Robert Crews is a historian at Stanford, specializing in Afghanistan, Russia, Islam, Central Asia, and South Asia. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:19 - U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
15:08 - September 11
32:43 - Bin Laden
1:08:12 - Withdrawal of U.S. troops
2:00:24 - War
2:11:39 - Leadership
2:27:49 - Afghan people
2:37:18 - Rumi

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The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz, a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Robert Cruz.

Was it a mistake for the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?

I'm a historian, so I say this with some humility about what we can know.

I think I'd still like to know much more about what was going on in the White House, in the hours, days, weeks after 9-11.

Bush administration acted in a state of panic And I think they wanted to show a kind of toughness.

They wanted to show some kind of resolve.

You know, this was a horrific act that played out on everyone's television screens.

And I think it was really a, fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy within the White House, within the Oval Office.

And I think they felt like they had to do something and something dramatic.

I think they didn't really think through, you know, who they were fighting, you know, who the enemy was, what this geography had to do with 9-11.

I think Looking back at it, I mean, some of us, not to say I was clairvoyant or could see into the future, but I think many of us were, from that morning, skeptical about the connections that people were drawing between Afghanistan as a state, as a place, and the actions of Al-Qaeda in Washington and New York and Pennsylvania.

So as you watch the events of 9-11, the things that our leaders were saying in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed, maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline of what was being said, when was the actual invasion of Afghanistan, and also what were your feelings in the minutes, weeks after 9-11?

I was in DC, I was on the way to American University hearing on NPR what had happened, and I thought of the American University logo, which is red, white, and blue.

And I thought, you know, Washington is under attack, and symbols of American power are under attack.

And so, I was quite concerned and at the time lived just a few miles from the Capitol.

So I appreciate the sense of anxiety and fear and panic.

And for 2, 3 years later in DC, we were constantly getting reports, mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks that would fall the city.

So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.

But in watching television, including Russian television that day, because I just installed a satellite thing, so I was trying to watch world news and get different points of view, and that was quite useful to have an alternative set of eyes.

Okay, so your Russian is good enough to understand Russian television.

the news and the visuals that were coming that were not shown on American television.

I don't know how they had it, but they had, they were not filtering anything in the way that the major networks and cable televisions were doing here.

So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence of the moment, you know, in New York City, of people diving from the towers or being, you know, and it was really, they didn't hold back on that, which was quite, you know, fascinating.

I think much of the world saw much more than actually the American public saw.

But to your question, you know, amid that feeling of imminent doom, I watched commentators start to talk about Al-Qaeda and then talk about Afghanistan.

And 1 of the experts was Barnett Rubin, who's at NYU, who's a long, very learned Afghanistan hand.

And he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News to kind of lay this out for everyone.

And I thought, you know, he did a fine job, but I think it was formative in submitting the view that somehow Al-Qaeda was synonymous with this space, Afghanistan.

And I think, again, I was no al-Qaeda expert then, and I'm not now, but I think my immediate thought went to war.

And because my background had been with, at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war, whom I encountered in Uzbekistan, who were refugees and so on.

I thought immediately, my mind went to the suffering of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep up, of course, the defenseless people who have nothing to do with these politics.

So we should give maybe a little bit of context that you can speak to.

So assume nobody's an expert in anything.

So let's just say you and I are not experts in anything.

What, as a historian, were you studying at the time and thinking about, see, is it the full global history of Afghanistan?

Were you thinking about the Mujahideen and Al-Qaeda and Taliban?

Were you thinking about the Soviet Union, the proxy war through Afghanistan, were you thinking about Iraq and oil?

Like what's the full space of things in your heart, in your mind at the time?

I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was, you know, there's the sense of, you know, the suffering and the tragedy of the moment of, you know, the deaths.

And that was, I think, I was preoccupied by the violence of the moment.

But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan, as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment, I think immediately what came to mind was that little I knew about Al-Qaeda at the time suggested that the geography was inaccurate, that this was a global network, a global threat, that this was a kind of a movement that went beyond borders.

And I think it felt early on that Afghanistan was gonna be used as a scapegoat.

And this is intellectually at the time, you know, I was teaching at American University, my courses, you know, touched on a range of subjects, but I was trying to complete a book on Islam and the Russian Empire, actually.

But in doing that research, which took me across Russia and Central Asia, purely by accident, I had developed an interest in Afghanistan because, just again, a series of coincidences, I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, without housing, through an American friend who was like the king of the market in Tashkent.

He knew everyone, he run into some Afghan merchants there.

They found out I didn't have a place to live.

I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly.

Yeah, in Tashkent, doing dissertation research.

Yeah, because it was, you know, hub of the Russian empire in Central Asia.

So just by accident, I ended up with these young Afghans who took me in as roommates.

And that, I think, the sense of that community shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.

They brought, they had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.

They had somehow brought flour and some agricultural products from Egypt.

And they were sitting in enclosed containers in Tashkent waiting for the Uzbekistani state to permit them to trade.

So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.

They'd put on suits and ties like you're wearing.

And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios, then they'd feast at lunch and then at night we would go out.

So part of my research, because I also had a bottleneck in my research, I was going to the state archives in Tashkent And because of the state of Uzbekistan, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do.

So I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys.

And it was really just an accidental kind of thing, but grew quite close to them.

And I developed an appreciation of, which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this, these people had already lived, young guys, you know, in the 20s, they'd already lived in 67 countries.

1 of my best friends there had been a kickboxer and break dancer, trained in Tehran.

His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.

He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan during the civil war, going to Uzbekistan, escaping death there.

Can you also just briefly mention, geographically speaking, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran.

What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?

I was always terrible at geography and spatial information, so can you lay it out?

So Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan.

It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century.

The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty in 1865.

It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917.

It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, which becomes independent finally in 1991

So these are all like these republics are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia.

And they've been independent since 1991, but they have struggled to disentangle themselves from Moscow, from 1 another, and now they face very serious pressure from China to form a kind of periphery of the great machine that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions to stretch across Asia.

For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends hailed from, Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s when leftists tried to seize power there in 1978.

The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan, crossing the border with its forces in 1979 to try to shore up this leftist government that had seized power in 1978.

And so for Central Asians in the wider region, their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected in 1980s when Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years.

And here I refer your listeners and viewers to Rainbow 3 as the guide to...

The Bible of Afghan history in Rambo III, yeah.

As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war, right?

But for most Afghans, there are people who fought against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation, the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.

And so they fled in waves by the millions to Pakistan, to Iran, some went north into Southeast Asia later in the 1990s.

And some were displaced across the planet.

So California, where we're sitting today, has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s in the East Bay.

quick question that's a little bit of a tangent?

What is the correct or the respectful way to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran.

the on versus the an, Is it a different country by country?

As an English speaker in America, is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan?

Or is it the opposite, respectful to say it that way?

I defer to the people from those countries to of course sort out those politics.

I think 1 of the fascinating things about the region broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures and are really quite cosmopolitan.

So I think people are mostly quite forgiving about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.

No, I think people are very, very forgiving.

And I think that, you know, Iranians are a bit, you know, more instructive in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right?

Iraq, Iraq, you know, I think there's come to be a fit between certain ways of pronouncing these places and the position that Americans take about them, right?

So it's more jarring when people say Iraq and it comes with a claim that a certain kind of person should be the victim of violence or, right?

It's kind of like talking about the Democratic Party or the Democrat Party.

It's sometimes using certain kind of terminology to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement about your beliefs, it's fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran, I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional in the case of a Democrat or is it just a, you know, innocent, whatever.

I think, again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people I know have been very cool about that.

What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's fair to say, I don't mean to speak for millions of people, for a group of people, but I can just share with our non-Afghan friends.

The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense because that's the name of the currency.

And so, lots of people ask, you know, why having, especially again, it's more directed at Americans because, you know, we've been so deeply involved in that country, obviously for the last 20 years, right?

So Afghans ask why after 20 years are you still calling us the wrong name?

Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency.

Yeah, and it's, again, I think, but I would emphasize that people are quite open and it's a whole region of incredible diversity and respect for linguistic pluralism, actually.

So I think that, but I also appreciate that in this context, when there's a lot of pain in the Afghan diaspora community in particular, being called the wrong name after 20 years when they already feel so betrayed at this moment.

If 1 follows us on social media, that is 1 kind of hot wire.

Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation is because yes, it is true that there are certain things when mispronounced kind of reveal that you don't care enough to pronounce correctly, you don't know enough to pronounce correctly, and you dismiss the culture and the people, which I think, as per your writing, is something that, if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan, just because I'm used to it.

As you do in your writing, Afghanistan suffers from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world.

But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the whole region that gives us context for the events of 9-11.

go back to that day and the weeks that followed, my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent, which is interesting.

It was, I mean, they were, so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US about 9-11, right?

Everyone wanted to know what was the relationship between the serific violence and that religious tradition with its you know 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right?

That became the issue of course for American security institutions, for you know local state and police institutions, right?

I mean it became the I think it was the question that most Americans had on their mind.

So, again, I didn't imagine myself as someone who had all the answers, of course, but given my background and coming at this from Russian history, coming at this from studying empire and trying to think about the region broadly, I was very alarmed at the way that the conversation went.

What was your feeling on that morning of 9-11?

It's coupled with fear of what's next, especially when you're in DC, but also who is this?

What were your thoughts of the options and the internal ranking given your expertise?

I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative that this was international.

I mean, I'd also lived in New York during 1 of the first bombings in 94 of the World Trade Center.

So, it was clear to me that a radical community had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of...

I immediately thought it was a kind of blow to American power.

And I was drawn by the symbolism of, if you think of it as an act, it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will, a kind of a way of speaking to, from a position of relative weakness, speaking to an imperial power.

And that I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that with horrific real world consequences for all those innocent victims, for the firemen, for the police, and just the horror of the moment.

So I did see it as transcending the United States, but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily to do fundamentally about Afghanistan and the history of the region that I've been studying and the community people that I knew who were not particularly religious, right?

The guys I hung out with actually wore me out because they wanted to go out every night.

I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its, you know.

So I do want to travel to that part of the world.

When was the last time you were in that part of the world?

Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice.

And it informs, but the fascinating thing, you know, as a student, is what you're observing as a non-Muslim, you know, I'm a non-Russian, This is all culturally new to me.

And then you get the psalmogon, the grass vodka.

You get, you know, I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier that I'm not proud of.

to know the people and some of them from Afghanistan.

But intellectually, so the thing, I mean, the fascinating thing there was it, and just as a, I mean, there's a whole, you know, I'm a historian, right, but there are great contributions by, you know, anthropologists and ethnographers who've gone across the planet and try to understand how Muslims understand the tradition at different contexts.

So many Uzbeks will say, this is part of our national culture to drink and eat as we please, right?

And so, of course, you can encounter other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right?

But it's become kind of, I think it's very much, you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression in each of these places.

And so there are ways of thinking, ways of performing, ways of enjoying oneself that are shared across Soviet, in former Soviet space to this day, right?

And you've written also about Muslims in the Soviet Union.

There's an article that there was a paywall, so I couldn't read it, and I really wanna read it.

Is Moscow and the Mosque or something like that.

By the way, just another tangent on a tangent.

reasons I bought them and read many parts is because they're easy to buy, unlike articles.

So it's Very frustrating to read brilliant scholars such as yourself.

I wish there was 1 fee I could pay everywhere.

What it gives allows me to read some of your brilliant writing.

No, I think moving toward more kind of open source for writing stuff, I think is what a lot of journals are thinking about now.

And I think it's definitely for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship, that's definitely an important thing that we should all think about.

And I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good, I appreciate it.

So your thought was Afghanistan is not going to be the center,

It's not the center of this, and invading that country isn't gonna fix the toxic milestone of politics that produced 9-11, right?

I think I'm just thinking of some of the personalities just thinking about going back to the Tashkent story which I'll end with.

I mean just observing real Muslims doing things and then asking questions about it and trying to understand through their eyes what the tradition means to them.

And then we had a very narrow conversation about what Islam is that generated, immediately exploded on the day of 9-11, right?

And then of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam and Muslims was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.

So it became a perfect storm, I think, of demonization that didn't sit with what I knew about the tradition and with the actual people that I had known.

Because then going back to, I mean, there were other friends and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tashkent for a moment, I mean, just thought about my friends who had been, who had suffered a great deal in their short lives, who had been cast aside from country to country, but had found a place in Tashkent with some relative stability.

And they explained, 1 friend, we talked about it with the alcohol and all that, and he didn't get crazy, but he was like, you can drink, but just don't get drunk.

I think Uzbeks had a different view, often the more vodka the better, and it doesn't violate, as I understand Islam.

So even, it's kind of a silly example, but it's just an illustration of the ways in which different communities, different generations, different people can come at this very complex, rich tradition in so many different ways.

So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are, any kind of expert, whatever, it's always disconcerting to see your field of specialization be flattened, right?

And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments for violence,

Mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate

So, I mean, that day I vividly remember, I sat with other PhD historians in different fields.

We, oddly enough, had lunch that day and it kind of deserted Washington.

And we just thought, this is gonna kind of open up like a great mall of destruction.

And the American state is going to destroy, and it's gonna destroy in this geography.

And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.

And then I think if 1, you know, I'd been doing some research on Afghanistan then, I was kind of shifting to the South, and I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar for some years, and I think it's clear now that in retrospect there were opportunities for alternative policies at that moment.

So what should the conversation have been like?

Because from a perspective of the time, the United States was invaded by a foreign force.

What is the proper response, or what is the proper conversation about the proper response at the time, you think?

You know, I know my colleague at Stanford, Condoleezza Rice, would tell me this is above my pay grade, and she makes a point in her classes to talk about how difficult decision making is under such intense pressure.

You know, I am an historian who sits safely in my office.

I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone because of the way I look and because of my nationality and so on, but I'm not a spy.

So I defer, I respect the expertise of all those communities.

They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the, in a way, there was a compensatory aspect of this decision-making.

This was an extraordinary failure, right?

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Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #244