Transcript for S4 Episode 1 - "Snake Eater"

September 2001.

1980 U.S. National Security Advisor, Briginski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Kaiba Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Cohen. And this is season four episode one. Snake Eater. Here we are, welcome friends old and new to season four. And thanks as always, most of all, to everyone who listened last season. And thank you to everyone who is subscribing to join us for this season.

And this season we'll just tell you up front is our most ambitious yet, the saga of war in Afghanistan. And it's a story that winds through decade after decade. Covered war started by the CIA in the 70s, which explodes into a full-scale invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union through the 1980s.

So think of this season as a two-parter. The first half will be in the 1980s during the Soviet Afghan War. And the second half will lead us up to 911 in America's War on Terror and Occupation of Afghanistan. Along the way we will meet secret agents, Soviet commissars, Afghan warlords, Texas Cowboys, Saudi oligarchs, and the people caught in between. In a 40-year war that may not yet be over.

From the novel, The worm or Oboros. The king weareth on his thumb that worm or Oboros, which doctors have from a old maid for an ensemble of eternity. Wear of the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end forever more. In other words, the snake eats its tail. Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan the summer of 2021 produced a very odd spectacle the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover that followed in some ways appear to wake Americans up almost remind them that we had been occupying a country halfway across the world for 20 years

Abandoning Afghanistan is a historic mistake, read the New York Times, a dishonorable exit, read the Atlantic, and said the Washington Post editorial board that debacle in Afghanistan is the worst kind. Avoidable. There was an interesting logic at play. It was as if the chaos had started that day, and all of the violence and the horror of the past 20 years had nothing to do with the images coming out of Afghanistan.

We wanted to look at that trail. Study the connections, the associations, the clues that place Afghanistan in America's crosshairs by September 2001. And then we can try to understand what the Americans did next.

I think we should start here with the biggest bombshell. Many of you out there, whether you know it or not, are probably familiar with the whole vibe of American foreign policy toward Afghanistan from the following point of trivia. in Rambo 3, released in 1988, in which John Rambo fights against the Soviets alongside the Mujahideen. The original cut of the film ended with a title card. You probably know it already. This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan. And as if to underline the historical irony years later. After the 911 attacks, the home video releases of Rambo 3 changed this text to this film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan. So there it is, everything you need to know. It's right there.

Well, here it is. And this brings me no pleasure to report. That entire story, that entire meme is a myth. Reviews from the time way back, reference the title card of Galant people, not the Mujahideen fighters. No home video releases printed before 9.11 have ever been shown to contain the Mujahideen shout out. Someone just did a really good job in Photoshop and convinced the internet, and indeed if you look it up several academics, into believing a piece of pop culture history, too good to be true.

That said, if the trivia itself is false, it is, as they say, spiritually true. And to be honest, Rambo 3 is as good a place as any to understand how Afghanistan first entered the minds of many Americans in the 1980s, a place where Russia got its own Vietnam.

And we'll see this season how this shorthand for the Soviet Afghan war, Russia's Vietnam, was really fed to the American media, be they artists, or the press, and how it gave the Americans only a few years after Vietnam, the opportunity to finally play the anti-imperialists.

We saw in season one how architects of the Iraq War, known as the Vulcans, were haunted by, and raging against, so-called Vietnam Syndrome. Well, that pathology begins decades earlier in Afghanistan.

That, we will find in this season, was a bit of an understatement.

All the way back in 1954, the Pakistani writer Sadat Monto published a series of essays called Letters to Uncle Sam, writing satirically but with astounding prescience, he jokingly advised the new superpower of the United States to team up with hardcore Islamic militants in the region to scare away the Soviets.

Even before 911, but certainly since, there's been a popular idea of the standoff between the superpower America and terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, a sprawling global modern capitalism in one corner and a reactionary militant Islam in the other. McDonald's versus Jihad, to paraphrase the scholar Benjamin Barber. But in telling this season's story about Afghanistan, one that Sadat Monto predicted the better part of a century ago, We're looking to show things in quite a different light. You could look at Islamic fundamentalism as something as American as Apple Pie.

There are, of course, exceptions. The split between Sunni and Shia governments has meant that the Islamic Republic of Iran is usually a sworn enemy of the United States, except, of course, when President Reagan was selling the missiles, where the Iatol is, we're offering to help against the Taliban. But on the whole, it is impossible to ignore the alliances, some temporary, some permanent, between the US and Sunni, conservatives, and extremists. It was seemed to follow, Mitchell writes, that political Islam plays an unacknowledged role in the making of what we call global capitalism.

In the fall of 2001, as the U.S. bombing campaign routed the Taliban and al Qaeda, Vice President Dick Cheney, anti-terror obsessive, supervised the evacuation of hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban by Pakistani planes, who safely transported them over the border, where they would enjoy protection for years.

In the 1990s, when a plucky group of religious rivalists called the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The supposedly medieval Taliban tapped top-notch public relations experts and lobbyists in Washington. Specifically, they enlisted New Jersey's socialite, Laly Helms, the niece of former CIA director, Richard Helms.

In the shadowy and bizarre web of connections that lead up to the September 11th attacks, one name kept coming up. Mr. Ali Muhammad, according to one FBI Special Agent, trained scores of Islamic militants in the 80s and 90s. The man who taught Al Qaeda the art of kidnapping, suicide bombing, and hijacking airplanes cut his teeth fighting the Soviets on behalf of the USA. Perhaps that's not too surprising. More interesting, though, is the fact that Ali Muhammad was a green beret, an FBI informant, and a CIA asset.

Maybe the widest reaching effect of the Afghan Jihad and the wars that followed was Afghanistan's transformation from a developing modern economy to far and away the world's largest supplier of heroin. As we'll see, in a country of poppy fields, the Mija Hadine, the CIA, and the Pakistanis juice the heroin trade in the 1980s. In decades later, though the Taliban insurgency used drug money to fight the American occupation. The major areas of production of heroin took place in regions controlled by the United States. By the height of the US occupation, Afghanistan was producing 90% of the world's heroin. It still dominates the market today.

This season features our largest cast of characters yet, and perhaps the most colorful as well.

Wilson exclusively staffed his office with beautiful women, known as Charlie's Angels. He once explained, quote, you can teach them how to type, but you can't teach them how to grow tits.

Using his buffoonish persona to disguise some genuine political talent, Wilson managed to transform the jihad in Afghanistan from a dirty, low-key covert op into, quote, a Washington cocktail circuit called Celeb. But to some, he would always be known as cocaine Charlie.

Averacodos represented, at least to his admirers, the new crop of blue collar, ethnic, hard-scrabble CIA recruits that had no connection to the blue-blooded cast, ruling the agency back in the 70s and 80s. In fact, according to author George Criall, it was Averacodos's Greek background that made him useful as a frontline player in the CIA's program to assist the military junta taking over Greece. sent by the agency to advise the hunter to spare the country's president for execution, Avra Codos recalls telling them, unofficially, as your friend, my advice is to shoot the mother fucker.

Even the boisterous gust of recoders had a boss, and during the years of the US-backed Jihad, the agency was headed by director Bill Casey. Casey was not only a staunch Catholic, with ties to the Vatican, but also a member of the secretive religious order, the Knights of Malta. According to Steve Cole, Casey saw a political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the realistic counter-strategy of covert action he was forging at the CIA. and X-Wall Street lawyer, similar to the dullest brothers. Casey cultivated relationships with powerful foreign leaders in a position to help his causes. In particular, some people will meet this season, like Pakistan's General Zia and Saudi Arabia's King Fad. Casey was probably the only guy who could and did get the Islamic theocracy to arrange for a Catholic mass while he was visiting the country.

To draw the Soviets into a hopeless military, quagmire. He later denied saying this, but we have some interesting tapes and interviews revealing that in private, Presinsky couldn't quite help himself, bragging of his triumph in sucking the Soviet Union into Afghanistan.

The most celebrated of the Mujahideen was the Tajik commander, Akmed Shah Masud. One of the young Islamists who came out of Kabul University in the 60s and 70s, Masud cut a dashing figure. His knowledge of French and his reported taste for French nurses earned him the nickname, the Parisian.

Indeed, European and American writers would go on to romanticize Masood as a religious patriot, fighting for Afghan democracy. But there was a dark side to the so-called lion of the Panshir Valley.

If Akmachama sued was a smooth criminal, Golbedin Hechmachar didn't even try to hide it. Far and away the most notorious of all the Mujahideen, Hechmachar was the favorite of every intelligence agency. By the end of the Soviet Afghan war, Hechmachar had received over 1 billion in armaments, writes Peter Delskot, more than any other CIA client has ever received, before, or since.

All in all, these so-called holy warriors were less of your traditional religious figures, and more of your typical mafia bosses. They ran rackets and delt drugs, and, like the five families in America, the Afghan gangs ward with each other over turf and money. When visiting Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson noticed the, quote, menacing bands of bodyguards surrounding Mushadeen. Wilson asked his Pakistani handler. Do they really have to worry that much about the Soviets trying to kill them? It's not the Soviets they're worried about. The ISI officer said. It's each other.

Osama's father started modestly with small jobs, writes reporter John Cooley. But he soon moved into the big time by building palaces in the early 1950s, for the House of Soud, in the capital, Riyadh. Muhammad bin Laden's big chance, and that of his progeny, he fathered with various wives, no fewer than 52 children, came when he won the contract to build a Medina Jeda Highway in the holy province of Hijaz. Soon, the bin Laden name was legendary.

Osama, on the other hand, used his large chest to support the Afghans, and founded so-called refugee camps where eager new recruits could receive weapons and training. Through his family businesses' work in the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, Osama seemed to both Saudi intelligence and the CIA an ideal choice for the leading role he began to play. Senior Saudi intelligence officials told Steve Cole that Osama was by this point basically a contractor for Saudi intelligence. And it's a relationship that the kingdom has sought to downplay ever since.

FBI agents had been told by the administration of George W. Bush to back off investigating members of the bin Laden clan living in the US. What are we to make of all this? The paper asked. One possible conclusion was that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden himself had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia.

Beyond the Bin Laden's themselves, the Saudi links with the Bush dynasty go on and on. No other political family in the United States says writer Kevin Phillips has had anything remotely resembling the Bush's four decade relationship with the Saudi royal family and the oil sheaks of the Persian Gulf. One glaring example of Saudi influence was the American government's reluctance to prosecute in the early 90s, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI, a global network of dark money that was used to finance crime, run drugs, and supply the Majahadine in Afghanistan.

I was substituted. Bush's language that he used once and ever again. I was substituted toward crusade. It was already seen as a war to the death of the G-Hide, if you will.

This season, as ever, we have a fantastic set of guests that you're going to hear from. We had the honor of speaking with Afghan politician and social activist, Malalai Joya, with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, and the inimitable Muckraker Sihersh.

You'll also get extra cuts of music from the soundtrack for a release of which will come out September 25th. And yes, we are finally putting out merch. And as a subscriber, you'll get discount codes for upcoming t-shirts, hats, and posters.

And we'll see you on the other side.