The Invasion Was a Mistake

Lex Fridman opens with the question hanging over two decades of American war: was it a mistake for the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001? Robert Crews, a Stanford historian of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam, does not hedge. "Yes," he says, and then, when asked why, he slows down with a scholar's caution. He still wants to know more about what happened inside the White House in the hours, days, and weeks after September 11. What he is willing to say is that the George W. Bush administration acted in a state of panic.

They wanted to show toughness. They wanted to show resolve. The attacks had played out on every television screen, and Crews reads the moment as a crisis of legitimacy inside the Oval Office. Officials felt they had to do something, and something dramatic. He does not think they thought through who the enemy was, or what that geography had to do with the hijackings. From that morning, he and others were already skeptical of the claim that Afghanistan as a state, as a place, caused what al-Qaeda did in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania.

He was in Washington that day, a few miles from the Capitol, driving to American University when he heard the news on NPR. The first image in his mind was the university's logo: red, white, and blue, an eagle. Washington was under attack. Symbols of American power were under attack. He felt the anxiety, and he does not dismiss it. For two or three years afterward, the city lived on rumors of the next strike. The fear was real. The causal story that followed, he argues, was not.

That same day Crews did something that would shape how he later judged the rush to war. He had just installed a satellite dish, so he sat at home and flipped through world news, including Russian television. The Russian broadcasts did not filter the images the way the major American networks and cable channels did. People jumping from the towers appeared on screen, unvarnished. Much of the world, he says, saw more of the violence that morning than the American public did.

Then the commentators began to talk. First came al-Qaeda. Then the conversation turned to Afghanistan. ABC News brought on Barnett Rubin of New York University, a longtime Afghanistan specialist, to lay the story out for Peter Jennings. Crews thought Rubin did a fine job. The problem was the framing itself. It helped cement the idea that al-Qaeda and the space called Afghanistan were the same thing.

His own mind went to war, and to who war would sweep up. By then his closest contact with Afghans had been with people displaced by decades of fighting, people he had met as refugees in Uzbekistan. He thought immediately of the defenseless, of men and women with nothing to do with the politics of that morning. At lunch in a nearly deserted Washington, he sat with other historians and felt a great wall of destruction opening. The American state, he thought, was about to destroy in the wrong geography.

Crews did not set out to become an Afghanistan historian. In 1997 he was in Tashkent finishing dissertation research on Islam and the Russian empire. He had only a vague idea that Afghanistan was next door. An American friend who seemed to run the entire local market introduced him to a few Afghan merchants. They found out he had nowhere to live and took him in as a roommate.

They were a trading diaspora. They had brought matches from Riga, in Latvia, and flour and agricultural goods from Egypt. The containers sat in Tashkent waiting for permission to trade, so the men had time. They dressed in suits and ties, polished their shoes, drank tea, ate pistachios, took a large lunch, and went out at night. Crews was stuck too: Uzbekistan's state archives were suspicious of a foreign researcher, and approval took forever. The downtime made them close.

The young men in their twenties had already lived in six or seven countries and spoke half a dozen languages. One of Crews's best friends had trained in Tehran as a kickboxer and breakdancer; his father had worked in Afghan theater; he could tell, in detail, how he had escaped death in the civil war and then escaped it again after fleeing. That community became the baseline for how Crews understood the country. Afghans could look optically remote, stuck in time. A family's actual trajectory could be worldly in the extreme. He later wrote *Afghan Modern* to argue that this place has been cosmopolitan for centuries: traders moving across Eurasia, a scholar in the family who studied around the Middle East and South Asia, ancestors who drove horses as far as Moscow.

Islam was not a single posture either. The men he knew in Tashkent wore him out because they wanted to go out every night. One friend, discussing alcohol, drew a simple line: you can drink, just don't get drunk. Uzbeks he met often treated vodka as national culture and still called themselves devout. The American conversation after 9/11 flattened all of that into one tradition and then turned the flattening into an argument for violence. For anyone who studies a place, he says, it is always disconcerting to watch your field get used that way.

If the question is what Washington should have done differently, Crews starts with an intelligence failure that predates the bombs. Richard Clarke, the national security official tasked with tracking al-Qaeda, had produced a dossier under Clinton and passed it to the incoming Bush team. Condoleezza Rice, Crews's Stanford colleague, had just published a *Foreign Affairs* essay that framed the era as great-power politics: the rise of China, the problem of Russia. Clinton officials, he says, kept repeating that the bear had to stay in its cage, an image with roots in nineteenth-century European thought about the Russian empire and a long afterlife in Reaganism.

By the time Bush took office, the FBI had been following al-Qaeda figures for months. Crews estimates that perhaps a dozen were already training inside the United States. The 9/11 hijackers were a hodgepodge from around the world, but most of them were Saudi. That was known, or presumed, very early. An Egyptian among them had been studying urban planning in Germany. The geography of the retaliation still did not add up. Afghanistan, in this reading, was a soft target: a place to stage explosions, recapture a sense of American supremacy, and satisfy an old-fashioned urge for revenge.

The organization called itself *al-Qaeda*, a word that can mean the base or the center. Crews insists that center lived in the imagination. Bin Laden bounced from country to country. His people were scattered across the globe. The movement was transnational. Tying it to one piece of land was, as intelligence logic, already broken. The men who have led this current are mostly not religious scholars. They come out of engineering, medicine, and the practical sciences, then bring that mindset to fields of religious interpretation that real scholars spend decades learning. Bin Laden was an engineer. Some biographers say he was a playboy with family money for much of his youth.

On camera he performed something else. He sat in front of a wall of Arabic books with a Kalashnikov, looking like a scholar's study. He played at modesty: low voice, averted gaze, an attempt at poetry. Fridman and Crews linger on the chin as a joke about power. Mussolini used the chin. Wrestlers use the chin. It is a male-to-male attack posture. Bin Laden did the opposite. He offered shyness, a message handed over rather than a chest thumped. Invisibility can be a source of authority because it invites fantasy. Mullah Omar was rarely seen. The Taliban's later supreme leader is almost never seen. Mystery, Crews says, is cultivated so that people can project whatever they need onto the man in the shadows.

Bin Laden was a visitor in Afghanistan, not a native son of its history. He came from a Saudi elite family with a Yemeni, Arabian Sea genealogy and no Pashtun tie to the country until the 1980s, when he joined thousands of other young Saudis in Peshawar who wanted a part in the anti-Soviet jihad. Most of the Arabs who went opened hospitals or schools. The Bin Laden family business was engineering and construction; he is thought to have used those skills and connections to build. There are photographs of him firing a gun for show. Whether he ever fired one in what we would call combat is unclear.

The fighting that mattered was Afghan. Crews's timeline is blunt. Leftists seized power in 1978. Soviet forces crossed from Uzbekistan in 1979 to shore up that government. The Red Army occupied the country for a decade and killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians, perhaps as many as two million. Gorbachev, coming to power in 1985, pushed Moscow's Afghan clients toward a unity government. Najibullah agreed to make space for opponents. The United States, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia backed a refusal: no reconciliation, push him off the cliff. The last Soviet troops left in early 1989. Najibullah's government lasted until 1992. Afghans did perhaps 95 percent of the fighting and dying. Arabs swam in that ocean. Some later went home. The Saudi monarchy, Crews says, used Afghanistan as a safety valve: televised fundraisers, chartered jets, an offer to would-be dissidents to fight somewhere else and leave the kingdom alone.

When Crews teaches Bin Laden, he starts with a premise. This is a man who took innocent life again and again and was aspirationally genocidal. Then the class reads the texts. Students are shocked. The arguments are sophisticated. He uses the word imperialism. He knows geography. He speaks differently to different audiences, the way a politician does. The core is human suffering, mapped mostly onto the Muslim world: Kashmir, Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq. He also talks environmental ruin and the West's abuse of women, in a feminist register that startles the women in the room. After the Gulf War, Crews says, much of the world saw the carnage of the Iraqi army and the sanctions-era suffering of Iraqi children. He recalls Madeleine Albright on *60 Minutes*, asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were worth containing Saddam Hussein, answering on camera that it was worth it.

Put those images together and you can see why some young men are drawn to self-sacrifice. You will not recognize our suffering, the argument runs, so we will speak the only language you understand. That does not make Bin Laden an Islamic thinker. A real scholar, Crews says, could negate 99 percent of the religious claims. He is a cosmopolitan who plays in modern ideologies: antisemitism, populism, environmentalism, class, gender. You can buy Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in any language. For years you could not easily buy Bin Laden in English. Verso in the United Kingdom published *Messages to the World*, the first real compendium. Crews's judgment is direct: the powers that be did not trust the public to know what the man was actually saying. The blood on his hands also limited him. Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement. Jeremy Prestholdt has written about children in East Africa wearing Bin Laden shirts next to Bob Marley and Tupac: a partial embrace of rebelliousness, by some people, under certain conditions. Fridman wonders whether the world was simply lucky that the writing and the speeches were not more contagious. Crews does not reject the point. He adds another: reading Bin Laden is a way of taking him out of Islam.

Some scholars describe the Taliban as polycentric: different cities, different interests, a caravan that people join for different reasons. Crews says he was always skeptical. How do they know? This is an organization that does not want you to know where the money comes from. After August 15, 2021, he thinks the picture is clear. They are an astoundingly well-organized clerical-military force with a cohesive, enduring, and quite idiosyncratic ideology. A lot of the polycentric talk, he suggests, was a way of talking while a war was still on.

Sticking the Deobandi school on them does not help much. It is like saying someone is an MIT person: a campus can hold dozens of intellectual orientations. The core is ethnic politics. They represent a vision of Pashtun power. Pashtun identity itself is fluid. People speak multiple dialects, live on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, keep genealogies, or say they are Pashtun without speaking Pashto. Plenty of Pashtuns want nothing to do with the Taliban and say so. In propaganda the movement claims to represent all Afghans and all pious Muslims, and in recent years it has advertised Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara recruits, especially in the north among people furious at the government. Watch who was appointed after August 15, Crews says, and the answer is still Pashtun, male, and tightly disciplined.

The brand is public morality. The origin story, dated to 1994, is that they broke up a gang of criminals who were trying to rape people. Sex, order, and the restoration of morals sit at the center of the narrative. How any of that becomes a banking system is a problem they have never sorted out. Crews asks the question directly: if your intellectual priorities are the length of a beard, how do you run a state? What recruits young fighters is the promise of martyrdom. Many foot soldiers lost family in air strikes and night raids. Orphans have always been a stream. They grow up in all-male worlds, hearing rumors about Kabul. Martyrdom is not bizarre inside religious traditions. It is alien to many American Marines, and it still has to be understood, even if it is not accepted.

The hard pivot now is from martyrdom to government. Some Taliban have told foreign journalists that being in charge is boring, that they want to keep fighting, maybe in Pakistan. Crews notes that many people never become honest enough with themselves to say that out loud. It is the athlete who retires and does not know what the days are for. They have also walked into cities that are not the 1990s. Women have stood in their faces demanding rights, education, and work. Foot soldiers freeze; they do not know what to do with women, or with being yelled at, even while cameras are still around. When the cameras leave, he expects it to get worse. They beat NATO with light arms, mines, suicide attacks, and, by the end, captured American equipment. That fact, he says, has not yet sunk in.

Some numbers change Crews's tone. The world did not begin counting civilian casualties in Afghanistan until 2009. The war had already run for eight years. The United States, he says, never accounted for those deaths and never even counted them. Trump escalated the air war and, with it, civilian casualties. A great deal of the killing on the ground was uglier still: night raids into a hamlet, a massacre, then a dishonest story about what happened. That dynamic kept feeding the Taliban from below. The United States and its allies killed tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Taliban fighters. The supply of fighters never ran out. Solidarity, male bonding, martyrdom, revenge, and the fact of a foreign invader kept producing more.

Through Hoover Institution placements, American officers sometimes sat in Crews's Stanford classes. He has liked a number of them. One said he understood why villagers still fought: the week before, the Americans had killed fourteen people from that village. The men on the ground were not stupid about the human dimension. Nobody got off the highway. Elections were part of the same theater. The State Department, Crews says, doubled down again and again on fraudulent parliamentary and presidential votes, from the beginning. The show was partly for American audiences: we are building democracy, so we cannot exit. In reality the project was control, and ballots were one tool for gathering it.

Young people still took the promise seriously. They went to university. They had experiences their parents never had. The disillusionment visible now is partly that they believed the United States when they were younger and later became sharp enough to see a farce. Indirectly, the twenty years still taught a generation that democracy was possible and then showed them what it is not. Crews will not put that on an American scoreboard. Much of it happened against what Washington wanted. The best American project he names is the American University of Afghanistan. He regrets that the United States did not fund twenty more and scatter them across the country. The thirst for higher education was extraordinary and never met. Money went into primary schooling, much of it fraudulent. Meanwhile Afghans built their own public sphere: arts, criticism, music, television. He recommends the documentary *Afghan Star*, a singing contest with a vote, generators hooked to televisions, a faint practice of democracy. Literacy rates miss what people actually hear when a book is read aloud or a cheap phone opens the world.

A younger cohort tried to put civic nationalism ahead of ethnic blocs, posting that they were Hazara and also Tajik and also Uzbek. It was utopian. On August 15 the door shut. An Afghan American student of Crews's, newly a PhD, keeps asking a question he has polished: why did you go to war in our country when this was never about us? You never asked us when you were coming. You never asked us when you were leaving. We tried to make the most of it, and then you pulled the rug out. He rejects the claim that Biden had no choice. Every president writes his own foreign policy. The administration did not have to keep Trump's Doha timetable or give up Bagram on that clock. The false alternative was withdraw now or fight twenty-one more years. The banks are frozen as leverage on the Taliban. A cousin in California cannot easily send a hundred dollars for bread. Hospitals lean on international NGOs. Adult women have been told to stay home. Pakistan closes borders and plays a double game. Crews's forecast that winter was malnutrition and famine claiming tens of thousands of lives, perhaps hundreds of thousands, with no framework in place to stop it.

Crews is a critic of empire. Colonialism still works and still does harm, and scholars should point to it. Racism, gendered exploitation, and the living fruits of conquest in the Americas are part of that work. The last months in Afghanistan, he says, made him more humble. He has watched people take joy in the American expulsion, calling it an anti-colonial victory. He understands the story. He does not think it is enough.

Part of being an empire is that you can get up and leave. You can remake a country's politics on one day and, when the place stops advancing your agenda, walk away. He points to 1947 on the subcontinent: British withdrawal played a real role in the mass violence of Partition, even though many people chose, on their own, to pick up a knife. Agency is not the issue. The issue is capriciousness: political decisions about other people's lives made in secret, made willingly, beyond the accountability of those who will live with the result.

He still disagrees with Niall Ferguson about weighing the British empire's books and finding more good than bad. He has not become an apologist. He also wanted the United States out, and he wanted a political settlement. He wanted, as he puts it, his cake and to eat it too. Ending empire, in this mood, can be a continuation of imperial hubris. You are not really out of empire yet, not for the people living inside the decision. "Be careful what you asked for," he says of himself. The American University could have been built without an invasion. Invading Afghanistan and then Iraq did not end al-Qaeda or terrorism. Suicide bombing spread. Knowledge of how to do it expanded. The Islamic State, he adds, may be the best thing that ever happened to the Taliban, because a new counterterrorism pose is how they will seek recognition from neighbors and even from Moscow.

Fridman returns to a metaphor the two of them had already used. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden took turns driving. Exits kept appearing. None of them pulled off. The tank ran empty. Crews agrees that leadership failed, and he adds a structural point. The Pentagon used 2001 to expand its authority at the expense of other institutions. The State Department's diplomatic capacity became a shadow of what it once was. The country, he says, needs a reckoning about how it uses military power, why so much money goes to the armed forces, and what would be available if Americans held a more sensible view of what force can actually do.

He wants the word defeat said out loud. If you are an American militarist, you have to face the fact that you were beaten by men in sandals with AK-47s. There is no separate question of shame. There is a question of description. "We lost" is a sentence that should be spoken. Then there are the veterans. People lost limbs, eyes, and lives. Suicide among veterans has been a quiet epidemic. Crews has heard that the State Department is seeing a similar surge, from people watching an adult life's work collapse and taking midnight calls from Afghans they once entrusted with their lives, some of them already dead.

He has met enough officers to believe that many went as young people with the best intentions and learned to see gray. That, he says, is as much as one can hope for. What he does not want is a generation of disillusioned veterans becoming fuel for the right. Interwar Europe, in his teaching, is very much a story of mobilizing such men in the name of fascist politics. The collapse is already a gift to xenophobia. Germany had been ramping up Afghan deportations before Kabul fell. Center-right politicians now tell domestic audiences that they are the party that will protect you from the Afghans who are coming. Malnutrition and hunger will push people into neighboring states. For a resurgent European right, Crews says, that is useful politics, and it will not stay confined to Afghanistan.

What blocked some of those highway exits, Crews says, was an absence of truth. The lying is not a secret to anyone who followed the war. Fridman finds a sliver of hope in the internet: it hates inauthenticity and smells nonsense more sharply than older media. People are tired of the posture that the public is too busy or too simple for complexity, so leaders decide first and then invent a digestible story. They want to watch a leader struggle, change his mind, and admit that last month's certainty was wrong.

The headline in front of them was the drone strike of August 29, in the last hours of the Kabul evacuation. It killed an entire family, mostly children. The United States later acknowledged that the target was not the ISIS bomb cell it thought it had found. The next day's quick review, as Crews heard it from people who watch these statements, was taken almost whole cloth from the language the government uses after every such strike. Officials pointed to technical errors. They denied procedural mistakes. They had followed policy. Legalese turned a war crime into something that was not a crime. That, he says, is a refusal of accountability.

Fridman had just spoken with Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, and used the moment to press a related point about Anthony Fauci. The issue was not the early uncertainty about masks. Uncertainty was understandable. The issue was how a small error gets communicated. Saying we thought this was true and it was not builds trust. The legalese reflex destroys it. Crews takes the handoff without strain: accountability, honesty, openness, the admission of mistakes. Humility, he says, is the key to all learning. Over-analogizing is another kind of laziness. Kabul airport and the Saigon embassy are close enough to be juxtaposed and not the same. Before 9/11, security agencies lacked the imagination to treat an airliner as a weapon, even though a plot in Germany had aimed an airplane at Atatürk's mausoleum in Ankara, and even though Joseph Conrad's *The Secret Agent* is about a conspiracy to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. Novels and films stretch the sense of what people might do. Security, Crews adds, is also other people's perception of their own insecurity, and that perception unleashes a web of emotion.

Asked to speak about the Afghan people, Crews first declines the grand statement. He is an outsider. He points to films instead. *Afghan Star* takes you into ordinary homes: artists who want to be known, a woman who gets into trouble for dancing, people who love music and poetry and want their children safe. *Love Crimes of Kabul* is set in a women's prison in the world the Americans helped shape after 2000. The charges range from homicide, which one woman admits, to sex outside marriage. Islamic law is the judicial logic. Continuity with the earlier Taliban period is part of the point. The women do not all claim innocence. One is in prison as a way to pressure a fiancé to marry her. There is ethnicity, a Romeo-and-Juliet plot, love, money, clothing, furniture. When Crews screened it, a brilliant Afghan Fulbright student at Stanford's education school sat in discomfort. This was not the Afghanistan she wanted shown. American students, he says, recognized the women anyway, because they were so real.

He names Khaled Hosseini, whom many American readers already know, and the Hazara visual artist Khadim Ali, based in Australia, who blends Persian miniature tradition with contemporary political commentary. Ali's work has been shown in New York, Europe, and Australia. He talks about migration in a way that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center and still speaks to a universal crisis of displacement. The visual language comes from the *Shahnameh*, the Persian Book of Kings, which Iranian and Afghan children can quote at length. Mythic figures of good and evil become everyday speech. Wordplay across several languages, Crews says, is a major value of Afghan storytelling, closer to the Russian habit of talking through literary reference than to most American conversation.

Humor and hospitality belong in the same portrait. A TikTok of an Irish comedian riffing on Irish and German stereotypes around guests made the rounds among Crews's Afghan acquaintances. An Afghan woman commented that she had not known the Irish were just white Afghans. The politics of refusal, the rule that you do not take what is offered the first time, the heat of receiving a guest: that is the country you miss if you only watch war and the moving pieces of a map. There is no single gender script either. Some Afghans will do family life differently from an American visitor. Others will say every woman should be educated and should work. Humility, he says, is the only useful starting point.

Fridman closes on Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet born on land that is now Afghanistan. Crews will not walk into the ownership fight. Some Afghans are militant: he is ours. Others will say he is Iranian, Sufi, Muslim, Central Asian, Turkic. He is a Rorschach blot, something special to everyone. Madonna helped make him famous in the United States, for better and worse; there used to be Rumi merchandise at Starbucks. The translations are bitterly disputed, and the internet is full of fake quotes. "Rumi said, always be your best." He did not say that.

Crews still likes Rumi as a gateway to the ecumenism and cosmopolitanism he keeps insisting on. The Afghans he actually met were fluent in Russian, German, Turkish, Dari, and Pashto. Some had been to university; some had not. He likes the category of the popular intellectual: a person whose worldly knowledge is not limited to a province or a village, and who did not acquire it as a privilege. They learned because they had to adapt. Ask what an Afghan does for a living and the résumé can run shoe seller, taxi driver, surgeon, all in one person. That is not a fairy tale of curiosity. It is a survival document.

The same humility applies to names. After twenty years of war, calling someone an Afghani still stings, because Afghani is the currency; the people are Afghans. Pronunciation of the country's name is more forgiving than Parisian French, until the moment already feels like betrayal. The usable work, as Crews describes his own, is to read the primary texts instead of the commentary, to watch the films that show people calculating a life, and to treat analogy as a tool that can lie. Four presidents had exits. The institutional failure was not a villain opening a gas valve. It was the refusal, at the right mile marker, to say we stop here.