Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East

Lex Fridman (01:14.680)

I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us,

Robert Crews (01:17.160)

not to say I was clairvoyant or could see into the future,

Lex Fridman (01:19.800)

but I think many of us were, from that morning,

Robert Crews (01:22.360)

skeptical about the connections that people were drawing

Lex Fridman (01:24.240)

between Afghanistan as a state, as a place,

Lex Fridman (01:27.560)

and the actions of Al Qaeda in Washington

Lex Fridman (01:30.160)

and New York and Pennsylvania.

Lex Fridman (01:32.960)

So as you watch the events of 9 11,

Lex Fridman (01:35.880)

the things that our leaders were saying

Robert Crews (01:40.240)

in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed,

Lex Fridman (01:44.720)

maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline

Robert Crews (01:47.720)

of what was being said.

Lex Fridman (01:49.680)

One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (01:52.240)

And also, what were your feelings

Lex Fridman (01:55.320)

in the minutes, weeks after 9 11?

Robert Crews (01:59.400)

I was in DC.

Lex Fridman (02:00.360)

I was on the way to American University

Robert Crews (02:04.120)

hearing on NPR what had happened.

Lex Fridman (02:07.200)

And I thought of the American University logo,

Robert Crews (02:10.520)

which is red, white, and blue.

Lex Fridman (02:11.720)

It's an eagle.

Lex Fridman (02:12.960)

And I thought Washington is under attack

Lex Fridman (02:15.360)

and symbols of American power are under attack.

Lex Fridman (02:18.600)

And so I was quite concerned and at the time lived

Lex Fridman (02:22.200)

just a few miles from the capital.

Lex Fridman (02:24.760)

And so I felt that it was real.

Lex Fridman (02:28.360)

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

Lex Fridman (02:32.240)

And four, two, three years later in DC,

Lex Fridman (02:35.320)

we were constantly getting reports,

Robert Crews (02:37.680)

mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks

Lex Fridman (02:40.800)

that befall the city.

Lex Fridman (02:41.640)

So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.

Lex Fridman (02:46.200)

But in watching television,

Robert Crews (02:47.240)

including Russian television that day,

Lex Fridman (02:48.680)

because I just installed a satellite thing.

Lex Fridman (02:51.200)

So I was trying to watch world news

Lex Fridman (02:52.400)

and get different points of view.

Lex Fridman (02:53.240)

And that was quite useful

Lex Fridman (02:54.920)

to have an alternative set of eyes.

Lex Fridman (02:57.320)

In Russian?

Lex Fridman (02:58.160)

Yeah, in Russian, yeah.

Robert Crews (02:59.360)

Okay, so your Russians is good enough

Lex Fridman (03:01.440)

to understand Russian television.

Robert Crews (03:03.120)

The news, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming

Lex Fridman (03:05.520)

that were not shown on American television.

Robert Crews (03:07.920)

I don't know how they had it, but they had,

Lex Fridman (03:09.280)

they were not filtering anything

Robert Crews (03:11.320)

in the way that the major networks

Lex Fridman (03:13.080)

and cable televisions were doing here.

Lex Fridman (03:14.520)

So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence

Lex Fridman (03:17.720)

of the moment in New York City

Robert Crews (03:19.400)

of people diving from the towers or being,

Lex Fridman (03:22.320)

and it was really, they didn't hold back on that,

Robert Crews (03:24.440)

which was quite fascinating.

Lex Fridman (03:26.280)

I think much of the world saw much more

Robert Crews (03:27.560)

than actually the American public saw.

Lex Fridman (03:29.880)

But to your question, amid that feeling of imminent doom,

Robert Crews (03:33.760)

I watched commentators start to talk about Al Qaeda

Lex Fridman (03:36.840)

and then talk about Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (03:39.080)

And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin,

Lex Fridman (03:42.880)

who's at NYU, who's a kind of long,

Robert Crews (03:45.760)

very learned Afghanistan hand.

Lex Fridman (03:48.560)

And he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News

Robert Crews (03:50.480)

to kind of lay this out for everyone.

Lex Fridman (03:54.080)

And I thought, you know, he did a fine job,

Lex Fridman (03:55.320)

but I think it was formative in submitting the view

Lex Fridman (03:57.920)

that somehow Al Qaeda was synonymous

Robert Crews (04:00.160)

with this space, Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (04:02.040)

And I think, again, I was no Al Qaeda expert then,

Lex Fridman (04:06.240)

and I'm not now, but I think my immediate thought

Lex Fridman (04:09.160)

went to war and because my background had been with,

Robert Crews (04:13.720)

at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced

Lex Fridman (04:15.840)

from decades of war,

Robert Crews (04:17.720)

whom I encountered in Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (04:19.080)

who were refugees and so on.

Robert Crews (04:20.920)

I thought immediately, my mind went to the suffering

Lex Fridman (04:24.080)

of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep up,

Robert Crews (04:28.240)

of course, the defenseless people

Lex Fridman (04:30.000)

who have nothing to do with these politics.

Lex Fridman (04:31.400)

So we should give maybe a little bit of context

Lex Fridman (04:33.280)

that you could speak to.

Lex Fridman (04:35.200)

So assume nobody's an expert at anything.

Lex Fridman (04:38.240)

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

Robert Crews (04:43.280)

What, as a historian, were you studying at the time

Lex Fridman (04:46.400)

and thinking about, is it the full global history

Lex Fridman (04:52.200)

of Afghanistan?

Lex Fridman (04:53.680)

Is it the region?

Robert Crews (04:55.400)

Were you thinking about the Mujahideen

Lex Fridman (04:58.880)

and Al Qaeda and Taliban?

Robert Crews (05:01.720)

Were you thinking about the Soviet Union,

Lex Fridman (05:04.160)

the proxy war through Afghanistan?

Lex Fridman (05:06.600)

Were you thinking about Iraq and oil?

Lex Fridman (05:09.880)

What's the full space of things in your heart,

Lex Fridman (05:12.760)

in your mind at the time?

Lex Fridman (05:14.320)

I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was just the sense

Robert Crews (05:16.440)

of the suffering and the tragedy

Lex Fridman (05:19.480)

of the moment of the deaths.

Lex Fridman (05:21.400)

And that was, I think, I was preoccupied

Lex Fridman (05:23.320)

by the violence of the moment.

Lex Fridman (05:26.280)

But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (05:28.520)

as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment,

Robert Crews (05:31.320)

I think immediately what came to mind

Lex Fridman (05:32.360)

was that little I knew about Al Qaeda at the time

Robert Crews (05:34.640)

suggested that the geography was inaccurate,

Lex Fridman (05:38.120)

that this was a global network, a global threat,

Robert Crews (05:41.320)

that this was a movement that went beyond borders.

Lex Fridman (05:45.200)

And I think that it felt early on

Robert Crews (05:47.200)

that Afghanistan was gonna be used as a scapegoat.

Lex Fridman (05:50.480)

And intellectually at the time,

Robert Crews (05:51.640)

I was teaching at American University.

Lex Fridman (05:52.960)

My courses touched on a range of subjects,

Lex Fridman (05:56.320)

but I was trying to complete a book

Lex Fridman (05:58.240)

on Islam and the Russian Empire, actually.

Lex Fridman (06:01.160)

But in doing that research, which took me across Russia

Lex Fridman (06:04.040)

and Central Asia, purely by accident,

Robert Crews (06:06.520)

I had developed an interest in Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (06:08.520)

because just, again, a series of coincidences.

Robert Crews (06:12.720)

I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (06:15.280)

without housing, through an American friend

Robert Crews (06:17.960)

who was like the king of the market in Tashkent.

Lex Fridman (06:20.160)

He knew everyone.

Robert Crews (06:21.400)

He ran into some Afghan merchants there.

Lex Fridman (06:24.400)

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

Robert Crews (06:26.760)

I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly.

Lex Fridman (06:28.240)

This was 1997.

Robert Crews (06:29.320)

I had a vague idea it was next door.

Lex Fridman (06:30.560)

Well, you lived in Uzbekistan?

Robert Crews (06:32.160)

Yeah, in Tashkent, doing dissertation research, yeah.

Lex Fridman (06:35.000)

Because it was hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia.

Lex Fridman (06:37.880)

So just by accident, I met with these young Afghans

Lex Fridman (06:40.240)

who took me in as roommates.

Lex Fridman (06:42.720)

And that, I think, the sense of that community

Lex Fridman (06:46.240)

shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.

Robert Crews (06:48.480)

It was my first exposure to them.

Lex Fridman (06:51.160)

They were part of a trading diaspora.

Robert Crews (06:53.480)

They had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.

Lex Fridman (06:57.440)

They had somehow brought flour

Lex Fridman (06:59.960)

and some agricultural products from Egypt.

Lex Fridman (07:02.800)

And they were sitting in closed containers in Tashkent

Robert Crews (07:06.480)

waiting for the Uzbekistan state to permit them to trade.

Lex Fridman (07:10.120)

So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.

Robert Crews (07:11.880)

They'll get dressed up.

Lex Fridman (07:12.800)

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

Robert Crews (07:15.160)

They'd polish their shoes.

Lex Fridman (07:16.480)

And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios.

Robert Crews (07:21.800)

Then they'd feast at lunch.

Lex Fridman (07:23.240)

And then at night, we would go out.

Lex Fridman (07:25.120)

So part of my research,

Lex Fridman (07:26.800)

because I also had a bottleneck in my research,

Robert Crews (07:28.160)

I was going to the state archives in Tashkent.

Lex Fridman (07:31.880)

And because of the state of Uzbekistan,

Robert Crews (07:34.160)

that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do.

Lex Fridman (07:36.560)

So it took a while to get in.

Lex Fridman (07:38.200)

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

Lex Fridman (07:41.600)

So I got to know them pretty well.

Lex Fridman (07:42.800)

And it was really just an accidental kind of thing,

Lex Fridman (07:45.880)

but grew quite close to them.

Lex Fridman (07:47.600)

And I developed an appreciation of,

Lex Fridman (07:50.520)

which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this,

Robert Crews (07:53.280)

these people had already lived,

Lex Fridman (07:55.800)

young guys in their 20s,

Robert Crews (07:57.240)

they'd already lived in six or seven countries.

Lex Fridman (07:59.840)

They all spoke half a dozen languages.

Robert Crews (08:02.040)

One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer

Lex Fridman (08:06.080)

and break dancer, trained in Tehran.

Robert Crews (08:08.240)

His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (08:11.240)

He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan

Robert Crews (08:14.480)

during the civil war, going to Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (08:16.960)

escaping death there.

Lex Fridman (08:18.640)

And these were very real stories.

Lex Fridman (08:21.200)

Can you also just briefly mention,

Robert Crews (08:23.920)

geographically speaking,

Lex Fridman (08:25.880)

Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran.

Lex Fridman (08:29.840)

Who are the neighbors of all of this?

Lex Fridman (08:32.680)

What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?

Robert Crews (08:35.200)

I was always terrible at geography and spatial information.

Lex Fridman (08:38.800)

So can you lay it out?

Robert Crews (08:39.960)

Yeah, sure, sure.

Lex Fridman (08:40.960)

So Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan.

Robert Crews (08:44.280)

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

Lex Fridman (08:49.680)

The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim

Robert Crews (08:52.960)

dynasty in 1865.

Lex Fridman (08:55.360)

It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power

Robert Crews (08:59.320)

in Central Asia after 1917.

Lex Fridman (09:01.760)

It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan,

Robert Crews (09:06.800)

which becomes independent finally in 1991

Lex Fridman (09:09.160)

when the Soviet Union collapses.

Lex Fridman (09:10.720)

So these are all like these republics

Lex Fridman (09:14.400)

are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia.

Robert Crews (09:18.400)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (09:19.320)

And they've been independent since 1991,

Lex Fridman (09:22.360)

but they have struggled to disentangle themselves

Lex Fridman (09:25.560)

from Moscow, from one another.

Lex Fridman (09:28.280)

And now they face very serious pressure from China

Lex Fridman (09:31.320)

to form a kind of periphery of the great machine

Robert Crews (09:34.880)

that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions

Lex Fridman (09:37.680)

to stretch across Asia.

Robert Crews (09:40.840)

For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends

Lex Fridman (09:43.640)

hailed from, Afghanistan had fallen into civil war

Robert Crews (09:49.760)

in the late 1970s when leftists tried

Lex Fridman (09:52.240)

to seize power there in 1978.

Robert Crews (09:54.680)

The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (09:58.400)

crossing the border with its forces in 1979

Robert Crews (10:01.600)

to try to shore up this leftist government

Lex Fridman (10:03.640)

that had seized power in 1978.

Lex Fridman (10:06.360)

And so for Central Asians in the wider region,

Lex Fridman (10:11.000)

their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan

Robert Crews (10:13.920)

in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected

Lex Fridman (10:17.400)

in the 1980s when the Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan

Robert Crews (10:21.880)

for 10 years.

Lex Fridman (10:23.280)

And here, I refer your listeners and viewers

Robert Crews (10:25.120)

to Rainbow Three as the guide to.

Lex Fridman (10:28.600)

The historically accurate guide.

Robert Crews (10:30.080)

The historically accurate, the Bible.

Lex Fridman (10:32.320)

The Bible of Afghan history in Rainbow Three, yeah.

Robert Crews (10:34.440)

As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war.

Lex Fridman (10:39.320)

But for us Afghans, there are people who fought

Robert Crews (10:41.720)

against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation,

Lex Fridman (10:46.560)

the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.

Lex Fridman (10:50.840)

And so they fled in waves by the millions

Lex Fridman (10:54.040)

to Pakistan, to Iran.

Robert Crews (10:56.680)

Some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in the 1990s.

Lex Fridman (11:00.520)

And some were displaced across the planet.

Lex Fridman (11:02.200)

So California, where we're sitting today,

Lex Fridman (11:03.960)

has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s

Robert Crews (11:07.920)

in the East Bay.

Lex Fridman (11:09.680)

Can I ask a quick question that's a little bit of a tangent?

Robert Crews (11:12.720)

Yep.

Lex Fridman (11:13.920)

What is the correct or the respectful way

Lex Fridman (11:17.720)

to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran?

Lex Fridman (11:25.840)

So as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (11:28.600)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (11:30.040)

The an versus the an.

Robert Crews (11:32.400)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (11:33.240)

Is it a different country by country?

Robert Crews (11:34.720)

As an English speaker in America,

Lex Fridman (11:37.160)

is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan?

Lex Fridman (11:41.360)

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

Lex Fridman (11:44.440)

What are your thoughts on this?

Robert Crews (11:45.400)

That's a fascinating question.

Lex Fridman (11:47.240)

I defer to the people from those countries

Robert Crews (11:50.160)

to, of course, sort out those politics.

Lex Fridman (11:52.600)

I think one of the fascinating things about the region

Robert Crews (11:55.080)

broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures

Lex Fridman (11:57.080)

and it's really quite cosmopolitan.

Lex Fridman (12:00.040)

So I think people are mostly quite forgiving

Lex Fridman (12:02.000)

about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (12:04.560)

It's not like Paris.

Lex Fridman (12:05.840)

Yeah, right, right.

Robert Crews (12:06.680)

The French are not forgiving.

Lex Fridman (12:07.880)

No, no, no.

Robert Crews (12:08.720)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (12:09.560)

I think people are very, very forgiving.

Lex Fridman (12:10.680)

And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive

Lex Fridman (12:15.680)

in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, Iraq, Iraq.

Robert Crews (12:22.080)

I think there's going to be a fit

Lex Fridman (12:24.960)

between certain ways of pronouncing these places

Lex Fridman (12:27.440)

and the position that Americans take about them.

Lex Fridman (12:30.960)

So it's more jarring when people say Iraq

Lex Fridman (12:36.240)

and it comes with a claim that a certain kind of person

Lex Fridman (12:41.480)

should be the victim of violence or.

Robert Crews (12:43.440)

Yeah, that's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (12:44.560)

It's kind of like talking about the Democratic Party

Robert Crews (12:47.040)

or the Democrat Party.

Lex Fridman (12:48.440)

It's sometimes using certain kind of terminology

Robert Crews (12:51.720)

to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement

Lex Fridman (12:57.720)

about your beliefs.

Robert Crews (12:58.680)

That's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (12:59.520)

Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran,

Robert Crews (13:02.640)

I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional

Lex Fridman (13:04.840)

in the case of a Democrat or is it just a,

Robert Crews (13:07.280)

you know, and it's a whatever.

Lex Fridman (13:08.120)

Again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people I know

Robert Crews (13:10.560)

have been very cool about that.

Lex Fridman (13:12.880)

What annoys Afghans now, I can say,

Robert Crews (13:15.440)

I think it's fair to say,

Lex Fridman (13:16.280)

I don't mean to speak for many people,

Robert Crews (13:18.320)

for the entire group of people,

Lex Fridman (13:20.080)

but I can just share with our non Afghan friends.

Robert Crews (13:24.360)

The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense

Lex Fridman (13:28.600)

because that's the name of the currency.

Lex Fridman (13:29.920)

And so lots of people ask, you know, why having,

Lex Fridman (13:34.400)

especially again, it's more directed at Americans

Robert Crews (13:36.600)

because, you know, we've been so deeply involved

Lex Fridman (13:38.400)

in that country obviously for the last 20 years, right?

Lex Fridman (13:40.920)

So Afghans ask why after 20 years,

Lex Fridman (13:43.360)

are you still calling us the wrong name?

Lex Fridman (13:45.320)

What is the right name of somebody?

Lex Fridman (13:47.360)

They prefer Afghans.

Robert Crews (13:48.440)

Afghans.

Lex Fridman (13:49.280)

Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency.

Lex Fridman (13:52.160)

And so.

Lex Fridman (13:53.000)

I just dodged a bullet

Robert Crews (13:54.000)

because I was gonna say Afghans.

Lex Fridman (13:54.840)

That's cool, no, no, no, yeah, I hear you.

Robert Crews (13:56.040)

That's really great to know.

Lex Fridman (13:57.280)

Yeah, and it's, again, I think,

Lex Fridman (13:59.360)

but I would emphasize that people are quite open

Lex Fridman (14:02.240)

and, you know, it's a whole region of incredible diversity

Lex Fridman (14:06.160)

and respect for linguistic pluralism actually.

Lex Fridman (14:09.800)

So I think that, you know,

Lex Fridman (14:11.200)

but I also appreciate that in this context,

Lex Fridman (14:14.240)

when there's a lot of pain, you know,

Robert Crews (14:16.120)

in the Afghan diaspora community in particular,

Lex Fridman (14:18.840)

you know, being called the wrong name after 20 years

Robert Crews (14:22.000)

when they already feel so betrayed at this moment,

Lex Fridman (14:24.800)

you know, just kind of,

Robert Crews (14:25.760)

if one follows this on social media,

Lex Fridman (14:27.960)

that is one kind of hot wire, right?

Robert Crews (14:32.160)

Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation

Lex Fridman (14:35.400)

is because, yes, it is true

Robert Crews (14:37.360)

that there are certain things when mispronounced

Lex Fridman (14:39.880)

kind of reveal that you don't care enough

Robert Crews (14:42.800)

to pronounce correctly.

Lex Fridman (14:44.320)

So I don't know enough to pronounce correctly

Lex Fridman (14:47.040)

and you dismiss the culture and the people,

Lex Fridman (14:49.760)

which I think as per your writing is something that,

Robert Crews (14:54.960)

if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (14:57.160)

just because I'm used to it.

Robert Crews (14:58.480)

I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (15:01.520)

Yeah, that's great.

Robert Crews (15:02.880)

As you do in your writing,

Lex Fridman (15:04.560)

Afghanistan suffers from much misunderstanding

Robert Crews (15:07.360)

from the rest of the world.

Lex Fridman (15:08.640)

But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,

Robert Crews (15:13.800)

the whole region that gives us context

Lex Fridman (15:17.600)

for the events of 9 11.

Robert Crews (15:18.880)

Right, right.

Lex Fridman (15:20.280)

So yeah, if we go back to that day

Lex Fridman (15:21.600)

and the weeks that followed,

Lex Fridman (15:23.880)

in my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent,

Robert Crews (15:28.040)

which was interesting.

Lex Fridman (15:28.880)

I mean, they were,

Lex Fridman (15:29.800)

so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US

Lex Fridman (15:33.080)

about 9 11, right?

Robert Crews (15:34.040)

Everyone to know what was the relationship

Lex Fridman (15:36.280)

between the civic violence and that religious tradition

Lex Fridman (15:39.840)

with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right?

Lex Fridman (15:45.160)

That became the issue, of course,

Robert Crews (15:47.000)

for American security institutions,

Lex Fridman (15:49.400)

for local state and police institutions, right?

Robert Crews (15:53.440)

I mean, it became the,

Lex Fridman (15:54.320)

I think it was the question

Robert Crews (15:55.560)

that most Americans had on their mind.

Lex Fridman (15:56.680)

So again, I didn't imagine myself as someone

Robert Crews (15:59.760)

who had all the answers, of course,

Lex Fridman (16:00.840)

but given my background

Lex Fridman (16:02.520)

and coming at this from Russian history,

Lex Fridman (16:04.600)

coming at this from studying empire

Lex Fridman (16:06.840)

and trying to think about the region broadly,

Lex Fridman (16:10.080)

I was very alarmed at the way that the conversation went.

Lex Fridman (16:12.840)

Can I ask you a question?

Lex Fridman (16:13.880)

What was your feeling on that morning of 9 11?

Lex Fridman (16:19.120)

Who did this?

Lex Fridman (16:20.240)

Isn't that a natural feeling?

Robert Crews (16:22.520)

It's coupled with fear of what's next,

Lex Fridman (16:25.640)

especially when you're in DC,

Lex Fridman (16:27.160)

but also who is this?

Lex Fridman (16:28.680)

Is this an accident?

Lex Fridman (16:30.280)

Is this a deliberate terrorist attack?

Lex Fridman (16:32.040)

Is this domestic?

Lex Fridman (16:34.960)

What were your thoughts of the options

Lex Fridman (16:37.440)

and the internal ranking given your expertise?

Robert Crews (16:41.040)

I suppose I was taken by the narrative

Lex Fridman (16:44.040)

that this was international.

Robert Crews (16:46.400)

I mean, I'd also lived in New York

Lex Fridman (16:47.920)

during one of the first bombings in 94

Robert Crews (16:50.760)

of the World Trade Center.

Lex Fridman (16:52.240)

So it was clear to me that a radical community

Robert Crews (16:53.920)

had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of,

Lex Fridman (16:58.280)

and I immediately thought it was a kind of blow

Robert Crews (17:03.200)

to American power.

Lex Fridman (17:04.320)

And I was drawn by the symbolism of it.

Robert Crews (17:08.840)

If you think of it as an act,

Lex Fridman (17:09.680)

it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will,

Robert Crews (17:13.120)

a kind of a way of speaking to,

Lex Fridman (17:16.840)

from a position of relative weakness,

Robert Crews (17:18.560)

speaking to an imperial power.

Lex Fridman (17:21.440)

And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that

Robert Crews (17:25.760)

with horrific real world consequences

Lex Fridman (17:28.960)

for all those innocent victims,

Robert Crews (17:30.960)

for the firemen, for the police,

Lex Fridman (17:32.000)

and just the horror of the moment.

Lex Fridman (17:35.600)

So I did see it as transcending the United States,

Lex Fridman (17:39.640)

but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily

Robert Crews (17:42.840)

to do fundamentally about Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (17:45.360)

and the history of the region that I'd been studying

Lex Fridman (17:48.000)

and the community people that I knew

Lex Fridman (17:49.760)

who were not particularly religious.

Robert Crews (17:52.360)

The guys I hung out with actually wore me out

Lex Fridman (17:54.200)

because they wanted to go out every night.

Robert Crews (17:56.120)

They wanted to party every night.

Lex Fridman (17:57.880)

Drinking?

Robert Crews (17:58.720)

Yep.

Lex Fridman (17:59.560)

We had discussions about alcohol.

Robert Crews (18:00.560)

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

Lex Fridman (18:02.720)

Drinking.

Robert Crews (18:03.560)

It's drinking.

Lex Fridman (18:04.400)

You know, it's.

Robert Crews (18:05.220)

That's something to look forward to.

Lex Fridman (18:06.060)

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

Lex Fridman (18:08.360)

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

Lex Fridman (18:11.400)

Early 2000s.

Robert Crews (18:12.680)

Well, in the mid 2000s, 2010s.

Lex Fridman (18:14.840)

So wait, so by the way, what drinking?

Lex Fridman (18:16.880)

Vodka?

Lex Fridman (18:17.720)

What's the, what's the weapon of choice?

Robert Crews (18:20.040)

Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice.

Lex Fridman (18:26.240)

And that, and it informs, you know, and it's,

Lex Fridman (18:28.280)

but the fascinating thing, you know, as a student,

Lex Fridman (18:30.040)

is what you're observing as a non Muslim.

Robert Crews (18:32.520)

You know, I'm a non Russian.

Lex Fridman (18:34.200)

I'm, this is all, you know, culturally new to me.

Lex Fridman (18:38.840)

And I'm, you know, a student of all that, right?

Lex Fridman (18:40.800)

As a grad student doing my work there.

Lex Fridman (18:42.520)

So you're like Jane Goodall of vodka and Russia.

Lex Fridman (18:45.280)

That's right.

Robert Crews (18:46.120)

You're just observing.

Lex Fridman (18:46.940)

That's right.

Robert Crews (18:47.780)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (18:48.620)

You get the Samogon, the grass vodka.

Robert Crews (18:51.280)

You get, you know, I have,

Lex Fridman (18:53.360)

I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier

Robert Crews (18:56.640)

that I'm not proud of, you know.

Lex Fridman (19:00.120)

But you got to know the people

Lex Fridman (19:01.520)

and some of them from, from, from.

Lex Fridman (19:03.000)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (19:03.840)

But intellectually, so the thing, I mean,

Lex Fridman (19:05.360)

the fascinating thing there was that, and just as a,

Lex Fridman (19:08.040)

I mean, there's a whole, you know, I'm a historian, right?

Lex Fridman (19:09.920)

But there, there are great contributions by, you know,

Robert Crews (19:14.400)

anthropologists and ethnographers who,

Lex Fridman (19:15.880)

who've gone across the planet

Lex Fridman (19:16.920)

and try to understand how Muslims understand the tradition

Lex Fridman (19:20.000)

at different contexts.

Lex Fridman (19:21.600)

So many Uzbeks will say, you know,

Lex Fridman (19:25.680)

this is part of our national culture

Lex Fridman (19:27.200)

to drink and eat as we please, right?

Lex Fridman (19:29.760)

And yet I'm a very devout Muslim.

Lex Fridman (19:31.620)

And so of course you can encounter

Lex Fridman (19:33.960)

other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right?

Lex Fridman (19:37.400)

But it's become kind of, I think it's very much,

Lex Fridman (19:40.120)

you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression

Robert Crews (19:42.360)

in each of these places.

Lex Fridman (19:43.200)

And so there are ways of thinking,

Robert Crews (19:45.360)

ways of performing, ways of, you know, enjoying oneself

Lex Fridman (19:49.760)

that are shared across Soviet and former Soviet space

Lex Fridman (19:53.320)

to this day, right?

Lex Fridman (19:54.640)

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

Robert Crews (19:57.800)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (19:59.120)

There's an article that, there was a paywall,

Robert Crews (1:00:01.880)

who never succeeded in anything.

Lex Fridman (1:00:04.400)

But others had at least one thing,

Robert Crews (1:00:06.480)

had a wife and family who he widowed and orphaned.

Lex Fridman (1:00:10.480)

And so there's no, I mean, for policing,

Robert Crews (1:00:12.840)

I mean, if you're looking at it through that lens,

Lex Fridman (1:00:15.160)

there is no kind of typology

Robert Crews (1:00:17.560)

that will predict who will become violent.

Lex Fridman (1:00:20.120)

And that's why I think we have to move beyond

Robert Crews (1:00:22.160)

thinking about religious augmentation narrowly or by itself

Lex Fridman (1:00:25.880)

and think about things like geopolitics,

Robert Crews (1:00:27.280)

think about how people respond to inequality,

Lex Fridman (1:00:30.220)

the existential threat of climate crisis,

Robert Crews (1:00:35.980)

of a whole host of matters,

Lex Fridman (1:00:38.180)

and think about this is a mode of political contestation.

Robert Crews (1:00:42.080)

I mean, it's a violent one, it's one I condemn.

Lex Fridman (1:00:43.560)

It is evil, right?

Lex Fridman (1:00:45.200)

But these are people that are trying to be political.

Lex Fridman (1:00:47.760)

They're trying to change things in some way.

Robert Crews (1:00:49.800)

It's not narrowly about like,

Lex Fridman (1:00:51.460)

I don't know, impose Sharia law on you.

Robert Crews (1:00:54.220)

You must wear a veil.

Lex Fridman (1:00:55.940)

You must eat this kind of food.

Robert Crews (1:00:57.220)

It's not that parochial.

Lex Fridman (1:00:59.340)

But another quick thought

Robert Crews (1:01:00.980)

about your interesting claim about charisma in this,

Lex Fridman (1:01:03.380)

I think that the one self limiting feature

Robert Crews (1:01:06.820)

of this subculture is that definitely,

Lex Fridman (1:01:11.140)

I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen

Lex Fridman (1:01:13.940)

and that the kind of invisibility

Lex Fridman (1:01:17.420)

is a productive force of a power,

Robert Crews (1:01:20.700)

which a colleague of mine

Lex Fridman (1:01:22.420)

who knows ancient history far better than I,

Robert Crews (1:01:24.860)

said that this is, when she looked at Milo Omar initially,

Lex Fridman (1:01:29.420)

or we talk about Bin Laden,

Robert Crews (1:01:30.460)

I mean, this kind of studied posture

Lex Fridman (1:01:33.580)

of staying in the shadows

Robert Crews (1:01:36.020)

is also a source of authority potentially,

Lex Fridman (1:01:37.980)

because it invites the idea,

Lex Fridman (1:01:41.140)

and it's partly dictatorships do as well.

Lex Fridman (1:01:42.780)

I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working,

Lex Fridman (1:01:45.780)

and maybe it's the basis for a lot of QAnon

Lex Fridman (1:01:47.820)

or other conspiracy today,

Robert Crews (1:01:48.660)

that someone's working behind the scenes

Lex Fridman (1:01:51.220)

and things are gonna go the right way.

Robert Crews (1:01:53.020)

You can't see it.

Lex Fridman (1:01:54.460)

That's almost preferable because you can kind of feel it.

Lex Fridman (1:01:57.940)

And so not having someone out front

Lex Fridman (1:02:01.140)

can be maybe more effective

Robert Crews (1:02:02.740)

than having someone out in front constantly.

Lex Fridman (1:02:04.900)

Then the whole...

Robert Crews (1:02:05.740)

Maybe, maybe.

Lex Fridman (1:02:06.580)

And then the whole Bin Laden,

Robert Crews (1:02:07.420)

you know, Milo Omar thing, like you can't see me,

Lex Fridman (1:02:09.300)

or if you look at Bin Laden's photographs

Lex Fridman (1:02:11.380)

and his video stuff, I mean, he's coy.

Lex Fridman (1:02:16.340)

Some observers have noted that he's kind of effeminate.

Robert Crews (1:02:18.860)

He doesn't strike this kind of masculine,

Lex Fridman (1:02:21.140)

he's not a Mussolini, he's not a Hitler,

Robert Crews (1:02:24.260)

macho, upstanding, thumping my chest.

Lex Fridman (1:02:26.780)

He's not doing the theatrical chin, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:02:29.380)

The theater people tell us he's so aggressive, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:02:32.780)

Oh, a chin?

Lex Fridman (1:02:33.820)

What, bringing your chin up?

Lex Fridman (1:02:35.540)

I saw a great BBC theater person.

Robert Crews (1:02:38.220)

It was kind of a...

Lex Fridman (1:02:39.420)

It was a makeover show about how to become a better...

Lex Fridman (1:02:42.300)

A dictator?

Lex Fridman (1:02:43.140)

Oh, no.

Robert Crews (1:02:43.980)

Just a powerful, yeah, leader, authoritarian figure.

Lex Fridman (1:02:47.740)

No, just how to get ahead in life.

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.860)

And then...

Lex Fridman (1:02:50.700)

Oh, okay, cool.

Lex Fridman (1:02:51.540)

And just about acting, how you can act differently, right?

Lex Fridman (1:02:53.700)

So it was a BBC thing.

Lex Fridman (1:02:56.220)

And this woman claimed that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:02:59.660)

sticking your chin out, like a wrestler does, right,

Robert Crews (1:03:01.620)

is the most, like, male to male.

Lex Fridman (1:03:03.020)

I love this kind of hilarious analysis

Robert Crews (1:03:05.820)

that people have about power.

Lex Fridman (1:03:08.380)

But watch the chin, watch the chin.

Robert Crews (1:03:09.660)

It's the same as analyzing, like,

Lex Fridman (1:03:11.740)

in wrestling styles that win or fighting or so on.

Robert Crews (1:03:16.300)

There's so many ways to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:03:17.420)

Well, the chin, I mean, the chin is a...

Robert Crews (1:03:19.420)

Could be interesting verbal gesture.

Lex Fridman (1:03:21.620)

And I've watched enough Mussolini footage from my classes

Robert Crews (1:03:25.900)

to try to pick the right moment.

Lex Fridman (1:03:27.500)

And the chin is...

Robert Crews (1:03:28.380)

Mussolini is all about the chin, so...

Lex Fridman (1:03:29.900)

And I have watched human beings and human nature enough

Robert Crews (1:03:33.540)

to know that there's more to a man,

Lex Fridman (1:03:36.220)

a powerful man, than a chin.

Robert Crews (1:03:38.060)

Yeah, no, no, no.

Lex Fridman (1:03:38.900)

I'm saying it's an act of aggression.

Robert Crews (1:03:40.340)

I'm not saying it's...

Lex Fridman (1:03:41.180)

It's one of the many tools in the toolkit.

Robert Crews (1:03:43.820)

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Lex Fridman (1:03:44.660)

So she definitely...

Robert Crews (1:03:45.500)

It's not all about the chin, but it's a...

Lex Fridman (1:03:47.540)

But that's what I'm trying to tell you about Ben Laden.

Robert Crews (1:03:49.500)

I don't think he was deliberate enough

Lex Fridman (1:03:52.500)

with the way he presents himself.

Lex Fridman (1:03:55.060)

What I'm saying about Ben Laden

Lex Fridman (1:03:55.900)

that makes him different from these other characters is that

Robert Crews (1:03:58.060)

because he played at being the scholar,

Lex Fridman (1:04:01.460)

he played at being a figure of modesty and humility.

Lex Fridman (1:04:05.580)

And that meant that he was often...

Lex Fridman (1:04:07.940)

Again, if you watch his visuals,

Robert Crews (1:04:09.140)

I mean, yes, there's one video of him firing a gun,

Lex Fridman (1:04:11.780)

but if you watch how he moved,

Lex Fridman (1:04:14.220)

how he wouldn't look at people directly,

Lex Fridman (1:04:16.220)

how his face was almost...

Robert Crews (1:04:17.900)

I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy.

Lex Fridman (1:04:20.260)

He's not spoken.

Robert Crews (1:04:22.180)

His voice was low.

Lex Fridman (1:04:23.860)

He attempted to be poetic, right?

Lex Fridman (1:04:25.820)

So it wasn't a warrior kind of image

Lex Fridman (1:04:28.500)

that he tried to project of like a tough guy.

Robert Crews (1:04:30.900)

It was, I'm demure, I'm humble.

Lex Fridman (1:04:34.620)

I'm offering you this message.

Lex Fridman (1:04:37.140)

And the appeal that he was going for was to see...

Lex Fridman (1:04:43.660)

To project himself as a scholar,

Robert Crews (1:04:45.620)

his knowledge and humility, the whole package,

Lex Fridman (1:04:48.340)

carried with it an authenticity and a valor

Robert Crews (1:04:52.020)

that would animate, inspire people

Lex Fridman (1:04:54.900)

to commit acts of violence, right?

Lex Fridman (1:04:56.180)

So there's a different kind of logic of like go and kill.

Lex Fridman (1:04:59.660)

So he presented himself in contrast

Robert Crews (1:05:03.660)

to the imperialist kind of macho power, superpowers.

Lex Fridman (1:05:09.780)

So that's just yet another way of...

Lex Fridman (1:05:12.980)

And you have to have facial hair or hair

Lex Fridman (1:05:14.820)

of different kinds that's recognized.

Robert Crews (1:05:16.180)

We had a very recognizable look too,

Lex Fridman (1:05:18.140)

or at least later in life.

Robert Crews (1:05:20.020)

So...

Lex Fridman (1:05:20.860)

Yeah, no, he tried to look the part.

Robert Crews (1:05:22.860)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:05:23.980)

But I'm saying we're fortunate

Robert Crews (1:05:25.900)

that whatever calculation that he was making,

Lex Fridman (1:05:29.060)

he was not more effective.

Robert Crews (1:05:33.660)

I mean, the world is full of terrorist organizations

Lex Fridman (1:05:38.220)

and we're fortunate to the degree any one of them

Robert Crews (1:05:42.700)

does not have an incredibly charismatic leader

Lex Fridman (1:05:45.580)

that attains the kind of power that's very difficult

Robert Crews (1:05:49.380)

to manage at the geopolitical level.

Lex Fridman (1:05:52.500)

Yeah, and we credit the publics,

Lex Fridman (1:05:55.260)

who don't buy into that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:57.140)

Who see through this.

Lex Fridman (1:05:57.980)

We credit the critics, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:06:01.300)

Early on, Kermadev 9.11 itself,

Robert Crews (1:06:05.340)

one of the problems was that US government officials

Lex Fridman (1:06:08.900)

kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this

Robert Crews (1:06:12.140)

as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility

Lex Fridman (1:06:16.260)

or culpability.

Lex Fridman (1:06:17.780)

And in fact,

Lex Fridman (1:06:20.860)

dozens of scholars and organizations,

Robert Crews (1:06:23.060)

hundreds condemned this,

Lex Fridman (1:06:25.100)

but their condemnations never quite made it out.

Lex Fridman (1:06:27.140)

But it created a tension where, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:06:29.900)

if you wore a veil, you must've been one of them

Lex Fridman (1:06:32.420)

and you must be on Team Bin Laden.

Lex Fridman (1:06:33.980)

And so a lot of the, you know,

Robert Crews (1:06:35.620)

I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination

Lex Fridman (1:06:38.420)

and profiling came out of that urge

Robert Crews (1:06:40.740)

to see a oneness, which, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:06:44.140)

Bin Laden projected, right?

Robert Crews (1:06:45.420)

He wanted to say, we are one community.

Lex Fridman (1:06:47.580)

You know, if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right?

Lex Fridman (1:06:50.660)

But I think that's where the diversity

Lex Fridman (1:06:53.980)

of Muslim communities became important

Robert Crews (1:06:55.620)

because outside of small pockets,

Lex Fridman (1:06:57.420)

I mean, they didn't accept his leadership, right?

Robert Crews (1:07:00.060)

People wore T shirts in some countries.

Lex Fridman (1:07:01.500)

I mean, non Muslims wore T shirts

Robert Crews (1:07:02.420)

because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans.

Lex Fridman (1:07:03.980)

So in Latin America, people are like,

Robert Crews (1:07:07.180)

yeah, that was sad, but, you know, finally,

Lex Fridman (1:07:09.620)

I mean, there was a kind of schadenfreude

Robert Crews (1:07:10.980)

in that moment internationally.

Lex Fridman (1:07:11.820)

It's like Che Guevara or somebody like that.

Robert Crews (1:07:13.820)

Yeah, Che's the other character in Prasad's book.

Lex Fridman (1:07:16.140)

Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

Robert Crews (1:07:17.740)

It's just a symbol.

Lex Fridman (1:07:18.700)

It's not exactly what he believed

Robert Crews (1:07:20.980)

or the cruelty of actions he took.

Lex Fridman (1:07:23.260)

It's more like he stood for an idea

Robert Crews (1:07:24.980)

of revolution versus authority.

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.100)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:07:29.020)

And that's a great way to understand Bin Ladenism

Lex Fridman (1:07:32.780)

and the whole phenomenon,

Lex Fridman (1:07:33.620)

but I think looking at the big picture,

Lex Fridman (1:07:35.420)

it's also, you wonder, will that ever end, right?

Robert Crews (1:07:40.180)

I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk

Lex Fridman (1:07:42.180)

of being a kind of hyper power like the U.S.

Robert Crews (1:07:45.140)

where you, in assisting on a kind of unipolar world

Lex Fridman (1:07:49.940)

in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created

Robert Crews (1:07:55.260)

an almost irresistible target, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:07:57.860)

wherever the U.S. wanted to exert itself militarily.

Robert Crews (1:08:00.700)

Before we go to the history of Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (1:08:03.980)

the people, and I just want to talk to you

Robert Crews (1:08:05.980)

about just some fascinating aspect of the culture.

Lex Fridman (1:08:10.580)

Let's go to the end.

Robert Crews (1:08:13.060)

Withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:08:18.100)

What are your thoughts on how that was executed?

Lex Fridman (1:08:21.540)

How could it have been done better?

Lex Fridman (1:08:24.460)

Yeah, an important question.

Robert Crews (1:08:26.020)

I mean, I would preface all this by saying,

Lex Fridman (1:08:29.020)

you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.

Robert Crews (1:08:31.860)

I had hoped the war would end sooner.

Lex Fridman (1:08:36.540)

I think there were different exit routes all along the way.

Robert Crews (1:08:39.900)

Again, I think there were lots of policy choices

Lex Fridman (1:08:43.420)

in September and October when the war began.

Robert Crews (1:08:46.980)

There were choices in December 2001.

Lex Fridman (1:08:50.540)

So we could look at almost every six month stopping point

Lex Fridman (1:08:54.060)

and say, we could have done differently.

Lex Fridman (1:08:57.580)

As it turns out though, I mean, the way it played out,

Robert Crews (1:09:00.700)

you know, it's been catastrophic.

Lex Fridman (1:09:02.380)

And I think the Biden administration

Robert Crews (1:09:08.300)

has remained unaccountable for the scale

Lex Fridman (1:09:10.180)

of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure

Robert Crews (1:09:14.340)

that they're responsible for.

Lex Fridman (1:09:15.980)

Well, okay, let's lay out the full,

Robert Crews (1:09:19.300)

there's George W. Bush, there's Barack Obama,

Lex Fridman (1:09:24.060)

there's Donald Trump, there's Biden.

Lex Fridman (1:09:27.820)

So they're all driving this van and there's these exits

Lex Fridman (1:09:32.820)

and they keep not taking the exits

Lex Fridman (1:09:34.500)

and they're running out of gas.

Lex Fridman (1:09:36.500)

I do this all the time thinking, where am I gonna pull off?

Robert Crews (1:09:38.980)

I'll go till it's empty.

Lex Fridman (1:09:41.220)

How could it have been done better?

Lex Fridman (1:09:43.860)

And what exactly, how much suffering

Lex Fridman (1:09:48.740)

have all the decisions along the way caused?

Lex Fridman (1:09:52.380)

What are the longterm consequences?

Lex Fridman (1:09:54.220)

What are the biggest things that concern you

Robert Crews (1:09:56.360)

about the decisions we've made in both invading Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (1:10:00.620)

and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have?

Robert Crews (1:10:03.380)

I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed,

Lex Fridman (1:10:07.820)

you know, the horrific scenes of the airport,

Robert Crews (1:10:09.580)

you know, that was just one dimension.

Lex Fridman (1:10:12.980)

I think in the weeks to come,

Robert Crews (1:10:15.860)

I mean, we're gonna see Afghanistan implode.

Lex Fridman (1:10:19.540)

There are lots of signs that malnutrition,

Robert Crews (1:10:22.100)

hunger, starvation are going to claim tens of thousands,

Lex Fridman (1:10:26.980)

maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter.

Lex Fridman (1:10:29.520)

And I think there is really nothing,

Lex Fridman (1:10:33.100)

there's no framework in place to forestall that.

Lex Fridman (1:10:38.940)

What is the government, what is currently the system there?

Lex Fridman (1:10:42.900)

What's the role of the Taliban?

Lex Fridman (1:10:44.740)

So there could be tens of thousands,

Lex Fridman (1:10:46.620)

hundreds of thousands that starve,

Robert Crews (1:10:48.420)

either just almost to famine or starve to death.

Lex Fridman (1:10:54.380)

So this is economic implosion, this is political implosion.

Robert Crews (1:10:58.100)

What's the system there like

Lex Fridman (1:11:01.540)

and what could be the one, you know, some inkling of hope?

Robert Crews (1:11:05.000)

Right, right.

Lex Fridman (1:11:06.780)

The Taliban sit in control, that's unique.

Robert Crews (1:11:09.380)

When they were in power in the 1990s from 1996, 2001,

Lex Fridman (1:11:14.380)

they controlled some 85 to 90% of the country.

Robert Crews (1:11:18.860)

Now they own it all, but they have no budget.

Lex Fridman (1:11:22.380)

The Afghan banking system is frozen.

Lex Fridman (1:11:28.780)

So the financial system is a mess.

Lex Fridman (1:11:30.940)

And it's frozen by the U.S.

Robert Crews (1:11:32.340)

because the U.S. is trying to use that lever

Lex Fridman (1:11:34.500)

to exert pressure on the Taliban.

Lex Fridman (1:11:36.940)

And so the ethical quandaries are of course legion, right?

Lex Fridman (1:11:40.540)

Do you release that money to allow the Taliban

Lex Fridman (1:11:44.020)

to shore up their rule, right?

Lex Fridman (1:11:46.740)

The Biden administration has said no,

Lex Fridman (1:11:48.900)

but the banks aren't working.

Lex Fridman (1:11:52.300)

If you're in California, you wanna send $100 to your cousin

Lex Fridman (1:11:56.660)

so she can buy bread, you can't do that now.

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.980)

It's almost impossible.

Robert Crews (1:12:01.360)

There are some informal networks,

Lex Fridman (1:12:02.600)

they're removing some stuff, but there are bread lines.

Robert Crews (1:12:06.140)

The Taliban government is incapable,

Lex Fridman (1:12:09.300)

fundamentally just of ruling.

Robert Crews (1:12:10.720)

I mean, they can discipline people on the street,

Lex Fridman (1:12:13.620)

they can force people into the mosque,

Robert Crews (1:12:15.660)

they can shoot people, they can beat protesters,

Lex Fridman (1:12:18.780)

they can put out a newspaper,

Robert Crews (1:12:20.740)

they can have, they're great at diplomacy it turns out,

Lex Fridman (1:12:23.860)

they can't rule this country.

Lex Fridman (1:12:24.860)

So essentially the hospitals

Lex Fridman (1:12:27.800)

and the kind of healthcare infrastructure

Robert Crews (1:12:31.640)

is being managed by NGOs that are international.

Lex Fridman (1:12:38.460)

But most people had to leave

Lex Fridman (1:12:41.180)

and the Taliban have impeded some of that work.

Lex Fridman (1:12:44.740)

They've told adult women essentially to stay home, right?

Lex Fridman (1:12:47.980)

So a big part of the workforce isn't there.

Lex Fridman (1:12:51.740)

So the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt.

Robert Crews (1:12:57.200)

Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors,

Lex Fridman (1:13:00.260)

I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy.

Robert Crews (1:13:03.660)

It exports fruits.

Lex Fridman (1:13:05.540)

Pakistan has been closing the border

Robert Crews (1:13:07.460)

because they're anxious about refugees.

Lex Fridman (1:13:09.060)

They want to exert pressure on the international community

Robert Crews (1:13:12.020)

to recognize the Taliban

Lex Fridman (1:13:13.660)

because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power

Robert Crews (1:13:17.460)

because they see that in Pakistan's national interest,

Lex Fridman (1:13:20.420)

especially through the lens of its rivalry with India.

Lex Fridman (1:13:24.020)

So the Pakistani security institutions

Lex Fridman (1:13:27.380)

are playing a double game.

Robert Crews (1:13:29.260)

Essentially Afghan people are being held hostage.

Lex Fridman (1:13:31.460)

And so the Taliban are also saying,

Robert Crews (1:13:34.280)

if you don't recognize us,

Lex Fridman (1:13:36.280)

you're gonna let tens of millions of Afghans starve.

Lex Fridman (1:13:39.120)

So to which degree is Taliban,

Lex Fridman (1:13:41.140)

like who are the Taliban?

Lex Fridman (1:13:44.100)

What do they stand for?

Lex Fridman (1:13:45.700)

What do they want?

Robert Crews (1:13:47.360)

Obviously year by year, this changes.

Lex Fridman (1:13:49.860)

So what is the nature of this organization?

Robert Crews (1:13:53.600)

Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful

Lex Fridman (1:13:58.900)

government sort of holder of power

Lex Fridman (1:14:02.320)

or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so?

Lex Fridman (1:14:06.940)

Yeah.

Robert Crews (1:14:08.140)

I mean, the briefest answer would be

Lex Fridman (1:14:09.900)

that they are a clerical slash military organization.

Robert Crews (1:14:17.300)

They have, this is kind of a imperfect metaphor,

Lex Fridman (1:14:23.620)

but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan

Robert Crews (1:14:28.180)

to describe them.

Lex Fridman (1:14:29.260)

And that has some attractive elements

Robert Crews (1:14:31.100)

because different people have joined the Taliban

Lex Fridman (1:14:35.100)

for different purposes at different times,

Lex Fridman (1:14:37.500)

but today, and people tell us,

Lex Fridman (1:14:40.100)

scholars who know more about the women than I have said,

Robert Crews (1:14:42.180)

listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge

Lex Fridman (1:14:45.220)

of different actors and people and competing interests.

Lex Fridman (1:14:48.300)

And I think, so we have a lot of scholars who said,

Lex Fridman (1:14:51.140)

listen, it's polycentric.

Robert Crews (1:14:54.060)

It's got people in this city and that city and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:14:57.300)

I think actually, I was always very skeptical.

Lex Fridman (1:15:00.020)

How do they know this?

Lex Fridman (1:15:00.940)

I mean, this is an organization that doesn't want you

Robert Crews (1:15:03.580)

to know where that money comes from and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:15:06.820)

But I would say now that we have a clear picture

Robert Crews (1:15:09.700)

of what has happened,

Lex Fridman (1:15:11.300)

I'd say they are a astoundingly well organized

Robert Crews (1:15:15.220)

clerical military organization that has a very cohesive

Lex Fridman (1:15:22.300)

and enduring ideology, which is quite idiosyncratic.

Robert Crews (1:15:26.220)

If we zoom out and continue the conversation

Lex Fridman (1:15:28.180)

we're having about Islam and how we think about radicalism

Lex Fridman (1:15:30.600)

and who's drawn to what,

Lex Fridman (1:15:34.620)

people throw different terms around to describe the Taliban.

Robert Crews (1:15:38.540)

Some use a term that links it to a kind of school of thought

Lex Fridman (1:15:43.060)

born in the 19th century in India, the Doabandi school.

Lex Fridman (1:15:47.400)

But if you look at their teachings,

Lex Fridman (1:15:49.260)

it's very clear now I think that these labels,

Robert Crews (1:15:51.540)

it's like saying, you're an MIT guy.

Lex Fridman (1:15:54.140)

Well, what does that mean?

Robert Crews (1:15:54.980)

I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different potentially

Lex Fridman (1:15:59.340)

kinds of intellectual orientations, right?

Robert Crews (1:16:02.340)

I mean, attaching the name of the school

Lex Fridman (1:16:03.860)

doesn't quite capture, I mean, university.

Robert Crews (1:16:07.420)

It's complicated.

Lex Fridman (1:16:08.260)

I mean, actually MIT is interesting

Robert Crews (1:16:09.500)

because I would say MIT is different

Lex Fridman (1:16:11.340)

than Stanford, for example.

Robert Crews (1:16:13.000)

I think MIT has a more kind of narrow.

Lex Fridman (1:16:16.500)

Yeah, I hear you.

Robert Crews (1:16:18.020)

Bad analogy on my part, maybe.

Lex Fridman (1:16:19.740)

Well, no, it's interesting because I would argue

Robert Crews (1:16:21.740)

that there's some aspect of a brand like Taliban or MIT,

Lex Fridman (1:16:26.740)

no relation, that has a kind of interact,

Robert Crews (1:16:33.060)

like the brand results in the behavior of the,

Lex Fridman (1:16:37.100)

like enforces a kind of behavior on the people

Lex Fridman (1:16:39.260)

and the people feed the brand and like there's a loop.

Lex Fridman (1:16:41.860)

I think Stanford is a good example

Robert Crews (1:16:43.780)

of something that's more distributed.

Lex Fridman (1:16:45.140)

There's sufficient amount of diversity

Robert Crews (1:16:48.220)

in like all kinds of like centers

Lex Fridman (1:16:50.020)

and all that kind of stuff that the brand

Robert Crews (1:16:53.180)

doesn't become one thing.

Lex Fridman (1:16:55.020)

MIT is so engineering.

Robert Crews (1:16:57.180)

It's so different than that.

Lex Fridman (1:16:59.080)

Okay, scratch MIT, scratch Stanford too

Robert Crews (1:17:01.580)

because I think Stanford's more like MIT

Lex Fridman (1:17:03.540)

than you might imagine, but isn't Taliban,

Robert Crews (1:17:07.580)

isn't it pretty, I don't think there's a diversity.

Lex Fridman (1:17:10.640)

So yeah, sorry, so just to rephrase.

Lex Fridman (1:17:13.200)

So people say, oh, the Deobandi school.

Lex Fridman (1:17:15.100)

I'm like, what is that?

Robert Crews (1:17:16.340)

I mean, but the Taliban are, they're an ethnic movement.

Lex Fridman (1:17:20.460)

They represent a vision of Pashtun power, right?

Robert Crews (1:17:26.180)

Pashtuns are people who are quite internally diverse,

Lex Fridman (1:17:29.980)

who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto,

Robert Crews (1:17:34.940)

who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:17:40.540)

There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet, right?

Robert Crews (1:17:42.820)

There's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere,

Lex Fridman (1:17:45.140)

right, so it's a global diaspora of sorts.

Robert Crews (1:17:48.660)

Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination

Lex Fridman (1:17:51.140)

so that lots of Pashtuns can tell you

Robert Crews (1:17:53.600)

the names of their grandparents, great grandparents

Lex Fridman (1:17:55.180)

and so on, and that's kind of a,

Robert Crews (1:17:56.420)

there's a sense of pride in that.

Lex Fridman (1:17:58.840)

Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity,

Lex Fridman (1:18:03.540)

but it's not universal.

Lex Fridman (1:18:05.300)

So for example, you can meet people who say,

Robert Crews (1:18:07.740)

I am Pashtun, but I don't know Pashto.

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.660)

So as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous.

Robert Crews (1:18:14.820)

It also means different things,

Lex Fridman (1:18:15.940)

different people at different times.

Lex Fridman (1:18:17.020)

So saying the Taliban are Pashtun

Lex Fridman (1:18:20.700)

requires lots of qualifiers

Robert Crews (1:18:21.700)

because lots of Pashtuns will say,

Lex Fridman (1:18:24.020)

no, no, I have nothing to the Taliban.

Robert Crews (1:18:26.480)

I hate those people.

Lex Fridman (1:18:28.300)

So the Taliban tried to mobilize other Pashtuns

Robert Crews (1:18:32.680)

with limited success,

Lex Fridman (1:18:34.120)

but their core membership is almost exclusively Pashtun.

Lex Fridman (1:18:37.020)

And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans.

Lex Fridman (1:18:40.180)

We represent pious Muslims.

Lex Fridman (1:18:42.460)

And so in recent two, three years,

Lex Fridman (1:18:46.020)

they've gone further to say, no, we have other groups.

Robert Crews (1:18:48.920)

We have Uzbeks, we have Tajiks, we have Hazaras.

Lex Fridman (1:18:52.660)

And in the North of Afghanistan, in recent years,

Robert Crews (1:18:54.640)

they did do a bit better at drawing in people

Lex Fridman (1:18:57.300)

who were very disaffected because of the government.

Lex Fridman (1:18:59.800)

And they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat.

Lex Fridman (1:19:02.580)

But if you want to say August 15 and who they've appointed,

Lex Fridman (1:19:06.060)

what language they've used,

Lex Fridman (1:19:07.440)

how they've presented themselves,

Robert Crews (1:19:09.980)

it's clear that they are Pashtun, they are male,

Lex Fridman (1:19:14.500)

and they are extremely ideologically cohesive

Lex Fridman (1:19:20.140)

and disciplined, I'd say, right?

Lex Fridman (1:19:22.820)

So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah,

Robert Crews (1:19:25.860)

some of that stuff was a way to fight a war.

Lex Fridman (1:19:28.860)

They are fundamentally a guerrilla movement.

Robert Crews (1:19:33.020)

They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods.

Lex Fridman (1:19:37.620)

The rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich,

Robert Crews (1:19:40.340)

taking from the privileged, giving to the poor,

Lex Fridman (1:19:43.100)

being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.

Lex Fridman (1:19:47.020)

And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing,

Lex Fridman (1:19:50.220)

their central theme, their brand is about public morality.

Lex Fridman (1:19:53.780)

And so their origin story, going back to 1994,

Lex Fridman (1:19:55.940)

is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals

Robert Crews (1:20:00.940)

who were trying to rape people.

Lex Fridman (1:20:03.300)

And so there's a very interesting emphasis on sexuality

Lex Fridman (1:20:08.140)

and on public morality and really being the core

Lex Fridman (1:20:11.540)

of we're gonna restore order and public morality.

Lex Fridman (1:20:16.100)

And how that translates into governance

Lex Fridman (1:20:18.020)

is something they've never sorted out.

Robert Crews (1:20:19.300)

I mean, how do you run a banking system

Lex Fridman (1:20:20.860)

if your intellectual priorities are really about

Lex Fridman (1:20:23.660)

the length of a beard?

Lex Fridman (1:20:25.380)

And then their path to power in a kind of abstract sense,

Robert Crews (1:20:29.260)

I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by,

Lex Fridman (1:20:33.740)

if you like, propagating the promise of martyrdom.

Lex Fridman (1:20:37.300)

And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way

Lex Fridman (1:20:38.820)

that, to make it sound ridiculous,

Robert Crews (1:20:40.740)

to make it sound like it's a moral judgment,

Lex Fridman (1:20:44.380)

it's simply, I think, a fact, it's a fact of their appeal

Robert Crews (1:20:46.980)

that they promised young men who have known nothing else

Lex Fridman (1:20:52.420)

but studying in certain schools, if at all,

Lex Fridman (1:20:56.300)

but they've known fighting

Lex Fridman (1:20:57.220)

and they've known victimization.

Lex Fridman (1:20:59.940)

And this isn't, I'm not asking for sympathy for them,

Lex Fridman (1:21:03.180)

but I think the reality is that a lot of the,

Robert Crews (1:21:05.380)

we know about the kind of foot soldiers

Lex Fridman (1:21:06.980)

is that they lost families in bombings,

Robert Crews (1:21:11.700)

in airstrikes, in night raids.

Lex Fridman (1:21:15.300)

I mean, orphans have always been a stream,

Robert Crews (1:21:18.740)

living in all male society, not knowing girls,

Lex Fridman (1:21:23.180)

not knowing women, hearing things from outside

Robert Crews (1:21:25.820)

about places like Kabul.

Lex Fridman (1:21:27.420)

And so there's always been this kind of urban rural

Robert Crews (1:21:30.020)

dimension, it's not just that,

Lex Fridman (1:21:32.100)

but I think there's a whole imagination

Robert Crews (1:21:36.180)

that being Taliban captures.

Lex Fridman (1:21:39.740)

And the whole margin of thing is really it's,

Robert Crews (1:21:43.300)

you know, I think to any religious person,

Lex Fridman (1:21:45.060)

I mean, it's not a bizarre idea.

Robert Crews (1:21:46.860)

I mean, it animates, I mean, so many global traditions,

Lex Fridman (1:21:50.740)

you know, but I think the,

Lex Fridman (1:21:52.660)

but you try to tell like an army colonel,

Lex Fridman (1:21:54.780)

if you were to have a conversation with,

Robert Crews (1:21:56.460)

you know, a US Marine about this,

Lex Fridman (1:21:58.900)

I mean, some would get it

Robert Crews (1:21:59.740)

from their own religious backgrounds,

Lex Fridman (1:22:01.300)

but I think it's an alien idea,

Lex Fridman (1:22:04.260)

but I think it's essential to kind of stretch out

Lex Fridman (1:22:06.300)

my imagination to understand that's attractive.

Lex Fridman (1:22:08.580)

And now one of the dilemmas going forward

Lex Fridman (1:22:09.860)

is that they've got to pivot from martyrdom.

Lex Fridman (1:22:14.180)

And some have been, some have told foreign journalists,

Lex Fridman (1:22:16.700)

I mean, it's good that we're in charge now,

Robert Crews (1:22:19.140)

we're gonna build a proper state,

Lex Fridman (1:22:21.740)

but it's kind of boring.

Robert Crews (1:22:24.540)

I wanna keep fighting, maybe I'll do that in Pakistan.

Lex Fridman (1:22:26.820)

Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they are expressing

Robert Crews (1:22:28.980)

that thought, some are not even honest sufficiently

Lex Fridman (1:22:32.060)

with themselves to express that kind of thought.

Robert Crews (1:22:34.220)

If you're a fighter,

Lex Fridman (1:22:38.340)

you see that with a bunch of fighters

Robert Crews (1:22:40.900)

or professional athletes, once they retire,

Lex Fridman (1:22:43.940)

they don't know, it's very, it's boring.

Robert Crews (1:22:47.180)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:22:48.020)

And so like if the spirit of the Taliban,

Robert Crews (1:22:51.820)

even the best version of the Taliban is to fight,

Lex Fridman (1:22:55.020)

is to be martyrs, is to paint the world as good and evil

Lex Fridman (1:23:00.300)

and you're fighting evil and all that kind of stuff,

Lex Fridman (1:23:02.900)

that's difficult to imagine how they can run

Robert Crews (1:23:04.620)

an education system, a banking system,

Lex Fridman (1:23:07.540)

respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds

Lex Fridman (1:23:12.020)

and religious beliefs and women and all that kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:23:16.580)

Yeah, and they've walked into Kabul

Lex Fridman (1:23:18.460)

and other major cities, some of them are young,

Lex Fridman (1:23:22.060)

they didn't know those places,

Lex Fridman (1:23:22.900)

but also the very important obstacle for them

Lex Fridman (1:23:26.940)

is that Afghan society has changed.

Robert Crews (1:23:28.900)

I mean, it's not what, even for the older guys,

Lex Fridman (1:23:31.500)

it's not what they knew in the 1990s.

Robert Crews (1:23:34.260)

Some always had some ambivalence about the capital,

Lex Fridman (1:23:37.500)

but now it's totally different.

Robert Crews (1:23:38.500)

I mean, they've been shocked to see, I think to me,

Lex Fridman (1:23:40.580)

one of the most striking features of the last few weeks

Robert Crews (1:23:43.620)

has been that women have come out on the streets

Lex Fridman (1:23:47.100)

and have stood in their faces and said,

Robert Crews (1:23:50.300)

we demand rights, we demand education,

Lex Fridman (1:23:52.180)

we demand employment.

Lex Fridman (1:23:53.820)

And these foot soldiers are paralyzed, they're not sure.

Lex Fridman (1:23:57.900)

They don't know what to do with women, period.

Robert Crews (1:23:59.780)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:24:00.620)

And they don't know what to do with being yelled at

Lex Fridman (1:24:01.940)

and having someone stick their fingers in their faces.

Lex Fridman (1:24:04.260)

I mean, this is not what they've imagined.

Lex Fridman (1:24:07.700)

And so I think, and at this juncture,

Lex Fridman (1:24:10.340)

there are still foreign cameras around.

Lex Fridman (1:24:12.460)

So they have committed acts of violence against women,

Lex Fridman (1:24:16.300)

against journalists, they've beaten people,

Robert Crews (1:24:18.580)

they've disappeared people.

Lex Fridman (1:24:19.580)

Even with cameras around, even in this tense period.

Robert Crews (1:24:22.100)

Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat

Lex Fridman (1:24:24.860)

and that's not gonna happen,

Robert Crews (1:24:26.340)

it's gonna get much worse, I think.

Lex Fridman (1:24:28.540)

So the challenge now is can the Taliban rule?

Lex Fridman (1:24:31.980)

And then this is where the diplomacy is so important

Lex Fridman (1:24:35.100)

because the Taliban can't rule in isolation

Lex Fridman (1:24:38.580)

and they know that.

Lex Fridman (1:24:39.500)

And part of the success is due to the fact

Robert Crews (1:24:41.740)

that they became very good at talking to other people

Lex Fridman (1:24:45.500)

in the last, I mean, it's been building for the last decade,

Lex Fridman (1:24:48.220)

but I'd say the last five years,

Lex Fridman (1:24:50.860)

they always had Pakistan's backing.

Lex Fridman (1:24:52.300)

And so the Taliban are, we noted they're a military force,

Lex Fridman (1:24:55.820)

very effective guerrilla force.

Robert Crews (1:24:57.260)

They beat NATO, I mean, this is, still hasn't sunk in.

Lex Fridman (1:25:00.860)

I mean, the fact that they, with light arms,

Robert Crews (1:25:04.300)

using suicide attacks, using mines,

Lex Fridman (1:25:08.620)

improvised explosive devices, machine guns.

Robert Crews (1:25:13.340)

In some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles

Lex Fridman (1:25:17.100)

and from the summer, they got American equipment

Lex Fridman (1:25:20.380)

on a broad scale, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:22.340)

They have airplanes, they have a lot

Robert Crews (1:25:23.420)

that they will be able to use eventually.

Lex Fridman (1:25:25.460)

So, but still, basically it's a story of AK47s,

Robert Crews (1:25:30.660)

some American small arms and mines.

Lex Fridman (1:25:33.700)

So it's very Ho Chi Minh,

Lex Fridman (1:25:36.060)

very old school guerrilla fighting, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:38.140)

And they defeated the most powerful military alliance

Robert Crews (1:25:40.300)

in world history probably.

Lex Fridman (1:25:41.380)

So that has not yet sunk in and what that means

Robert Crews (1:25:43.780)

for American and global politics.

Lex Fridman (1:25:47.260)

And now they're trying to rule, right?

Robert Crews (1:25:49.380)

They know they need international support

Lex Fridman (1:25:52.460)

and their most consistent backer has been Pakistan

Robert Crews (1:25:56.100)

who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.

Lex Fridman (1:26:01.180)

And this is very important for a Pakistani elite

Robert Crews (1:26:02.660)

that of course is looking toward India.

Lex Fridman (1:26:05.300)

They wanna have their rear covered, right?

Robert Crews (1:26:08.540)

They wanna make sure that these Pashtuns

Lex Fridman (1:26:10.700)

don't cause trouble for Pakistan.

Lex Fridman (1:26:13.060)

And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces,

Lex Fridman (1:26:15.380)

they like this vision of the Islamic state

Robert Crews (1:26:17.900)

that the Taliban are building there

Lex Fridman (1:26:19.540)

because those are not so distant from their views

Robert Crews (1:26:22.060)

of what Pakistan should be.

Lex Fridman (1:26:24.260)

But the Taliban have been smart enough

Robert Crews (1:26:27.180)

to kind of diversify their potential international allies.

Lex Fridman (1:26:30.380)

So everyone in the neighborhood

Lex Fridman (1:26:32.540)

has wanted the US to leave, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:34.820)

If we go back to 2001,

Robert Crews (1:26:36.540)

there were Iranian and American special forces in the North

Lex Fridman (1:26:39.140)

working together against the Taliban to displace them

Robert Crews (1:26:41.660)

using Iranian, American, and then Afghan resistance forces

Lex Fridman (1:26:47.460)

against the Taliban.

Lex Fridman (1:26:48.820)

And that was a real moment of rapprochement

Lex Fridman (1:26:50.180)

if we go back to the missed exits.

Robert Crews (1:26:54.580)

The relationship with Iran

Lex Fridman (1:26:55.460)

could have been different at that moment,

Lex Fridman (1:26:57.220)

but the US under George W. Bush, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:27:01.260)

devised this axis of evil language,

Robert Crews (1:27:04.820)

put them together with their enemy,

Lex Fridman (1:27:06.300)

Iraq and the North Korea, all that went south.

Robert Crews (1:27:10.180)

That was the most opportunity.

Lex Fridman (1:27:12.460)

But in recent years, the Taliban and Iran

Robert Crews (1:27:14.700)

have kind of papered over the differences.

Lex Fridman (1:27:19.140)

They allowed the Taliban to open small offices

Robert Crews (1:27:22.580)

on Iranian territory,

Lex Fridman (1:27:24.460)

likely shared some resources, some intelligence,

Robert Crews (1:27:26.540)

some sophisticated weaponry.

Lex Fridman (1:27:28.500)

And then the Taliban went to Moscow.

Lex Fridman (1:27:30.660)

And for the Putin administration,

Lex Fridman (1:27:32.900)

you know, they've long been worried that,

Robert Crews (1:27:35.420)

you know, they see the Taliban as a kind of,

Lex Fridman (1:27:37.700)

you know, disease that will potentially move North,

Robert Crews (1:27:40.620)

infect Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,

Lex Fridman (1:27:43.180)

Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,

Lex Fridman (1:27:44.660)

and maybe creep into Russia's sphere of influence.

Lex Fridman (1:27:47.980)

Maybe that's why they have, you know,

Robert Crews (1:27:51.060)

a bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan.

Lex Fridman (1:27:52.540)

I mean, the one, you know,

Robert Crews (1:27:54.460)

Ford base that Russia as well has in Central Asia

Lex Fridman (1:27:56.900)

is in Tajikistan.

Lex Fridman (1:27:58.780)

And so the Taliban were always, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:28:01.060)

a worrying point, but also useful because

Robert Crews (1:28:03.900)

they could say, well, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:28:06.700)

in case the Taliban get out of control,

Robert Crews (1:28:08.380)

we need to be here.

Lex Fridman (1:28:09.900)

And so Tajikistan said, okay, you know,

Robert Crews (1:28:12.300)

you're helping secure us.

Lex Fridman (1:28:14.100)

And yes, it impinges upon our sovereignty,

Lex Fridman (1:28:16.140)

but it's okay, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:28:18.100)

So Putin said, you know, let's, you know,

Robert Crews (1:28:21.380)

give another black eye to the Americans

Lex Fridman (1:28:23.540)

and let's, you know, treat the Taliban

Robert Crews (1:28:25.380)

as if they're the kind of government in waiting.

Lex Fridman (1:28:27.460)

Let's have them come to Moscow multiple times.

Robert Crews (1:28:30.180)

This summer, you know, for the last year or two,

Lex Fridman (1:28:32.580)

they've been talking to China, right?

Lex Fridman (1:28:34.300)

So the photographs of senior Taliban figures

Lex Fridman (1:28:39.340)

going from their office in Qatar,

Robert Crews (1:28:40.740)

which was a major blow to the U.S. back government,

Lex Fridman (1:28:43.460)

the fact that they were able to open up

Robert Crews (1:28:45.380)

an office in Qatar that at one point

Lex Fridman (1:28:47.100)

began to fly a flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,

Robert Crews (1:28:51.340)

that basically said, we're a state in the waiting.

Lex Fridman (1:28:54.260)

And as the U.S.-backed Afghan government failed

Lex Fridman (1:28:57.300)

and failed and failed at ruling too, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:00.460)

As they showed how corrupt they were.

Lex Fridman (1:29:02.500)

And as they really alienated more and more Afghans

Lex Fridman (1:29:04.660)

by committing acts of violence against them,

Robert Crews (1:29:07.340)

by stealing from them, by, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:29:11.020)

basically creating a kind of kleptocracy, right?

Robert Crews (1:29:17.100)

The Taliban said, we are pure, we are not corrupt.

Lex Fridman (1:29:20.700)

And look at us, we're winning on the battlefield.

Lex Fridman (1:29:22.660)

And internationally, look, we're talking to China.

Lex Fridman (1:29:25.260)

We're talking to Putin, we're talking to China.

Robert Crews (1:29:27.980)

We're a legitimate, powerful center of Central Asia.

Lex Fridman (1:29:31.220)

And also kind of, you know, hinting that, you know,

Robert Crews (1:29:33.460)

oh, we have a website.

Lex Fridman (1:29:34.500)

I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing

Robert Crews (1:29:36.180)

because they began to, and this is important, actually.

Lex Fridman (1:29:39.380)

They had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.

Robert Crews (1:29:43.380)

Again, after having, you know, shot televisions

Lex Fridman (1:29:45.580)

and these kind of ceremonial killings

Lex Fridman (1:29:47.580)

of these infidel devices, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:49.900)

They said, we have a government, we have commissions,

Robert Crews (1:29:53.540)

we have a complaint line.

Lex Fridman (1:29:55.420)

They lifted all this technocratic language

Robert Crews (1:29:57.980)

that you would get from any UN document,

Lex Fridman (1:30:00.100)

you know, about good governance

Lex Fridman (1:30:01.340)

and all the kind of, you know, generic language

Lex Fridman (1:30:03.340)

that the NGO world has produced for us, right, in English.

Robert Crews (1:30:06.740)

They reproduced that in five languages

Lex Fridman (1:30:08.620)

on their Taiwan website.

Lex Fridman (1:30:10.460)

And of course, I'm not saying even believe this,

Lex Fridman (1:30:12.300)

but it was like, you know, just put me in coach.

Robert Crews (1:30:15.620)

You know, I know the playbook.

Lex Fridman (1:30:17.300)

I know how to run a government.

Lex Fridman (1:30:18.140)

And look, we have an agricultural commission.

Lex Fridman (1:30:20.700)

We have, you know, a taxation system.

Lex Fridman (1:30:24.220)

And again, this idea, and then on the ground,

Lex Fridman (1:30:26.180)

they had their own law courts.

Lex Fridman (1:30:28.340)

And they would creep into a district,

Lex Fridman (1:30:30.380)

assassinate some people, the local authority figures,

Robert Crews (1:30:32.900)

men of influence, talk to local clerics,

Lex Fridman (1:30:36.380)

either get them on board or kill them and say, you know,

Robert Crews (1:30:39.740)

this state is corrupt, but we're bringing you justice.

Lex Fridman (1:30:42.220)

This is our calling card.

Robert Crews (1:30:43.300)

We're bringing public reality and justice.

Lex Fridman (1:30:45.700)

And then to a broader world, they said, you know,

Robert Crews (1:30:48.980)

yeah, things didn't go perfectly, the whole Al Qaeda thing,

Lex Fridman (1:30:51.740)

you know, you know, wish we could have a do over on that.

Robert Crews (1:30:56.060)

We're not gonna let anyone hurt you from our territory.

Lex Fridman (1:30:58.780)

We just wanna rule and people like us and look.

Lex Fridman (1:31:03.220)

And so if you look at the neighborhood,

Lex Fridman (1:31:05.140)

Iran, even the Central Asian states after a while,

Robert Crews (1:31:08.340)

recognizing they could make some money.

Lex Fridman (1:31:09.500)

I mean, one of the, one thing that Uzbekistan likes

Robert Crews (1:31:11.420)

about the current arrangement, or they're not,

Lex Fridman (1:31:13.940)

they're not hostile to is that they have all these contracts.

Robert Crews (1:31:17.460)

They can potentially make some money from, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:31:21.180)

the pipeline dream remains alive, running natural gas, oil,

Robert Crews (1:31:25.020)

to, you know, which is the Indian ocean,

Lex Fridman (1:31:28.020)

to markets, you know, beyond Central Asia.

Robert Crews (1:31:31.380)

It's sitting on a couple of trillion dollars,

Lex Fridman (1:31:32.740)

probably in mineral resources

Robert Crews (1:31:34.100)

that China would love to have, of course.

Lex Fridman (1:31:36.500)

And so people are looking at Afghanistan now,

Robert Crews (1:31:38.460)

after 20 years saying, you know, under American rule,

Lex Fridman (1:31:41.180)

it was a basket case, right?

Robert Crews (1:31:43.900)

There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent.

Lex Fridman (1:31:46.620)

The world did not start counting civilian casualties

Robert Crews (1:31:49.140)

in Afghanistan until 2009.

Lex Fridman (1:31:51.060)

I mean, think about that.

Robert Crews (1:31:51.900)

The war went on for eight years.

Lex Fridman (1:31:53.460)

The Taliban were never really defeated.

Robert Crews (1:31:54.780)

They just went to Pakistan.

Lex Fridman (1:31:56.100)

They went to the mountains, they went to the woods.

Lex Fridman (1:31:59.180)

And so all of these different American operations,

Lex Fridman (1:32:01.580)

as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on,

Robert Crews (1:32:07.460)

killed countless civilians.

Lex Fridman (1:32:09.420)

The US never accounted for that.

Robert Crews (1:32:10.580)

We never even counted.

Lex Fridman (1:32:13.260)

Trump escalated civilian casualties

Robert Crews (1:32:15.500)

by escalating the air war.

Lex Fridman (1:32:17.260)

But a lot of this was like very ugly, on the ground,

Robert Crews (1:32:19.980)

you know, night raid stuff,

Lex Fridman (1:32:21.260)

where you drop into a Hamlet and massacre people,

Lex Fridman (1:32:25.820)

and then you're not honest about what happened, right?

Lex Fridman (1:32:27.900)

So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth of the Taliban

Robert Crews (1:32:31.620)

from below.

Lex Fridman (1:32:32.700)

So the foot soldiers, they never ran out of foot soldiers.

Robert Crews (1:32:35.100)

I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands,

Lex Fridman (1:32:39.300)

maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters

Robert Crews (1:32:41.140)

over the last 20 years.

Lex Fridman (1:32:42.740)

But they just sprouted up again.

Lex Fridman (1:32:44.860)

And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture,

Lex Fridman (1:32:46.420)

the male bonding of martyrology, of martyrdom,

Lex Fridman (1:32:51.020)

and of revenge, and a sense of the foreign invader.

Lex Fridman (1:32:56.020)

And I've heard, I mean, I haven't taught a ton

Robert Crews (1:32:57.860)

of US military people, but through the Hoover,

Lex Fridman (1:33:01.540)

they put officers in our classes sometimes,

Lex Fridman (1:33:03.540)

and met a few wonderful army and marine officers

Lex Fridman (1:33:07.220)

who I really enjoyed.

Robert Crews (1:33:08.940)

You know, we came from the South like me,

Lex Fridman (1:33:11.260)

always had great rapport with them,

Lex Fridman (1:33:12.620)

and they expressed a range of opinions about this.

Lex Fridman (1:33:15.260)

I think that I learned a lot from someone who said,

Robert Crews (1:33:17.460)

yeah, I mean, I get why they hate us.

Lex Fridman (1:33:20.020)

I get why they're still fighting,

Robert Crews (1:33:21.860)

because last week, we were in the middle of a war,

Lex Fridman (1:33:25.820)

we just killed 14 of their fellow villagers.

Lex Fridman (1:33:31.300)

So the officers, the guys on the ground,

Lex Fridman (1:33:34.780)

fighting this war, we're not stupid about that.

Robert Crews (1:33:37.300)

I mean, they got the human dimension of that,

Lex Fridman (1:33:39.500)

and yet no one got off the exit,

Robert Crews (1:33:41.060)

as you said, people kept driving.

Lex Fridman (1:33:43.940)

But going forward now, internationally,

Robert Crews (1:33:46.380)

it's critical that they have,

Lex Fridman (1:33:48.940)

and they've had meetings.

Robert Crews (1:33:50.460)

I mean, what the Taliban have done since August 15th

Lex Fridman (1:33:52.660)

is a lot of diplomacy.

Robert Crews (1:33:54.140)

They've had meetings, they've had people,

Lex Fridman (1:33:55.900)

they've had Tashkent come, they've had Beijing come,

Robert Crews (1:33:58.500)

they've had Moscow come.

Lex Fridman (1:34:00.300)

I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad,

Robert Crews (1:34:06.100)

from security people, from diplomatic circles.

Lex Fridman (1:34:09.260)

And they're counting on things being different this time.

Robert Crews (1:34:11.940)

I mean, the first time around,

Lex Fridman (1:34:13.100)

the only people who backed the Taliban by recognition,

Robert Crews (1:34:15.900)

giving them diplomatic recognition,

Lex Fridman (1:34:17.620)

were the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the UAE.

Lex Fridman (1:34:20.260)

And because of Al Qaeda, because of opium,

Lex Fridman (1:34:24.420)

because of some of the human rights stuff,

Robert Crews (1:34:27.020)

the US pushed everyone to like,

Lex Fridman (1:34:28.420)

let's not recognize the state,

Robert Crews (1:34:30.020)

even though the US did.

Lex Fridman (1:34:31.260)

I mean, Colin Powell famously,

Robert Crews (1:34:33.300)

summer of 2001, we did give a few grants and aid

Lex Fridman (1:34:38.940)

to the Taliban as kind of like massaging negotiations.

Robert Crews (1:34:44.420)

They kept talking about bin Laden,

Lex Fridman (1:34:46.180)

but they also wanted them to stop opium production.

Robert Crews (1:34:49.420)

I mean, Afghanistan, throughout all this period

Lex Fridman (1:34:50.780)

we've talked about, is the global center

Robert Crews (1:34:52.300)

of opium production.

Lex Fridman (1:34:54.220)

I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy

Robert Crews (1:34:57.460)

continued to today is devoted to the opium trade.

Lex Fridman (1:35:00.460)

Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin,

Robert Crews (1:35:06.420)

some of the painkillers.

Lex Fridman (1:35:07.780)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:35:09.180)

And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to Hoboken,

Lex Fridman (1:35:13.540)

they are not the source of American deaths.

Robert Crews (1:35:18.340)

They are part of a universal market, a global market,

Lex Fridman (1:35:22.820)

which I think any economist would tell you

Robert Crews (1:35:25.900)

is part of the story of our opium problem.

Lex Fridman (1:35:29.660)

Something I read maybe a decade ago now,

Lex Fridman (1:35:34.940)

and I just kind of looked it up again

Lex Fridman (1:35:36.460)

to bring it up to see your opinion on this,

Robert Crews (1:35:38.380)

is a 2010 report by the International Council

Lex Fridman (1:35:43.060)

on Security and Development that showed

Robert Crews (1:35:45.380)

that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province

Lex Fridman (1:35:52.460)

know nothing of the 9 11 attacks on US in 2001.

Lex Fridman (1:35:56.900)

Is this at all representative of what you know?

Lex Fridman (1:36:00.500)

Is this possible?

Lex Fridman (1:36:01.700)

So basically, put another way,

Lex Fridman (1:36:05.140)

is it possible that a lot of Afghans don't even know

Robert Crews (1:36:10.060)

the reason why there may be troops

Lex Fridman (1:36:13.100)

or the sort of American provided narrative

Robert Crews (1:36:17.460)

for why there's troops, American soldiers,

Lex Fridman (1:36:21.340)

and American drones overhead in Afghanistan?

Robert Crews (1:36:25.500)

Right.

Lex Fridman (1:36:26.580)

I mean, my gut response,

Robert Crews (1:36:28.700)

not knowing the details of this actual poll is

Lex Fridman (1:36:32.180)

that that's a very unhelpful way to think about

Lex Fridman (1:36:38.260)

how Afghans relate to the world.

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.940)

And I think it could be, if you go to my hometown,

Robert Crews (1:36:44.780)

in North Carolina, if you knock on some doors,

Lex Fridman (1:36:48.180)

you may meet people who don't know all kinds of things.

Robert Crews (1:36:50.740)

I could probably walk around this neighborhood

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.100)

here in California and there'd be all kinds of people

Robert Crews (1:36:54.180)

who don't know all kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (1:36:57.980)

Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat.

Robert Crews (1:37:01.460)

I mean, so we could make a lot of certain kinds

Lex Fridman (1:37:07.260)

of ignorance, I think.

Lex Fridman (1:37:08.100)

But I think what I would say,

Lex Fridman (1:37:09.980)

and there's also, I mean, a companion point maybe

Robert Crews (1:37:12.140)

that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse,

Lex Fridman (1:37:15.140)

the return of the Taliban,

Robert Crews (1:37:17.020)

there has been a big conversation

Lex Fridman (1:37:18.780)

about what Afghans think of us really.

Lex Fridman (1:37:21.780)

And this famous piece in the New Yorker

Lex Fridman (1:37:24.300)

was about how many people liked the Taliban,

Robert Crews (1:37:28.740)

that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece,

Lex Fridman (1:37:35.460)

were sympathetic because they had lost family members

Lex Fridman (1:37:37.340)

and all the violence.

Lex Fridman (1:37:38.260)

And the idea kind of was that,

Robert Crews (1:37:41.420)

we haven't thought about that at all.

Lex Fridman (1:37:42.500)

When in fact, of course we have and lots of people have,

Lex Fridman (1:37:45.340)

but I think if you're just dropping into the conversation,

Lex Fridman (1:37:48.300)

if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage

Robert Crews (1:37:49.780)

of Afghanistan and the United States,

Lex Fridman (1:37:50.940)

I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during,

Robert Crews (1:37:55.500)

of course, 9.11 and its aftermath,

Lex Fridman (1:37:57.780)

lots of coverage during Obama's surge,

Lex Fridman (1:38:00.860)

and then quickly dropped down the last decade,

Lex Fridman (1:38:03.700)

it's been almost nothing.

Lex Fridman (1:38:05.220)

So if you ask the same question about Americans

Lex Fridman (1:38:07.380)

or of Americans, I'm not sure what they would say to you,

Lex Fridman (1:38:09.500)

what percentage would actually know

Lex Fridman (1:38:11.380)

why the US is in X, Y, or Z either, right?

Lex Fridman (1:38:14.340)

But on the Afghan side, just to return to that for a moment,

Lex Fridman (1:38:16.220)

I think that we can fetishize these provinces.

Robert Crews (1:38:19.540)

They are kind of a place

Lex Fridman (1:38:21.620)

where Taliban support has been greatest.

Robert Crews (1:38:24.140)

Also where there's been the most violence,

Lex Fridman (1:38:25.620)

where the Americans have been most committed

Robert Crews (1:38:27.300)

to trying to root out the Taliban movement.

Lex Fridman (1:38:30.420)

Where exactly in the South.

Lex Fridman (1:38:32.380)

What are the other parts in the South of Afghanistan?

Lex Fridman (1:38:34.500)

Yeah, it's mostly Pashtun, not exclusively,

Lex Fridman (1:38:37.060)

but mostly Pashtun, mostly rural.

Lex Fridman (1:38:39.540)

What is Pashtun?

Robert Crews (1:38:40.420)

That's the other group

Lex Fridman (1:38:41.260)

that the Taliban claim to represent, right?

Lex Fridman (1:38:44.740)

So they are this group.

Lex Fridman (1:38:45.580)

What other groups are there?

Robert Crews (1:38:46.660)

Okay, sorry, yeah, sorry.

Lex Fridman (1:38:48.060)

So in cities, you'll find everything, right?

Robert Crews (1:38:51.020)

That is in Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:38:51.940)

You'll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras.

Lex Fridman (1:38:55.780)

These are people who, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:01.140)

Most Uzbeks live in what is now Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (1:39:03.340)

but they form majorities in some Northern parts of the city.

Lex Fridman (1:39:06.700)

I'm sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:39:08.700)

But what I emphasize is that,

Lex Fridman (1:39:11.620)

and you can find online an ethnographic map of Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (1:39:14.060)

and you'll see green where Pashtuns live,

Lex Fridman (1:39:16.860)

red where Hazaras live, orange where Uzbeks live,

Robert Crews (1:39:20.460)

purple where Tajiks live.

Lex Fridman (1:39:22.460)

Then there are a bunch of other smaller groups

Robert Crews (1:39:23.940)

of different kinds.

Lex Fridman (1:39:25.500)

There are Noristanis, there are Baluch,

Robert Crews (1:39:30.620)

there are, in different religious communities,

Lex Fridman (1:39:32.620)

there are Sunni, Shia, different kinds of Shia.

Lex Fridman (1:39:34.940)

What are the key differences between them?

Lex Fridman (1:39:36.660)

Is it religious basis from the origins

Lex Fridman (1:39:39.940)

of where they immigrated from and how different are they?

Lex Fridman (1:39:43.380)

So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous, I think.

Robert Crews (1:39:46.180)

I mean, there's a kind of mythology

Lex Fridman (1:39:47.260)

that some groups have been there longer, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:49.540)

So they have a greater claim to power.

Lex Fridman (1:39:50.980)

But historically, I mean, it's like, you know,

Robert Crews (1:39:55.100)

ethnic groups anywhere,

Lex Fridman (1:39:55.940)

people have different narratives about themselves,

Lex Fridman (1:39:58.460)

but many Pashtuns would tell you, not all,

Lex Fridman (1:40:01.860)

but many would say,

Robert Crews (1:40:03.340)

we are the kind of state builders of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:40:05.780)

The dynasty that ruled much of the space,

Robert Crews (1:40:09.620)

that was born in the mid 18th century,

Lex Fridman (1:40:12.100)

that ruled until 1973, more or less,

Robert Crews (1:40:15.380)

generalizing, you know, it was a Pashtun dynasty.

Lex Fridman (1:40:18.420)

The Taliban have definitely said to some audiences,

Robert Crews (1:40:21.820)

we are the rightful rulers because we are Pashtun.

Lex Fridman (1:40:26.620)

The trick though is, I don't mean to be evasive,

Lex Fridman (1:40:28.580)

but just to convey some of the complexity,

Lex Fridman (1:40:30.700)

one quick answer as well,

Robert Crews (1:40:32.780)

they're majorities and minorities.

Lex Fridman (1:40:34.420)

I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps,

Lex Fridman (1:40:37.420)

but I would say suspend any firm belief in that

Lex Fridman (1:40:40.940)

because that could be entirely wrong.

Robert Crews (1:40:42.980)

In fact, there's never been a modern census of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:40:47.100)

So when journalists say Pashtuns are the majority,

Robert Crews (1:40:49.980)

or they're the biggest group, I would say not so fast.

Lex Fridman (1:40:53.220)

I would say not so fast

Robert Crews (1:40:54.060)

because of migration is one major issue.

Lex Fridman (1:40:57.020)

No major modern census.

Robert Crews (1:41:00.060)

Actually, the Soviets got pretty close,

Lex Fridman (1:41:01.260)

but didn't quite, you know, find something comprehensive

Lex Fridman (1:41:04.060)

and didn't publicize it knowing that it was,

Lex Fridman (1:41:07.380)

you know, in modern times,

Robert Crews (1:41:08.220)

ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization.

Lex Fridman (1:41:11.060)

It's not innately so, but it's been part of the story.

Lex Fridman (1:41:14.740)

But then you have mixed families, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:16.020)

So a lot of people you'll meet,

Robert Crews (1:41:17.740)

you'll encounter in the diaspora and around,

Lex Fridman (1:41:19.140)

I mean, well, I am, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:41:22.340)

my one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:26.220)

Or I'm Pashtun, as I mentioned before,

Lex Fridman (1:41:27.980)

but I don't speak Pashto, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:29.980)

Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as Shiite Hazara,

Robert Crews (1:41:35.100)

in fact, I'm a Sunni Hazara,

Lex Fridman (1:41:36.900)

or I'm a secular Hazara, or I'm an atheist Hazara.

Lex Fridman (1:41:39.380)

I mean, everything's possible, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:41.940)

One of my friends, if he were here,

Robert Crews (1:41:46.100)

he'd say, I'm Kabuli, you know, I'm from Kabul.

Lex Fridman (1:41:49.140)

So if you think about it in Russian terms,

Robert Crews (1:41:51.140)

you know, it means a lot if you're a Muscovitch,

Lex Fridman (1:41:53.260)

you know, if you're from Pisa or Moscow, I mean, you know.

Robert Crews (1:41:57.060)

Yeah, well, even here is Pashtunians, Texans, Californians.

Lex Fridman (1:42:04.460)

Yeah, East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff.

Robert Crews (1:42:07.340)

Those are all part of the mix here.

Lex Fridman (1:42:08.820)

So you asked about Kandahar and Helmand,

Robert Crews (1:42:10.980)

then I would say, yeah, if you go out to, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:42:14.580)

a pomegranate field, you'll meet a guy

Robert Crews (1:42:18.340)

who may reckon time differently from you and me,

Lex Fridman (1:42:22.460)

who may not be literate,

Robert Crews (1:42:24.860)

you may not have ever had a geography lesson,

Lex Fridman (1:42:27.900)

but if you go one door over, you may meet a guy

Robert Crews (1:42:31.700)

who, you know, his life path has taken him

Lex Fridman (1:42:36.020)

to live in, you know, six countries.

Robert Crews (1:42:38.500)

He may speak five languages.

Lex Fridman (1:42:40.340)

And these are all things I'm not saying they're all,

Robert Crews (1:42:41.780)

these are just because people have money

Lex Fridman (1:42:43.300)

can go fly around.

Robert Crews (1:42:44.140)

I mean, there are people who are displaced by war

Lex Fridman (1:42:46.860)

from late 1970s, right?

Robert Crews (1:42:48.500)

Even already in the early 70s,

Lex Fridman (1:42:50.180)

people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran,

Robert Crews (1:42:53.620)

you know, as labor migrants.

Lex Fridman (1:42:55.220)

And once you get to Iran, once you get to Pakistan,

Robert Crews (1:42:56.940)

once you get to Uzbekistan,

Lex Fridman (1:42:59.500)

you then connect to all kinds of cosmopolitan cultures.

Lex Fridman (1:43:02.620)

And in fact, I think one of the themes of the book,

Lex Fridman (1:43:04.900)

you know, that you may or may not have read,

Robert Crews (1:43:06.020)

it may put you to sleep.

Lex Fridman (1:43:07.740)

You know, Afghan Modern was about, you know,

Robert Crews (1:43:09.580)

conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place

Lex Fridman (1:43:11.820)

where for centuries people put on the move

Lex Fridman (1:43:14.860)

and trade in this area.

Lex Fridman (1:43:15.700)

You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization

Robert Crews (1:43:17.900)

of places like Helmand and Kandahar,

Lex Fridman (1:43:20.460)

you know, you fly in or you're part of a Marine battalion

Lex Fridman (1:43:24.460)

and you see people there and they look different.

Lex Fridman (1:43:26.620)

And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize,

Robert Crews (1:43:30.220)

you know, they look like they've been there

Lex Fridman (1:43:31.860)

for millennia, right?

Lex Fridman (1:43:33.420)

The dress, the whatever, right?

Lex Fridman (1:43:34.860)

You think of technology,

Robert Crews (1:43:35.980)

you think of the mud compounds and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:43:38.700)

You think of, you know, animal drawn transportation,

Lex Fridman (1:43:42.740)

that kind of stuff, right?

Lex Fridman (1:43:43.940)

Or the motorbike, right, at most is what they have.

Lex Fridman (1:43:46.660)

But in fact, if you follow those families,

Lex Fridman (1:43:49.220)

their trade has taken them to Northern India

Lex Fridman (1:43:51.940)

for centuries, right?

Lex Fridman (1:43:53.100)

Their trade has connected them to cosmopolitan centers.

Robert Crews (1:43:56.260)

You know, say they have a scholar in the family,

Lex Fridman (1:43:58.060)

that scholar may have studied

Lex Fridman (1:43:59.740)

all of the Middle East, South Asia, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:02.220)

You know, their ancestors may have been horse traders

Lex Fridman (1:44:03.940)

who went all the way to Moscow, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:05.660)

I mean, we have a sort of records of all these people

Robert Crews (1:44:07.860)

traveling across Eurasia,

Lex Fridman (1:44:10.420)

pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.

Lex Fridman (1:44:12.580)

And so Afghanistan is this paradox

Lex Fridman (1:44:14.700)

of visually looking remote

Lex Fridman (1:44:17.300)

and looking like it's kind of stuck in time,

Lex Fridman (1:44:20.260)

but the family trajectories

Lex Fridman (1:44:22.660)

and the current trajectories

Lex Fridman (1:44:23.740)

are astoundingly cosmopolitan and mobile.

Lex Fridman (1:44:26.420)

And so, and a conception of being a world center

Lex Fridman (1:44:29.860)

is also quite strong.

Robert Crews (1:44:30.900)

So, you know, another way to frame that question about like,

Lex Fridman (1:44:33.820)

do they know about 9.11 would be like,

Lex Fridman (1:44:36.220)

why should we know about 9.11?

Lex Fridman (1:44:37.420)

Because we are at the center of something important, right?

Robert Crews (1:44:39.660)

We are the center of Asia.

Lex Fridman (1:44:41.140)

We are the heart of Asia.

Robert Crews (1:44:42.900)

We have a kind of historic greatness.

Lex Fridman (1:44:44.540)

We are a proud culture of our own achievements, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:49.180)

So we're not worried about that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:51.780)

That said, I mean, sure,

Robert Crews (1:44:53.020)

there are different narratives about

Lex Fridman (1:44:54.780)

why Americans are there,

Lex Fridman (1:44:56.100)

why people are being killed.

Lex Fridman (1:44:57.860)

You know, of course you'd find,

Robert Crews (1:45:00.300)

they want to convert us,

Lex Fridman (1:45:02.100)

they want our gold,

Robert Crews (1:45:03.180)

they want our opium,

Lex Fridman (1:45:04.620)

they want X, Y, and Z, right?

Robert Crews (1:45:06.580)

There was a recent story about a Taliban official

Lex Fridman (1:45:10.700)

sitting in an office in Kabul

Lex Fridman (1:45:11.780)

and a journalist asked him,

Lex Fridman (1:45:12.620)

what can you find in this rotating globe?

Robert Crews (1:45:15.180)

Find your country,

Lex Fridman (1:45:16.020)

find where are we sitting right now?

Lex Fridman (1:45:17.900)

And he was filmed not being able to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:45:21.460)

And so a lot of, you know,

Robert Crews (1:45:22.420)

race sophisticated Afghans in the diaspora

Lex Fridman (1:45:23.740)

were saying, you know, ha ha, look at this.

Lex Fridman (1:45:25.900)

And that exists.

Lex Fridman (1:45:27.260)

I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom

Lex Fridman (1:45:29.860)

and there'd be a lot of kids

Lex Fridman (1:45:30.700)

who wouldn't know where Afghanistan is too, right?

Lex Fridman (1:45:32.580)

But I guess I wouldn't use those metrics

Lex Fridman (1:45:35.580)

to suggest that this is a place

Robert Crews (1:45:38.220)

that doesn't have a sense of its place in the world

Lex Fridman (1:45:40.340)

and of geopolitics.

Robert Crews (1:45:42.300)

I think if anything,

Lex Fridman (1:45:43.220)

being a relatively small country

Robert Crews (1:45:44.500)

in a very complicated neighborhood,

Lex Fridman (1:45:46.620)

I mean, everybody, every cab driver,

Robert Crews (1:45:48.340)

I mean, people have, I mean,

Lex Fridman (1:45:50.620)

you know, this is where America is different

Robert Crews (1:45:52.420)

because I don't think Americans have this sense.

Lex Fridman (1:45:54.340)

You know, we're talking about Moscow and stuff.

Robert Crews (1:45:55.860)

I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers,

Lex Fridman (1:45:59.820)

I think a lot of them are gonna tell you,

Lex Fridman (1:46:01.580)

like what's happening in the world and why, right?

Lex Fridman (1:46:04.460)

And it's just part of their thing, right?

Robert Crews (1:46:07.020)

You can find that in Ghana,

Lex Fridman (1:46:07.940)

you can find that in Mexico city, right?

Robert Crews (1:46:09.100)

You find that lots of places.

Lex Fridman (1:46:10.220)

So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated

Robert Crews (1:46:13.660)

kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in.

Lex Fridman (1:46:17.940)

And a lot of them remarkably had done it firsthand,

Robert Crews (1:46:20.020)

which is what struck me so much.

Lex Fridman (1:46:21.340)

And, you know, really my experiences

Robert Crews (1:46:22.980)

from the 1990s and Tashkent places

Lex Fridman (1:46:24.460)

that these guys had already lived

Robert Crews (1:46:26.380)

in more countries than I'd ever been.

Lex Fridman (1:46:28.420)

They already knew half those languages.

Robert Crews (1:46:30.100)

I mean, this one friend's Russian was impeccable.

Lex Fridman (1:46:34.140)

And of course it helped, they had Russian girlfriends,

Robert Crews (1:46:36.460)

they had, you know, they mixed with the police,

Lex Fridman (1:46:38.780)

they had run ins, I mean,

Lex Fridman (1:46:40.700)

this wasn't something you got from a book, right?

Lex Fridman (1:46:42.940)

This was like hard knock life.

Robert Crews (1:46:44.940)

I mean, one friend was from a wealthy family

Lex Fridman (1:46:48.580)

in this trading diaspora and he was imprisoned.

Robert Crews (1:46:51.180)

I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan

Lex Fridman (1:46:54.060)

and he talks about how he could start like running,

Robert Crews (1:46:57.140)

running in the jail, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:46:58.900)

taking cigarettes to people, doing little things

Lex Fridman (1:47:00.580)

and kind of, you know, these are not stories of like,

Lex Fridman (1:47:03.980)

oh, I went to Harvard and so I'm so learned

Robert Crews (1:47:06.020)

because of this.

Lex Fridman (1:47:06.860)

I mean, it's a whole range of experiences.

Robert Crews (1:47:08.860)

The interesting thing is the survey is a survey

Lex Fridman (1:47:10.860)

and it doesn't reflect ignorance,

Robert Crews (1:47:16.500)

as you're saying, perhaps,

Lex Fridman (1:47:18.900)

but it may reflect a different geopolitical view

Robert Crews (1:47:22.460)

of the world than the West has.

Lex Fridman (1:47:25.660)

So if, you know, for a lot of the world,

Robert Crews (1:47:29.260)

9 11 was one of the most important moments

Lex Fridman (1:47:33.220)

of recent human history.

Lex Fridman (1:47:35.580)

And for Afghanistan to not to know that,

Lex Fridman (1:47:38.540)

especially when they're part of that story,

Robert Crews (1:47:41.420)

means they have a very different,

Lex Fridman (1:47:43.060)

like there could be a lot of things said.

Robert Crews (1:47:46.140)

One is the spread of information is different.

Lex Fridman (1:47:49.660)

The channels of the way information is spread.

Lex Fridman (1:47:52.540)

And two of the things they care about,

Lex Fridman (1:47:54.900)

maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc

Robert Crews (1:47:59.980)

of history where the bickering of these superpowers

Lex Fridman (1:48:03.980)

that seem to want to go to the moon

Robert Crews (1:48:06.220)

are not as important as the big sort of arc

Lex Fridman (1:48:09.220)

that's been the story of Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (1:48:13.020)

You know, that's an interesting idea,

Lex Fridman (1:48:15.100)

but it's still a bit, if at all,

Robert Crews (1:48:18.220)

representative of the truth.

Lex Fridman (1:48:20.100)

It's heartbreaking that they're not,

Robert Crews (1:48:23.340)

do not see themselves as active player

Lex Fridman (1:48:28.700)

in this game between the United States

Lex Fridman (1:48:32.940)

and Central Asia, because they're such a critical player.

Lex Fridman (1:48:37.420)

And I feel, and obviously, in many ways,

Robert Crews (1:48:41.580)

get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction

Lex Fridman (1:48:44.300)

with the invasion of Afghanistan for many years,

Lex Fridman (1:48:50.100)

and then this rushed withdrawal of troops,

Lex Fridman (1:48:54.580)

and now the economic collapse, and it's sad in some ways.

Robert Crews (1:49:04.100)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:49:04.940)

I mean, you know, another way to put it is this.

Robert Crews (1:49:07.540)

I mean, yeah, there's a range of knowledge,

Lex Fridman (1:49:08.820)

and you're right, the information flows

Robert Crews (1:49:10.180)

are peculiar to particular geographies

Lex Fridman (1:49:14.260)

and histories and stuff.

Robert Crews (1:49:15.100)

I think that, you know, plucking out one sample

Lex Fridman (1:49:17.300)

from some fairly remote area,

Robert Crews (1:49:20.180)

from one like follow the agricultural products.

Lex Fridman (1:49:22.700)

I mean, and this is where, you know,

Robert Crews (1:49:24.940)

I think urban rural divides used to mean a lot more

Lex Fridman (1:49:29.500)

in the 19th century, right?

Lex Fridman (1:49:30.460)

So a lot of like the nuts and bolts of history

Lex Fridman (1:49:32.700)

is about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions,

Lex Fridman (1:49:35.780)

but I think that if one has the privilege

Lex Fridman (1:49:37.900)

of traveling a bit, you see that like urban areas

Robert Crews (1:49:40.740)

are fed by rural hinterlands.

Lex Fridman (1:49:43.420)

And if you think of who actually brings the bread,

Robert Crews (1:49:47.060)

the milk, the pomegranates and so on,

Lex Fridman (1:49:49.740)

it creates these networks.

Lex Fridman (1:49:50.740)

And then, you know, mobility channels,

Lex Fridman (1:49:53.620)

information and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:49:55.740)

But yeah, but your broader point

Lex Fridman (1:49:57.220)

about like the tragedy of this,

Robert Crews (1:49:58.060)

I mean, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student of mine,

Lex Fridman (1:50:01.140)

an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD,

Robert Crews (1:50:04.220)

who's now, you know, a doctor, he's a great scholar.

Lex Fridman (1:50:07.980)

You know, we've done several events now

Robert Crews (1:50:10.620)

trying to just think through what's happened.

Lex Fridman (1:50:11.980)

And of course, she's very emotionally affected by it.

Lex Fridman (1:50:14.620)

And she continues to ask a really great question.

Lex Fridman (1:50:17.340)

If I can get her phrasing right, you know,

Robert Crews (1:50:19.780)

if you think of the cycle of like the Taliban

Lex Fridman (1:50:21.500)

being in power in 2001 and the way in which

Robert Crews (1:50:24.340)

that affected women in particular,

Lex Fridman (1:50:25.660)

you know, half Afghan, half of the society, right?

Robert Crews (1:50:28.940)

Then you think of this 20 year period of violence

Lex Fridman (1:50:30.980)

and, you know, missed exits, right?

Lex Fridman (1:50:34.340)

And repeated tragedy that also it created a space.

Lex Fridman (1:50:38.300)

I mean, it created a space for a whole generation.

Robert Crews (1:50:39.980)

I'd say generationally, it created a sense,

Lex Fridman (1:50:41.340)

a space for people to realize something new.

Lex Fridman (1:50:44.380)

And I think, so we have to attend to the dynamism

Lex Fridman (1:50:47.020)

of the society, right?

Lex Fridman (1:50:47.860)

So yeah, this happened mostly in Kabul,

Lex Fridman (1:50:51.100)

other big cities, Mazar Sharif, Herat, and Kandahar.

Lex Fridman (1:50:55.420)

But you can't limit your analysis to that

Lex Fridman (1:50:56.700)

because things like radio, television,

Robert Crews (1:51:00.540)

everyone got a TV channel.

Lex Fridman (1:51:02.340)

There's a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star

Robert Crews (1:51:05.340)

that I recommend to your listeners and viewers

Lex Fridman (1:51:07.420)

that it's about a singing show, a singing contest show.

Lex Fridman (1:51:10.620)

But you see just for some of these things

Lex Fridman (1:51:12.100)

about like connections, I mean,

Robert Crews (1:51:14.060)

it's a show by an independent television network

Lex Fridman (1:51:17.940)

that did drama, it did kind of infomercials

Robert Crews (1:51:21.180)

for the government and huge American investment in it.

Lex Fridman (1:51:24.300)

So it wasn't politically neutral,

Lex Fridman (1:51:25.540)

but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:51:27.660)

But it did a singing show that became incredibly popular,

Robert Crews (1:51:31.820)

modeled upon the British American,

Lex Fridman (1:51:33.300)

you know, American Idol kind of stuff, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:51:35.260)

and you could vote.

Lex Fridman (1:51:36.260)

So it had a kind of democratic practice element.

Lex Fridman (1:51:39.020)

But it's fascinating to see that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:51:41.260)

people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this,

Robert Crews (1:51:44.780)

you know, you think of like literacy rates,

Lex Fridman (1:51:46.940)

literacy rates are imperfect.

Robert Crews (1:51:47.980)

And, you know, people who study, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:51:50.620)

medieval or modern Europe talk about how,

Robert Crews (1:51:52.860)

yeah, no one could read and there weren't many books,

Lex Fridman (1:51:56.100)

but if someone had a book, it'd be read aloud

Robert Crews (1:51:58.700)

to a whole village potentially or gathering.

Lex Fridman (1:52:00.340)

So there isn't much, you know,

Robert Crews (1:52:01.460)

some of these metrics don't get what people actually

Lex Fridman (1:52:03.780)

receive as information or exposure

Robert Crews (1:52:05.180)

because there's the magnifying power of open spaces

Lex Fridman (1:52:08.900)

and hearing radio in group settings,

Robert Crews (1:52:11.540)

seeing television group settings, having telephone,

Lex Fridman (1:52:15.340)

you know, cheap telephones, which then become an access

Lex Fridman (1:52:18.420)

point to the world and social media, right?

Lex Fridman (1:52:20.380)

So all the stuff swept across Afghan society

Robert Crews (1:52:23.140)

as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more.

Lex Fridman (1:52:28.260)

So Afghan society became, you know, in important ways,

Robert Crews (1:52:31.180)

really connected to everything going on.

Lex Fridman (1:52:33.300)

And so you see that reflected politically

Lex Fridman (1:52:34.460)

and what people wanted.

Lex Fridman (1:52:35.300)

So you had some people obviously

Robert Crews (1:52:37.300)

back to return to the Taliban,

Lex Fridman (1:52:39.020)

some people wanted the status quo,

Lex Fridman (1:52:41.180)

but increasingly many more people wanted something else.

Lex Fridman (1:52:44.260)

And one of the great failures was

Robert Crews (1:52:45.700)

to expose people to democracy,

Lex Fridman (1:52:47.980)

but only give them the rigged version.

Lex Fridman (1:52:50.020)

And so the US State Department in particular

Lex Fridman (1:52:52.780)

continued to double down on faked elections

Robert Crews (1:52:55.060)

for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (1:52:57.860)

What kind of elections?

Robert Crews (1:52:58.980)

Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament

Lex Fridman (1:53:02.140)

and for president in Afghanistan again and again

Robert Crews (1:53:06.740)

from the very beginning.

Lex Fridman (1:53:08.300)

And those elections were partly theater for the US,

Robert Crews (1:53:12.260)

like for remaining on the road that you're describing,

Lex Fridman (1:53:14.380)

right, for not deviating, for not exiting

Robert Crews (1:53:15.820)

because we were building democracy there.

Lex Fridman (1:53:18.660)

In reality, the US government knew

Robert Crews (1:53:19.820)

it was never really building democracy there.

Lex Fridman (1:53:21.940)

It was establishing control

Lex Fridman (1:53:24.100)

and elections were one of the means to gather control,

Lex Fridman (1:53:26.540)

right?

Lex Fridman (1:53:27.380)

But then you had on the ground,

Lex Fridman (1:53:28.460)

especially among young people going to university,

Robert Crews (1:53:32.100)

you know, having experiences

Lex Fridman (1:53:33.340)

that were denied to them before,

Robert Crews (1:53:36.180)

you know, they took these problems so seriously.

Lex Fridman (1:53:37.620)

So part of the disillusionment that we see today

Robert Crews (1:53:40.060)

is that, you know, they believe what the US told them

Lex Fridman (1:53:43.340)

that they're constructing democracy.

Lex Fridman (1:53:45.100)

And of course, you know, cynics like us may be thinking,

Lex Fridman (1:53:46.980)

well, you know, you're not really doing that.

Robert Crews (1:53:49.300)

You're backing fraud.

Lex Fridman (1:53:50.420)

They believed it when they were younger

Lex Fridman (1:53:52.180)

and now they're actually smart enough

Lex Fridman (1:53:54.060)

to understand that it's a farce.

Lex Fridman (1:53:56.380)

But in so indirectly had the consequence

Lex Fridman (1:53:59.140)

of actually working and that it taught the young

Robert Crews (1:54:03.460)

over a period of 20 years, young folks to believe

Lex Fridman (1:54:07.020)

that democracy is possible

Lex Fridman (1:54:08.420)

and then to realize what democracy is not.

Lex Fridman (1:54:10.860)

It's just the current system.

Robert Crews (1:54:11.700)

That's beautifully said, beautifully said.

Lex Fridman (1:54:12.780)

And so, but now look at us, now it's, you know,

Robert Crews (1:54:15.460)

it's now November.

Lex Fridman (1:54:17.900)

And so this whole period,

Lex Fridman (1:54:21.620)

and I wouldn't say like, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:23.300)

I wouldn't cast the last 20 years

Robert Crews (1:54:25.540)

if we're looking at all the achievements, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:27.780)

I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet,

Robert Crews (1:54:30.220)

like, oh, this is something

Lex Fridman (1:54:31.620)

we should pat ourselves on the back for.

Robert Crews (1:54:32.660)

I think that much of this happened actually

Lex Fridman (1:54:34.540)

against what the Americans wanted.

Robert Crews (1:54:35.940)

I mean, that the kind of free thinking,

Lex Fridman (1:54:39.260)

democracy wanting, I mean, even like, you know,

Robert Crews (1:54:42.340)

we could point out on the religious,

Lex Fridman (1:54:43.260)

go back to the religious sphere.

Robert Crews (1:54:44.100)

I mean, the African religious landscape

Lex Fridman (1:54:47.780)

became very pluralistic.

Robert Crews (1:54:50.220)

Lots of young people wanted a different kind

Lex Fridman (1:54:52.100)

of secular politics, but the old guard

Robert Crews (1:54:56.300)

who wanted the status quo and wanted something

Lex Fridman (1:54:59.020)

that they'd fought for in 1980s tended

Robert Crews (1:55:01.220)

to still get American backing as the political leads,

Lex Fridman (1:55:04.060)

who still tended to monopolize political power.

Lex Fridman (1:55:06.860)

So all this stuff was happening in different ways.

Lex Fridman (1:55:09.460)

I mean, the Americans established

Robert Crews (1:55:10.740)

this American University of Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (1:55:12.780)

which was, I think, one of the best things

Robert Crews (1:55:13.940)

the U.S. did there.

Lex Fridman (1:55:14.780)

And I regret that the U.S. didn't fund 20 more,

Robert Crews (1:55:18.020)

you know, sprinkling them across the country,

Lex Fridman (1:55:19.940)

making them accessible to people,

Robert Crews (1:55:20.780)

because it was, you know, again,

Lex Fridman (1:55:23.140)

it wasn't an engine of Americanization.

Robert Crews (1:55:26.420)

It was just opportunity.

Lex Fridman (1:55:27.260)

And so the thirst for higher education

Robert Crews (1:55:28.660)

was really extraordinary there.

Lex Fridman (1:55:29.860)

It was never really met.

Robert Crews (1:55:31.020)

The U.S. tended to put money in primary education,

Lex Fridman (1:55:34.180)

which much of that too was fraudulent.

Lex Fridman (1:55:37.060)

But so you have all this interesting dynamism.

Lex Fridman (1:55:38.420)

You have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space.

Robert Crews (1:55:42.220)

I mean, I call it a public sphere

Lex Fridman (1:55:43.660)

in the classic European sense.

Robert Crews (1:55:45.660)

You know, the Afghans made of their own.

Lex Fridman (1:55:46.780)

And again, it wasn't Americanization.

Robert Crews (1:55:49.180)

It wasn't imposed.

Lex Fridman (1:55:51.500)

It was something that Afghans built across generations,

Lex Fridman (1:55:54.220)

but really with a firm foundation among youth,

Lex Fridman (1:55:58.340)

who wanted, importantly, a multiethnic Afghan society.

Robert Crews (1:56:01.620)

You asked about Pashtuns and that kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:56:03.660)

And a lot of that language in recent years was,

Robert Crews (1:56:07.660)

they were aware that the U.S.-backed government

Lex Fridman (1:56:09.820)

was playing ethnic politics

Lex Fridman (1:56:11.860)

and trying to kind of put people on the blocks

Lex Fridman (1:56:14.460)

and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity.

Lex Fridman (1:56:17.860)

And there was a younger cohort of people who said,

Lex Fridman (1:56:19.820)

you know, we are Afghan.

Lex Fridman (1:56:21.540)

And then there was interesting social media stuff

Lex Fridman (1:56:23.260)

where people would say, I am Hazara,

Lex Fridman (1:56:25.580)

but I'm also Tajik, I'm also Uzbek.

Lex Fridman (1:56:28.340)

I mean, it was a way of creating

Robert Crews (1:56:30.380)

a multiethnic Afghan national identity

Lex Fridman (1:56:33.540)

that embraced everything.

Lex Fridman (1:56:34.980)

I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian, right?

Lex Fridman (1:56:37.860)

But symbolically, it was very important

Robert Crews (1:56:39.220)

that they rejected being mobilized politically,

Lex Fridman (1:56:42.940)

you know, voting as a Hazara or voting as whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:56:45.340)

And of course, there were communities who wanted to,

Lex Fridman (1:56:47.580)

you know, vote as that ethnic community.

Lex Fridman (1:56:50.660)

But there are also people who said, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:52.220)

let's put a kind of civic nationalism first,

Robert Crews (1:56:55.060)

one that accommodates, I think, pluralism

Lex Fridman (1:56:57.740)

in a way that rejected the kind of majoritarian politics

Robert Crews (1:57:00.180)

of one ethnic group dominating the thing.

Lex Fridman (1:57:03.380)

So all this stuff was quite interesting.

Robert Crews (1:57:04.580)

I mean, women were asserting themselves

Lex Fridman (1:57:07.380)

across multiple spheres.

Robert Crews (1:57:09.580)

Of course, it remained patriarchal.

Lex Fridman (1:57:10.740)

Of course, there were struggles.

Robert Crews (1:57:11.580)

Of course, there was violence.

Lex Fridman (1:57:12.420)

Of course, you know, there's no utopia.

Lex Fridman (1:57:15.100)

But the door on all that shut on August 15.

Lex Fridman (1:57:18.820)

So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer

Robert Crews (1:57:22.020)

from the student, now professor,

Lex Fridman (1:57:25.620)

was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this,

Lex Fridman (1:57:28.540)

and you mentioned the tragic arc here,

Lex Fridman (1:57:31.780)

if you think of the 20 years, like, she asked, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:57:35.060)

why did you go to war in our country?

Lex Fridman (1:57:37.620)

Basically, why did you do this to us for 20 years

Lex Fridman (1:57:39.220)

when this was never about us?

Lex Fridman (1:57:41.460)

You know, you never asked us if you wanted to come.

Robert Crews (1:57:43.860)

You never asked us what you wanted to build here.

Lex Fridman (1:57:46.420)

You didn't ask us when you were coming

Lex Fridman (1:57:47.460)

and you didn't ask us when you were leaving.

Lex Fridman (1:57:49.420)

You just did this all on your own.

Lex Fridman (1:57:51.460)

And we tried to make the most of it.

Lex Fridman (1:57:53.780)

And then you pulled the rug out from under us,

Robert Crews (1:57:55.820)

you know, at the 11th hour,

Lex Fridman (1:57:57.860)

and returned to power, probably by diplomacy.

Robert Crews (1:58:02.100)

It wasn't, at the end, just a military loss.

Lex Fridman (1:58:04.460)

I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions.

Robert Crews (1:58:06.980)

I mean, the idea, you asked about alternatives.

Lex Fridman (1:58:08.500)

I mean, give me a Bagram.

Robert Crews (1:58:10.900)

I mean, holding to the timeline.

Lex Fridman (1:58:12.740)

I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold

Robert Crews (1:58:14.260)

to the Doha Agreement that Trump had signed.

Lex Fridman (1:58:17.620)

I mean, every American president

Lex Fridman (1:58:19.820)

writes his or her own foreign policy, right?

Lex Fridman (1:58:21.900)

So the Biden administration acted as if,

Lex Fridman (1:58:24.580)

and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied,

Lex Fridman (1:58:28.460)

and that it was either this or 20 more years of war

Robert Crews (1:58:31.340)

or some absurd kind of, you know, false alternative.

Lex Fridman (1:58:36.020)

And so, but I think that's important

Robert Crews (1:58:37.980)

for American audiences to hear that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:58:40.020)

they're like, you came to here to experiment.

Robert Crews (1:58:42.180)

You came here to punish.

Lex Fridman (1:58:44.180)

You came here to kind of reassert, you know,

Robert Crews (1:58:47.820)

your dominance the world stage,

Lex Fridman (1:58:49.860)

you know, to work out the fear and hurt of 9 11

Robert Crews (1:58:53.460)

that we talked about, which was so real, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:58:55.020)

impalpable and so important for American politics since then.

Robert Crews (1:58:59.060)

Like you did, you worked out your problems,

Lex Fridman (1:59:00.900)

you know, on us, on our territory.

Lex Fridman (1:59:03.940)

And now what do we have for it?

Lex Fridman (1:59:06.140)

You know, and then the people who had a stake

Robert Crews (1:59:08.820)

in that system, imperfect as it was,

Lex Fridman (1:59:12.180)

have been desperate to leave.

Lex Fridman (1:59:13.700)

And so this, I don't know how much people are aware of this,

Lex Fridman (1:59:15.620)

but, you know, I'm a scholar, I work in California,

Robert Crews (1:59:19.300)

you know, I have friends, I edited a journal on Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (1:59:23.380)

and, you know, but I'm not a politician, I'm not a soldier,

Lex Fridman (1:59:26.820)

but people assume that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:59:28.780)

Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me

Lex Fridman (1:59:31.100)

and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American

Lex Fridman (1:59:34.700)

to help get them out.

Robert Crews (1:59:36.020)

You know, that's the kind of like, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:59:39.420)

the symbol of voting with your feet, you know,

Robert Crews (1:59:42.260)

is quite powerful.

Lex Fridman (1:59:43.100)

I mean, there's a huge swath of society

Robert Crews (1:59:45.900)

that doesn't want the system

Lex Fridman (1:59:47.260)

and is literally living in terror about it.

Robert Crews (1:59:50.580)

Naturally women, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:59:51.420)

I mean, especially women of a certain age,

Robert Crews (1:59:52.860)

I mean, they feel like their lives are over.

Lex Fridman (1:59:54.780)

I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide.

Robert Crews (1:59:58.380)

They feel betrayed and some people have done

Lex Fridman (20:02.280)

so I couldn't read it and I really want to read it.

Robert Crews (20:04.920)

It's a Moscow in the mosque or something like that.

Lex Fridman (20:11.840)

By the way, just another tangent on a tangent.

Lex Fridman (20:15.000)

So I bought all your books.

Lex Fridman (20:16.280)

I love them very much.

Robert Crews (20:18.120)

One of the reasons I bought them and read many parts

Lex Fridman (20:21.560)

is because they're easy to buy.

Robert Crews (20:24.320)

Unlike articles, every single website has a paywall.

Lex Fridman (20:28.560)

So it's very frustrating to read brilliant scholars

Robert Crews (20:32.720)

such as yourself.

Lex Fridman (20:35.280)

I wish there was one fee I could pay everywhere.

Robert Crews (20:37.520)

I don't care what that fee is,

Lex Fridman (20:38.840)

where it gives, allows me to read

Robert Crews (20:41.200)

some of your brilliant writing.

Lex Fridman (20:42.200)

No, no, thank you, I hear you.

Robert Crews (20:43.040)

I think moving toward more kind of open source

Lex Fridman (20:47.360)

formatting stuff I think is what a lot of journals

Robert Crews (20:49.120)

are thinking about now and I think it's definitely

Lex Fridman (20:51.760)

for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship

Robert Crews (20:54.520)

that's definitely an important thing

Lex Fridman (20:55.940)

that we should all think about.

Lex Fridman (20:56.900)

And I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers

Lex Fridman (21:01.200)

to do that, so I appreciate that.

Robert Crews (21:02.600)

This is what I'm doing here.

Lex Fridman (21:03.840)

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

Lex Fridman (21:06.520)

So your thought was Afghanistan is not going to be

Lex Fridman (21:11.520)

to be the center, the source of where.

Robert Crews (21:14.960)

It's not the center of this and invading that country

Lex Fridman (21:16.960)

isn't gonna fix the toxic milestone of politics

Lex Fridman (21:22.160)

that produced 9 11, right?

Lex Fridman (21:25.200)

I'm just thinking of some of the personalities,

Robert Crews (21:26.520)

just thinking about going back to the Tashkent story

Lex Fridman (21:28.880)

which I'll end with.

Robert Crews (21:29.800)

I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things

Lex Fridman (21:34.060)

and then asking questions about it

Lex Fridman (21:35.400)

and trying to understand through their eyes

Lex Fridman (21:39.000)

what the tradition means to them.

Lex Fridman (21:40.920)

And then we had a very narrow conversation

Lex Fridman (21:43.680)

about what Islam is that generated, immediately exploded

Lex Fridman (21:48.320)

on the day of 9 11, right?

Lex Fridman (21:50.120)

And then of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam

Lex Fridman (21:53.800)

and Muslims was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.

Lex Fridman (21:59.920)

So it became a perfect storm I think of demonization

Robert Crews (22:03.000)

that didn't sit with what I knew about the tradition

Lex Fridman (22:06.180)

and with actual people that I had known

Robert Crews (22:08.380)

because then going back to, I mean, there were other friends

Lex Fridman (22:10.960)

and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (22:13.000)

and Tashkent for a moment, I mean,

Lex Fridman (22:15.360)

just thought about my friends who had been,

Robert Crews (22:18.360)

who had suffered a great deal in their short lives,

Lex Fridman (22:20.600)

who had been cast aside from country to country,

Lex Fridman (22:24.680)

but had found a place in Tashkent

Lex Fridman (22:26.680)

with some relative stability.

Lex Fridman (22:28.680)

And they wanted to go out every night

Lex Fridman (22:31.040)

and they explained, one friend,

Robert Crews (22:33.480)

we talked about it with the alcohol and all that

Lex Fridman (22:34.840)

and he didn't get crazy, but he was like,

Robert Crews (22:37.260)

you can drink, but just don't get drunk.

Lex Fridman (22:38.880)

That's permissible within Islam, right?

Lex Fridman (22:42.720)

And he was an ethnic Pashtun.

Lex Fridman (22:44.960)

I think Uzbeks had a different view,

Robert Crews (22:47.640)

often the more vodka the better,

Lex Fridman (22:49.840)

and it doesn't violate, as I understand Islam.

Lex Fridman (22:51.840)

So even, it's kind of a silly example,

Lex Fridman (22:54.080)

but it's just an illustration of the ways in which

Robert Crews (22:56.160)

different communities, different generations,

Lex Fridman (22:57.980)

different people can come at this very complex rich tradition

Robert Crews (23:01.520)

in so many different ways.

Lex Fridman (23:02.500)

So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are,

Robert Crews (23:06.120)

or any kind of expert, whatever,

Lex Fridman (23:08.320)

it's always disconcerting to see

Lex Fridman (23:10.880)

your field of specialization be flattened, right?

Lex Fridman (23:13.800)

And then be flattened and then be turned

Lex Fridman (23:15.120)

to arguments for violence, right?

Lex Fridman (23:18.480)

Mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate.

Robert Crews (23:22.280)

Yeah, that's right.

Lex Fridman (23:23.120)

And depression. And hurt at that moment, and pain.

Robert Crews (23:25.480)

So, I mean, that day I vividly remember,

Lex Fridman (23:28.080)

I sat with other PhD historians in different fields.

Robert Crews (23:32.800)

We, oddly enough, had lunch that day

Lex Fridman (23:35.740)

and it kind of deserted Washington.

Robert Crews (23:37.320)

Some place was open when we went.

Lex Fridman (23:39.760)

And we just thought, you know,

Robert Crews (23:40.600)

this is going to kind of open up

Lex Fridman (23:42.480)

like a great mall of destruction.

Robert Crews (23:45.800)

And, you know, the American state is going to destroy

Lex Fridman (23:51.020)

and it's going to destroy in this geography.

Lex Fridman (23:53.800)

And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.

Lex Fridman (23:56.560)

And then I think if one, you know,

Robert Crews (23:59.200)

I'd been doing some research on Afghanistan then,

Lex Fridman (24:02.560)

I was kind of shifting to the South

Lex Fridman (24:03.640)

and I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar

Lex Fridman (24:08.000)

for some years.

Robert Crews (24:08.840)

And, you know, I think it's clear now

Lex Fridman (24:11.800)

that in retrospect there were opportunities

Robert Crews (24:14.080)

for alternative policies at that moment.

Lex Fridman (24:16.560)

So what should the conversation have been like?

Lex Fridman (24:20.880)

What should we have done differently?

Lex Fridman (24:23.560)

Because, you know, from a perspective of the time,

Robert Crews (24:28.560)

the United States was invaded by a foreign force.

Lex Fridman (24:33.440)

What is the proper response

Robert Crews (24:35.080)

or what is the proper conversation

Lex Fridman (24:36.760)

about the proper response at the time, you think?

Robert Crews (24:39.080)

You know, I know my colleague at Stanford,

Lex Fridman (24:41.300)

Condoleezza Rice would tell me this is above my pay grade.

Robert Crews (24:44.600)

And, you know, she makes a point in her classes

Lex Fridman (24:46.640)

to talk about how difficult decision making is

Robert Crews (24:50.240)

under such intense pressure.

Lex Fridman (24:52.200)

And I appreciate that.

Robert Crews (24:53.900)

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

Lex Fridman (24:57.420)

I don't like battlefields.

Robert Crews (24:58.720)

I don't like taking risks.

Lex Fridman (25:01.480)

So I can see all those limits.

Robert Crews (25:02.960)

You know, I'm not a military expert.

Lex Fridman (25:05.280)

I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone

Robert Crews (25:07.200)

because of the way I look

Lex Fridman (25:08.040)

and because of my nationality and so on, but I'm not a spy.

Lex Fridman (25:10.320)

So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise

Lex Fridman (25:12.760)

of all those communities.

Lex Fridman (25:13.720)

But I think they acted out of ignorance.

Lex Fridman (25:16.960)

They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the,

Robert Crews (25:19.680)

in a way there was a compensatory aspect

Lex Fridman (25:22.840)

of this decision making.

Robert Crews (25:23.840)

I mean, the Bush administration failed.

Lex Fridman (25:27.580)

This was an extraordinary failure, right?

Lex Fridman (25:29.580)

So if we start.

Lex Fridman (25:30.420)

In which way?

Lex Fridman (25:31.240)

Can we break down the nation?

Lex Fridman (25:32.080)

Of intelligence.

Robert Crews (25:32.920)

I mean, if they, you know,

Lex Fridman (25:33.760)

if you follow the story of Richard Clarke.

Lex Fridman (25:36.840)

Who's Richard Clarke?

Lex Fridman (25:37.800)

He was a national security expert

Robert Crews (25:40.840)

who was tasked with following Al Qaeda,

Lex Fridman (25:43.400)

who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration

Robert Crews (25:47.280)

that he passed on to the George W. Bush administration.

Lex Fridman (25:50.720)

And if you look at the work of Condoleezza Rice,

Robert Crews (25:53.440)

she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaywalled

Lex Fridman (25:56.760)

foreign affairs article that you can read,

Robert Crews (25:58.680)

announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook.

Lex Fridman (26:02.840)

And it was all about great powers.

Robert Crews (26:05.280)

It was about the rise of China.

Lex Fridman (26:06.480)

It was about Russia.

Robert Crews (26:07.520)

I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover

Lex Fridman (26:10.920)

of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman.

Robert Crews (26:16.000)

Who spoke, you know, the Clinton administration

Lex Fridman (26:17.660)

repeated again and again the idea of making sure

Robert Crews (26:19.920)

the bear stayed in his cage.

Lex Fridman (26:22.860)

Which is why the United States threw a lifeline

Robert Crews (26:26.540)

to the Central Asian states, hoping to have pipelines,

Lex Fridman (26:31.120)

hoping to shore up their national sovereignty

Robert Crews (26:34.580)

as a way of containing Russia initially, but also Iran,

Lex Fridman (26:39.120)

you know, which sits to the south and west.

Lex Fridman (26:42.160)

And then peripherally looking down the road

Lex Fridman (26:43.840)

to China to the east.

Lex Fridman (26:45.640)

So the bear is what, like Russia?

Lex Fridman (26:50.200)

Or is it kind of like some weird combination

Lex Fridman (26:53.200)

of Russia, Iran, and China?

Lex Fridman (26:55.360)

The bear is Russia and Russia is this thing.

Robert Crews (27:00.240)

I'm trying to characterize the imagination

Lex Fridman (27:01.760)

of some of these national security figures.

Robert Crews (27:04.920)

This is an image formed in the Cold War.

Lex Fridman (27:07.240)

I mean, it has deeper seeds in European

Lex Fridman (27:09.480)

and Western intellectual thought that go back

Lex Fridman (27:12.160)

at least to the 1850s and the reign of Tsar Nicholas I.

Robert Crews (27:17.600)

When we first get this language about the Russian Empire

Lex Fridman (27:21.140)

as this kind of evil polity.

Robert Crews (27:24.960)

Obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism.

Lex Fridman (27:29.000)

But the Clinton folks kept that alive.

Robert Crews (27:30.960)

They wanted to make sure that American power

Lex Fridman (27:34.040)

would be unmatched.

Lex Fridman (27:36.080)

And they, being creatures of the Cold War themselves,

Lex Fridman (27:39.400)

they looked to Russia as a recession power

Robert Crews (27:42.860)

well before Putin was even thought of.

Lex Fridman (27:45.560)

Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep,

Robert Crews (27:49.440)

profound historical piece in Rambo.

Lex Fridman (27:52.140)

It's probably, this conflict has to do

Robert Crews (27:55.640)

with another Sylvester Stallone movie,

Lex Fridman (27:57.280)

a Rocky IV, which is also historically accurate

Lex Fridman (28:00.520)

and based on, it's basically a documentary.

Lex Fridman (28:03.540)

So there is something about the American power,

Robert Crews (28:07.440)

even at the level of Condoleezza Rice,

Lex Fridman (28:10.140)

these respected deep kind of leaders and thinkers

Robert Crews (28:15.760)

about history and the future,

Lex Fridman (28:17.560)

where they like to have competition

Robert Crews (28:20.440)

with other superpowers and almost conjure up superpowers,

Lex Fridman (28:26.520)

even when those countries don't maybe at the time

Robert Crews (28:31.280)

at least deserve the label of superpower.

Lex Fridman (28:33.520)

That's right, great point.

Robert Crews (28:34.360)

Yeah, they're all some points.

Lex Fridman (28:35.760)

So yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many, many exports.

Robert Crews (28:39.400)

I mean, my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Cotkin,

Lex Fridman (28:43.320)

was then writing great things about how,

Robert Crews (28:46.280)

if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP,

Lex Fridman (28:49.600)

its capacity to actually act globally,

Robert Crews (28:52.240)

it's all quite limited.

Lex Fridman (28:54.160)

But Condoleezza Rice and the people around her

Robert Crews (28:58.360)

came into power with George W. Bush,

Lex Fridman (29:00.080)

thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era

Lex Fridman (29:03.560)

would be those of the past, right?

Lex Fridman (29:06.480)

Richard Clark and others within the administration

Robert Crews (29:08.120)

warned that, in fact, there is this group

Lex Fridman (29:10.440)

that has declared war against the United States

Lex Fridman (29:12.940)

and they are coming for us.

Lex Fridman (29:14.760)

The FBI had been following these people around

Robert Crews (29:17.280)

for many months.

Lex Fridman (29:18.120)

So by the time George W. Bush comes to power,

Robert Crews (29:21.880)

lots of Al Qaeda activists are, well, not lots,

Lex Fridman (29:23.800)

but perhaps a dozen or so,

Lex Fridman (29:26.120)

are already training in the United States, right?

Lex Fridman (29:30.000)

And what we knew immediately from the biographies

Robert Crews (29:31.800)

of some of the characters of the attackers of 9.11,

Lex Fridman (29:34.400)

it was a hodgepodge of people from across the planet,

Lex Fridman (29:37.120)

but most of them were Saudi, right?

Lex Fridman (29:39.320)

And that was known very early on

Robert Crews (29:41.240)

or presumed very early on.

Lex Fridman (29:43.240)

So again, if we go back to your big question

Lex Fridman (29:44.520)

about the geography, why Afghanistan?

Lex Fridman (29:47.080)

It didn't add up, right?

Robert Crews (29:48.240)

It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target.

Lex Fridman (29:51.240)

It was a place to have explosions,

Robert Crews (29:54.100)

to seemingly recapture American supremacy.

Lex Fridman (29:58.360)

And also, I think, you know, there was,

Robert Crews (29:59.760)

in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge.

Lex Fridman (2:00:02.380)

some good things in getting people out.

Robert Crews (2:00:03.540)

You know, I mean, some, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:00:05.740)

the US military vets have been, you know,

Robert Crews (2:00:08.140)

at the forefront of working to get out people,

Lex Fridman (2:00:10.980)

you know, that they know they owe,

Lex Fridman (2:00:14.500)

but the US government doesn't want these people.

Lex Fridman (2:00:17.580)

I mean, they have created all these obstacles

Robert Crews (2:00:19.660)

to allowing a safety valve for people to leave.

Lex Fridman (2:00:24.820)

Looking forward from a perspective of leadership,

Lex Fridman (2:00:27.820)

how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes?

Lex Fridman (2:00:31.100)

So obviously some interests,

Robert Crews (2:00:33.620)

some aspects of human nature led to this war.

Lex Fridman (2:00:36.940)

How do we resist that in the future?

Robert Crews (2:00:41.060)

I guess beyond my moral and intellectual capacity,

Lex Fridman (2:00:44.540)

I'll just say this, I mean, looking at it,

Robert Crews (2:00:45.620)

again, looking at it from my home ground as the university,

Lex Fridman (2:00:47.980)

and I think of the intellectual,

Robert Crews (2:00:53.100)

you know, ways of thinking that I think students

Lex Fridman (2:00:55.900)

should develop for themselves as citizens, right?

Robert Crews (2:00:59.060)

Maybe that's where to start is like historical thinking.

Lex Fridman (2:01:01.940)

I mean, these are all, you know,

Robert Crews (2:01:03.620)

I try to tell people, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:01:04.900)

if you want to do robotics, computer science,

Robert Crews (2:01:07.460)

you'd be a doctor or whatever.

Lex Fridman (2:01:08.700)

You should study history.

Robert Crews (2:01:10.100)

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be in a story like me,

Lex Fridman (2:01:11.700)

and it's, you know, my job isn't perfect.

Lex Fridman (2:01:13.300)

My profession is deeply flawed, right?

Lex Fridman (2:01:15.100)

But as I get older, I'm like,

Robert Crews (2:01:17.620)

there are fewer and fewer historians

Lex Fridman (2:01:18.460)

that I actually like and want to hang out with and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:01:20.460)

So it's like, I'm not offering myself

Lex Fridman (2:01:22.220)

as like a model for anything,

Lex Fridman (2:01:23.180)

but you know, whether you're a, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:01:25.660)

you carry the mail or you're a brain surgeon, whatever.

Robert Crews (2:01:27.820)

I mean, I think it's a way of civic engagement

Lex Fridman (2:01:30.500)

and a way of like, you know, ethical being in the world

Robert Crews (2:01:32.700)

that we need to familiarize ourselves with,

Lex Fridman (2:01:34.500)

because if you're an American

Robert Crews (2:01:35.980)

or if you're from a rich country, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:01:38.180)

you need to be aware of your effect

Robert Crews (2:01:40.260)

on an intricate world.

Lex Fridman (2:01:42.260)

You can't say anymore that you don't know or care

Robert Crews (2:01:45.100)

what's happening in Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:01:46.820)

or really circle the globe and point to a place.

Robert Crews (2:01:49.580)

I mean, we're all connected and we have ethical obligations.

Lex Fridman (2:01:54.420)

That's one place to start, but I would just say this,

Lex Fridman (2:01:55.940)

and this is a lot for a self critique,

Lex Fridman (2:01:57.540)

and that is so much of my teaching

Lex Fridman (2:02:01.180)

and like the themes of my research have been about empire,

Lex Fridman (2:02:03.020)

you know, how big states work,

Robert Crews (2:02:05.460)

not only on big territories like the Russian Empire

Lex Fridman (2:02:07.500)

and Soviet Union and stuff,

Lex Fridman (2:02:08.340)

but the way in which power often is projected

Lex Fridman (2:02:11.860)

beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see.

Lex Fridman (2:02:14.140)

So this is where things like neoliberalism

Lex Fridman (2:02:16.940)

or just, you know, if you want to take capitalism

Robert Crews (2:02:18.780)

or just things that, you know, the idea of humanity

Lex Fridman (2:02:21.860)

or of liberalism or of humanitarianism,

Robert Crews (2:02:24.900)

ideas that move beyond state boundaries

Lex Fridman (2:02:26.900)

are all things that we think about as affecting power

Lex Fridman (2:02:30.140)

in some ways that often harm people, right?

Lex Fridman (2:02:33.700)

So I think part of, as I've seen my job so far

Robert Crews (2:02:36.140)

is to think about, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:02:37.620)

building upon the work of my people in grad school

Robert Crews (2:02:39.940)

and, you know, scholars that have affected me.

Lex Fridman (2:02:42.140)

I mean, you know, we're all concerned

Robert Crews (2:02:43.820)

with how power works and its effects

Lex Fridman (2:02:45.580)

and trying to be attuned to understanding

Robert Crews (2:02:50.020)

things that aren't visible, right,

Lex Fridman (2:02:50.980)

that we should be thinking about,

Robert Crews (2:02:51.860)

that should be known to us.

Lex Fridman (2:02:52.940)

And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role

Robert Crews (2:02:55.260)

in showing effects that aren't, you know, obvious initially.

Lex Fridman (2:03:01.620)

So empire is a framework to think about this.

Lex Fridman (2:03:03.220)

And so you think about invading foreign countries.

Lex Fridman (2:03:05.940)

Obviously, if you're a scholar of empire,

Robert Crews (2:03:07.980)

you've seen what that looks like,

Lex Fridman (2:03:09.580)

and that's horrific, right?

Robert Crews (2:03:11.620)

You look at things like racism

Lex Fridman (2:03:13.100)

as one of the ideological pillars of empire.

Robert Crews (2:03:16.780)

You know, that's horrific.

Lex Fridman (2:03:17.620)

It must be critiqued.

Robert Crews (2:03:18.460)

It must be, you know, we must be educated against.

Lex Fridman (2:03:22.100)

Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire

Robert Crews (2:03:24.100)

is also something to highlight, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:03:25.420)

to rectify and so on.

Robert Crews (2:03:27.820)

You know, to be moral beings,

Lex Fridman (2:03:28.660)

we need to think about past inequality

Lex Fridman (2:03:31.260)

and the legacies of violence and destruction that live on.

Lex Fridman (2:03:35.220)

I mean, living in the Americas.

Robert Crews (2:03:36.340)

I mean, look at, you know, we're all on stolen land.

Lex Fridman (2:03:39.620)

We're all in the sense living with the fruits of genocide

Lex Fridman (2:03:43.020)

and slavery and all those things

Lex Fridman (2:03:44.380)

that are hard to come to terms with, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:46.980)

But the last few months in Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:03:49.740)

and thinking about empire, I think, made me more humble

Robert Crews (2:03:53.380)

when I read people who say,

Lex Fridman (2:03:57.100)

to put it simply, have taken some joy in this moment,

Robert Crews (2:03:59.980)

saying like, well, the Americans

Lex Fridman (2:04:02.020)

got kicked out of Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (2:04:03.940)

You know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing.

Lex Fridman (2:04:07.020)

This is a kind of victory of anti colonial.

Robert Crews (2:04:10.780)

You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:04:14.020)

that America is not some kind of place

Robert Crews (2:04:16.940)

that has an ideal of freedom

Lex Fridman (2:04:18.900)

and all the kind of things that we Americans tell ourselves,

Lex Fridman (2:04:21.980)

but it's more America has the ideal of empire,

Lex Fridman (2:04:25.820)

that there's one place that has the truth

Lex Fridman (2:04:28.420)

and everybody else must follow this truth.

Lex Fridman (2:04:31.700)

And so from a perspective of Afghanistan,

Robert Crews (2:04:34.340)

it could be a victory against this idea

Lex Fridman (2:04:36.460)

of centralized truth of empire.

Robert Crews (2:04:39.780)

That's another way to tell the story.

Lex Fridman (2:04:41.660)

And then in that sense, it's a victory.

Lex Fridman (2:04:43.500)

And in that sense also, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:04:46.580)

you push back against this somewhat,

Robert Crews (2:04:49.340)

this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires.

Lex Fridman (2:04:54.620)

Right, right.

Lex Fridman (2:04:56.140)

And outside this, I mean, I'm a critic of empire.

Lex Fridman (2:04:59.980)

I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon

Robert Crews (2:05:04.060)

that stays with us.

Lex Fridman (2:05:05.060)

And I think, you know, we need scholars

Robert Crews (2:05:06.900)

to point to the way in which it still works

Lex Fridman (2:05:08.900)

and still does harm.

Lex Fridman (2:05:11.780)

But it's part of being an empire

Lex Fridman (2:05:12.820)

that you can just get up and leave a place, right?

Robert Crews (2:05:15.780)

That you can remake its politics on one day.

Lex Fridman (2:05:19.820)

And then because it fails to advance your agenda

Robert Crews (2:05:22.580)

at one moment, you simply walk away.

Lex Fridman (2:05:26.180)

I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.

Robert Crews (2:05:27.860)

I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent,

Lex Fridman (2:05:30.380)

you know, the way that the British withdrew

Robert Crews (2:05:34.500)

played a significant role in mass violence,

Lex Fridman (2:05:37.780)

you know, that accompanied partition.

Robert Crews (2:05:40.100)

It wasn't all the actions of the British

Lex Fridman (2:05:41.620)

that, you know, dictated that, right?

Robert Crews (2:05:44.420)

There were lots of actors who chose to pick up,

Lex Fridman (2:05:46.940)

you know, the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.

Robert Crews (2:05:49.860)

I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment

Lex Fridman (2:05:52.020)

as there is now in what's happening in Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (2:05:54.700)

But I think the capriciousness,

Lex Fridman (2:05:56.980)

I mean, the ability to act as if your political decisions

Robert Crews (2:06:03.020)

about other people's lives, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:06:06.340)

are something that can be made, you know, in secret.

Robert Crews (2:06:09.580)

They can be made willy nilly.

Lex Fridman (2:06:11.820)

They really are beyond the accountability, you know,

Robert Crews (2:06:14.580)

of those who are actually going to live

Lex Fridman (2:06:17.020)

with the consequences of shifting the cards on a deck

Robert Crews (2:06:20.580)

in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't.

Lex Fridman (2:06:23.460)

I would love to hear your conversation

Robert Crews (2:06:25.420)

with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson,

Lex Fridman (2:06:28.420)

who argues on the topic of empire,

Robert Crews (2:06:30.980)

that you can also zoom out even further

Lex Fridman (2:06:34.700)

and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire.

Lex Fridman (2:06:38.220)

And he argues, I think he gets a lot of flack for this

Lex Fridman (2:06:41.260)

from other historians, that like the British empire

Robert Crews (2:06:45.780)

did more good than bad in certain moments of history.

Lex Fridman (2:06:50.420)

And that's an uncomfortable truth.

Robert Crews (2:06:52.860)

There's like levels, it's a cake

Lex Fridman (2:06:55.300)

with layers of uncomfortable truths.

Lex Fridman (2:06:57.860)

And it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good.

Lex Fridman (2:07:00.780)

Right.

Robert Crews (2:07:01.620)

I mean, I would continue to disagree with Neil Ferguson.

Lex Fridman (2:07:04.180)

So I'm still working out where I am

Lex Fridman (2:07:06.460)

and what this moment does to kind of, I think,

Lex Fridman (2:07:08.820)

qualify my understanding of the past into,

Robert Crews (2:07:12.380)

I think in a moment of humility, I do,

Lex Fridman (2:07:15.460)

and I'm probably reacting to the kind of, as you put it,

Robert Crews (2:07:18.660)

I mean, the idea that this is like a good thing

Lex Fridman (2:07:21.020)

that American power has been defeated here.

Robert Crews (2:07:23.140)

I mean, I do think American power should contract.

Lex Fridman (2:07:25.780)

And I don't think, and again,

Robert Crews (2:07:28.540)

if I had to create a tally sheet

Lex Fridman (2:07:30.660)

of what the Americans did in the US,

Robert Crews (2:07:32.020)

I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (2:07:35.460)

It could have done that without invading the country

Lex Fridman (2:07:37.660)

and killing people.

Lex Fridman (2:07:38.900)

I've not now become an apologist for empire.

Robert Crews (2:07:41.460)

I'm not now a mini Neil Ferguson,

Lex Fridman (2:07:44.460)

but ending empire is, I mean,

Robert Crews (2:07:51.580)

those decisions you make are in some ways

Lex Fridman (2:07:54.180)

a continuation of imperil hubris, right?

Lex Fridman (2:07:57.900)

So you're not really out of empire yet.

Lex Fridman (2:07:59.380)

You're not really contracting empire

Lex Fridman (2:08:01.020)

for those who are living it, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:08:03.500)

But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way,

Lex Fridman (2:08:05.580)

it's be careful what you ask for, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:08:08.300)

I mean, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (2:08:12.380)

but I wanted there to be a political settlement.

Lex Fridman (2:08:14.980)

I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:18.100)

I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:20.580)

But why is going to Afghanistan even needed for that?

Robert Crews (2:08:22.740)

You can play all those games of geopolitics

Lex Fridman (2:08:26.260)

without ever invading and taking ownership of the place.

Robert Crews (2:08:30.140)

It feels like the war, it feels like,

Lex Fridman (2:08:33.500)

I mean, I'm not exactly sure

Lex Fridman (2:08:35.660)

what military force is necessary for,

Lex Fridman (2:08:38.420)

except for targeted intense attacks.

Robert Crews (2:08:41.820)

It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9 11

Lex Fridman (2:08:46.500)

was to show what was a display of force

Robert Crews (2:08:49.940)

unlike anything the world has ever seen

Lex Fridman (2:08:52.040)

for a very short amount of time.

Robert Crews (2:08:54.180)

Targeted at, sure, a terrorist,

Lex Fridman (2:08:57.220)

at certain strongholds and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:08:59.860)

And then in and out and then focus on education,

Lex Fridman (2:09:03.500)

on empowering women into the education system,

Robert Crews (2:09:08.980)

all those kinds of things that have to do

Lex Fridman (2:09:10.740)

with supporting the culture, the education,

Robert Crews (2:09:13.980)

the flourishing of the place.

Lex Fridman (2:09:16.420)

It has nothing to do with military policing essentially.

Robert Crews (2:09:21.260)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:09:22.100)

I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it through that lens,

Robert Crews (2:09:25.100)

I mean, if any Afghanistan and then if any Iraq

Lex Fridman (2:09:28.100)

didn't end Al Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right?

Robert Crews (2:09:33.300)

It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely.

Lex Fridman (2:09:38.260)

There were, if you like, you could say there were,

Robert Crews (2:09:41.900)

some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.

Lex Fridman (2:09:47.200)

But in fact, I mean,

Robert Crews (2:09:48.040)

look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing.

Lex Fridman (2:09:50.620)

I mean, it spread.

Robert Crews (2:09:51.700)

I mean, it was never an Islamic thing.

Lex Fridman (2:09:53.780)

It was never a Muslim thing.

Robert Crews (2:09:55.420)

Some Muslims adopted it in some places,

Lex Fridman (2:09:58.100)

but the circuits of knowledge

Robert Crews (2:10:00.340)

about how to do these kinds of things only expanded

Lex Fridman (2:10:02.740)

with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Lex Fridman (2:10:05.700)

and then they kind of became connected.

Lex Fridman (2:10:06.860)

And then they began to the present.

Robert Crews (2:10:08.380)

I mean, the Islamic state is,

Lex Fridman (2:10:10.220)

it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever

Robert Crews (2:10:12.580)

because it's on the basis of its supposed new stance

Lex Fridman (2:10:18.420)

as a counterterrorism outfit

Robert Crews (2:10:20.080)

that it will get recognition from all its neighbors.

Lex Fridman (2:10:22.460)

It will get recognition from Russia.

Robert Crews (2:10:24.380)

I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport,

Lex Fridman (2:10:26.900)

the United States was collaborating with the Taliban

Robert Crews (2:10:29.340)

against the Islamic state

Lex Fridman (2:10:31.300)

and openly talking about the Taliban

Robert Crews (2:10:34.140)

as if they were partners in the security operation.

Lex Fridman (2:10:35.780)

So, and then Al Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan, so.

Robert Crews (2:10:40.000)

Trillions of dollars spent.

Lex Fridman (2:10:42.260)

Yeah.

Robert Crews (2:10:43.860)

The drones up above bombing places

Lex Fridman (2:10:48.520)

that result in civilian death,

Robert Crews (2:10:50.140)

the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers,

Lex Fridman (2:10:53.220)

and those stories even at the individual level

Robert Crews (2:10:56.060)

propagate virally across the land,

Lex Fridman (2:10:58.940)

creating potentially more terrorists.

Lex Fridman (2:11:01.700)

And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars

Lex Fridman (2:11:04.920)

is the military industrial complex

Robert Crews (2:11:08.460)

where there's just a momentum where after 9 11,

Lex Fridman (2:11:13.460)

the feeling like we should do something

Robert Crews (2:11:16.240)

led to us doing something.

Lex Fridman (2:11:18.740)

And then a lot of people realizing they can make money

Robert Crews (2:11:21.580)

from doing more of that something.

Lex Fridman (2:11:23.500)

And then it's just the momentum

Robert Crews (2:11:25.380)

where no one person is sitting there

Lex Fridman (2:11:28.620)

petting a cat in an evil way,

Robert Crews (2:11:30.900)

saying we're going to spend all of this money

Lex Fridman (2:11:33.220)

and create more suffering and create more terrorism.

Lex Fridman (2:11:36.260)

But it's just something about that momentum

Lex Fridman (2:11:37.860)

that leads to that.

Lex Fridman (2:11:39.140)

And to me, honestly, I'm still a sucker.

Lex Fridman (2:11:42.540)

I believe in leadership.

Robert Crews (2:11:43.940)

I believe in great charismatic leaders

Lex Fridman (2:11:47.540)

and the power of that want to do evil and to do good.

Lex Fridman (2:11:51.460)

And it felt like I honestly put the blame on George Bush,

Lex Fridman (2:11:58.620)

Obama, Trump, and Biden for lack of leadership.

Robert Crews (2:12:03.020)

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Lex Fridman (2:12:05.060)

I agree.

Robert Crews (2:12:05.900)

Yeah, there is the military industrial complex component,

Lex Fridman (2:12:08.020)

which is huge.

Lex Fridman (2:12:09.360)

And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership,

Lex Fridman (2:12:11.300)

it's also, I'd say the imbalance of power within Washington.

Robert Crews (2:12:15.020)

I mean, the Pentagon used this moment,

Lex Fridman (2:12:20.160)

well, beginning in 2001,

Robert Crews (2:12:21.260)

I think to assert this authority

Lex Fridman (2:12:24.620)

at the expense of other institutions

Robert Crews (2:12:26.300)

of national government.

Lex Fridman (2:12:27.940)

I mean, the State Department diplomacy

Robert Crews (2:12:31.780)

has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.

Lex Fridman (2:12:35.820)

And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians,

Robert Crews (2:12:37.980)

which I'm not formally a historian of the United States,

Lex Fridman (2:12:39.620)

but we can go back to talk about Vietnam.

Robert Crews (2:12:42.040)

We talk about lots of Cold War and post Cold War engagements.

Lex Fridman (2:12:47.380)

And I think we need a reckoning

Robert Crews (2:12:49.000)

about how the United States uses military power,

Lex Fridman (2:12:52.580)

why we devote so much to our military budget

Lex Fridman (2:12:55.220)

and what could be available to us

Lex Fridman (2:12:56.780)

if we had a more sensible view

Robert Crews (2:12:59.940)

of the value of military power, of its effectiveness.

Lex Fridman (2:13:03.060)

And I think we're willing to hammer home

Robert Crews (2:13:04.900)

that this was a defeat.

Lex Fridman (2:13:05.900)

I mean, I think there should be accountability.

Lex Fridman (2:13:08.020)

And this could be a kind of opening

Lex Fridman (2:13:09.780)

for a kind of bipartisan conversation,

Robert Crews (2:13:11.220)

because if you are a kind of American militarist,

Lex Fridman (2:13:16.460)

I mean, you have to look at the leadership

Robert Crews (2:13:18.440)

that got you to a place where you were defeated

Lex Fridman (2:13:20.660)

by men wearing sandals firing AK 47s, right?

Robert Crews (2:13:25.980)

Yeah, there should be a humility with that.

Lex Fridman (2:13:29.480)

I mean, we should actually say that,

Robert Crews (2:13:31.820)

like literally the...

Lex Fridman (2:13:34.200)

Oh, we lost.

Robert Crews (2:13:35.040)

You should say we lost.

Lex Fridman (2:13:35.880)

It wasn't just, you know...

Robert Crews (2:13:37.580)

The American military lost.

Lex Fridman (2:13:40.700)

Yeah, and I feel I have very mixed feelings

Lex Fridman (2:13:43.620)

and it's, I don't know, a ton of veterans,

Lex Fridman (2:13:46.340)

but Mitch and I have topped my share

Lex Fridman (2:13:48.160)

and have a student now and they're suffering

Lex Fridman (2:13:52.380)

because they look at the sacrifices that they made

Robert Crews (2:13:54.260)

that I didn't make.

Lex Fridman (2:13:55.260)

I mean, American society didn't make the sacrifices.

Robert Crews (2:13:57.060)

I mean, men and women lost limbs,

Lex Fridman (2:13:59.420)

they lost eyes, they lost lives.

Robert Crews (2:14:02.900)

There's been this, of course, quiet epidemic of suicide

Lex Fridman (2:14:06.140)

among veterans.

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.980)

And I've heard some stories

Lex Fridman (2:14:10.860)

the fact that the State Department

Robert Crews (2:14:12.300)

is seeing a similar surge of suicides

Lex Fridman (2:14:14.760)

because they see their adult life's work collapse.

Robert Crews (2:14:19.820)

They've seen their relationships.

Lex Fridman (2:14:20.740)

I mean, they've seen phone calls in the middle of the night

Robert Crews (2:14:23.500)

from people who they entrusted with their lives

Lex Fridman (2:14:26.460)

who they know are gonna be targeted.

Robert Crews (2:14:28.340)

I mean, some of them have already been killed.

Lex Fridman (2:14:30.820)

They've seen the, I mean, I think just,

Robert Crews (2:14:32.780)

I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally

Lex Fridman (2:14:35.620)

what they believed in and what they sacrificed for

Robert Crews (2:14:40.060)

has vanished.

Lex Fridman (2:14:41.780)

And I think that's bad.

Robert Crews (2:14:44.700)

I mean, historically thinking of some of the precedents

Lex Fridman (2:14:46.740)

you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of,

Robert Crews (2:14:49.580)

first of all, at a human level,

Lex Fridman (2:14:51.300)

I feel horrible for those people who,

Robert Crews (2:14:53.220)

I may not have agreed with everything they had done

Lex Fridman (2:14:55.500)

and their choices in life,

Lex Fridman (2:14:56.620)

but I respect the fact that many good people

Lex Fridman (2:14:59.260)

went out of the best intentions as young people

Robert Crews (2:15:03.540)

to do the right thing and make things right.

Lex Fridman (2:15:05.900)

And I respect that.

Lex Fridman (2:15:07.180)

And I've met enough to know that there were people

Lex Fridman (2:15:09.980)

who saw the gray and complexity

Lex Fridman (2:15:12.180)

and that's all you can hope for.

Lex Fridman (2:15:16.340)

But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans

Robert Crews (2:15:20.900)

if we look at the other postwar moments.

Lex Fridman (2:15:23.460)

And this is kind of a postwar moment where,

Robert Crews (2:15:25.940)

I think we need a conversation with American veterans

Lex Fridman (2:15:27.740)

about what they've gone through and what they're feeling.

Lex Fridman (2:15:31.040)

And they still have skin in the game

Lex Fridman (2:15:33.100)

because their personal connections

Lex Fridman (2:15:33.940)

and the end of their histories.

Lex Fridman (2:15:35.460)

And they're also gonna be future leaders.

Robert Crews (2:15:37.260)

I mean, veterans.

Lex Fridman (2:15:39.380)

People who have served are often great men and women.

Robert Crews (2:15:43.940)

That's true.

Lex Fridman (2:15:45.080)

And throughout history,

Robert Crews (2:15:50.080)

whether you sacrifice you served in fighting World War II,

Lex Fridman (2:15:54.500)

in fighting Vietnam,

Robert Crews (2:15:55.940)

that's going to mold you in different ways.

Lex Fridman (2:15:58.780)

That's going to mold how you are as a leader

Robert Crews (2:16:02.620)

that leads this country forward.

Lex Fridman (2:16:04.740)

And so you have to have an honest conversation

Robert Crews (2:16:07.200)

about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (2:16:13.680)

the war in the Middle East,

Robert Crews (2:16:15.000)

the war on terror in the history of America.

Lex Fridman (2:16:18.060)

If we just look at the full context

Robert Crews (2:16:20.100)

at the end of this 21st century,

Lex Fridman (2:16:22.340)

how are we going to remember this

Lex Fridman (2:16:24.420)

and how that's going to result in our future interactions

Lex Fridman (2:16:27.800)

with small and large countries,

Robert Crews (2:16:30.560)

with China or some proxy war with China,

Lex Fridman (2:16:32.860)

with Russia or some proxy war with Russia

Robert Crews (2:16:36.420)

what's the role of oil and natural resources and opium

Lex Fridman (2:16:39.180)

and all those kinds of things.

Robert Crews (2:16:40.620)

What's the role of military power in the world.

Lex Fridman (2:16:45.220)

And now with COVID,

Robert Crews (2:16:50.220)

it's almost like because of the many failures

Lex Fridman (2:16:55.220)

of the US government and many leaders

Robert Crews (2:17:00.860)

in science and politics to respond effectively

Lex Fridman (2:17:04.700)

and quickly to COVID,

Robert Crews (2:17:07.820)

we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too.

Lex Fridman (2:17:12.340)

And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive.

Robert Crews (2:17:17.340)

They seem to be symptoms of something

Lex Fridman (2:17:21.820)

of a same kind of source problem of leadership,

Robert Crews (2:17:28.140)

of bureaucracy, of the way information

Lex Fridman (2:17:31.740)

and intelligence flows throughout the US government.

Robert Crews (2:17:34.500)

All those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (2:17:35.660)

And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things.

Robert Crews (2:17:39.340)

Definitely, I mean, if there's one theme

Lex Fridman (2:17:41.140)

that jumps out to me and thinking about this moment,

Robert Crews (2:17:43.060)

I mean, if we recognize that we live

Lex Fridman (2:17:45.100)

in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States

Lex Fridman (2:17:48.540)

and in other countries that have long been proud

Lex Fridman (2:17:50.900)

of their democratic traditions,

Robert Crews (2:17:51.820)

if we see them being under assault from certain quarters,

Lex Fridman (2:17:54.220)

I think military defeat is yet another addition

Robert Crews (2:17:57.700)

to all the aspects of this that you mentioned.

Lex Fridman (2:18:00.020)

I mean, the fact that military defeat is a giant match

Robert Crews (2:18:04.020)

that you're throwing on this fire potentially,

Lex Fridman (2:18:05.580)

if we think of its legacies

Lex Fridman (2:18:07.780)

and other postwar environments,

Lex Fridman (2:18:09.100)

when the veteran angle is one,

Robert Crews (2:18:12.700)

when you have people who feel betrayed,

Lex Fridman (2:18:15.500)

I mean, they have been fodder

Robert Crews (2:18:17.060)

for the far right in other settings.

Lex Fridman (2:18:18.580)

I mean, interwar Europe is very much

Robert Crews (2:18:19.820)

about mobilizing dissolution veterans

Lex Fridman (2:18:23.020)

in the name of right wing fascist politics.

Robert Crews (2:18:26.580)

If one thinks too of this moment

Lex Fridman (2:18:28.940)

of really increasing xenophobia,

Robert Crews (2:18:32.060)

our immigration debate is now talking about

Lex Fridman (2:18:34.580)

whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all

Robert Crews (2:18:36.420)

in the United States after 20 years.

Lex Fridman (2:18:39.020)

And I think immediately the response in Europe,

Robert Crews (2:18:41.540)

which I followed to some extent, focusing on Germany,

Lex Fridman (2:18:45.220)

because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans

Robert Crews (2:18:49.100)

leading up to this collapse.

Lex Fridman (2:18:50.820)

And now they have been,

Robert Crews (2:18:53.540)

a lot of right wing center right politicians in Germany

Lex Fridman (2:18:57.100)

have been watching all this with an eye to,

Robert Crews (2:19:01.220)

using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience

Lex Fridman (2:19:05.220)

to say, in the context of recent elections,

Robert Crews (2:19:07.660)

that we are the party who will defend you

Lex Fridman (2:19:09.820)

against these Afghans who are gonna be coming from this.

Lex Fridman (2:19:11.460)

So what I've tried to emphasize

Lex Fridman (2:19:13.380)

in talking to different groups about this moment

Robert Crews (2:19:15.180)

is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:19:17.700)

or even the region.

Robert Crews (2:19:18.540)

I mean, obviously malnutrition, hunger

Lex Fridman (2:19:20.700)

will send Afghans to neighboring states,

Lex Fridman (2:19:23.140)

but where the European right is resurgent,

Lex Fridman (2:19:27.180)

this has been a gift, right?

Robert Crews (2:19:28.620)

To say that the Afghans are coming,

Lex Fridman (2:19:30.700)

they're brown skinned, they're Muslim,

Robert Crews (2:19:32.460)

they're uneducated, they're gonna want your women.

Lex Fridman (2:19:34.980)

And they will take the odd sexual assault case

Robert Crews (2:19:37.900)

or the odd, whatever, dramatic act of violence

Lex Fridman (2:19:41.460)

that happens numerically in any population.

Lex Fridman (2:19:45.380)

And they will magnify that to say that,

Lex Fridman (2:19:49.020)

our far right group is gonna save the nation.

Lex Fridman (2:19:51.740)

And sorry, the main point I wanted to speak of leadership

Lex Fridman (2:19:54.620)

was that I think the serial,

Robert Crews (2:19:56.740)

well, there were many, many carnal sins, if you like,

Lex Fridman (2:20:00.180)

but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits,

Robert Crews (2:20:02.580)

I mean, what blocked some of those exits

Lex Fridman (2:20:04.740)

was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying.

Lex Fridman (2:20:09.660)

And so, I mean, this is no secret,

Lex Fridman (2:20:11.620)

anyone who's followed this, but we've allowed,

Lex Fridman (2:20:15.140)

and you think of the general mistrust of government,

Lex Fridman (2:20:17.460)

mistrust of authority across the board,

Lex Fridman (2:20:21.820)

of professors, of economists, of scientists, doctors, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:26.740)

Well, I actually think that's the hopeful thing to me

Robert Crews (2:20:28.900)

about the internet is the internet hates inauthenticity.

Lex Fridman (2:20:34.140)

They can smell bullshit much better.

Lex Fridman (2:20:36.180)

And I think that motivates young leaders

Lex Fridman (2:20:38.300)

to be transparent and authentic.

Lex Fridman (2:20:40.580)

So like the very problems we've been seeing,

Lex Fridman (2:20:45.260)

this kind of attitude of authority where,

Robert Crews (2:20:49.180)

oh, the populace, they're too busy with their own lives.

Lex Fridman (2:20:53.220)

They're not smart enough to understand

Robert Crews (2:20:54.900)

the full complexities of the things we're dealing with.

Lex Fridman (2:20:57.580)

So we're not going to even communicate to them

Robert Crews (2:20:59.820)

the full complexities, we're just going to decide

Lex Fridman (2:21:02.860)

and then tell them what we decided

Lex Fridman (2:21:05.300)

and conceive some kind of narrative

Lex Fridman (2:21:08.100)

that makes it easy for them to consume this decision.

Robert Crews (2:21:13.500)

As opposed to that, I really believe,

Lex Fridman (2:21:16.620)

I see there's a hunger for authenticity

Robert Crews (2:21:18.820)

of when you're making decisions,

Lex Fridman (2:21:21.780)

when you're looking at the rest of the world

Lex Fridman (2:21:23.780)

and trying to untangle this complexity, the internet,

Lex Fridman (2:21:28.980)

the public, the world wants to see you as a leader struggle

Robert Crews (2:21:33.220)

with the tension of these ideas, to change your mind,

Lex Fridman (2:21:37.700)

to recognize your own flaws

Lex Fridman (2:21:40.380)

and your own thinking from a month ago, all that,

Lex Fridman (2:21:43.060)

the full complexity of it,

Robert Crews (2:21:44.300)

also acknowledge the uncertainty as with COVID,

Lex Fridman (2:21:47.660)

also with the wars, I think there's a hunger for that.

Lex Fridman (2:21:51.820)

And I think that's just going to change the nature

Lex Fridman (2:21:53.860)

of leadership in the 21st century.

Robert Crews (2:21:56.340)

I hope so.

Lex Fridman (2:21:57.180)

I think all the things you've highlighted,

Lex Fridman (2:21:59.780)

accountability is part of that, right?

Lex Fridman (2:22:00.900)

I mean, we need honesty, openness,

Lex Fridman (2:22:04.740)

and then acknowledgement of mistakes.

Lex Fridman (2:22:06.820)

Humility is the key to all learning, right?

Lex Fridman (2:22:08.900)

But also, I mean, you think just the headline

Lex Fridman (2:22:10.860)

from yesterday, the horrible drone strike,

Robert Crews (2:22:14.660)

which was really the last kind of American military action

Lex Fridman (2:22:18.180)

on the day that the US was, I think,

Robert Crews (2:22:20.460)

mostly departing from Kabul,

Lex Fridman (2:22:22.660)

wiped out an entire family, mostly children.

Robert Crews (2:22:25.500)

You know, the US acknowledged that, yes,

Lex Fridman (2:22:27.020)

this was not the ISIS bombing outfit

Robert Crews (2:22:29.540)

that they thought it was.

Lex Fridman (2:22:31.300)

But yesterday, they did a quick review.

Robert Crews (2:22:34.860)

I'm not an expert on drone strikes in the aftermath,

Lex Fridman (2:22:36.940)

but those who've looked at it more closely said

Robert Crews (2:22:38.940)

it was basically whole cloth taken

Lex Fridman (2:22:41.860)

from what the US government has been saying

Robert Crews (2:22:44.900)

after all these strikes, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:22:46.980)

reproducing the same language

Lex Fridman (2:22:48.100)

and basically pointing to technical errors,

Lex Fridman (2:22:51.740)

but denying that there were any procedural mistakes

Robert Crews (2:22:57.420)

or flaws, or it was just kind of,

Lex Fridman (2:22:59.780)

they found little ways of acknowledging

Robert Crews (2:23:01.580)

things did not go as planned,

Lex Fridman (2:23:02.660)

but, you know, we follow the policies essentially,

Lex Fridman (2:23:06.340)

and yeah, that's it.

Lex Fridman (2:23:08.060)

It's not a crime.

Robert Crews (2:23:09.700)

It's a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up.

Lex Fridman (2:23:13.700)

And it's kind of the legal ease

Lex Fridman (2:23:15.620)

that suddenly makes a war crime not a war crime, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:23:19.700)

And that reflects, I think,

Robert Crews (2:23:22.420)

our refusal to take accountability.

Lex Fridman (2:23:24.660)

I think people are really sick of that

Robert Crews (2:23:26.660)

in a way where the opposite is true,

Lex Fridman (2:23:29.580)

which is they get excited for people who are not,

Robert Crews (2:23:33.660)

for leaders who are not that,

Lex Fridman (2:23:35.540)

and so they're not going to punish you

Robert Crews (2:23:37.660)

for saying, I made a mistake.

Lex Fridman (2:23:42.740)

I just had a conversation with Francis Collins,

Robert Crews (2:23:44.740)

the director of the NIH,

Lex Fridman (2:23:46.180)

and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci

Robert Crews (2:23:49.300)

has been that it's such subtle,

Lex Fridman (2:23:54.180)

but such crucial communication of mistakes made.

Robert Crews (2:23:58.900)

If you make a small mistake,

Lex Fridman (2:24:00.540)

it is so powerful to communicate,

Robert Crews (2:24:04.100)

I think we messed up.

Lex Fridman (2:24:05.500)

We thought this was true, and it wasn't.

Lex Fridman (2:24:08.620)

So the obvious thing there was with masks

Lex Fridman (2:24:11.220)

early in the pandemic.

Robert Crews (2:24:13.220)

There's so much uncertainty.

Lex Fridman (2:24:14.620)

It's so understandable to make mistakes

Robert Crews (2:24:17.020)

or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria,

Lex Fridman (2:24:21.140)

different statements you make lead to.

Robert Crews (2:24:23.420)

Just being transparent about that

Lex Fridman (2:24:25.020)

and saying we were not correct

Lex Fridman (2:24:26.820)

and saying the thing we said before.

Lex Fridman (2:24:28.100)

That's so powerful to communicate, to gain trust.

Lex Fridman (2:24:33.340)

And the opposite is true.

Lex Fridman (2:24:35.180)

When you do this legal ease type of talk,

Robert Crews (2:24:38.580)

it destroys trust.

Lex Fridman (2:24:40.780)

And again, I really think the lessons of recent history

Robert Crews (2:24:47.180)

teach us how to be a leader

Lex Fridman (2:24:51.060)

and teach young leaders how to be leaders.

Lex Fridman (2:24:53.580)

And so I have a lot of hope.

Lex Fridman (2:24:56.740)

Partially thanks for the internet.

Robert Crews (2:24:58.580)

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Lex Fridman (2:25:00.140)

Oh, humility.

Robert Crews (2:25:00.980)

I mean, we need humility, accountability, honesty.

Lex Fridman (2:25:05.340)

And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that.

Robert Crews (2:25:07.660)

I mean, to learn from past mistakes.

Lex Fridman (2:25:09.700)

And obviously there's stories of inspiration and courage

Lex Fridman (2:25:11.900)

and we can take some kind of assistance from that too.

Lex Fridman (2:25:14.700)

But also learning from, learning how not to do things.

Lex Fridman (2:25:19.100)

And then analogies are never like one to one.

Lex Fridman (2:25:23.140)

I mean, we talk about Vietnam.

Robert Crews (2:25:24.260)

I mean, I think many Vietnam veterans would say,

Lex Fridman (2:25:27.100)

yeah, this is like deja vu.

Robert Crews (2:25:28.500)

I mean, the story, the visuals of the Kabul airport

Lex Fridman (2:25:31.700)

and of the Saigon embassy were not the same,

Lex Fridman (2:25:35.580)

but close enough that people would juxtapose them.

Lex Fridman (2:25:38.220)

All of this right now, but I would just ask people

Robert Crews (2:25:39.620)

that over analogizing is also a kind of path down

Lex Fridman (2:25:44.780)

making errors of judgment and comparison,

Lex Fridman (2:25:47.900)

and then sameness, but it's stretch.

Lex Fridman (2:25:51.260)

I mean, like 9.11 itself,

Robert Crews (2:25:52.380)

I think the idea that people lack the imagination

Lex Fridman (2:25:56.580)

within our security apparatus

Lex Fridman (2:25:58.100)

to think this was even possible, right?

Lex Fridman (2:26:00.540)

And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock

Robert Crews (2:26:03.380)

on a cockpit door, could have wanted all this.

Lex Fridman (2:26:06.380)

And again, I'm not saying either the time

Robert Crews (2:26:09.500)

or in hindsight that I am omniscient about all this,

Lex Fridman (2:26:11.780)

but I had just been living in Germany the year before,

Lex Fridman (2:26:15.100)

and there was a plot there.

Lex Fridman (2:26:16.980)

This guy was hatching from Germany

Robert Crews (2:26:18.780)

to blow up the mausoleum of Attertwerk in Ankara

Lex Fridman (2:26:22.220)

with an airplane.

Lex Fridman (2:26:23.580)

And so if you kind of dig, it wasn't unimaginable

Lex Fridman (2:26:27.460)

that you would use an airplane as a weapon.

Lex Fridman (2:26:29.700)

And the Bush administration kept saying,

Lex Fridman (2:26:31.580)

no one had ever heard of this.

Lex Fridman (2:26:32.900)

Who would do this?

Lex Fridman (2:26:33.740)

Like, well, not a lot of people do this.

Lex Fridman (2:26:35.540)

And then at that very moment,

Lex Fridman (2:26:37.180)

my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel Secret Agent,

Robert Crews (2:26:41.220)

which was about a conspiratorial organization

Lex Fridman (2:26:44.100)

that wanted to bomb,

Robert Crews (2:26:46.340)

actually in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing

Lex Fridman (2:26:48.940)

because they tricked this guy into doing it,

Lex Fridman (2:26:50.660)

but they wanted to bomb the Greenwich Observatory

Lex Fridman (2:26:53.460)

for some obscure political purpose.

Lex Fridman (2:26:57.140)

So that's an instance in which, you know, the novel,

Lex Fridman (2:27:00.660)

right, to go back to our kind of humanities pitch, right,

Robert Crews (2:27:02.460)

that my point was that, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:27:05.940)

as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency,

Lex Fridman (2:27:08.180)

but also imagination, right?

Lex Fridman (2:27:09.940)

I think part of expanding our imagination is by, you know,

Robert Crews (2:27:14.100)

I mean, obviously delving into your fields, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:27:16.580)

of engineering and the sciences and robotics

Lex Fridman (2:27:19.020)

and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape.

Lex Fridman (2:27:20.860)

And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature,

Robert Crews (2:27:24.740)

I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do

Lex Fridman (2:27:28.500)

to really educate ourselves more fully, right,

Robert Crews (2:27:31.460)

across the spectrum of everything humans need

Lex Fridman (2:27:34.860)

to imagine, to reimagine security.

Robert Crews (2:27:37.340)

You know, so much of what we talked about today,

Lex Fridman (2:27:38.660)

I mean, so much of, you know,

Robert Crews (2:27:41.660)

our security is affected by others perception

Lex Fridman (2:27:43.860)

of their insecurity, right?

Robert Crews (2:27:46.580)

Which unleashes a whole web of emotions.

Lex Fridman (2:27:49.620)

Can you tell me about the Afghan people,

Lex Fridman (2:27:54.060)

what they love, what they fear,

Lex Fridman (2:27:57.020)

what they dream of for themselves and for their nation?

Robert Crews (2:28:00.100)

Is there something to say,

Lex Fridman (2:28:02.020)

to speak to to the spirit of the people

Robert Crews (2:28:04.860)

that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns

Lex Fridman (2:28:09.620)

and the hopes they have?

Robert Crews (2:28:12.020)

Yeah, I think I, you know, as an outsider,

Lex Fridman (2:28:13.940)

I hesitate to make any grand statement,

Lex Fridman (2:28:16.300)

but I would say, listen, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:28:19.020)

there are a number of documentary films

Robert Crews (2:28:21.540)

that are incredibly rich

Lex Fridman (2:28:23.420)

that will offer your listeners and viewers a snapshot.

Lex Fridman (2:28:26.180)

So there is Afghan Star, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:28:29.460)

which really brings you in the homes of a set of people

Robert Crews (2:28:32.500)

who, you know, they want stardom, they're artists,

Lex Fridman (2:28:34.980)

they want to express themselves.

Robert Crews (2:28:36.700)

Some want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries.

Lex Fridman (2:28:39.940)

There's a woman who gets into hot water for dancing.

Lex Fridman (2:28:42.660)

But yeah, you realize that, I mean, people,

Lex Fridman (2:28:46.460)

I mean, they love art, they love music,

Robert Crews (2:28:48.020)

they love poetry, they love expression.

Lex Fridman (2:28:50.700)

You know, people want to care for their children.

Robert Crews (2:28:52.820)

They want safety of their families.

Lex Fridman (2:28:54.260)

They want to enjoy what everyone enjoys, you know?

Robert Crews (2:28:57.380)

I think it's a very humanizing portrait.

Lex Fridman (2:29:00.540)

There's another great documentary film

Robert Crews (2:29:01.660)

called Love Crimes of Kabul,

Lex Fridman (2:29:06.620)

which is a great snapshot of the post 2000 world

Robert Crews (2:29:10.020)

that the Americans shaped a lot of ways.

Lex Fridman (2:29:11.500)

And it's about a women's prison.

Lex Fridman (2:29:13.580)

And it's incredibly revealing

Lex Fridman (2:29:15.500)

because it's about young girls and what they want.

Robert Crews (2:29:19.820)

Well, not just young, but young, teenage,

Lex Fridman (2:29:22.220)

and then some middle aged people

Robert Crews (2:29:23.420)

who are accused of moral crimes,

Lex Fridman (2:29:26.180)

ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to,

Robert Crews (2:29:29.900)

to having sexual relations outside of marriage.

Lex Fridman (2:29:33.700)

And so it shows in a way continuity

Robert Crews (2:29:36.260)

with the previous Taliban regime

Lex Fridman (2:29:38.660)

and that women are in prison

Robert Crews (2:29:40.340)

for things that you wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere,

Lex Fridman (2:29:42.300)

and that Islamic law operates as the kind of judicial logic

Robert Crews (2:29:46.860)

for these punishments.

Lex Fridman (2:29:50.180)

But letting these women kind of speak for themselves,

Robert Crews (2:29:52.700)

I mean, it's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:29:53.540)

I mean, I don't want to get too much away,

Lex Fridman (2:29:55.100)

but women make very interesting choices in this film

Lex Fridman (2:29:58.820)

that land them in this predicament.

Lex Fridman (2:30:00.300)

So they don't all profess innocence.

Lex Fridman (2:30:04.100)

Some are like, I'm guilty, but they're guilty for reasons.

Robert Crews (2:30:06.980)

In one case, one woman is guilty, she's in prison

Lex Fridman (2:30:09.180)

because it's a way to exert pressure on her fiancee

Lex Fridman (2:30:12.100)

to finally marry her, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:30:14.580)

So you get ethnicity, you get like, you know,

Robert Crews (2:30:16.540)

kind of Romeo and Juliet things

Lex Fridman (2:30:18.500)

where their families don't like each other necessarily,

Lex Fridman (2:30:20.580)

but they find each other.

Lex Fridman (2:30:21.980)

You have questions of like, love, money, clothing,

Robert Crews (2:30:25.300)

furniture, it's beautiful.

Lex Fridman (2:30:28.180)

And like, I mean, the parts with it,

Robert Crews (2:30:29.460)

I remember showing it in class,

Lex Fridman (2:30:30.980)

there was a wonderful Afghan student who was a,

Robert Crews (2:30:33.660)

I think a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford,

Lex Fridman (2:30:35.900)

and she's a genius, she's amazing.

Robert Crews (2:30:38.900)

It was awkward for her because talking about young women

Lex Fridman (2:30:41.460)

having sex and stuff, and it was just, it wasn't,

Robert Crews (2:30:44.500)

you know, the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.

Lex Fridman (2:30:46.780)

And obviously there's so much more,

Robert Crews (2:30:47.700)

they're great writers and, you know, musicians.

Lex Fridman (2:30:50.380)

And I mean, you know, music is a huge thing.

Robert Crews (2:30:52.260)

I mean, poetry, all those things are great.

Lex Fridman (2:30:55.380)

So she found it, you know, I hear you.

Robert Crews (2:30:57.500)

I mean, it's kind of a taboo subject,

Lex Fridman (2:30:59.100)

but I thought the American students seeing it

Robert Crews (2:31:02.220)

really identified with these women

Lex Fridman (2:31:04.780)

because they're just so real.

Lex Fridman (2:31:05.700)

And so, you know, young people trying to find like,

Lex Fridman (2:31:08.580)

I mean, relationships that are universal

Lex Fridman (2:31:11.820)

and circumstances that are very difficult.

Lex Fridman (2:31:14.820)

Love, love is universal.

Robert Crews (2:31:16.820)

Yeah, yeah, so it's, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:31:17.780)

we do have resources to humanize.

Robert Crews (2:31:18.940)

I mean, you know, some of your people will know

Lex Fridman (2:31:20.980)

Khaled Hosseini, you know, he's an African American,

Robert Crews (2:31:23.780)

he's done his stuff, but there are,

Lex Fridman (2:31:25.660)

there are a number of novelists and short story writers

Robert Crews (2:31:29.260)

who do cool things.

Lex Fridman (2:31:30.420)

I think that another tragic aspect of this moment

Robert Crews (2:31:33.300)

is that those people have now pretty much

Lex Fridman (2:31:35.100)

had to leave the country.

Lex Fridman (2:31:36.180)

So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you

Lex Fridman (2:31:39.940)

named Khadem Ali, who's a Hazara based in Australia.

Robert Crews (2:31:44.940)

He does extraordinary work in blending a tradition

Lex Fridman (2:31:48.460)

of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary.

Robert Crews (2:31:54.500)

His work is between Australia and Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (2:31:56.020)

but he also, he had to flee.

Robert Crews (2:31:57.340)

I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul,

Lex Fridman (2:31:59.180)

but it's a extraordinary kind of visual language

Robert Crews (2:32:04.180)

that he's adopted that has been shown all over the planet now.

Lex Fridman (2:32:06.620)

He's got some of his work is in New York galleries,

Robert Crews (2:32:08.300)

is in Europe.

Lex Fridman (2:32:10.300)

He's been shown in Australia,

Lex Fridman (2:32:11.140)

but he talks about migration in a way

Lex Fridman (2:32:13.180)

that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center,

Lex Fridman (2:32:16.380)

but it's totally universal about, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:32:20.180)

our modern crisis of all the mains people

Robert Crews (2:32:23.300)

who were displaced across our planet.

Lex Fridman (2:32:24.860)

And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them

Robert Crews (2:32:28.540)

in a way that like everyone can get.

Lex Fridman (2:32:31.460)

I mean, the visual imagery experts will know

Robert Crews (2:32:32.820)

that it's from, you know, like the Shah Naam,

Lex Fridman (2:32:36.060)

like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to,

Robert Crews (2:32:38.980)

that Afghans are attached to, that people can quote,

Lex Fridman (2:32:41.660)

you know, at length, that has mythical figures

Robert Crews (2:32:44.180)

of good and evil that kids grow up embodying.

Lex Fridman (2:32:47.180)

They're named the names of the characters that are,

Robert Crews (2:32:50.140)

it's called, you know, the Book of Kings.

Lex Fridman (2:32:52.340)

The heroes and villains are the staple

Robert Crews (2:32:53.700)

of conversation and poetry and, you know, like Russians,

Lex Fridman (2:32:59.460)

I mean, the kind of, the resort to literary references

Lex Fridman (2:33:02.500)

and speak is something that, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:33:04.460)

Americans don't do, most West European countries don't do,

Lex Fridman (2:33:07.260)

but the fact that everyone's got to know this character,

Lex Fridman (2:33:09.260)

everyone knows this reference,

Robert Crews (2:33:10.860)

the wordplay, the linguistic finesse in multiple languages

Lex Fridman (2:33:16.220)

is, you know, a major value of Afghan storytelling.

Robert Crews (2:33:21.620)

As an outsider, I'm scratching at the surface of the surface.

Lex Fridman (2:33:25.340)

Yeah, but there's a depth to it.

Robert Crews (2:33:26.180)

It's just like, it is fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:33:28.100)

With the layers, yeah.

Robert Crews (2:33:29.060)

With the layers of Russian language that's.

Lex Fridman (2:33:31.660)

Exactly.

Robert Crews (2:33:32.500)

The culture, it's a, I've been struggling,

Lex Fridman (2:33:36.060)

and this is kind of the journey I'm embarking on

Robert Crews (2:33:40.300)

to convey to an American audience

Lex Fridman (2:33:43.180)

what is lost in translation between Russian and English.

Lex Fridman (2:33:47.860)

And it's very challenging in some of the great translators

Lex Fridman (2:33:51.540)

of Dostoevsky, of Tolstoy, of Russian literature,

Robert Crews (2:33:55.220)

struggle with this deeply.

Lex Fridman (2:33:56.700)

And they work, it's an art form just to convey that.

Lex Fridman (2:34:01.260)

And it's amazing to hear that Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (2:34:03.780)

with a full mix of cultures that are there,

Robert Crews (2:34:06.700)

have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect.

Lex Fridman (2:34:10.980)

I mean, the humor thing is, that's, you know,

Robert Crews (2:34:13.100)

I'm so much of our visual imagery

Lex Fridman (2:34:14.100)

is about like this sad place in Dower or whatever,

Lex Fridman (2:34:15.980)

but the, I mean, socially, again,

Lex Fridman (2:34:18.540)

I'm gonna engage in some stereotypes

Robert Crews (2:34:19.780)

about generalization stuff, but just the,

Lex Fridman (2:34:22.940)

you know, the Afghan friends that I've come to

Robert Crews (2:34:25.220)

be close with and really love, I mean, the humor,

Lex Fridman (2:34:28.380)

there's so much there of common stuff of like,

Robert Crews (2:34:31.340)

when I go to Ireland, it's one of my favorite places

Lex Fridman (2:34:33.340)

and just like the, I feel a sense of pressure,

Robert Crews (2:34:36.260)

like the humor all around me at the time.

Lex Fridman (2:34:38.020)

I mean, I feel like there's something between Ireland

Lex Fridman (2:34:40.580)

and Russia with the humor stuff where it's like,

Lex Fridman (2:34:43.740)

you've gotta be on your game if you wanna be, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:34:46.220)

so it's, yeah, I feel like the intensity of conversation

Lex Fridman (2:34:52.140)

in terms of, yeah, you have to be on your game

Robert Crews (2:34:54.260)

in terms of wit and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:34:55.980)

I mean, you have to, there's certain people I have,

Robert Crews (2:34:58.340)

like when I talk on this podcast,

Lex Fridman (2:34:59.620)

they're like that, certain people from the Jewish tradition

Robert Crews (2:35:02.620)

have that, like where the wit is just like,

Lex Fridman (2:35:05.460)

okay, I have to, oh yeah, I really have to pay attention.

Lex Fridman (2:35:09.340)

It's a game, it's like, you know what it feels like?

Lex Fridman (2:35:12.380)

It feels like speed chess or something like that

Lex Fridman (2:35:14.660)

and you really have to focus and play

Lex Fridman (2:35:17.420)

and at the same time, there's body language in the,

Lex Fridman (2:35:19.900)

and then there's a melancholy nature to it,

Lex Fridman (2:35:22.260)

at least in the Russian side.

Robert Crews (2:35:23.860)

The whole thing is just a beautiful mess.

Lex Fridman (2:35:25.780)

Yeah, I mean, there's a funny TikTok video

Robert Crews (2:35:27.060)

that went around that I got from like some Afghan

Lex Fridman (2:35:29.620)

acquaintances that was a, that he's an Irish comedian

Robert Crews (2:35:33.100)

kind of highlighting, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:35:35.820)

kind of Irish and German national stereotypes

Robert Crews (2:35:38.060)

around hospitality.

Lex Fridman (2:35:39.740)

And this Afghan woman said, you know,

Robert Crews (2:35:41.540)

I didn't know that the Irish were just white Afghans

Lex Fridman (2:35:44.980)

because the whole, like, you know, the hospitality,

Robert Crews (2:35:46.260)

like politics of like, of refusal.

Lex Fridman (2:35:48.380)

You know, you don't take something

Robert Crews (2:35:51.140)

that's offered to you the first time.

Lex Fridman (2:35:52.180)

You don't, I mean, it's the culture of receiving a guest.

Robert Crews (2:35:56.780)

You know, that's, you know, Americans aren't,

Lex Fridman (2:35:59.260)

I mean, that's not, you know, that's not always,

Robert Crews (2:36:01.420)

I mean, the different, the regional cultures

Lex Fridman (2:36:02.940)

where that's the thing, there's whatever,

Lex Fridman (2:36:03.780)

but it's, I mean, the kind of like generosity

Lex Fridman (2:36:06.940)

and the kind of, you know, that's real.

Robert Crews (2:36:09.380)

I mean, that's, and that's a cool thing.

Lex Fridman (2:36:11.420)

And that's amazing.

Robert Crews (2:36:12.260)

That's, you know, the food, I mean, going off

Lex Fridman (2:36:13.820)

just the superficial things, but all of that,

Robert Crews (2:36:17.500)

the warmth of hospitality and of wit and humanity.

Lex Fridman (2:36:22.500)

I mean, that's what we don't see viewing the place

Robert Crews (2:36:25.780)

just through war and geopolitics

Lex Fridman (2:36:27.660)

and the moving pieces of the map and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:36:29.100)

And that's hard to see when, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:36:31.700)

there are gaps in language and in religious tradition

Lex Fridman (2:36:34.900)

and all that stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:36:35.820)

And then, you know, being open to the fact

Robert Crews (2:36:38.380)

that people do things differently, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:36:41.060)

and it's, and the gender dimension there is important,

Lex Fridman (2:36:43.500)

right?

Lex Fridman (2:36:44.340)

They're kind of, you know, arguably each culture

Robert Crews (2:36:47.540)

has a kind of gender dynamic that's different.

Lex Fridman (2:36:49.140)

And so I think it's helpful to have humility

Robert Crews (2:36:50.940)

in thinking that some Afghans

Lex Fridman (2:36:53.100)

will do some things differently, you know.

Lex Fridman (2:36:55.660)

But then you'll also have Afghans who say,

Lex Fridman (2:36:58.580)

every woman should be educated.

Robert Crews (2:36:59.820)

Everyone should work and so on and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:37:01.260)

So there's no, there's no single way of, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:37:03.460)

And there is a gender dynamic in Russia too.

Lex Fridman (2:37:06.060)

We need to be respectful of that.

Lex Fridman (2:37:08.260)

And that's not always what it looks like at first.

Lex Fridman (2:37:10.100)

Yeah, exactly.

Robert Crews (2:37:10.940)

There's layers.

Lex Fridman (2:37:11.780)

Where power is.

Robert Crews (2:37:12.600)

I mean, that's definitely, I don't know, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:37:14.300)

Yeah, that's a whole nother conversation

Robert Crews (2:37:16.060)

where the power is.

Lex Fridman (2:37:17.180)

Yeah.

Robert Crews (2:37:18.220)

Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet

Lex Fridman (2:37:20.620)

who was born on the land that is now Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (2:37:23.980)

Is there something in his words that speaks to you

Lex Fridman (2:37:26.940)

about the spirit of the Afghan people?

Robert Crews (2:37:31.420)

I mean, everyone owns Rumi, I guess I'd say.

Lex Fridman (2:37:33.060)

I mean, that's gonna get me in trouble

Robert Crews (2:37:34.060)

with certain Afghan fans of Rumi

Lex Fridman (2:37:36.060)

who wanna see him as an Afghan.

Robert Crews (2:37:38.740)

I would say.

Lex Fridman (2:37:40.500)

Are they proud of Rumi?

Robert Crews (2:37:42.020)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:37:42.860)

Do they see him as an Afghan?

Lex Fridman (2:37:44.020)

Do they?

Lex Fridman (2:37:44.860)

Yeah, I mean, it depends.

Robert Crews (2:37:46.180)

I mean, some people will be militant and say,

Lex Fridman (2:37:49.860)

you know, the Iranian's gonna have him.

Robert Crews (2:37:51.100)

He's ours.

Lex Fridman (2:37:53.500)

But they'll also say, you know, he's,

Robert Crews (2:37:55.940)

I mean, you can say, I mean, again,

Lex Fridman (2:37:57.140)

he's like a Rorschach blot.

Robert Crews (2:37:57.980)

I mean, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim,

Lex Fridman (2:38:00.900)

he's a Central Asian, he's Iranian, he's Afghan,

Robert Crews (2:38:04.980)

he's a Turk.

Lex Fridman (2:38:05.940)

I'm trying to think of the analogy,

Lex Fridman (2:38:06.780)

but he's something special to everyone.

Lex Fridman (2:38:08.940)

So I guess I would not walk into that conversation

Lex Fridman (2:38:11.060)

and claim that he's one or another,

Lex Fridman (2:38:12.700)

but it's a cool thing.

Robert Crews (2:38:13.540)

I mean, it's the, but I'm glad you brought that up

Lex Fridman (2:38:15.860)

because that's a good way of seeing something that Afghans,

Robert Crews (2:38:20.700)

I mean, we live in our country in Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:38:22.260)

and say, okay, Rumi's everyone, you know,

Robert Crews (2:38:24.700)

Madonna helped make him famous in the United States,

Lex Fridman (2:38:26.420)

you know, for better, for worse.

Robert Crews (2:38:27.860)

They used to sell stuff at Starbucks

Lex Fridman (2:38:29.180)

and that's all complicated and embarrassing.

Lex Fridman (2:38:32.020)

And his translations are very much disputed

Lex Fridman (2:38:35.140)

where you have people be like,

Robert Crews (2:38:36.420)

there's some awful Rumi translations.

Lex Fridman (2:38:37.780)

And there are, there are also a lot of,

Robert Crews (2:38:40.300)

speaking of the internet,

Lex Fridman (2:38:41.140)

there are lots of fake Rumi quotes, you know,

Robert Crews (2:38:44.020)

like Rumi said, always be your best.

Lex Fridman (2:38:46.100)

Like, Rumi didn't say that, you know, that was, you know,

Robert Crews (2:38:48.620)

I mean, that's kind of slow stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (2:38:49.980)

But the cool thing is like, I mean,

Robert Crews (2:38:52.380)

I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker,

Lex Fridman (2:38:56.420)

but you can also, you know, read Rumi as,

Robert Crews (2:39:00.500)

you know, in an Islamic sense,

Lex Fridman (2:39:01.420)

but you can also read him as a kind of spiritualist, right?

Robert Crews (2:39:03.340)

As someone who, or an ethicist or moralist.

Lex Fridman (2:39:05.260)

And so I think that's, I like the lens of Rumi

Robert Crews (2:39:09.420)

as a gateway to Afghan ecumenism and cosmolitanism.

Lex Fridman (2:39:14.100)

You know, the theme I keep emphasizing of,

Robert Crews (2:39:16.420)

of meeting actual Afghans who were actually,

Lex Fridman (2:39:19.220)

you know, fluent in Russian, fluent in German,

Robert Crews (2:39:21.380)

fluent in Turkish, they know Dari, they know Pashto.

Lex Fridman (2:39:26.100)

They've gone to university or sometimes they haven't.

Lex Fridman (2:39:28.460)

And yet, I mean, they are,

Lex Fridman (2:39:30.300)

I like the category of the popular intellectual,

Robert Crews (2:39:34.260)

you know, the intellectual who isn't,

Lex Fridman (2:39:36.060)

isn't formally educated necessarily.

Robert Crews (2:39:37.940)

Although of course that's represented too,

Lex Fridman (2:39:39.500)

especially increasingly now with the generation

Robert Crews (2:39:41.100)

of going to university all over the world,

Lex Fridman (2:39:42.540)

you know, Stanford, MIT, everywhere.

Robert Crews (2:39:45.500)

Afghans are well represented there.

Lex Fridman (2:39:47.220)

But just being, I don't have any kind of worldly knowledge

Robert Crews (2:39:50.660)

that is not limited to a province, to a village, to a hamlet.

Lex Fridman (2:39:54.700)

But sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not.

Robert Crews (2:39:58.140)

Because of, again, not because of some fairy tale story

Lex Fridman (2:40:02.140)

of curiosity wandering the globe out of, you know,

Robert Crews (2:40:06.980)

some sense of privilege, but out of necessity,

Lex Fridman (2:40:10.220)

out of survival of having to adapt.

Lex Fridman (2:40:11.780)

And it's really extraordinary that, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:40:14.780)

also let me think about like professions,

Lex Fridman (2:40:16.180)

so like, you know, ask an Afghan, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:40:20.460)

what does he or she do for a living?

Lex Fridman (2:40:22.340)

And what have they done in the past?

Lex Fridman (2:40:23.460)

I mean, the answers one gets,

Robert Crews (2:40:25.060)

shoe salesman, task cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.

Lex Fridman (2:40:30.900)

Yeah.

Robert Crews (2:40:31.740)

I mean, that's not just Afghan,

Lex Fridman (2:40:33.540)

but that's, you know, that's very common.

Lex Fridman (2:40:35.340)

But it's also Russia is the same.

Lex Fridman (2:40:37.420)

I think it's whenever there's complexities

Robert Crews (2:40:39.980)

to the economic system and the short term

Lex Fridman (2:40:43.140)

and the long term history of how the country develops.

Lex Fridman (2:40:46.300)

And it's basically the people figuring out their way

Lex Fridman (2:40:49.980)

around a mess of a country politically,

Lex Fridman (2:40:54.180)

but a beautiful, flourishing culture and humanity.

Lex Fridman (2:40:59.340)

And that creates super interesting people.

Robert Crews (2:41:01.420)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:41:02.620)

So we can often see, okay, there's Taliban, there's war,

Robert Crews (2:41:05.660)

there's economic malfunction,

Lex Fridman (2:41:09.620)

there's harboring of terrorists, there's opium trade,

Robert Crews (2:41:11.980)

all that kind of stuff, but there's humans there

Lex Fridman (2:41:13.860)

with deep intellectual lies.

Lex Fridman (2:41:17.980)

And like, I love the movie, Love Crimes.

Lex Fridman (2:41:21.220)

And the same kind of hopes, fears, and desire to love

Robert Crews (2:41:25.740)

the old Romeo and Juliet story.

Lex Fridman (2:41:27.740)

And I think Rumi to me represents that.

Robert Crews (2:41:31.460)

The wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent

Lex Fridman (2:41:37.180)

and just beautiful representation of humanity of love.

Robert Crews (2:41:40.860)

Some of the best quotes about love are from him,

Lex Fridman (2:41:44.700)

half of them fake, half of them real, but.

Lex Fridman (2:41:48.540)

The best ones are real, right?

Lex Fridman (2:41:49.380)

The best ones are real, the best ones are real.

Robert Crews (2:41:52.020)

Robert, this was an incredible conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:41:53.860)

Oh, thank you for having us.

Robert Crews (2:41:54.700)

Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (2:41:59.380)

and making me, making us realize that there's much more

Robert Crews (2:42:04.900)

to this country than what we may think.

Lex Fridman (2:42:09.020)

It's a beautiful country and it's full of beautiful people.

Robert Crews (2:42:13.500)

You made me think about a lot of new things too,

Lex Fridman (2:42:15.020)

so it was definitely, definitely great online too,

Lex Fridman (2:42:17.460)

so thank you so much.

Lex Fridman (2:42:19.280)

Thanks for listening to this conversation

Robert Crews (2:42:20.740)

with Robert Cruz.

Lex Fridman (2:42:22.000)

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

Robert Crews (2:42:24.700)

in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:42:26.060)

And now, let me leave you with some words

Robert Crews (2:42:27.960)

from Winston Churchill.

Lex Fridman (2:42:29.760)

"'History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.'"

Robert Crews (2:42:34.760)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman (30:02.660)

And this was a place to have some casualties,

Robert Crews (30:05.440)

have some explosions.

Lex Fridman (30:07.480)

And then I think, you know, restore the legitimacy

Robert Crews (30:09.720)

of the Bush administration

Lex Fridman (30:11.340)

by showing that we are in charge, we will pay.

Lex Fridman (30:14.060)

And I think that was a very old fashioned punitive dimension,

Lex Fridman (30:17.480)

which rests upon the presumption

Robert Crews (30:19.280)

that if we intimidate these people,

Lex Fridman (30:21.600)

they'll know not to try us again, right?

Robert Crews (30:23.880)

All these, I would suggest, are all misreadings

Lex Fridman (30:25.680)

of an organization that was always global.

Robert Crews (30:28.360)

It had no real center.

Lex Fridman (30:29.680)

I mean, it called itself the center.

Robert Crews (30:30.680)

That's one way to translate Al Qaeda.

Lex Fridman (30:32.880)

But that center was really in the imagination.

Robert Crews (30:36.840)

Bin Laden bounced around from country to country.

Lex Fridman (30:40.120)

And crucially, I think a dimension

Robert Crews (30:42.740)

that I don't claim to know anything new about,

Lex Fridman (30:45.200)

but has endured as a kind of doubt,

Robert Crews (30:47.900)

is the role of Saudi Arabia and the fact that, you know,

Lex Fridman (30:50.360)

the muscle in that operation of 9 11 was Saudi, right?

Robert Crews (30:55.000)

I mean, this was a Saudi operation with,

Lex Fridman (30:57.480)

if one thinks, again, just on the basis of nationalities,

Robert Crews (31:00.400)

Saudis, you know, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy.

Lex Fridman (31:04.440)

And the Egyptian guy, you know,

Robert Crews (31:06.800)

had been studying in Germany.

Lex Fridman (31:08.640)

He was an urban planner, right?

Lex Fridman (31:10.980)

So if one thinks of the imagination of this,

Lex Fridman (31:12.360)

I mean, in fact, if you look at the kind of typology

Robert Crews (31:15.760)

of the figures who have led this radical movement,

Lex Fridman (31:19.440)

I mean, if you think of the global jihadists,

Lex Fridman (31:22.000)

they are mostly not religious scholars, right?

Lex Fridman (31:25.480)

Bin Laden was not a religious scholar.

Robert Crews (31:27.660)

His training was an engineer.

Lex Fridman (31:29.200)

You know, some biographers claim

Robert Crews (31:30.160)

that he was a playboy for much of his youth.

Lex Fridman (31:32.640)

But really, these ideas,

Robert Crews (31:34.680)

I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers.

Lex Fridman (31:37.600)

I mean, this is an imagination fueled

Robert Crews (31:41.720)

by training and engineering.

Lex Fridman (31:43.880)

I mean, a lot of the, you know, the sociology,

Robert Crews (31:46.400)

if you do a kind of post biography

Lex Fridman (31:47.560)

of a lot of these leading jihadists,

Robert Crews (31:50.800)

their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship,

Lex Fridman (31:53.160)

but actually in engineering

Lex Fridman (31:54.560)

and kind of practical sciences and professions.

Lex Fridman (31:57.160)

Medical doctors are among their ranks.

Lex Fridman (32:00.400)

And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars

Lex Fridman (32:03.040)

who devote their whole lives to study of texts

Lex Fridman (32:05.360)

and commentary and interpretation.

Lex Fridman (32:08.000)

And then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals,

Robert Crews (32:10.640)

new Muslim authorities,

Lex Fridman (32:12.400)

who actually have secular university educations,

Robert Crews (32:16.080)

often in the natural sciences

Lex Fridman (32:17.200)

or engineering and technical fields,

Robert Crews (32:19.220)

who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will,

Lex Fridman (32:22.560)

to what Muslim scholars called the religious sciences,

Robert Crews (32:26.760)

which are, you know, a field of kind of ambiguity

Lex Fridman (32:30.600)

and of gradation and of subtlety and nuance,

Lex Fridman (32:33.940)

and really of decades of training

Lex Fridman (32:36.540)

before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues

Robert Crews (32:39.840)

like whether or not it's legitimate

Lex Fridman (32:41.200)

to take someone else's life.

Lex Fridman (32:43.260)

With the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden?

Lex Fridman (32:47.420)

Bin Laden was a visitor.

Robert Crews (32:50.640)

If you look at his whole life course,

Lex Fridman (32:53.800)

part of it is an enigma still.

Robert Crews (32:55.760)

You know, he is from a Saudi elite family,

Lex Fridman (32:59.880)

but a family that kind of has a Yemeni Arabian sea

Robert Crews (33:03.920)

kind of genealogy.

Lex Fridman (33:07.060)

So the family has no relationship to Afghanistan,

Robert Crews (33:10.240)

past or present, except at some point in 1980s,

Lex Fridman (33:13.560)

when he went like thousands of other young Saudis,

Robert Crews (33:16.960)

first to Pakistan, to places like Bashour on the border,

Lex Fridman (33:20.720)

where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.

Lex Fridman (33:25.760)

And for the most part, the Arabs who went

Lex Fridman (33:29.180)

opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.

Robert Crews (33:32.140)

The bin Laden family had long been

Lex Fridman (33:35.020)

based in engineering construction.

Lex Fridman (33:37.320)

So it's thought that he used some of those skills

Lex Fridman (33:39.400)

and resources and connections to build things.

Lex Fridman (33:44.240)

We have images of him firing a gun for show, right?

Lex Fridman (33:48.240)

It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun

Robert Crews (33:50.600)

in what we would call combat.

Lex Fridman (33:53.900)

Again, I could be corrected by this.

Lex Fridman (33:55.480)

And I think there are competing accounts of who he was.

Lex Fridman (33:58.600)

So he's kind of a, I mean, many of these figures

Robert Crews (34:01.200)

who sit at the pinnacle of this world are fictive heroes

Lex Fridman (34:05.280)

that people map their aspirations onto, right?

Lex Fridman (34:08.400)

And so people like Mullah Omar,

Lex Fridman (34:10.400)

who was then head of the Taliban,

Robert Crews (34:13.300)

was rarely seen in public.

Lex Fridman (34:15.920)

The current head of the Taliban

Robert Crews (34:17.680)

is almost never seen in public.

Lex Fridman (34:19.480)

I mean, there's a kind of studied era of mystery

Robert Crews (34:22.240)

that they've cultivated to make themselves available

Lex Fridman (34:25.340)

for all kinds of fantasies, right?

Lex Fridman (34:27.720)

Do you think he believed, so his religious beliefs,

Lex Fridman (34:33.720)

do you think he believed some of the more extreme things

Lex Fridman (34:39.120)

that enable him to commit terrorist acts?

Lex Fridman (34:42.320)

Maybe put another way,

Lex Fridman (34:44.000)

what makes a man want to become a terrorist?

Lex Fridman (34:46.960)

And what aspect of bin Laden made him want to be a terrorist?

Robert Crews (34:51.440)

Great.

Lex Fridman (34:52.520)

I mean, let me offer some observations.

Robert Crews (34:54.120)

I think there are others who know more about bin Laden

Lex Fridman (34:57.040)

and have far more expertise in Al Qaeda.

Lex Fridman (34:59.600)

So I'm coming at this in an adjacent way,

Lex Fridman (35:04.340)

kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training.

Lex Fridman (35:06.520)

So this is my two cents, so bear with me.

Lex Fridman (35:10.820)

I don't have the authoritative account for this.

Robert Crews (35:12.680)

Which in itself is fascinating

Lex Fridman (35:14.040)

because you're a historian of Afghanistan,

Lex Fridman (35:16.960)

and the fact that bin Laden isn't a huge part

Lex Fridman (35:21.160)

of your focus of study just means

Robert Crews (35:23.960)

that bin Laden is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (35:28.680)

except that America made him a key part

Robert Crews (35:31.000)

of the history of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (35:32.280)

I would endorse that.

Robert Crews (35:33.300)

Definitely, that's it.

Lex Fridman (35:34.140)

I mean, you've put it in a very pithy, pithy way.

Robert Crews (35:37.140)

Yeah, so listen, so he was an engineer.

Lex Fridman (35:40.480)

He was said to be a playboy

Robert Crews (35:42.520)

who spent a lot of cash from his family.

Lex Fridman (35:45.280)

Like many young Saudis and from some other countries,

Robert Crews (35:48.240)

he was inspired by this idea

Lex Fridman (35:50.560)

that there was jihad in Afghanistan.

Robert Crews (35:52.760)

It was gonna take down one of the two superpowers,

Lex Fridman (35:55.840)

the Soviet Union,

Robert Crews (35:57.200)

who the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands,

Lex Fridman (36:01.720)

perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians

Robert Crews (36:05.680)

during that conflict.

Lex Fridman (36:07.720)

It's very plausible and very completely understandable

Robert Crews (36:13.500)

that many young people would see that cause

Lex Fridman (36:16.660)

as the righteous, pious fighters for jihad

Robert Crews (36:21.660)

who call themselves mujahideen

Lex Fridman (36:23.820)

are ready against this evil empire

Robert Crews (36:26.420)

of a godless Soviet empire that,

Lex Fridman (36:30.220)

I mean, there's even confusion

Robert Crews (36:31.060)

about what the Soviets wanted.

Lex Fridman (36:32.300)

Now we know much more about what the Kremlin wanted,

Lex Fridman (36:34.380)

what Brezhnev wanted,

Lex Fridman (36:36.220)

and how the Soviet elite thought about it

Robert Crews (36:37.540)

because we have many more of their records.

Lex Fridman (36:39.180)

But from the outside, for Jimmy Carter and then for Reagan,

Robert Crews (36:42.700)

it looked like the Soviets were making a move on South Asia

Lex Fridman (36:47.860)

because they wanted to get to the warm water ports,

Lex Fridman (36:50.860)

which Russians always want supposedly, right?

Lex Fridman (36:52.660)

And it was kind of a move to take over our oil

Lex Fridman (36:56.120)

and to assert world domination, right?

Lex Fridman (36:58.780)

So there are lots of ways in which this looked like

Robert Crews (37:01.500)

good versus evil in Congress.

Lex Fridman (37:03.300)

It looked like kind of Vietnam again,

Lex Fridman (37:06.880)

but this time this is our chance to get them.

Lex Fridman (37:08.920)

And there are lots of great quotes,

Robert Crews (37:11.380)

I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes

Lex Fridman (37:13.900)

that American policymakers made about

Robert Crews (37:16.300)

wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam.

Lex Fridman (37:18.980)

So the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars

Robert Crews (37:23.320)

into this project to back the Mujahideen,

Lex Fridman (37:25.660)

who Reagan called freedom fighters.

Lex Fridman (37:27.580)

And so Bin Laden was part of that universe,

Lex Fridman (37:29.460)

he's part of that,

Robert Crews (37:30.300)

he's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen

Lex Fridman (37:33.520)

who out of size did 95% of the fighting,

Robert Crews (37:36.740)

they're the ones who died,

Lex Fridman (37:37.740)

they're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right?

Robert Crews (37:40.500)

The Arabs who were there did a little fighting,

Lex Fridman (37:43.100)

but a lot of it was for their purposes.

Robert Crews (37:45.740)

It was to get experience,

Lex Fridman (37:47.100)

it was to kind of create their reputations

Robert Crews (37:50.300)

like Bin Laden began to force for himself

Lex Fridman (37:52.660)

of being spoken for a global project.

Robert Crews (37:55.260)

Because by the late 80s,

Lex Fridman (37:57.020)

when Bin Laden I think was more active

Lex Fridman (37:58.860)

and began conspiring with people from other Arab countries,

Lex Fridman (38:02.840)

the idea that Gorbachev came to power in 85,

Robert Crews (38:06.020)

he's like, let's get out of here,

Lex Fridman (38:07.100)

this is draining the Soviet budget,

Robert Crews (38:09.380)

it's an embarrassment,

Lex Fridman (38:11.500)

we didn't think about this properly,

Robert Crews (38:13.220)

let's focus on restoring the party

Lex Fridman (38:17.220)

and strengthening the Soviet Union,

Robert Crews (38:19.300)

let's get out of this costly war,

Lex Fridman (38:20.900)

it's a waste, it's not worth it,

Robert Crews (38:23.780)

where you don't lose anything

Lex Fridman (38:24.620)

by getting out of Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (38:26.860)

And so their retreat was quite effective and successful

Lex Fridman (38:31.880)

from the Soviet point of view, right?

Robert Crews (38:33.100)

It's not what we're seeing now.

Lex Fridman (38:35.140)

What year was the retreat?

Robert Crews (38:37.300)

I mean, it began,

Lex Fridman (38:38.840)

so Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985,

Robert Crews (38:41.900)

he was a generation younger than the other guys,

Lex Fridman (38:44.540)

he was a critic of the system,

Robert Crews (38:46.300)

he didn't want to abolish it,

Lex Fridman (38:47.140)

he wanted to reform it,

Robert Crews (38:48.580)

he was a true believer in Soviet socialism

Lex Fridman (38:51.360)

and in the party as a monopolist, right?

Lex Fridman (38:56.740)

But he was critical of the old guard

Lex Fridman (38:58.020)

and recognized that the party had to change

Lex Fridman (39:00.900)

and the whole system had to change to continue to compete.

Lex Fridman (39:04.620)

And so Afghanistan was one element of this.

Lex Fridman (39:07.420)

And so he pushed the Afghan elites

Lex Fridman (39:11.420)

that Moscow was backing to basically say,

Robert Crews (39:14.320)

listen, we're gonna share power.

Lex Fridman (39:16.340)

And so a figure named Najibullah,

Robert Crews (39:19.660)

who was a Soviet trained intelligence specialist

Lex Fridman (39:23.260)

sitting in Kabul agreed.

Lex Fridman (39:26.420)

And he said, we need to have a more kind of

Lex Fridman (39:28.780)

pluralistic accommodations approach to our enemies

Robert Crews (39:33.220)

who are backed by the US mainly,

Lex Fridman (39:36.260)

sitting in Pakistan, sitting in Iran,

Robert Crews (39:39.180)

backed by these Arabs to a degree,

Lex Fridman (39:40.540)

getting money from Saudi.

Lex Fridman (39:42.340)

And he said, let's draw some of them into the government

Lex Fridman (39:45.100)

and basically have a kind of unity government

Robert Crews (39:48.420)

that would make some space to the opposition.

Lex Fridman (39:50.820)

And for the most part, with US backing,

Robert Crews (39:53.340)

with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing

Lex Fridman (39:56.020)

and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no,

Robert Crews (39:58.540)

we're not going to reconcile,

Lex Fridman (40:00.700)

we're gonna push you off the cliff.

Lex Fridman (40:02.700)

And so that story goes on from at least 1987,

Lex Fridman (40:06.660)

the last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989,

Lex Fridman (40:11.180)

but the Najibullah government holds on for three more years.

Lex Fridman (40:15.220)

It is the, I mean, they're still getting some help

Robert Crews (40:17.700)

from the Soviet Union,

Lex Fridman (40:18.740)

its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly.

Lex Fridman (40:21.660)

And it's not till 1992 that they lose.

Lex Fridman (40:27.180)

And then Mujahideen come to power,

Robert Crews (40:29.540)

they immediately, they're deeply fractured.

Lex Fridman (40:33.060)

And that's where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll.

Robert Crews (40:35.900)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (40:36.740)

And he's part of the mix, but he's also mobile.

Lex Fridman (40:37.860)

So he at one point goes, is in Sudan.

Lex Fridman (40:42.580)

He's moving from place to place.

Robert Crews (40:44.060)

His people are all over the world.

Lex Fridman (40:45.220)

In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the,

Robert Crews (40:48.180)

once the Mujahideen take power,

Lex Fridman (40:50.180)

they have difficulties with Arab fighters too.

Lex Fridman (40:52.100)

And they don't want them coming in and messing

Lex Fridman (40:54.180)

with Mujahideen regarding this as like,

Robert Crews (40:57.140)

this is an Afghan national state that we're gonna build.

Lex Fridman (40:59.340)

It's gonna be Islamic, it's gonna be an Islamic state,

Lex Fridman (41:01.620)

but you can't interfere with us.

Lex Fridman (41:03.740)

And so there are always tensions.

Lex Fridman (41:05.660)

And so the Arabs are always kind of,

Lex Fridman (41:07.020)

I would say they were Arab fighters were always interlopers.

Robert Crews (41:11.300)

Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money,

Lex Fridman (41:13.860)

send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons,

Lex Fridman (41:17.460)

but they were never gonna let this be like a Saudi

Lex Fridman (41:20.700)

or Egyptian or whatever project.

Lex Fridman (41:23.740)

But then many of those fighters went home,

Lex Fridman (41:26.340)

they went back to Syria, they went back to Egypt.

Robert Crews (41:29.140)

Some wanted to go back to the Saudi Arabia,

Lex Fridman (41:30.580)

but the Saudis were very careful.

Robert Crews (41:31.620)

I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan

Lex Fridman (41:33.220)

as a kind of safety valve.

Robert Crews (41:34.860)

In fact, they had fundraisers on television,

Lex Fridman (41:37.180)

they chartered jets.

Robert Crews (41:38.420)

They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan,

Lex Fridman (41:42.420)

get out in the shower and say, go fight.

Lex Fridman (41:44.340)

And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy,

Lex Fridman (41:48.980)

very cleverly I think, created a kind of escape valve

Lex Fridman (41:52.660)

for would be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right?

Lex Fridman (41:55.420)

Just send them abroad.

Robert Crews (41:56.900)

You wanna fight Jihad, go do that somewhere else.

Lex Fridman (41:59.140)

Don't bother the kingdom.

Lex Fridman (42:01.260)

But all this became dicier in the early 90s

Lex Fridman (42:04.380)

when some of these guys came back home

Lex Fridman (42:06.260)

and some of the scholars around them said,

Lex Fridman (42:09.140)

we've defeated the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost.

Lex Fridman (42:11.180)

And I think part of the dynamic we see today

Lex Fridman (42:12.780)

is that the Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration

Robert Crews (42:17.340)

for people who think, look, we beat the Soviets,

Lex Fridman (42:20.220)

now we beat the Americans.

Lex Fridman (42:21.940)

And so already watching the Soviet retreat

Lex Fridman (42:24.580)

across this bridge, back into Uzbekistan,

Robert Crews (42:26.900)

if you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving,

Lex Fridman (42:30.300)

a lot of people interpreted this as like,

Robert Crews (42:32.420)

we are going to change the world

Lex Fridman (42:34.620)

and now we're training to the Americans.

Lex Fridman (42:36.500)

And our local national governments

Lex Fridman (42:38.220)

are backed by the Americans.

Lex Fridman (42:39.780)

So let's start with those places

Lex Fridman (42:42.020)

and then let's go strike the belly of the beast,

Robert Crews (42:44.780)

which is America, which is New York.

Lex Fridman (42:47.300)

And going back to Bin Laden,

Robert Crews (42:48.140)

your question about what motivates him,

Lex Fridman (42:50.100)

what motivated him, again,

Robert Crews (42:52.500)

he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar.

Lex Fridman (42:57.340)

And that I think, when this comes up in our classes,

Robert Crews (43:00.580)

I think especially young people,

Lex Fridman (43:01.980)

I mean, people who weren't even born on 9 11,

Robert Crews (43:03.140)

I mean, they're shocked, they see his appearance,

Lex Fridman (43:05.460)

they see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf

Robert Crews (43:10.660)

of Arabic books, he's got the Kalashnikov,

Lex Fridman (43:13.500)

he's got what looks like

Lex Fridman (43:14.700)

a religious scholars library behind him, right?

Lex Fridman (43:16.980)

But if you look at his words,

Robert Crews (43:19.620)

I mean, one fascinating thing about just our politics

Lex Fridman (43:21.500)

and just one thing that kind of sums all this up,

Robert Crews (43:22.700)

I mean, the fact that on 9 11,

Lex Fridman (43:25.180)

we had to have a few people, a few experts,

Robert Crews (43:29.740)

people like Burnett Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert.

Lex Fridman (43:32.140)

So that was one way in which I think,

Robert Crews (43:33.780)

I'm not faulting him personally,

Lex Fridman (43:35.220)

but it's just one way in which that relationship

Lex Fridman (43:37.500)

appeared to be formed, right?

Lex Fridman (43:40.340)

Of linking Afghanistan to that moment.

Robert Crews (43:44.100)

If one looks actually at what Bin Laden was saying and doing,

Lex Fridman (43:47.380)

people like Richard Clarke were studying this,

Robert Crews (43:49.340)

there were Arab leaders, the Arab press was watching this

Lex Fridman (43:51.940)

because he gave some of his first interviews

Robert Crews (43:54.020)

to a few Arab newspaper outlets.

Lex Fridman (43:57.060)

But speaking of our American kind of monolingualism,

Robert Crews (44:00.260)

a lot of what he was saying wasn't known.

Lex Fridman (44:01.980)

And so I think for several years,

Robert Crews (44:04.820)

people weren't reading what Bin Laden said.

Lex Fridman (44:07.740)

I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic,

Lex Fridman (44:10.260)

but there was great anxiety around translating his works.

Lex Fridman (44:13.740)

So we have Mon conf, we have all this other stuff,

Robert Crews (44:15.820)

you can buy the collected works of Lenin, Stalin, Mao,

Lex Fridman (44:18.220)

whatever you want in whatever language you want.

Lex Fridman (44:20.460)

But Bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.

Lex Fridman (44:22.420)

So it was only a Verso in the UK

Robert Crews (44:25.540)

that published a famous volume called

Lex Fridman (44:29.020)

Messages to the World,

Robert Crews (44:30.940)

which was the first compendium of Bin Laden's writings.

Lex Fridman (44:33.820)

So he has a Mein Kampf.

Lex Fridman (44:35.980)

He has a type, does he have a thing?

Lex Fridman (44:38.140)

I mean, it's a kind of collected works.

Robert Crews (44:39.220)

It's a collected works of his, yeah.

Lex Fridman (44:41.860)

Well, like a blog, like a collection of articles versus.

Robert Crews (44:46.820)

Yeah, these are interviews, these are his missives,

Lex Fridman (44:49.300)

his declarations, his decrees, right?

Lex Fridman (44:54.300)

But I think just in terms of if we zoom out for a second

Lex Fridman (44:58.060)

about American policy choices and so on,

Robert Crews (45:00.580)

the powers that be didn't trust us

Lex Fridman (45:02.700)

to know what he was really about.

Robert Crews (45:04.260)

I put it that way.

Lex Fridman (45:05.100)

And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense.

Robert Crews (45:06.820)

I just think that it was a taboo.

Lex Fridman (45:11.100)

I think people, there was a kind of consensus

Robert Crews (45:14.740)

that trust us, we know how to fight Al Qaeda

Lex Fridman (45:20.180)

and you don't need to know what they're about

Robert Crews (45:21.340)

because they're crazy.

Lex Fridman (45:22.500)

They're fanatics, they're fundamentalists.

Robert Crews (45:24.540)

They hate us, remember that language, us versus them.

Lex Fridman (45:28.740)

But if you read Bin Laden, that's when it gets messy.

Robert Crews (45:30.740)

That's where the Bin Laden's argumentation

Lex Fridman (45:34.220)

is not fundamentally about Islam.

Lex Fridman (45:37.140)

And if you were sitting here with an Islamic scholar,

Lex Fridman (45:39.180)

he would say, depending on which Islamic scholar,

Robert Crews (45:43.140)

they would tend to go through and dissect

Lex Fridman (45:45.580)

and negate 99% of the arguments

Lex Fridman (45:48.660)

that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?

Lex Fridman (45:51.100)

But what strikes me as an historian who's again,

Robert Crews (45:53.340)

looking at this adjacently, if you read Bin Laden,

Lex Fridman (45:57.020)

I mean, the arguments that he make are,

Robert Crews (45:59.940)

first of all, they're sophisticated.

Lex Fridman (46:01.420)

They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics.

Robert Crews (46:07.820)

He uses terms like imperialism.

Lex Fridman (46:09.940)

He knows something about world history.

Robert Crews (46:12.220)

He knows something about geography.

Lex Fridman (46:14.300)

So imperialism is the enemy for him

Lex Fridman (46:16.140)

or what's the nature of the enemy?

Lex Fridman (46:17.900)

It's an amalgam and like a good politician,

Robert Crews (46:21.620)

which is what I would call him,

Lex Fridman (46:23.380)

he is adept at speaking in different ways

Robert Crews (46:27.020)

to different audiences.

Lex Fridman (46:28.060)

So if you look at the context in which he speaks,

Robert Crews (46:30.620)

if you look at messages to the world,

Lex Fridman (46:33.020)

if you look at his writings and you can zoom out now

Lex Fridman (46:35.740)

and we now have compendia of the writings

Lex Fridman (46:37.660)

of Al Qaeda more broadly, you can purchase these,

Robert Crews (46:42.420)

they're basically primary source collections.

Lex Fridman (46:45.340)

We now have that for the Taliban.

Robert Crews (46:47.020)

I mean, what's fascinating about,

Lex Fridman (46:49.500)

I think if you'd like this culture,

Robert Crews (46:52.220)

acknowledging it's very diverse internally

Lex Fridman (46:55.740)

is that these people are representatives

Robert Crews (46:58.860)

of political movements who seek followers.

Lex Fridman (47:01.140)

They speak, they often are very,

Robert Crews (47:05.420)

I'd say skilled at visual imagery.

Lex Fridman (47:08.460)

And especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that,

Robert Crews (47:10.220)

I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions.

Lex Fridman (47:12.900)

They used to blow up VCR, videotapes.

Robert Crews (47:19.420)

They used to string audio and video cassettes

Lex Fridman (47:22.740)

from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right?

Robert Crews (47:25.860)

That we're killing this nefarious, infidel technology

Lex Fridman (47:30.380)

that is doing the work of Satan.

Lex Fridman (47:32.260)

And yet today, and plus, I mean,

Lex Fridman (47:34.540)

one of the keys to the Taliban success

Robert Crews (47:35.740)

is that they got really good at using media.

Lex Fridman (47:38.860)

I mean, brilliant at using the written word,

Robert Crews (47:42.180)

the spoken word, music, actually.

Lex Fridman (47:45.100)

And Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard.

Lex Fridman (47:48.500)

And these guys have studied how to create drama,

Lex Fridman (47:52.300)

how to speak to modern users.

Robert Crews (47:53.900)

I mean, Islamic State did this.

Lex Fridman (47:55.020)

I mean, the role of media, new media.

Robert Crews (47:57.580)

I mean, I follow and I am followed by

Lex Fridman (48:01.780)

senior Taliban leaders, which is bizarre on Twitter.

Lex Fridman (48:06.580)

On Twitter?

Lex Fridman (48:07.620)

I don't know why they care about me.

Robert Crews (48:08.900)

I'm nothing.

Lex Fridman (48:10.500)

They follow you on Twitter.

Robert Crews (48:12.820)

I don't know why.

Lex Fridman (48:13.660)

This is no joke.

Robert Crews (48:14.500)

This is no joke.

Lex Fridman (48:15.340)

So they're part of our modern world

Lex Fridman (48:17.260)

and it's how they talk and it's how they recruit.

Lex Fridman (48:18.420)

And this is part of the, this is why they are.

Lex Fridman (48:20.740)

So Ben Laden, if you read Ben Laden,

Lex Fridman (48:22.100)

he speaks multiple languages, I would say.

Robert Crews (48:24.300)

It's environmentalism.

Lex Fridman (48:28.420)

The West is bad because we destroyed the planet.

Robert Crews (48:31.500)

The West is bad because we abuse women.

Lex Fridman (48:34.540)

So in class, especially female students

Robert Crews (48:38.820)

are very surprised to learn

Lex Fridman (48:40.180)

and actually say this feminist argument is not,

Robert Crews (48:45.500)

we start with, this is a murder.

Lex Fridman (48:47.420)

This is a person who has taken human life,

Robert Crews (48:49.140)

innocent life over and over again.

Lex Fridman (48:51.380)

And he is aspirationally genocidal,

Lex Fridman (48:56.020)

but let's try to understand what he's about.

Lex Fridman (48:57.620)

So we walk through the texts, read them

Lex Fridman (48:59.340)

and people are shocked to learn that

Lex Fridman (49:02.740)

it's not just about quotations in the Quran

Robert Crews (49:05.820)

strung together in some irrational fashion.

Lex Fridman (49:08.300)

He knows, I mean, at the core,

Robert Crews (49:10.940)

I'd say is the problem of human suffering.

Lex Fridman (49:12.980)

And he has a geography of that, that is mostly Muslim,

Lex Fridman (49:15.420)

but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir, right?

Lex Fridman (49:17.860)

So if you have a student in your class,

Robert Crews (49:19.580)

who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir,

Lex Fridman (49:22.420)

he or she will say, that's not entirely inaccurate.

Robert Crews (49:26.980)

The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir.

Lex Fridman (49:31.220)

Pakistan is doing that too.

Lex Fridman (49:33.340)

Palestine is an issue, right?

Lex Fridman (49:35.100)

So you have in the American university setting,

Robert Crews (49:37.940)

people across the spectrum who get that,

Lex Fridman (49:41.500)

Palestinians have had a raw deal.

Lex Fridman (49:43.460)

And so it's a, victimhood is central

Lex Fridman (49:46.220)

and it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary,

Lex Fridman (49:50.140)

but as a number of scholars have written,

Lex Fridman (49:52.380)

and I definitely think this is a framework

Robert Crews (49:55.420)

for what this is useful.

Lex Fridman (49:56.260)

I mean, in this kind of vocabulary,

Robert Crews (49:58.500)

in this framing, this narrative,

Lex Fridman (50:01.380)

today, in today's world,

Robert Crews (50:03.340)

if we think of today's world being post Cold War,

Lex Fridman (50:06.580)

91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars

Lex Fridman (50:12.020)

and seeing the visuals of that,

Lex Fridman (50:12.940)

I think that the American public

Robert Crews (50:14.700)

has been shielded from some of this,

Lex Fridman (50:15.540)

but if you look at just the carnage of the Iraqi army

Lex Fridman (50:20.940)

that George H.W. Bush produced, right?

Lex Fridman (50:24.180)

Or you think of the images of the suffering

Robert Crews (50:26.500)

of Iraqi children under George H.W. Bush's sanctions,

Lex Fridman (50:31.180)

US British airstrikes,

Robert Crews (50:33.420)

then you have Madeleine Albright answer a question

Lex Fridman (50:36.740)

on 16 Minutes saying,

Lex Fridman (50:37.580)

do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids

Lex Fridman (50:40.660)

is worth it?

Lex Fridman (50:41.820)

Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein?

Lex Fridman (50:44.620)

And she says on camera, yes, it's worth it to me.

Robert Crews (50:47.860)

If you put that all together,

Lex Fridman (50:49.820)

I mean, American kids, and of course the American public,

Robert Crews (50:52.300)

they're not always aware of those facts of global history,

Lex Fridman (50:55.900)

but these guys are,

Lex Fridman (50:57.180)

and they very capably use these images, use these tropes,

Lex Fridman (51:02.180)

and use facts.

Robert Crews (51:03.820)

I mean, some of these things are not deniable.

Lex Fridman (51:05.780)

I mean, these estimates about the number

Robert Crews (51:07.980)

of Iraqi civilian children dead,

Lex Fridman (51:10.740)

that came from, I think, the Lancet,

Lex Fridman (51:12.100)

and it came from, those are estimates,

Lex Fridman (51:13.980)

but looking at this from the point of view of Amman,

Robert Crews (51:18.420)

of Jaffa, of Nairobi,

Lex Fridman (51:22.380)

you can just think around the planet,

Lex Fridman (51:25.100)

and if you see yourself as the victim

Lex Fridman (51:26.500)

of this great imperial power,

Robert Crews (51:29.700)

you can see why especially young men

Lex Fridman (51:31.020)

would be drawn to a road of self sacrifice.

Lex Fridman (51:37.220)

And the idea is that in killing others,

Lex Fridman (51:41.820)

you are making them feel how you feel,

Robert Crews (51:46.860)

because they won't listen to your arguments reasonably,

Lex Fridman (51:49.180)

because they won't recognize Palestinian suffering,

Lex Fridman (51:52.620)

Bosnian suffering, right?

Lex Fridman (51:54.380)

Chechen suffering.

Lex Fridman (51:55.860)

You go across the planet, right?

Lex Fridman (51:57.420)

Because they won't recognize our suffering,

Robert Crews (51:59.980)

we're gonna speak to you in the only language

Lex Fridman (52:01.620)

that you understand, and that's violence.

Lex Fridman (52:04.220)

And look at the violence of the post 1991 world, right?

Lex Fridman (52:08.220)

In which American air power really becomes a global,

Robert Crews (52:12.340)

you know, kind of fact in the lives of so many people.

Lex Fridman (52:16.820)

And then the big mistake after 9 11 among many,

Robert Crews (52:19.340)

I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror

Lex Fridman (52:22.860)

to some 30 or 40 countries, right?

Lex Fridman (52:25.060)

So that you have more and more of the globe

Lex Fridman (52:28.180)

feel like they're under attack, right?

Lex Fridman (52:30.820)

And the logic is essentially, it's really bin Laden,

Lex Fridman (52:33.540)

it's not we're going to convert you

Lex Fridman (52:36.500)

and turn you into Muslims and that's why we're doing this.

Lex Fridman (52:38.820)

That appears, that claim does appear at times.

Lex Fridman (52:42.100)

But if you look at any given bin Laden text,

Lex Fridman (52:45.140)

I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.

Robert Crews (52:47.500)

I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying,

Lex Fridman (52:48.900)

but he's a modern politician,

Robert Crews (52:51.080)

he knows the language of social equality,

Lex Fridman (52:54.860)

you know, there's a class dimension to it,

Robert Crews (52:56.820)

there is an environmental dimension to it,

Lex Fridman (52:58.660)

there's a gender dimension to it.

Lex Fridman (53:00.740)

And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in.

Lex Fridman (53:04.180)

And when he wants to speak that language,

Robert Crews (53:06.500)

he knew that, you know, he's not a scholar.

Lex Fridman (53:09.300)

So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on.

Lex Fridman (53:13.420)

So some of his decorations of Jihad

Lex Fridman (53:16.020)

had his signature kind of sprinkled in

Robert Crews (53:19.000)

with like a dozen other signatures

Lex Fridman (53:20.500)

from people who are somewhat known

Lex Fridman (53:22.780)

or at least with titles, right?

Lex Fridman (53:24.800)

So as a kind of intellectual exercise,

Robert Crews (53:28.240)

it's fascinating to see

Lex Fridman (53:29.080)

that he is throwing everything at the wall in one level.

Robert Crews (53:34.080)

That's one way to see that it's a,

Lex Fridman (53:35.760)

these are kind of testaments toward recruitment

Robert Crews (53:39.860)

of people who, yes, they're angry, yes, they're unhappy.

Lex Fridman (53:43.840)

And this is what, you know,

Robert Crews (53:44.680)

I think for a broader public, it's hard to get,

Lex Fridman (53:47.160)

you're like, well, bin Laden didn't suffer, he wasn't poor.

Robert Crews (53:51.280)

Like, yeah, I mean, Lenin, Pol Pot, I mean.

Lex Fridman (53:55.120)

They're speaking to, they're empathetic

Robert Crews (53:57.160)

to the suffering, the landscape,

Lex Fridman (53:58.560)

the full landscape of suffering.

Robert Crews (53:59.860)

It's interesting to think about suffering,

Lex Fridman (54:03.400)

you know, America, the American public,

Robert Crews (54:06.900)

American politicians and leaders,

Lex Fridman (54:09.880)

when they see what is good and evil,

Robert Crews (54:13.080)

they're often not empathetic to the suffering of others.

Lex Fridman (54:16.560)

And what you're saying is bin Laden perhaps accurately

Robert Crews (54:21.600)

could speak to the ignorance of America,

Lex Fridman (54:24.860)

maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people.

Robert Crews (54:28.280)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (54:29.120)

And I mean, if you look at the speeches

Lex Fridman (54:32.680)

and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s,

Lex Fridman (54:37.200)

he spoke quite accurately to the injustice

Lex Fridman (54:42.640)

and maybe the suffering of the German people.

Lex Fridman (54:46.480)

I mean, charismatic politicians

Robert Crews (54:49.080)

are good at telling accurate stories.

Lex Fridman (54:50.840)

It's not all fabricated,

Lex Fridman (54:53.040)

but they emphasize certain aspects.

Lex Fridman (54:55.640)

And then the problem part is the actions

Robert Crews (54:58.400)

you should take based on that.

Lex Fridman (55:01.480)

So the narratives and the stories

Robert Crews (55:03.600)

may be grounded in historical accuracy.

Lex Fridman (55:06.680)

The actions then cross the line, the ethical line.

Robert Crews (55:11.800)

I found that too, I mean, it's a,

Lex Fridman (55:13.600)

again, if you pick up just one of these texts,

Robert Crews (55:14.760)

I mean, it's a kaleidoscope.

Lex Fridman (55:15.980)

So the Hitler analogy is interesting

Robert Crews (55:18.480)

because it's Hitler spoke to,

Lex Fridman (55:21.200)

he could speak to things like inflation, right?

Robert Crews (55:23.400)

Which really existed.

Lex Fridman (55:25.400)

But he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans.

Robert Crews (55:29.920)

He sought out scapegoats, Jews, Roma, disabled people,

Lex Fridman (55:36.220)

homosexuals and so on, right?

Robert Crews (55:38.120)

That's also there in bin Laden too.

Lex Fridman (55:40.120)

I mean, the idea of an anti semitism,

Robert Crews (55:44.040)

the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders,

Lex Fridman (55:47.640)

it's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers.

Lex Fridman (55:50.720)

But I also hasten to add that it's,

Lex Fridman (55:53.160)

for all of the things that we could take off saying,

Robert Crews (55:55.640)

well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered,

Lex Fridman (55:58.360)

Chechens have suffered and so on.

Robert Crews (56:01.280)

Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.

Lex Fridman (56:04.320)

I mean, it never really, I think the,

Lex Fridman (56:08.040)

I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right?

Lex Fridman (56:09.760)

About ideology.

Robert Crews (56:11.440)

I mean, I think the blood on his hands

Lex Fridman (56:14.840)

always limited his appeal among Muslims and others.

Lex Fridman (56:19.560)

But Bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a,

Lex Fridman (56:21.120)

there's a great book by a great scholar

Robert Crews (56:23.400)

at UC San Diego, Jeremy Prestholt,

Lex Fridman (56:26.760)

who read a great book about global icons

Robert Crews (56:29.120)

in which he has Bin Laden, he has Bob Marley,

Lex Fridman (56:35.640)

he has Tupac, you know, he asked why,

Robert Crews (56:40.440)

you know, he's doing research in East Africa,

Lex Fridman (56:42.360)

why did he see young kids wearing Bin Laden shirts?

Robert Crews (56:46.240)

They're also wearing like Tupac shirts.

Lex Fridman (56:48.080)

They're wearing Bob Marley shirts.

Lex Fridman (56:50.000)

And it's a way of looking at a kind of partial embrace

Lex Fridman (56:56.760)

of some aspects of the rebelliousness

Robert Crews (57:00.100)

of some of these figures, some of the time,

Lex Fridman (57:02.540)

by some people under certain conditions.

Robert Crews (57:05.280)

Well, the terrifying thing to me,

Lex Fridman (57:06.500)

so yeah, there is a longing in the human heart

Robert Crews (57:08.760)

to belong to a group and a charismatic leader somehow,

Lex Fridman (57:14.120)

especially when you're young,

Robert Crews (57:16.120)

just a catalyst for all of that.

Lex Fridman (57:18.840)

I tend to think that perhaps it's actually hard

Robert Crews (57:22.920)

to be Hitler, so a leader so charismatic

Lex Fridman (57:26.760)

that he can rally a nation to war.

Lex Fridman (57:29.560)

And Bin Laden, perhaps we're lucky,

Lex Fridman (57:32.580)

was not sufficiently charismatic.

Robert Crews (57:35.560)

I feel like if his writing was better,

Lex Fridman (57:37.740)

if his speeches were better,

Robert Crews (57:39.560)

if his ideas were stronger,

Lex Fridman (57:42.840)

better, it's like more viral,

Lex Fridman (57:46.000)

and then there would be more people,

Lex Fridman (57:48.800)

kind of young people uniting around him.

Lex Fridman (57:52.560)

So in some sense, it's almost like accidents of history

Lex Fridman (57:56.200)

of just how much charisma,

Lex Fridman (57:58.240)

how much charisma a particular evil person has,

Lex Fridman (58:01.360)

a person like Bin Laden.

Robert Crews (58:03.240)

I think it's fair, evil works, I think.

Lex Fridman (58:05.680)

So you think Bin Laden is evil?

Robert Crews (58:07.400)

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (58:08.240)

I mean, he was a mass murderer.

Robert Crews (58:11.120)

I'm just saying that his ideas were,

Lex Fridman (58:13.720)

they're more complex than we've tended to acknowledge.

Robert Crews (58:17.680)

They have a wider potential resonance

Lex Fridman (58:21.960)

than we would acknowledge.

Robert Crews (58:23.360)

I mean, and also, I guess what I'm,

Lex Fridman (58:25.600)

just one fundamental point is that

Robert Crews (58:29.560)

thinking about the complexity of Bin Laden

Lex Fridman (58:31.680)

is also a way of removing him from Islam.

Robert Crews (58:35.560)

He is not an Islamic thinker.

Lex Fridman (58:36.800)

He is a cosmopolitan thinker

Robert Crews (58:39.680)

who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies,

Lex Fridman (58:43.240)

which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right?

Lex Fridman (58:45.720)

So antisemitism, populism, environmentalism,

Lex Fridman (58:51.880)

and the urging to do something about humanity,

Robert Crews (58:56.400)

do something about suffering.

Lex Fridman (58:57.800)

That's why I think the actual,

Robert Crews (58:59.120)

you asked about what motivates people

Lex Fridman (59:00.320)

to do this kind of stuff.

Robert Crews (59:01.140)

I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership,

Lex Fridman (59:04.380)

and this is being reported,

Robert Crews (59:05.720)

if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris

Lex Fridman (59:09.240)

of the Bataclan murders, I think,

Robert Crews (59:14.080)

the court allowed some discussion

Lex Fridman (59:15.600)

of the backgrounds of the accused,

Lex Fridman (59:17.640)

and they come from different backgrounds,

Lex Fridman (59:20.360)

but if there's any common bond,

Robert Crews (59:22.040)

it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime.

Lex Fridman (59:26.160)

Famously, in the 7.7 bombings in London,

Robert Crews (59:29.260)

the Metropolitan Police, UK authorities

Lex Fridman (59:32.560)

looked at all those guys,

Lex Fridman (59:34.520)

and what people want is this idea

Lex Fridman (59:36.940)

that they must be very pious.

Robert Crews (59:39.100)

They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (59:42.040)

They must be fanatical true believers,

Lex Fridman (59:43.560)

but what they found with those guys

Lex Fridman (59:45.360)

was that some were nominally Muslim,

Robert Crews (59:50.020)

some went to mosques, some didn't.

Lex Fridman (59:53.320)

Some were single, young guys with criminal backgrounds.

Robert Crews (59:57.640)

Some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits