Uzbeks

But there was one of those that kind of grabbed my eye in all of this, and that was talk of Serbia offering Uzbekistan to do a joint deal on ballistic missiles, particularly on long-range missiles, which that raised my eyebrow.

That's something that the Uzbeks really haven't focused on for quite a while now.

And if it is using the proper terminology, because Vucic, who's the president of Serbia, it is correct in its long range, like he says it is, well, that would effectively give the Uzbeks range to strike at Kosovo.

Quite a lot of targets across Central Asia and into probably parts of Iran and India and Pakistan as well.

I mean, this is a pretty big doctrinal shift.

But again, it's to come out and say, hey, we're considering this.

We're offering you to jump on this project.

That's a weird project to offer the Uzbeks unless someone in the back had been asking about it.

And now for the part of this story that nobody, including Timur himself, could have planned for.

Among Timur's descendants, generations later, was a young prince named Babur, Timur's great-great-great-grandson, ruling a small, unstable territory in what's now Uzbekistan, in a world where the Uzbeks who had taken Samarkand and Herat were now the dominant power in the region Timur had once ruled outright.

Babur wanted Samarkand.

Of course he did.

A man who could never be Khan built an empire anyway.

A man who sacked cities for their craftsmen built a mosque that couldn't stand up straight for even one generation without him.

A man whose own family tore itself apart within his lifetime's shadow still managed, three or four generations down the line, to hand something durable to a descendant who'd never even met him and had nothing left of his but a name and a grudge against the Uzbeks.

Whoever wrote that warning into Timur's tomb, if anyone really did, and we don't actually know that anyone did, got one thing right whether they meant to or not.

No, they're not all late.

You know, Turks are not late Uzbeks are not late They're on time Yes, Indian Pakistanis are late Right? In many cases What are you? Egyptian Egyptians are very late Egyptians are very late MashaAllah And you are? Moroccan I'm not sure about Moroccans So Many What was I saying? Communication one of the problems that many of us face is that we don't have systems in place We let things spiral out of control then when we then we get angry when it doesn't go according to it So what we do is something's going wrong Okay, something's going wrong We don't talk about it We just think they should understand like why don't you understand one day will blow up and say don't you get it? Didn't your mom teach you? Why don't you have a communication People are brought up differently.

Maybe her mum or his mum should have taught, but she didn't.

So now let's sort it out here.

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.

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

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 so when we did this, I led the team.

The Jawbreaker team was with the Tajiks.

We had a team in the north with Dostom, the Uzbeks.

We had a team in Bamiyan with the Hazara.

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.

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