purged Afghanistan of all dissenters, inaugurating sweeping land reforms under a Marxist-Leninist model. The violent nature of the coup coupled with the repressive strategies of the PDPA sparked the uprisings of, duh, duh, duh, drumroll, the Mujahideen or the Muslim warriors across rural areas of Afghanistan. And it sparked the beginning of the mass migrations out of Afghanistan into Pakistan.
>> Jeff Crane: Turned out that this communist government in Afghanistan was too radical for the Soviet Union, women's rights, literacy campaigns, land distribution, forgiving of debt. And the KGB was basically articulating that you need to slow your roll. These are Muslim people. They are not ready for all this, which might not actually be true. It's definitely some chauvinistic attitudes on the part of the Soviet Union there. And the advice of the KGB was rejected by the leadership of the communist government in Afghanistan. And so the Soviet Union now has some pretty big concerns about the possibility of an Islamic revolt in Afghanistan against that government.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. So we are like, this is it. It is also complex. And this is something that's going to keep coming up one point here that the interrelationship between economic and cultural change. It's strong. We sort of pretend that the market is value neutral, something we come back to pretty often here. The market is not value neutral. And the cultural pressures are going to affect and change the way that economies are extended around the globe, often through military force, especially in the case of America. But that's not where we are at. We are in Afghanistan. Okay. Here we are in Afghanistan. Sure, there are other foreign incursions into Afghanistan, but the ferocity of arrests and persecutions at the hands of the PDPA engendered widespread resentment among the more rural and traditional populations of Afghanistan. And so in this way, Afghanistan is immediately embroiled in the Cold War political cluster that was looking for a hotspot after Vietnam. The Soviets sent in money, weapons and advisors, as you just mentioned, Jeff, to stabilize the ensuing conflict between the PDPA and the Mujahideen. The United States funneled support through Pakistan to the Mujahideen, who were waging a guerrilla war against the communists, who were themselves aligned with the Soviets. So within months, Afghanistan turns into yet another theater of the Cold War proxy war.
>> Jeff Crane: God, so much to think about and talk about here. One of the things that interests me, if I may, can I sidebar a little bit here into Jimmy Carter?
>> Sara Hart: We can't not sidebar into Jimmy Carter.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. So I liked President Carter. Famously in 1979, President Carter had given his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, which I remember. I'm old enough to remember him standing there in a sweater and telling us to turn our thermostats down. And I think what's important to note is that he made an argument for us liberating ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil. I'm just going to pause there for a second.
>> Sara Hart: What?
>> Jeff Crane: So we can all reflect on the degree to which none of that has changed. But this was something he tried really hard to lead on. And at that time, our oil came primarily from the Middle East. Now it's primarily from Canada, unless that's changed recently. So that speech initially was very popular. He had a strong popularity boost following that speech. And then, Americans sat with it for a second. They got bored. There were a lot of talking heads critical of the speech. And then, they started calling it the malaise speech. And what do you think, Sara, is the last time that an American president has asked Americans to make any kind of sacrifice?
>> Sara Hart: You mean like real sacrifice? I mean, we make all kinds of symbolic sacrifices.
>> Jeff Crane: Like going shopping.
>> Sara Hart: Go shopping. Go to Disneyland.
>> Liam Salcuni: Go to Disneyland. Don't forget to bring money.
>> Sara Hart: Don't forget to bring money.
>> Jeff Crane: So much money.
>> Sara Hart: In God we trust.
>> Jeff Crane: Buy a steak. I think we are all referencing to, the easy references President George Bush after 9/11, where one of the arguments was a return to active capital consumption was key to showing that we had not been defeated. That's real. That actually happened. So go buy a steak. And what ends up happening then with this rejection of Carter's very idealistic and sacrificing sort of approach, but I think also pragmatic, an approach that would have been very good for us if we had made these moves, we would be way out ahead of climate change. So you know, I did manage to work in a climate change reference.
>> Sara Hart: You did. Boy, and we will come back to Carter. We will also come back to that historical moment with President George W. Bush.
>> Liam Salcuni: Oh, yes, we will.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. And that's what we like about history, right? It's just it breaks us away from our simplistic narratives. I'm a bigger fan of Carter as a president than probably most people, but he has been simplified in many ways. So I'm going to paraphrase from Andrew Bacevich in his book, America's War for the Greater Middle East, in which he says that through this doctrine, President Carter essentially made the Persian Gulf an American protectorate. It's where we began identifying and working with Persian Gulf states to create new bases, places to store weapons, to store and deploy aircraft when we need them. With this, we make a commitment to preserve and control our access to oil in that region. And the other piece of that is prior to the actual Soviet invasion in December, Christmas Eve, 1979, we are already providing fairly significant aid to the Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the previous summer before. This is what we are learning, right? So I'm reading to prep for this script and this show. I was like, I had no idea. I thought it started with Reagan.
>> Sara Hart: Nope.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. So this is aid in the form of communications, medical aid. And one source I read actually some rifles from World War I. It's not supposed to be military aid. So the idea there from Brzezinski is can we bog down the Soviets, right? And that's ironic, right? We are trying to bog them down in a conflict as we are having our own struggles. And we want them bogged down in the way that we had been in Vietnam. So like a Vietnam level quagmire, the word that became really popular in reference to that.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. I mean, we need to keep them busy is this idea, right? This is the Great Game. And if they are distracted, then maybe we can win.
>> Jeff Crane: So now it's the United States and Russia, i.e. the Soviet Union, not England and Russia.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. That's right. And I mean, the Carter Doctrine. I'm still distracted by the Carter Doctrine, which we will come back to with some intention in another episode. But the Carter Doctrine, folks, in case you haven't heard of this one is most simply put, the free flow of oil from the Middle East is a matter of American national security. And that really is, Jeff, you are right. This is a textbook setup for establishing a protectorate. That's what it is. Thank you, Jimmy Carter.
>> Liam Salcuni: Listeners, welcome back to SNAFUBAR. I'm Liam Salcuni, and I'm joined here with Sara Hart and Jeff Crane. If you are just tuning in, we are about to detail the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The invasion triggers a response from the United States who will support the Mujahideen resisting Soviet expansion in the region.
>> Sara Hart: That's right. December, 1979. We are nearing the end of this chapter to our story. In December, 1979, tens of thousands of Soviet troops invaded, like Jeff, you were just saying, to help prop up the communist government and fight off the Mujahideen resistance and really to bog them down. And they stayed. The Soviets stayed for nearly a decade. This became that Vietnam level quagmire. Millions of civilians died. Millions more fled to Pakistan and Iran. All the while America supported the Mujahideen against what they saw as Soviet expansionism and in an effort to keep that expansionism checked.
>> Jeff Crane: Our version of the Great Game, right?
>> Sara Hart: That's right.
>> Jeff Crane: The Soviet invasion generated a massive shared backlash among Afghanis of all classes, tribes and political ideologists. They rose up in spontaneous. Free protests were gunned down by the Soviets in the hundreds. Thousands went to their roofs during call of prayer and denounce the Soviet invasion.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, that happened. And you know, those aren't necessarily the moments that stick in the American mind. We have got some culturally iconic moments in the American context that come from this. There is the 1983 meeting in the Oval Office when President Reagan hosted Mujahideen freedom fighters. And this is a surprising image to the kids today, you know, like we just don't expect to see that framing. And Rambo III, released in 1988, has Sly Stallone fighting alongside the Mujahideen and against the Russians. And that film is dedicated to "the gallant people of Afghanistan."
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah, I was in the army when that came out. I went with a bunch of friends. And you know, I was studying Afghanistan at the time. I was, you know, reading about what's happening there. I was looking at the psychological operations that were being done there and this is such a stupid movie. They assumed it's all over American history. I want to make a couple of points here. First, Americas love of freedom fighters and militia, right? This is such a true line in American history. Calling freedom fighter is something different. We have this love of militia going back to the French and Indian War, where we talked about, you know, Washington episodes where militia can be problematic. There is celebration of militia freedom fighters and that's embodied in things like Rambo III and the movie where Soviet Spetsnaz and Cuban troops invade Colorado with Patrick Swayze.
>> Sara Hart: Red Dawn. Yeah. Oh, totally, I mean, militia is just so deep within our myth. Freedom fighters, we want to be the good guys fighting long odds. We want to be underdogs. We want to go in and fight injustice and we don't need a governmental structure to do it. John Wayne. I want to be John Wayne.
>> Jeff Crane: Let me tell you.
[ Laughter ]
Terrible. So let me jump in with some Tom Engelhardt on American victory culture. He has got a great book. He talks about the reason Star Wars was so popular was because we lost in Vietnam. And it flipped the narrative. Because our narrative has always been, we are the little guy facing overwhelming forces, forced into conflict despite our desires. And then, you know, in spite of the fact that we are always starting conflicts. And that we are a peace-loving people.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, peace-loving people. Only to war when forced when, "God helping us, we can do no other," says President Woodrow Wilson.
>> Jeff Crane: President Woodrow Wilson. Yeah. And so in Engelhardt's American victory culture, the narrative about Americans of war is that through ingenuity and creativity, pluck, courage, self-sacrifice, we take on overwhelming odds and win. Now the Mujahideen is that group, right? And so we are able to align ourselves with that. And to some degree, even able to restore our narrative about who we are, because we are supporting freedom fighters against this, if you will, you know, evil empire, the Soviet Union. And it's also exciting and influential because we are coming out of this era of post-Vietnam trauma and depression. So it's a way to get a win with the good guys without actually going into war.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And this opportunity to be those freedom fighters is just woven into our myths in so many ways in the stories that we grow up through and that we teach our children. I mean, we have just given a couple examples here. They are everywhere. In 1988's Rambo III, that's like one example. Also in 1988, a small group of Islamists. Okay. And here we are going to start to get into Gen Z cultural knowledge. Yeah. In 1988, a small group of --
>> Jeff Crane: Plus the generation --
>> Sara Hart: I know, multi-generational discourse. A small group of Islamists, including Osama Bin Laden, were also fighting the Soviets. And they banded together and established Al-Qaeda or the base to help organize their efforts, same year that Rambo III came out. So we will see this come back.
>> Sara Hart: And this becomes the first global call for jihad. People are coming from around the world. Muslims are travelling from all over the place to join the mujahideen movement to fight against the Soviet Union.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And we are in a context of increased communication. We really are in a global context at this point. And they are unifying and we are on the same side. Their enemy is our enemy. They are fighting our enemy. Okay.
>> Jeff Crane: Great example, the proxy war.
>> Sara Hart: It really is. Yeah. So we are going to wrap this one up today, listeners. Now, history doesn't call it this, but Jeff, you have a few times. Tell me this whole story, the Americans and the Russians in Afghanistan. Tell me this isn't the Great Game all over again. Rehash with the U.S. taking on the role of the new Anglos still battling it out against the Russians still more or less unconcerned with the culture of Afghanistan, with the lives of Afghan people. Or with whatever desires for self-determination the Afghans themselves might have.
>> Jeff Crane: No, I think you are completely right. It's just that back then we were able to dress it up in fancy rhetoric.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah.
>> Jeff Crane: Call it something else. Well, I mean, new Anglos is appropriate because what England was able to do, especially during the Eisenhower administration was to have America pick up some of the global policing of resources that they had been doing when they were colonial power before they lost so much of their colonies and their wealth in World War II. A great example of that is Iran and the overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1952 or '53, I can't remember. The British that really convinced us to do that.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah, Iran. Not today, Jeff, though.
>> Jeff Crane: I want to so bad.
>> Sara Hart: Another day. I know. Listeners, we will get there. So this story, the Soviets withdrew in 1989 in something like disgrace.
>> Jeff Crane: In fact, this defeat is one of the major causes of the fall of the Soviet Union. So from a real politic perspective which is really, you know, we have to say it like that. This is a win for the U.S. But at what cost?
>> Sara Hart: A great cost. That's right. Somewhere between 1 and 3 million deaths, mostly Afghan civilians, another approximately 5 million Afghan civilians, a fifth of the nation's population driven out as refugees. Estimates on the money vary widely, but it was definitely billions, which could have gone to, you know, food, yeah, education, I don't know, water. So it's a steep cost. It's a really steep cost. And at this point, the Soviets and the Americans basically flip over the game board and walk out of the room like a couple of really upset toddlers. There is just no other way to put it. Looking back on it in 1990, only a year later and now safely out of the fray, while Afghanistan itself is embroiled in civil war, Soviet President, Gorbachev says to U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, "Let them boil in their own juices." And Baker replies, "When you said let them boil, I thought we have the same feeling."
>> Jeff Crane: This does bring us full circle really clearly back to the beginning a point that you made, Sara, that at no point in this history, in our actions, do we care at all about Afghanistan itself. This is about our own strategic interest.
>> Sara Hart: That's right. This is about our own strategic interest. So you know, we could sort of stop right there and say, well, that's seriously FUBAR. This isn't a historical moment of supposedly great peacemaking. This is glasnost. This is the end of the Cold War. Let them boil, I mean, Jesus.
>> Jeff Crane: Yeah. I feel your passion. It's a terrible way to think about other nations and other people. It's not like we don't have other examples, we do. We have the example of the Marshall Plan of World War II, where America invested in Germany and Japan and those countries are bastions of stability still and it worked. Why not do that in Afghanistan? You have to ask yourself that question.
>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And you know, we can't stop here because we do keep hurtling forward, America and Afghanistan, two nations on a path to still more bloody conflict. America is doing all right coming out of the '80s strong and about to hit a huge upsurge in wealth. Afghanistan is once more in civil war with Al-Qaeda and other Islamists claiming victory after the Soviets pullout. Now one legacy of the Great Game is that there are guns and bombs everywhere in Afghanistan and power is closely associated with armed force. America closes its embassy in Kabul in 1989, kind of washes its hands of the whole thing. We have a momentary inward turn, one more moment in our historically constant flirtation with isolationism. We are busy building shopping malls. Those relics of late century American consumer glut seems like as good a place as any to pause our story for the day. Americans are mall walking their way to global self-awareness and they are beginning their consumption field love affair with the internet, and Afghanistan, meanwhile, is erupting into one civil war after another.
>> Jeff Crane: Why do you have to ruin my Cinnabons breakfast. [laughter] After my mall walk and white Reeboks or New Balances or whatever.
>> Liam Salcuni: Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode on SNAFUBAR. We will pick up in the future with Episode 2, the Path to Jihad in our Afghanistan series.
>> Sara Hart: That's right. Thanks. See you then. You have been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.
>> Jeff Crane: And me.
>> Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.
>> Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer/researcher.
>> Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer/researcher.
>> Speaker 4: You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.
>> Speaker 5: Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.