YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Crews

lines on the record: 191
first: 2021-11-28
most recent: 2021-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, the briefest answer would be that they are a. They have Is kind of a Imperfect metaphor, but. Years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan to describe them. And that has some attractive elements because Different people who joined the Taliban for different purposes at different times. But today, and people tell us scholars who know more about the women than I have said, listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge of different actors and people and competing interests. And I think We have a lot of scholars who say, listen, it's polycentric, it's got people in this city and that city and so on. I think actually.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the Pakistani security institutions are playing a double game. Essentially, the Afghan people are being held hostage. And so the Taliban are also saying, you know, if you don't recognize us, you're going to let tens of millions of Afghans starve.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being managed by NGOs that are international. But most people had to leave and the Taliban have impeded some of that work. They've told adult women essentially to stay home, right? So a big part of the workforce isn't there. So, I mean, the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt. Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors, I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy. It exports fruits. Pakistan has been closing the border because they're anxious about refugees. They want to exert pressure on the international community to recognize the Taliban because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power because they see that in Pakistan's national interest, especially the lens with rivalry with India.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's frozen by the US because the US is trying to use that lever to exert pressure on the Taliban. And so the ethical quandaries are, of course, legion, right? Do you release that money? Allow the Taliban to shore up their rule. The Biden administration has said no, but the banks aren't working. If you're in California, you want to send $100 to your cousin, so she can buy bread, you can't do that now. It's almost impossible. There are some informal networks. They're moving some stuff, but there are bread lines. The Taliban government is incapable fundamentally just of ruling. I mean, they can discipline people on the street. They can force people into the mosque. They can shoot people. They can beat protesters. They can put out a newspaper. They can have, they're great at diplomacy, it turns out. They can't rule this country. the kind of healthcare infrastructure is”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Taliban sit in control. That's unique when they were in power in the 1990s from 1996, 2001. They controlled some 85 to 90 percent of the country. Now they own it all, but they have no budget. The Afghan banking system is frozen.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed, The hurric scenes of the airport, that was just one dimension. I think in the weeks to come, I mean, we're going to see, Afghanistan implode. There are lots of signs that malnutrition, hunger, starvation are going to claim. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter. And I think there is really nothing, there's no... Framework in place to foresaw that.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, an important question. I would prefer all this by saying, you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake. Hope the war would end sooner. I think there were different exit routes along the way. Again, I think there were. Policy choices in September and October when the war began. There were choices in December 2001, so we could look at almost every six month stopping point and say we could have done differently. As it turns out, though, I mean, the way it played out, it's been catastrophic. And I think The Biden administration Remained unaccountable for the scale of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure that they're responsible for.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And that's a great way to understand bin Ladenism and the whole phenomenon, but I think looking at the big picture, it's also you wonder without ever end, right? I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk of being a kind of hyperpower like the US. Were you in insisting on a kind of unipolar world in 2001, 2002, 2003, that created an almost irresistible target, wherever the US wanted to exert itself militarily.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the diversity of Muslim communities became important because outside of small pockets, I mean, they didn't accept his leadership, right? Wore t shirts in some countries. I mean, non Muslims wore t shirts because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans. In Latin America, people are like, yeah, that was sad. But, you know, finally, I mean, there was a kind of shout in Freuda in that moment internationally. Chase, the other character in Presalt's book. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we credit the publics who don't bind to that, right? Who see through this? We credit the critics. Barely on going back to 9-11 itself. One of the problems was that U.S. government officials kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility or culpability. And in fact, Dozens of scholars and organizations, hundreds condemn this, but their condemnations never quite made it out. But it created a tension where, you know, if you wore a veil, you must have been one of them and you must be on Team Bin Laden. And so a lot of the, you know, I think a lot of the popular islands and discrimination and profiling came out of that urge to see a oneness, which bin Laden projected, right? He wanted to say we are one community. If you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right? But I think the...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To project himself as a scholar whose knowledge and humility, the whole package carried with it an authenticity and a valor that would animate, inspire people to commit acts of violence, right? So it's a different kind of logic of like... Go and kill, right”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm saying about bin Laden, they make some different from these other characters is that because he played it being the scholar, he played it being a figure of modesty and humility. And that meant that he was often, again, if you watch his visuals, I mean, yes, there's one video of him firing a gun. But if you watch how he moved, how he wouldn't look at people directly, how his face was almost, I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy. He saw spoken. His voice was low. He attempted to be poetic. So it wasn't a warrior kind of image that he tried to project of like a tough guy. It was I'm demur, I'm humble, I'm offering you this message. And the appeal that he was going for was to see.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chin, I mean, the chin could be an interesting verbal gesture. And I've watched enough Mussolini footage for my classes to try to pick the right moment. And the chin is Mussolini is all about the chin.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just about acting, how you can act differently, right? So it was a BBC thing. And this woman claimed that sticking your chin out like a wrestler does, right, is the most male to male.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the whole bin Laden Omar thing, you can't see me. Or if you look at bin Laden's photographs and his video stuff, I mean, he's koi. Some observers have noted he's kind of effeminate. He doesn't strike this kind of masculine, he's not a Mussolini, he's not a Hitler macho, I'm standing my chest. He's not doing the theatrical chin, you know, the theater people tell us is so aggressive, you know.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's partly dictatorships do as well. I mean, it advice the idea that someone's working, and maybe it's the basis for a lot of QAnon or other conspiracies today, that someone's working behind the scenes and things are going to go the right way, you can't see it. But that's almost preferable because you can kind of feel it. And so not having someone out front can maybe be more effective than having someone out in front constantly.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a violent one. It's one I condemn. It is evil, right? But these are people that are trying to be political. They're trying to change things in some way. It's not narrowly about impose Sharia law on you. You must wear a veil. You must eat this kind of food. It's not that parochial. But another quick thought about your interesting claim about charisma in this. I think that one self-limiting feature of this subculture is that Definitely, I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen and the kind of invisibility is a productive force of power. Which a colleague of mine who knows ancient history far better than I said, this is when she looked at it. Malomar initially, or we talked about bin Laden. I mean, this kind of studied Posture of staying in the shadows is also a source of authority potentially.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhere nominally Muslim, some went to mosque, some didn't were single, young guys with like criminal backgrounds, some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits who never succeeded anything. But others had, you know, at least one thing had a wife and family he widowed and orphaned. And so there's no, I mean, for policing, I mean, if you're looking at that lens, there is no kind of typology that will predict who will become violent. And that's why I think we have to move beyond thinking about religious argumentation narrowly or by itself and think about things like geopolitics. Think about how people respond to inequality, the existential threat of climate crisis, of a whole history matters and think about this is a mode of political contestation.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some discussion of the backgrounds of the accused, and they come from different backgrounds, but if there's any common bond, it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime. Famously, in the 7-7 bombings in London, The Metropolitan Police, the UK authorities looked at all those guys. And what people want is this idea that they must be very pious. They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff. They must be fanatical true believers. But what they found with those guys was that”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he was a mass murderer. I'm just saying that his ideas were more complex than we have tended to acknowledge. They had. Have a wider potential residence than we would acknowledge. I mean, and also, I guess what I'm just one fundamental point is that thinking about the complexity of bin Laden is also a way of removing him from Islam. He is not an Islamic thinker. He is a cosmopolitan thinker who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies, which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right? anti-Semitism, populism, environmentalism, and the kind of the urging to do something about humanity, do something about suffering. That's why I think the actual, you ask about what motivates people to do this kind of stuff. I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership and this is being reported, if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris of the Bataclan murders, I think the court allows.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right? About ideology. I mean, I think the blood on his hands always limited his appeal among Muslims and others. But Bin Lan did have, I mean, he does a great book by a great scholar at UC San Diego, Jeremy Prestolt, who wrote a great book about global icons in which he has bin Laden. Bob Marley, he has Tupac. You know, he asks why when he's doing research in East Africa, why did he see young kids wearing bin Laden shirts? They're also wearing Tupac shirts. They're wearing Bob Marley shirts. And basically it's a way of looking at a kind of partial embrace of some aspects of the rebelliousness of some of these figures, some of the time by some people. Under certain conditions.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ethical line. We found out too. I mean, if you pick up just one of these texts, I mean, it's a kaleidoscope. So the Hitler analogy is interesting because Hitler spoke to, he could speak to things like inflation, right? Which really existed. But he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans, right? He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and so on, right? That's also there in bin Laden too. I mean, the idea of an anti-Semitism, the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders, it's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers. But I also hasten to add that it's for all of the things that we could tick off saying, well, yes, Kashmiris has suffered Chechens have suffered, and so on. Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement. I mean, it never really... I think the”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His signature kind of sprinkled in with like a dozen other signatures from people who were somewhat known or at least with titles. So as a kind of intellectual exercise, it's fascinating to see that he is throwing everything at the wall at one level. That's one way to see that these are kind of testaments toward recruitment of people who, yes, they're angry. Yes, they're unhappy. And this is what, you know, I think For a broader public, it's hard to get you're like, well, bin Laden didn't suffer. He wasn't poor. Like, yeah, I mean, Linen, Polpot. I mean,”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you look at any given bin Laden text, I mean, there are 40 claims in each text. I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying, but he's a modern politician. He knows the language of Social equality, there's a class dimension to it, there is an environmental dimension to it, there's a gender dimension to it. And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in. And when he wants to speak that language, he knew that he's not a scholar. So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on. So some of his declarations of jihad”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They won't listen to your arguments reasonably because they won't recognize Palestinian suffering, Bosnian suffering. Chechen suffering. You go across the planet, right? Because they won't recognize our suffering. We're going to speak to you in the only language that you understand, and that's violence. And look at the violence of the post-1991 world, right? In which American air power really becomes a global kind of fact in the lives of Sony people. And then the big mistake after 9-11 among many, I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror to some 30 or 40 countries, right? So that you have more and more of the globe feel like they're under attack, right? And the logic is that essentially it's not Free bin Laden. It's not we're going to convert you and turn you into Muslims, and that's why we're doing this. That appears. That claim does appear at times.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These estimates about the number of Iraqi civilian children dead, you know, that came from, I think, the Lancet and it came from those are estimates. But looking at this from the point of view of Amman, of Jaffa, of Nairobi, just think around the planet. If you see yourself as the victim of this great imperial power, you see why especially young men would be drawn to a road of self-sacrifice. And the idea is that In killing others, you are making them feel how you feel.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“George H.W. Bush produced, right? Or you think of the images of the suffering of Iraqi children under George H.W. Bush's sanctions, U.S.-British airstrikes. Then you have Madeline Albright answer a question on 60 minutes saying, do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids is worth it? Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein? And she says on camera, yes, it's worth it to me. If you put that all together, I mean, American kids and of course the American public, they're not always aware of those facts of global history. But these guys are, and they very capably use these images, use these tropes, and use facts. I mean, some of these things are not deniable.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir. Pakistani's even that too. Palestine is an issue, right? So you have an American university setting people across the spectrum who get that Palestinians have had a raw deal. And so victimhood is central and Muslim victimhood, which is primary. But as a number scholars have written, and I'm, you know, I definitely think this is a framework for what's useful. I mean, In this kind of vocabulary, in this framing, this narrative today, in today's world, if we think of today's world being post-Cold War, 91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars and seeing the visuals of that, I think that, you know, I think the American public has been shielded from some of this. But if you look at the carnage of the Iraqi army that drove”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quotations in the Quran thrown together in some rational fashion. He knows, um, I mean, at the core, I'd say, is the problem of human suffering, and he has a geography of that that is mostly Muslim. But he talked about the suffering of Kashmir. So if you have a student in your class who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir, he or she will say, that's not entirely inaccurate.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know why. This is no joke. This is no joke. They are part of our modern world, and it's how they talk, and it's how they recruit, and this is part of the this is why they are, you know, so bin Laden, if you read bin Laden, he speaks multiple languages, I would say. It's environmentalism. The West is bad because we destroyed the planet. The West is bad because we abuse women. So in class, especially female students are very surprised to learn and actually say this feminist argument is not. We start with this is a murder. This is a person who has taken human life, innocent life, of nerve again. And he is aspirationally genocidal. But let's try to understand what he's about. So we walk through the text, read them, and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got really good at using media. I mean, brilliant at using the written word, the spoken word, music actually. And, you know, Hollywood is the gold standard. And these guys have studied how to create drama, how to speak to modern users. I mean, the Islamic State did this. I mean, the role of media, new media. I mean, I follow and I am followed by senior Taliban leaders, which is bizarre, you know, on Twitter. I don't know why they care about me. I'm nothing.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they're basically primary source collections. We now have that for the Taliban. I mean, what's fascinating about, I think, if you'd like this culture, acknowledging its very diverse internally, is that these people are representatives of political movements who seek followers. They speak. They often are very, I'd say, skilled at visual imagery. especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that, I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions. They used to, you know, blow up VCR videotapes. They used to string audio and video cassettes from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right? We're killing this nefarious infidel technology that is doing the work of Satan. And yet today, in the last, I mean, one of the keys to top on success is that”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an amalgam. And like a good politician, which is what I would call him, he is adept at speaking in different ways to different audiences. So if you look at the context in which he speaks, if you look at messages to the world, if you look at his writings, and you can zoom out now, and we now have compendia of the writings of”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you read bin Laden, that's when it gets messy. That's where Bin Laden's documentation is not fundamentally about Islam. And if you're sitting here with Islamic scholar, he would say, you know, depending on which Islamic scholar, they would tend to go through and dissect and negate 99% of the arguments that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right? But what strikes me as an historian who's, again, looking at this adjacently, If you read bin Laden, I mean, the arguments that you make are first of all, they're sophisticated. They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics. He uses terms like imperialism. He knows something about world history. He knows something about geography.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are interviews. These are his missives, his declarations, his decrees, right? But I think just in terms of if we zoom out for a second about American policy choices and so on, the powers that be didn't trust us to know what he was really about, I put it that way. And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense. I just think that it was a taboo. I think people a kind of consensus that trusts us. We know how to fight al-Qaeda. And you don't need to know what they're about because they're crazy. They're fanatics. They're fundamentalists. They hate us. Remember that language? Us versus them”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For several years, people weren't reading what bin Laden said. I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic, but there was great anxiety around translating his works. So we have Montcomf, we have all this other stuff. You can buy the collector works of Lynn and Stalin, Mao, whatever you want, in whatever language you want. But bin Laden was taboo for American publishing. So it was only verso in the UK that published a famous volume called Messages to the World, which was the first compendium of Binan's writings.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you look at his words, I mean, one fascinating thing about just our politics and just one thing that kind of sums all this up. I mean, the fact that on 9-11 we had to have a few people, a few experts, people like Bernard Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert. So that was one way in which I think, you know, I'm not faulting him personally, but it's just one way in which that relationship appeared to be formed, right, of linking Afghanistan to that moment. If one looks actually at what bin Laden was saying and doing, people like Richard Clark were studying this, there were Arab leaders. The Arab press was watching this because he gave some of his first interviews to a few Arab newspaper outlets. But speaking of our American kind of monolingualism, a lot of what we were saying wasn't known.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration for people who think look, we beat the Soviets, now we beat the Americans. So already watching the Soviet retreat across this bridge back into Uzbekistan, if you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving, a lot of people interpreted this as like, you know, we are going to change the world. And now we're turning to the Americans and our local national governments are backed by the Americans. So let's start with those places and then let's go strike. Let's go strike the belly of the beast, which is America, which is New York. And going back to Bin Laden, your question about, you know, what motivates him, what motivated him, again, he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar. And that, I think, you know, when I, when this comes up on our classes, I think, especially young people, I mean, people who weren't born when I live. I mean, they're shocked. They see his appearance. They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf of Arabic books. He's got the Klashnikov. He's got what looks like a religious scholars library behind him, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never gonna let this be like a Saudi or Egyptian or whatever project. But then many of those fighters went home, they went back to Syria, they went back to Egypt. Some wanted to go back to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis were very careful. I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan as a kind of safety valve. In fact, they had fundraisers on television. They chartered jets. They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan. Get out and take shower and say, you know, go fight. And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy very cleverly, I think created a kind of escape valve for would-be dissidents inside Arabia, right? Just send them abroad. You want to fight jihad, go do that somewhere else. Don't bother the kingdom. But all this became dicier in the early 90s when some of these guys came back home and some of the scholars around them said, you know, let's defeat the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost. I think part of the dynamic we see today is that”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and he's part of the Mix, but he's also mobile, so he at one point goes in Sudan. He's moving from place to place. His people are all over the world, in fact. If you think of the Once the Mujaddin take power, they have difficulties with the Arab fighters, too, and they don't want them coming in and messing with Mujaddine regardless as an Afghan national state that we're going to build. It's going to be Islamic. It's going to be an Islamic state. But you can't interfere with us. And so there are always tensions. And so the Arabs are always kind of, I would say they were fighters were always interlopers. Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money, send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our enemies who are backed by the US mainly, sitting in Pakistan, sitting Iran, backed by these Arabs to a degree, getting money from Saudi. And he says, let's draw some of them into the government and basically have a kind of unity government that would make some space to the opposition. And for the most part, with U.S. backing, with Pakistani backing, with Irani backing and with Saudi backing, the opposition said no, we're not going to reconcile. We're going to push you off the cliff. And so that story goes on from at least 1987, the last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989. But the Najiba government holds on for three more years. It is the, I mean, they're still getting some help from the Soviet Union, its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly. And it's not until 1992 that they lose.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it began. So Mikhail Gorbachev, King of Power in 1985. You know, he was a generation younger than the other guys. He was a critic of the system. He didn't want to abolish it. He wanted to reform it. He was a true believer in Soviet socialism and the party as a monopolist, right? But he's critical of the old guard and recognized that the party had to change and the whole system had to change to continue to compete. And so Afghanistan was one element of this. And so he pushed the Afghan elites that Moscow was backing to basically say, listen, we're going to share power. And so I figured named Najibullah, who was a Soviet-trained intelligence specialist sitting in Kabul, agreed. And he said, we need to have a more kind of pluralistic accommodationist approach to”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And strengthening the Soviet Union. Let's get out of this costly war. It's a waste. It's not worth it. We don't lose anything by getting out of Afghanistan. And so their retreat was quite. Effective and successful from the Soviet point of view, right? It's not what we're seeing now.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds of millions of dollars into this project to back the Mujaddine, who reckon called freedom fighters. So bin Laden was part of that universe. He's part of that, you know, he's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen who outensized, did 95% of the fighting. They're the ones who died. They're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right? The Arabs who were there did a little fighting, but a lot of it was for their purposes. It was to get experience. It was to kind of create their reputations like bin Laden began to forge for himself of being spoken for a global project because by the late 80s, when Bin Laden, I think, was more active and began conspiring with people from other Arab countries, the idea that Gorbachev came to power in 85. He's like, let's get out of here. This is draining the Soviet budget. It's an embarrassment. We didn't think about this properly. Let's focus on restoring the party.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soviet empire. I mean, there's any confusion about what the Soviets wanted, right? Now we know much more about what the Kremlin wanted, what Brezhnev wanted, and how the Soviet elite thought about it because we have many more of their records. But from the outside, you know, for Jimmy Carter and then for Reagan, it looked like the Soviets were making a move on South Asia because they wanted to get to the warm water ports, which Russians always want, supposedly, right? And it was kind of a move to take over our oil and to assert world domination, right? So there are lots of ways in which this looked like good receival. In Congress, it looked like, you know, kind of Vietnam again, but this time this is our chance to get them and there are lots of great quotes. I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes that American policymakers made about wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam. So the CIA funneled, you know,”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would endorse that. Definitely. That's it. I mean, you put it in a very pithy way. So listen, he was an engineer. He was said to be a playboy who spent a lot of cash from his family. Like many young Saudis and from some other countries, he was inspired by this idea that those jihad in Afghanistan, it was going to take down one of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union, who the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians during that conflict. the righteous, pious fighters for jihad who call themselves Mujihadin arrayed against this evil empire, right, of a god.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. I mean, let me offer some observations. I think there are others who know more about bin Laden and have far more expertise in Al-Qaeda. So I'm coming this way. An adjacent way, kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training. So this is my two cents. So bear with me. I don't have the authoritative account, which in itself.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fictive heroes that people map their aspirations onto, right? And so people like Mula Omar, who was then seen in public, the current head of the Taliban is almost never seen in public. I mean, there's a kind of studied era of mystery that they've cultivated to make themselves available for all kinds of fantasies, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for the most part, the Arabs who went opened up hospitals, some opened up schools. The bin Laden family had long been based in engineering, construction. So it's thought that he used some of those skills and resources and connections to build things. We have images of him firing a gun for show, right? It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun in what we would call combat. Again, I could be corrected by this and I think there are competing accounts of who he was. So he's kind of a, I mean, these figures who sit at the pinnacle of this world are...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bin Laden was a visitor. If we look at his whole life course, Of it is an enigma still. He is from a Saudi elite family, but a family that kind of has a Yemeni Arabian Sea kind of genealogy. So the family has no relationship to Afghanistan, past or present, except at some point in the 1980s, when he went like thousands of other young Saudis first to Pakistan to places like Peshawar on the border where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source