Tajiks

Well, in the rugged mountains of central Afghanistan, their horses were the all-terrain vehicle, the day or night off-road, wherever you need to go mode of transportation.

And it was really, it was about working with our Uzbek partners, our Tajik partners, the Hazaras that were there.

Their main mode of transportation, particularly for the Uzbeks, was on horseback.

So that sounds like there was some advantages to being on horseback.

They were the United Front.

The name they gave themselves was the United Front because they were Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras, many of the different ethnic groups and including Pashtuns who made up this United Front that was fighting against the Taliban.

which was almost all Pashtun, if not all.

But their point was, I mean, the Tajiks were the heart and soul of that resistance, but they weren't the only part of it.

And they feel very sort of slighted by the propaganda effort that the Pakistanis ran successfully to try to marginalize them and how popular they really were with all of the tribes of Afghanistan.

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I've been on the ground with them before.

And so when we did this, I led the team.

And it was really it was about working with our Uzbek partners.

our Tajik partners, the Hazaras that were there, their main mode of transportation, particularly for the Uzbeks, was on horseback.

So that sounds like there was some advantages to being on horseback.

Did you ever have any uncertainty over the strategy though, given some of the limited experience some in your unit had with horseback riding?

And so this group is capable, these groups that are in Afghanistan are capable of, you know, carrying out a mass casualty attack in Europe, I think, uh, that would change the politics around this.

Right now, the Taliban, you know, are in power, but they, they won't be in power forever because I think sort of embedded in the DNA are the seeds of their own, because of their own defeat, because they're not offering much to the population, at least the Pashtuns, Uzbeks, and, um, Tajiks who make up the majority of Afghanistan.

Of course, fifty percent of the population is women.

So what are they, other than, you know...

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And it's not just for Iranians, it's for a large population of Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks, Turks, etc.

And even in the Balkans there are variants of it.

And then you saw it, because it happens in public places, and then you see what power it has when a whole lot of the Swedish population has this cultural...

The other angle to this, and we probably don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it's important to just put yourself in the shoes of policymakers' time.

is that what we're doing vis-a-vis bin Laden in Afghanistan, which, by the way, is happening, a lot of those tribal networks we're talking about are like Abed Shah Massoud's Tajik, right, militias and things like that.

There's a whole balance in our relationship with Pakistan at that point in time where the Paks hate Massoud.

And the concern on the part of the Clinton administration at the time, which I think is a reasonable one, is like, what do we do with loose nukes in Pakistan? and trying to prop up the Pakistani government to avoid this kind of nightmare scenario where some militia or whatever gets access to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.