Author Anand Gopal

Anand Gopal is a former reporter for the Wall St. Journal and author of the book “No Good Men Among the Living”. Gopal spent years traveling around in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, regions where no other US reporter would go, speaking to ordinary Afghanis who no other US reporter would consider worth his or her time. The result is an absolutely indispensable book. Oaklandsocialist had the privilege to interview him. Here is a video of that interview and below it is a transcript. This interview is also available as a podcast here.

John Reimann
So we’re talking with Anand Gopal, former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who also wrote a great, great book called, no good men among among the living. Which, for my money, it’s one, I think you could call it, a book of recent or current history. And for my money, is one of the best books of that sort that I’ve read. So we’re very happy to have Anand here. One of the things that really stands out about your book, I think, is the manner in which you, I guess you could call researched it, what you did in order to write it? And maybe you could explain that a little bit.

Anand Gopal
When I got to Afghanistan, I wasn’t part of a news bureau or anything, I was kind of independent. So as a result, I couldn’t actually afford to hire fixers and translators and the other usual sort of normal, you know, circumstances. So I ended up having to learn a language and kind of move with a segment of Afghans who usually aren’t the types that end up becoming friends with international journalists. And that was really big, kind of, by dumb luck that that happened to me. And so I ended up, you know, hanging out with these guys, much more working class people, poor people who just operate in a different milieu than some of the English speaking Afghans. And so they took me to different parts of the country, especially to the areas where the war was being fought at the time. And when I was doing that, I just started to hear lots of stories about the war on terror that were looking very different from or sounding very different from the stories that we had been hearing up until then.

John Reimann
So when reading about that, it really sounds like a great adventure. In one sense, I’m wondering if there’s any one or two particular incidents or situations that stand out in your mind that can bring it more to light? For people who are hearing this or watching it?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, I mean, it was fairly early on, I went to an area of Kandahar province called Band-i-timor, which is really historically been one of the most impoverished and neglected parts of Kandahar province. And when I was there, I noticed that well, first of all, many of the houses were empty, were completely destroyed. In some cases, there are only women living there, or sometimes just children, while fighting aged males have been killed or had fled. And as I spent time in that community, began to realize that almost every single household in that community had a member in the Taliban, and I was coming to that area and to Afghanistan, I think, with a very simplistic understanding of the Taliban. As you know, it’s just an extremist group that you kind of have to be basically beyond the pale to join. And so what struck me about that is that, instead of what we had in that community, at least was people from different walks of life, mostly farmers, school teachers, etc, had all joined are every household had one member who joined, and it wasn’t even necessarily because they supported the Taliban as a political project was rather that they had been facing pretty extreme violence committed by the US and the US backed forces, that they just looked at whoever could give them protection. And so many people took up weapons against the occupiers, and enjoy the time and in that way, so that really, maybe changed my understanding of the conflict.

John Reiman
I want to return to that later. But also, in your book, you give a very interesting explanation of how the strong tribal traditions developed in many parts of Afghanistan. I wonder if you could summarize that.

Anand Gopal
Well, yeah, so the questioner is I’ve got us on our tribal communities. And what that means is that there’s the the communities there, basically, are kinship based or fictive kinship based communities. What that means is that they believe that they hail from a common ancestor, or that they have, you know, a common founder of their group and there’s hundreds of Afghan tribes in across southern and eastern Afghanistan. In eastern Afghanistan, the tribes tend to be historically at least they tended to be much more egalitarian, at least among the men In the sense that there were no tribal leaders as such, they would have these tribal assemblies in which every man in the tribe would have an equal say or vote on whatever happened, and they had their own forms of dispute resolution, because there was no central state, you know, so if there was a crime that was committed, they had their own set of rules that had been passed on for generations or centuries, and how to deal with that. In southern Afghanistan, the situation was a bit different, because you had the state that penetrated these areas. And so you had really the rise of a feudal class of big landowners in southern Afghanistan. Khans are what they’re called, in the local language, big landowners. And so the, they became the tribal leaders as well. And so the kind of egalitarian ethos of the Eastern tribes didn’t exist in the south. And so the dispute resolution mechanisms were pretty much pretty heavily tilted in favor of the strong men or the big feudal lords. And so as a result, especially in southern Afghanistan, you had develop a kind of alternative form of dispute resolution based on religion. And that’s where the word Taliban comes from, religious students who used to be imams or they used to speak to, like, have courts, religious courts. And so it’s an old phenomenon. It goes back centuries in southern Afghanistan.

John Reimann
But you also talk in your book about how the some of the tribal traditions developed out of, you know, out of Afghanistan, being so mountainous groups being somewhat isolated communities being isolated from each other, and how people had to band together in extended family groups for mutual protection from raiding and so on.

Anand Gopal
That’s right, yeah, that’s kind of explaining why these these parts of the country were tribal. It’s really, that there’s a clan and a clannishness is developed as a way to best deal with the environment that they lived in. In which yeah, as you said, there were rival clans and raiding communities. And there wasn’t a strong central state in any of these places. And so this is kind of the the material origins for why these areas are clannish.

John Reimann
Right. And you also explain that the Taliban’s imposition of so called Sharia law has less to do with Islam as a religion and more to do with some of the tribal traditions of the pasture in certain regions?

Anand Gopal
Well, yeah. So there is a tribal law that exists as what I referred to earlier, which is our tribal code Pashtunwali is that and then there is the Taliban’s legal approach, whether they’re Sharia law, where it is frequently kind of adapts itself to local circumstances. So just to give an example, you know, when the Taliban took over the country last month, or a month and a half ago, one of the first things they did was to stop women and girls from going to school. I mean, there’s nowhere in most ordinary interpretations of Islamic law that bars women from going to school or from working, you know, and so what the Taliban were doing there wasn’t really an expression of Sharia, and they didn’t even write and really responding to the to the norms of the village, the rural village, the countryside where women in especially in the southern areas, women aren’t able to leave the house very freely. There’s generally a kind of a norm against women going to school, or women working outside the house. And so in many ways, the Taliban are more a reflection of some of those mores. At least when it comes to the question of women.

John Reiman
Passing on to the role of the United States, you write that “In the vagaries of this system, used to not not you but you generically survived one way and one way only through the ruthless exploitation of everyone around you. The Broken alliances, the faltering hopes, the root exposures of foreign agendas all dictated a certain logic of duplicity, if you plan to remain alive and free.” And you also call Afghanistan under the US, a “Potemkin country but almost entirely for show.” Can you expound on these comments a little bit?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, sure. So essentially, when the US invaded, the Taliban was defeated swiftly within three months and the Taliban leadership from the senior levels down to the rank and file more or less just quit, surrendered and went back home. T hey melded back into civilian life and became farmers or teachers etc. and al Qaeda, you know, principal target of the of the invasion for the country. So you had 1000s of troops US troops on the ground without an enemy to fight. And so this is a contradiction. And the way that contradiction was resolved is that the US brought in warlords and strong men who had been expelled previously from the country, brought them back into the country and started to pay them for intelligence and started to say that, you know, find us terrorists find us bad guys. And so these warlords are strong men would basically use this as an opportunity to to, you know, finger their rivals to, if there was some land that they were eyeing they could, you know, they can tell the Americans “Oh, that person living on that piece of land is a member of al Qaeda or the Taliban.” And the US, we just arrest people or torture them or send them to almost no questions asked, it was just essentially for three or four years or one sided war, waged by the US and its allies against poor Afghan villagers [unintelligible] that the United States set up and incentivized this war on terror system was that actual evidence didn’t matter, actual, you know, membership in an organization or even your activities of doing something, again, matter what mattered is what these warlords said, and therefore, that’s what the US would fall for.

John Reimann
How do you explain that position, that role of the US, given that they claim that they were going to the country to get rid of the Taliban?

Anand Gopal
Well, the bigger the problem is that, you know, I think you have to look at this in the larger geopolitical context of the war on terror. So Afghanistan, I think, at the time for the architects of this war, was the opening salvo of a war on terror, whose aim was to redraw the map of the Middle East and South Asia, to better align with us Imperial interests. And so that meant first, Afghanistan is the lowest hanging fruit in that. You know, go to Afghanistan, we would overthrow the government and put in a client regime, which just was like headed by Karzai. And a small number of troops there to shore up that client regime, and then move on to Iraq, do the same in Iraq. And then ultimately, the greatest prize is Iran. So that was the plan, I think of the architects of the war at the early time. And so for that plan to work, the ideology of the war on terror had to be central to it, that there were these terrorists and these bad guys all around the world that were that were hated us for our freedoms, and they were ready to attack us and do another 911 at any minute. And that meant that reality, even if reality said otherwise then went to hell with reality. So we had troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and they couldn’t find terrorists because there weren’t on well, then we had to manufacture those terrorists. And that’s essentially what happened.

John Reimann
So passing on to a different aspect of the question. In your book, you kind of traced the lives of a number of different people. And one of them was this woman Heela, whose life is kind of a roller coaster ride from a relatively liberated woman in Kabul, to the classic oppression of a housewife in rural Pashtun society, then, to becoming a senator. Now, your book was published in 2014. And I’m wondering if you know anything about what’s happened to her since then?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, so she, eventually, so the way she became a senator, was that she kind of allied with a strong man, a US-back strong man, and kind of as a window into the way politics really works, where you have this facade of democracy in Afghanistan during that time. But behind it was a series of strong random power brokers. And she understood that and she allied himself with that phenomenon and became a senator. Eventually, for various reasons, one of which is because she was independent, independent minded and strong minded, that she ran afoul of that strong man and was no longer assured of his his patronage. And so she managed to escape the country a couple of years back, and now she’s living in asylum in a third country.

John Reimann
In relation to that, you know, there’s been a lot of talk about a new generation of women in Afghanistan, women who came of age being educated and getting jobs and so on. And so, in your view, to what degree is that true? And also, to what degree does this include women beyond the middle class women in Kabul and other major cities?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, I mean, it is true for middle class women in Kabul and other major cities and it’s not true for poor women. in Kabul, and also for poor women and middle class women who are in the countryside, specifically I mean, when I see the countryside, Afghanistan is 70% rural, meaning half the countryside is where the war was fought over the last 20 years. And in that half that life is not what has been described generally, in television screens. I mean, under the Taliban, in the 90s, women were locked in their homes, they were not allowed to, they didn’t have access to education or health care. Under the US occupation, they were still locked in their homes still didn’t have access to education or healthcare. And on top of that, their houses can be bombed. On top of that their loved ones are taken away. They would go to sleep at night, not knowing whether someone’s going to break into their house and take take away their husband or son or brother. So in that respect, life actually got worse for those women in the last 20 years under American occupation than it did under the Taliban, which is not saying anything good about the Taliban, it’s just showing how what an utter failure the US occupation was,

John Reimann
As I understand it, in a lot of regions in Afghanistan, property ownership and inheritance is passed down strictly through men. And so it seems to me that there would be no real change in terms of the position for women in society unless that is changed. But I don’t see how that can change without properly property relations in general, being changed. What are your thoughts about that?

Anand Gopal
Well, you know, according to traditional norms, and tribal laws, and etc, women don’t have any rights to property. Under Sharia law, women do have rights to the inheritance. And so one of the things that Taliban sometimes did when they actually acted according to Sharia law, and not according to the village customs, what they sometimes do was actually enforce that, and therefore, women were able to inherit some property. But so there are mechanisms because there is a system in place for Sharia, which actually allows women to do that. But I think your point is, right, which is that I think there’s a lot of focus on what might be important, but superficial or formal freedoms, for women like education and going, you know, going to school, right? It’s important that girls should be allowed to go to school. It shouldn’t be illegal for them to go to school. But even when these girls go to school, what happens when they graduate, I mean, there’s no jobs for them whatsoever, they’re only going to go back and become a house maker after they’re done. And so without actually broadly shifting the sort of the economic structure of society, you know, efforts to improve the condition of women, I think, are only going to go so far. And that’s why we saw like, what the US occupation did was it, we put a heavy emphasis on putting women who haven’t grown to go to school and had a lot of NGOs and others who are supporting that, but without actually trying to shift the underlying basis of the economy. So once the US left, we just got back to the status quo.

John Reimann
So I mean, there’s been some, some of the NGOs that, for instance, encourage women to open up small businesses and so on. But as long as the general property and property relations don’t change, it seems to me it’s questionable. How much that sort of thing can really succeed in changing the situation.

Anand Gopal
Yeah, and like NGOs and encouraging women owned businesses. That’s fine. And that’s gonna affect like, point 1% of women. You know, that’s not that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to help the conditions of women. You know, it’s it’s a primarily agrarian economy, first and foremost, right. So those in which the vast majority of the workforce is either a state employee, which is now going to be drastically reduced because of the draw down on the borders and the agrarian workforce, which is really the majority of the population what’s the incentive for families to send their girls to school if you’re going to be a farmer at the end of this and so this is a deeper issue and and yes, that’s part of it then property relations is I think a part of if my property relations your meaning who gets the inherent inherit property that’s certainly part of it. But I think it’s wouldn’t just be who gets inherited property because it also has to be the ability of women to make money to earn to earn money, which isn’t there right now because there’s the economy just doesn’t have jobs for women outside of teachers.

John Reimann
And so if I were a major land owner, in southern Afghanistan, I would be very, very resistant to opening up the question of whether women can inherit property, because I wouldn’t want to open up the question at all of property relations and who owns property in the first place? That’s a can of worms that could be very dangerous.

Anand Gopal
Well, yeah, I think so. You know, and it’s primogeniture in these places. So it’s most close to the men, and that already is a problem, because they have many sons, and they divide their land, you know. And then after a couple of generations, you have families with small plots. So that’s definitely an issue. But I would say it’s something that’s not even not only just in the interest of big landowners, this is why I’m saying even small landowners, right? It’s like, what happens often is there’ll be a family and the husband dies, under the rights of Sharia, the woman or his wife should inherit the land. But the husband’s brothers will want the land, you know, and so they will try to get the land, either by force, or by marrying the widow. And this is also why there’s this tradition in the countryside that if a woman’s husband dies, she’ll marry the brother. And there’s now because of the war, there’s been women who, you know, have four husbands in series, who’ve been killed, all brothers, for example. All of that are are local adaptations to keep land within the male side of the family, which is also ultimately harmful for women.

John Reimann
So it’s there’s a general shortage of land or general poverty. I mean, seems to me that would be an underlying issue, for the whole question of the oppression of women in those areas.

Anand Gopal
You’re absolutely right. I mean, doesn’t mean if there’s enough land, that it means that women won’t be oppressed, because there’s also needs to be, you know, changes. But this is a maybe a structural constraint, I think, but there are other cases in other parts of the world that are land poor environments that have a better sort of more equitable ratio between men and women. I think here in Afghanistan, what I mean, is, there’s, you know, not a lot of arable land, I think, a very small percentage of the country’s arable. And it’s right now seen as at least in tribal law, as entirely belonging to the men.

John Reiman
And now, on the question of the Taliban: you’re probably aware of some on the left here in the United States say that the Taliban returned to power because they were seen as the true patriots who drove out the American invaders. Do you agree with with that point of view?

Anand Gopal
Well, no, I don’t think it’s it’s hard to see…. So I’ve got a son doesn’t have a national political political movement at all of any sort. The only national organization in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Meaning that the only organization that draws people from different communities and different tribes and different ethnic groups. But that being said, I wouldn’t say that they’re necessarily like popular a popular resistance force as such. It’s rather that the the other side is so unpopular, and people are craving or some kind of stability in order after 40 years of war, that if you have a national organization that can end the war, and stabilize things, people will acquiesce to that. And so I think that’s a better way to characterize it. You know, this isn’t like the Vietcong or something. This is not, you know, a nationwide liberation force. In the same way.

John Reiman
My understanding was that originally the Taliban were based, mainly or even almost exclusively, amongst the Pashtun and then particularly the Pashtun in a particular region, I think around Kandahar. What do you think of that? And you seem to think that’s not the case anymore?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, the first iteration of the Taliban were very heavily Pashtun and very heavily Kandahari, and from neighboring provinces around Kandahar. And the reason is, because when that first automation iteration, it came in the midst of a civil war. And the Taliban were, as I mentioned earlier, kind of a traditional presence, going back centuries in Kandahar, and Helmand. You know, this is part of the local fabric there. So they came out of there and then took over the country. The new iteration of the Taliban is different because what is the new iteration is basically a patchwork of various communities that have been excluded from the post 2001 US order. So that, you know, that looks different in different places. You know, in some places, it’s a particular tribe and some places, it’s a particular ethnic group. In some places, it’s a particular just community. It’s not a tribe, right? All they’re linked together by their mutual antipathy to the United States should because they’ve been excluded from patronage they’ve been killed in an attack for all these reasons. So, it’s a much broader network of people when we’re talking about the rank and file. It includes Uzbeks and Tajiks and others but when we talk about the leadership of the Taliban, it is still heavily Kandahari, primarily Kandahari Pashtun. And secondarily, from the south eastern provinces. Also Pashtun. So the leadership is still very much within those two groups.

John Reiman
But in your book, you would describe I think it was in some of the Hazara areas where when the Taliban came in, they, from my understanding of your description, they ruled as an occupying force themselves, as a foreign occupying force.

Anand Gopal
Yeah, in the ’90s. I mean, they committed some horrific massacres in Hazara areas. But today, I think it’s a bit different in that respect. I mean, there are even Hazar members of the Taliban, including because [?]commanders who joined. It doesn’t mean the Taliban are going to be popular in Hazara areas or not. There’s a lot of mistrust because of that history. But at the same time, for example, the Taliban we’re defending Hazara mosques during the recent religious, Shia religious ceremonies. Hazara are shias. So you know, the Taliban are not, like ethno nationalist or sectarian. It’s almost because they’re not even… they’re just traditionalist, they’re very much a village based. But their worldview and their their values are formed from thePashtun village. And this is really the problem they have is wherever one of the parts of the country that come from the policies they impose, or the policies of the power the are the mores of the question village, and the thing is, Afghanistan is a very diverse country, you know. you have very conservative places like most of the areas where you can go days without seeing a single woman outside. And then you have places like Kabul that are a bit more, I would say, a little bit more socially liberal, at least for Afghan standards. So when the Taliban coming to impose the posture and mores onto Kabul, that’s where you get all these all these problems.

John Reiman
So, you know, in the media today, you’re seeing some claims that all the Taliban today are different, that they’ve reformed. And in fact, some of the leadership is saying, we’ve learned from the past we’re going to rule differently. I get the impression that is more of that layer of the leadership that has a little more of an international perspective. So do you think that they will try to rule somewhat differently possibly in less violent ways? And if so, would you foresee divisions opening up possibly violent ones within the Taliban and and also, possibly some of the more extreme forces such as maybe ISIS-K start to gain adherence from the Taliban

Anand Gopal
Well, so now the Taliban have been in power for a little over two months right? And so we can begin to see you know, we begin to put their words to the test of the rules so far it’s too early but some positive signs are that they are they are not ruling as brutally as they did. They’re not ruling as brutally as they did in the 90s for example. You know, the public executions in the in the in the soccer stadiums. In the 90s all girls were banned from school or employment. That’s not the case now. Girls are starting to go back to school. Some private universities are functioning and women are still working in various ministries and stuff. Part of the reason for this change, I think, is there’s been like, the the middle class Afghans, who benefited a lot from American occupation have, you know, have gained a lot right. And they’ve they’ve had raised expectations as a result, and so they’ve had some pretty heroic protests, for example, against the Taliban. You know, and that would never happen really in the ’90s. And people would have just been shot dead. And so that’s one of the international attention is way higher now than it was in the 90s. So the Taliban trying to be on their best behavior. But you’re right, actually, there are different tendencies within the movement, there are the more pragmatic minded tendencies that realize that if we don’t play by the rules of the international community, then they’re you know, they’re going to increase the isolation of the Taliban and no government has recognized it yet. There’s no funding going into the into the country so that the Treasury is empty, the banks are closed. public sector workers have been paid in since June. So it’s a dire situation there. And there’s an element of leadership that says, hey, we better act in certain ways that won’t bring the hammer down harder on us. There are others who are really hardliners who are mostly military guys who’ve been fighting in the trenches for two decades, lost a lot of family members to American violence and Afghan Government violence. And they say, you know, to hell with this, we should just, we should just run the way we want. There are other factions as the Haqqani Network, which is another group of Taliban that are in the southeast. And I think that if the economic crisis isn’t sorted out, it’s very likely the Taliban might implode and break into factions, and we might see another Civil War. I think ISIS K, obviously would benefit from that chaos. The difference between ISIS-K and the rest of Taliban is Taliban do have a base in certain rural communities. I don’t think ISIS- or ISKP has a real social base in the country. They areSalafi Wahabbists. The Taliban are not Wahabbists. The Taliban are [?[ and they’re from the local, they’re part of the local tradition, ISIS K is really not. So I don’t expect that they would really be able to do anything outside of just sowing more chaos.

John Reimann
So, do you agree that the US and its allies were trying to build a stable or modern capitalist society over all the years that they remained in Afghanistan? And if so, how do you explain that they utterly failed?

Anand Gopal
Well, I think it wasn’t just that they’re trying to build a capitalist society. They’re trying to build a society based in a particular form of capitalism, which is neoliberalism. So what they were doing essentially, is creating a state that was really a state in name only. I’ll give you an example of the health, the health sector, the entire health sector, public, all the public health clinics or hospitals, were run by NGOs, who run by private charities. There’s no tax collection whatsoever. There are people warlords, and other businessmen making millions and millions of dollars, none of this, none of that money went into any kind of public revenue public coffers. The US fed privatized, most of its warfighting so that yeah, it had small numbers of troops on the ground. But it had a large number of private security contractors, most of them were Afghans, many of whom were led by warlords. So a lot of basic functions of the state, whether it is providing health care, or security was privatized and moved into the NGO sector or moved into the into the private commercial sector. And it’s, of course, it’s a recipe for instability. And that’s what that’s what we saw is if you start paying private security contractors and pay them for intelligence, and then they go and kill the wrong people, just do you know, you’ve incentivized instability. That’s the root note, I think,

John Reimann
When I was reading towards the end of your book, about how some of these Well, they were kind of like warlord capitalists, at the same time, real estate speculators, and so on, how they dealt with the different issues, I was reminded of reading about the so called robber barons in the United States 100 or more years ago, with their own private militias, which they use not just to repress the working class, but also to fight each other. But the main difference was, that at that time, they were actually expanding the means of production, building railroads, steel plants, and so on. Whereas now it’s not just in Afghanistan, it’s the whole economy it’s almost like what they call a casino economy, you know, and also a lot of it and in particular in Afghanistan, is based on the on the drug trade and poppy culture.

Anand Gopal
Poppy culture is a big part of it, but there’s a lot there’s a lot more than just opium that these robber barons were getting rich off. I mean, the real way, they’re getting rich is off of contracts of any kind, you know, to build a road, to build a school, didn’t matter. Usually they wouldn’t even build it. Okay, it was just contracts. And it was part of the the corruption that starts at the Pentagon and in Washington DC, you know, they had these huge contracts, subcontracts to an American company, then subcontracted again to an African company. And these are the guys getting really wealthy, and they weren’t really and there was no incentive for them to. It’s unlike, you know, the robber barons were incentivized to expand the means of production, right? Because that’s partly how they got rich is through like building the railroads and other such things. These guys were not incentivized to actually build anything. Because all they needed was the contracts and the contracts that got to their personal connections, or they got through the corruption that was in DC. So it’s really an example of just how utterly corrupt Washington DC is itself. What the US did, is it really just like, outsource the worst parts of the American political model onto Afghanistan? And so this is this is the result?

John Reimann
Well, I think you could make an argument that it’s a symptom of an entirely different era of capitalism itself, not just in Afghanistan or the United States, but globally.

Anand Gopal
Well, yeah, I mean, I use the word neoliberalism before, but there’s obviously a lot of parallels with neoliberalism and the Gilded Age, you know, in terms of the ways in which these individuals act, and I think the difference now, probably, is just how easy it is just move move the money around from one place to the other, and how global this whole system is. So a lot of these African businessmen, you know, they have businesses or they have their registered businesses in Dubai and in Washington, DC, and you know, they go and they’re essentially stealing more or less, it’s a legalized from the fact that they’re getting their contracts from ultimately from American taxpayers to Pentagon contracts, they’re spending, you know, of a portion of what they’re supposed to spend on the ground on building a road or whatever, and the rest are just going and building villas, and in Dubai, or whatever, save in a productive type of capital, it’s like, it’s rent of the worst kind, which is to use going to, you know, private consumption. It’s another reason why if you go to Afghanistan today, I was there a month ago, wouldn’t have to go and it’s you look at most of the countryside, you hardly find any paved roads. And you think the amount of billions of dollars were spent on this country, there’s no paved roads, it’s astonishing.

John Reimann
But isn’t it also a symptom of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?

Anand Gopal
In Afghanistan, specifically or…

John Reimann
globally, in this era of capitalism?

Anand Gopal
Well, yeah, it could be I mean, it’s a longer discussion out of the 60s and 70s. So it’s possible that that’s part of it.

John Reiman
A related question: Traditionally, we think of so called foreign influences as being one or another government, to put it bluntly, a one or another capitalist government. And in the case of Afghanistan, we tend to discuss the role of the US, obviously, and also China, India, Pakistan, etc. But we don’t tend to think of other forces, for example, there is a rising working class movement in Iran. And if the working class succeeds in Iran and overthrowing that regime, how could that affect the situation in Afghanistan? Similarly, incidentally, I’ve seen you have written and spoken about the Arab Spring and about Syria, if that had succeeded, how would that have affected the situation in Afghanistan, but in particular, with Iran, and also the Indian working class?

Anand Gopal
It’s a good question. if the Arab Spring had succeeded, the immediate pressure point, in terms of Afghanistan may have come through Qatar. So Qatar was a major force, I think, in why the Arab Spring did not succeed. Leaving aside the other forces, which is the Russians and Iranians and the Assad regime, but in fact, with Syria specifically, but if you think about Libya, and Syria, Qatar’s played a pretty malign role in these areas. And so it’s hard to say how would that have looked if the if there was successful revolutions here, that would have changed Qatar no doubt. I don’t know. I think the Iranian questions are much more interesting one, Iran hasn’t been a major player in Afghanistan. They’re involved, of course, but it hasn’t been kind of a determining factor. Now Pakistan would be really the determining factor. There was some kind of end to the Pakistani military. class that basically runs that country. If that had been overthrown, then of course, depositories of conocido would be very different. And they would feel it immediately.

John Reimann
No, I’m not thinking only of the role of the governments but for instance, as I understand that has Iran and Afghanistan have are like, culturally and ethnically linked with large sectors of the Iranian population.

Anand Gopal
It’s true. I mean, the challenge, I think, is it was a working class uprising in Iran. I mean, the big problem is that there’s not a very big working class in Afghanistan. You know, it’s it’s predominantly rural, and the Hazara areas, some of the most rural areas. And it’s everything from subsistence farming does, you know, small, holding peasantry to, you know, that sort of thing. So, as I’m sure you know, well, the connection between world class movements and the peasantry is always a complicated thing. So it’s unclear exactly how it worked. But the Hazara working class in Iran, as people who are migrant workers is a very important part of what happens in Iran. You know, but that’s, I’m still Yeah, I think just because of the severe under development of Afghanistan, Afghanistan is, to be honest, probably the most underdeveloped country on earth. And I don’t know if enough people recognize that. So there has to be part of these these discussions.

John Reimann
Afghanistan is one of the few countries where the great majority of the population is rural rather than urban. So but that brings me back to my point, which is: Well, it seems to me that from point of view of the masses of people, that the situation in Afghanistan, cannot be resolved just within Afghanistan itself, that it involves an entire regional struggle. And that’s where the role of the working class itself, as opposed to the peasantry, where the role of the working class itself could come in as a central organizing force, and the centralizing force within wider society. If we think about the working classes being beyond just Afghanistan,

Anand Gopal
For sure, for sure, if there was some kind of regional struggle, I think the Pakistani working class has to be central in this as well, you know, but for sure, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s like the classic results and prospects argument. But you know,it becomes that Afghanistan no longer becomes a severely underdeveloped if it’s in the context of a much larger uprising,

John Reimann
I see you gather where I’m coming from, yes, as a socialist, and it leads directly to my last question, which is as a socialist, my view is that such a society, a modern, society is not possible in the former colonial world, and that it’s only possible in conjunction with the building of real socialism, as opposed to what the Soviet Union tried to do. And it seems to me that Afghanistan stands as the poster child for that. And that your book, really, is an indication of that. Would you comment on that?

Anand Gopal
Well, thanks. Yeah, I think I think it’s a tragic. Yeah, I completely agree. And what the Soviet Union tried to implement in Afghanistan is not is socialism, a name only, and is actually antithetical to I think, the principles of socialism. I mean, at the end of the day, a million people were killed by what the Soviets and the Soviet proxies, you know, communist parties in the ground, did a million people were killed. And, you know, even positive, positive attempts to reform like land reform, which is, you know, is a good thing, if there’s land reform at the time in the 70s. That regime tried to institute learn from, you know, the way they tried to do it, which is completely top down. And without any real base in the areas where the landforms being affected was basically led to its complete disaster, I think and methods failure, which also is, I think, a broader indication of that kind of Soviet style of, of the Soviet approach, which I think is gives light to the idea that they are in any way genuine, or genuine socialist force country.

John Reimann
So my final question is this, bringing it home in the United States today, you’re seeing not only the beginning of the strike wave, but in my view, what’s even more important than that, the beginnings of the rebellion of the rank and file against the union bureaucracy that has that has controlled the unions for as long as I was a union member, which started in 1970. And I think that part of that development would have to be the beginnings of a movement for political independence for the working class that is to say for a true working class party. So it seems to me, you know, some of these questions can seem pretty far afield to the average worker today. But tomorrow, if you have a political organization that represents the working class, it has to deal with all issues, including questions like Afghanistan. And so how would workers and workers’ political organization, deal with these issues? If you would have maybe any concluding comments on that?

Anand Gopal
Well, you know, on the one hand, you couldn’t pick two countries that are more different, like Afghanistan and United States, one being one of the richest countries in the world, the other being possibly the poorest country in the world. But it’s interesting in the ways in which the fates of ordinary working class Americans is connected or linked to what happens in Afghanistan, because the billions of dollars that were spent over the last 20 years, did not go to helping off guns, nor did it go to helping Americans. It actually came from American taxpayers, and so in in different but important ways, both Americans and whatever Afghans are, were hurt by this conflict. And obviously, Afghans have way more because of the physical harm that they face. But the ordinary ordinary Americans did not benefit from this concept, either. And I think it points to the deeper links here now you have hundreds of 1000s of refugees or more coming here and to other parts of the Western world. And, you know, we should be doing everything we can to welcome them to demand that our leaders allow them into our countries. At the same time, we should recognize that all of these refugees, even if the ones who are now fleeing because of the Taliban, the only reason the Taliban emerged as a force to begin with is because of the crimes of the American occupation. And so ultimately, all the refugees that are coming are ultimately due to the to US policy, which is the same policy that took billions of dollars that could have been used for health care and education and other things and use it to line the pockets of warlords and strongman.

John Reimann
Well, thanks very much Anand Gopal. And we will be looking forward to your next book. 

Oaklandsocialist adds: For those who are interested in reading more on a socialist perspective on Afghanistan, see Oaklandsocialist’s article: “Afghanistan and the theory of permanent or uninterrupted revolution”