Conversations with Marianne | RADIO KABUL: Tom Freston's Memories of Afghan Culture

Well, I was working in the 70s. I was working in an ad agency in Manhattan and I was sort of just an alienated young man. It was a part of the Nixon administration, the war. At one point they assigned me to the charming toilet paper account, which was a little too much for me. So an ex-girlfriend called me from Paris and said, 'You can't do that. Why don't you come with me and go across the Sahara desert?' So I got a passport, I was on a plane like 10 days later. We split up after a couple of months, but I kept going. And from the first moments I was there, I felt I had entered some kind of magical land that I had been looking for. I was looking to get as far away from New York as I possibly could, and this seemed to be that. It was exotic, enchanting, and people were friendly. You know, I was going through some stuff the other day, Mary, and I got out an old tourist brochure from Afghanistan. In those days they hardly had any tourists, but on the tourist brochure it would say, 'See Afghanistan and visit the world's friendliest people,' which would be about the last thing that would come to mind to anybody these days. But I found I developed this deep connection with the Afghans. I thought they were humble, hospitable, friendly.

I started a business. I wanted to live there. No one would hire me, so I figured I'd start my own business. So I started a business making clothing. We'd import fabrics from Russia. I employed designers. We set up showrooms. I set up a parallel business in India as well. Got a house, and we would design and export clothing and sell to Bloomingdale's and sort of better stores. It wasn't the ethnic stuff, but it was for me just how could I support myself and live there. And in those years, I traveled pretty much all over the country. I mean, there was not a province I didn't go to. I was able to walk on the heads of those statues in Bamiyan that the Taliban blew up in 2001.

Well, I had followed it all those years. It was sort of blacked out. You know, I would read everything I could, buy every book I could find. And when I left, I was working at MTV Networks. And this girl tracked me down right after the Taliban fell and said, 'I just went back to Kabul.' She was a Persian girl who grew up in the States, family was from Tehran, and she said, 'I want to start a clothing company.' Then she said, 'You got to meet my boyfriend. He's the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan.' I had to laugh at that. I go, 'You got to be kidding me.' So he showed up a couple weeks later. His name's Saad Mohseni. And he effectively started the first media outlets in Afghanistan, and we became dear friends. He started the first radio station. That was the first thing. They borrowed $250,000 from the US government, which they repaid, and started a radio station with morning shows and jingles and playing Afghan music, which had all been banned under the Taliban. It lit up the country. It was just a phenomenon. People were just so dying to... He said, 'Why don't you come back to Kabul? You love it. And help me train people to run a television network, because obviously we don't have a pool of any experienced television executives because television had been illegal under the Taliban, and there really was very little television before the Taliban ever showed up to begin with.' So it was just exhilarating to be working in sort of a modern Afghan environment, men and women working side by side. I would bring in some expats that I knew, and we would get them up to speed. I was attracted to it because it's probably the best force for social change in that country in terms of communicating gender equality, having a male and a female news reader.

For months at a time, it was really quite rewarding. They became the powerhouse of Afghan media, which is an underreported story, because one thing that's been successful there has been independent media. It's got the freest independent media of any country in the region, including Turkey and India. That all now, of course, could be gone in the blink of an eye, and it's fading fast.

Yeah, I've been the last few weeks I've been in touch with so many of them, and working with Saad and trying to get people out. We just got 13 female journalists flew off to Albania. We've got people who went up to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, gone to Qatar. I think in total, maybe 150 people out of 600 have been able to get out of the country. The network's still up and running. The Taliban came by to see us. I mean, I wasn't there. They came by the first day they were in Kabul, and they wanted to look around, and they wanted to take away our weapons. They looked around and wanted to know if they could provide us protection, and they let us keep half of our weapons. And then they had one of their men, one of their, I wouldn't say minister yet, but they had a high-up Taliban fellow come in and be interviewed by one of our female journalists, who has since herself left the country. So they're sending signals that they're going to be more inclusive and liberal, but I think it's hard for the Taliban to be true to themselves. They're religious extremists. I don't see a great future for media in Afghanistan.

Well, the fact that we didn't understand them, and that's nothing new. We didn't understand the Vietnamese either. We're quite open about that. We would send people there for a year at a time, so if they were ever learning anything, they would be replaced by new people. I would find, though, because I would meet a lot of the military people, I had nothing to do with the military or the US government, but I would find that the Afghans who stuck around, I mean, the people in the 70s that they were going to finally join the modern world. Kabul was only 400,000 people, and part of it looked like some old medieval city, but it's now 5 million. And I've seen these planes leaving the airport now, and there's going by all these condo buildings. I mean, it's a remarkable change that has happened in the landscape there. But the people were excited to be part and connected to the modern world. You'd see women in miniskirts in Kabul in the 1970s, and there was also national women's week. They would have a lot of events for women. All of that, of course, went away with the wars. Once you got out of Kabul, it was still quite a conservative country. Afghanistan in the 80s during the Soviet war, because the Americans, as we know, supplied weapons to the Mujahideen. There were like eight groups, seven groups of them, and the Saudis matched that dollar for dollar with more weapons and cash. And then they set up these madrasas in the refugee camps in Pakistan, and all of a sudden the Wahhabi brand of Islam, the same brand of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda follow, infected the country like a virus. There used to be Sikh and Hindu communities and even some Christians in Afghanistan. They've all been driven out. So when I returned, it was a much harsher place. But if you scratch deep down, the Afghans...

So there's a whole generation now that's grown up in relative freedom, imperfect as it was, but that's just been taken away in a flash. I got an email today from a fellow who was the head of programming at Tolo TV, and he was the first guy to be a DJ on the radio station that preceded it. And he, as a kid, had worked for the Taliban because they hired him to be a news reader. So he was the only guy we could find in the country who had any experience in radio when they started. That's why they hired him. But now he's in Turkey, and he made it out with his family, and he's applied for a US visa, and he's asked me for some help. So we had some healthy back and forth today. But you left everything and are happy to be gone. He wasn't ready for a second run at the Taliban.

When we started, there was no library of any existing programming in Pashto or Dari. So we would dub Turkish soap operas, Indian soap operas, which they love. They would name their children after some of the stars. They had never seen anything like this, and they pick up all these social cues about how to decorate your house or cleanliness, that was simple stuff. And then we got into music programming, which of course was simple. And in my background with MTV, I was all for that. They have sort of a knock-off of American Idol. It would get more votes than the national election for president. I mean, people would text in their votes, so it was a huge event, like the Super Bowl playing the Super Bowl in Afghanistan. And you would find these people doing everything from sort of classical Pashtun music to Afghan hip-hop or heavy metal. There were all variants of music. The big thing though is news. If you live in a war zone, you like news. So we started a very credible news operation and would interview any major person coming through town, and we would call out corruption and bad things that Karzai would do. There was a well-known comic and also a well-known pop singer.

It's horrific. One thing, study after study that happened in the last 20 years that would be done by Asia Foundation or others would find that the support for the Taliban was like 15%. That was their approval rating. The problem was the government had a lower approval rating. But how do they feel? They feel like their life is closed. I'm involved also with the American University of Afghanistan, and I've had this hiring thing trying to get these girls out of there, pleading, trying to get them on planes. The last thing we had 20 buses of them on the last Sunday, a couple days before they closed the airport down. There was a fixer, it was lined up, they were going to go out, a copter was going to receive them, we were going to set up the university in exile. But they closed the airport down, and they've all gone back. They were told before this to burn all their books, to burn any correspondence they had with the American University. I read an article about that, I think it was probably in the New York Times.

We didn't just enable it. We formed a government there that was unlike any government they'd had in the past. It was a federal... People always say Afghanistan's always at war. Now that's not true. From the 40s to the 70s, it was at peace. But they had tribal autonomy. We set up a centralized state where the president would get to appoint the governors in each province. The country that almost led to the Taliban in the first place. So we aligned with the wrong people, set up the wrong kind of constitution, and then we laid this heavy military footprint in place. They'll be writing a lot of books about it.

Yeah, I mean, it was like trying to get into some nightclub. This was like trying to get out of a country. It's who you're connected to. There was no rhyme or reason. I made a case that I had heard that this had come down from the White House about who's going to be the last people to be able to get taken out on military aircraft, and these girls were not included. I said, 'Why aren't they included? For God's sake, it's the American University.' And we only have a limited amount of spaces. I mean, that's what I got from that. When in fact, I said, 'Well, these girls' futures are over. You're killing their futures.' But it doesn't seem to ring a bell. The whole way this thing has been done, Marianne, has just been one mistake after another, one mistake after another, and no concern, no preparation. Once again, bad intelligence. These are the same people who told us that Saddam Hussein had WMD. We spent two trillion dollars. And on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, they'll probably be flying a Taliban flag over the American embassy.

Unless they decide to do some new card tricks and be really inclusive and bring in people from other sectors of the society, it's going to be another civil war. Some people would say the best case is a civil war. There'll be resistance. There's a generation now different from in the 90s when they first came in, when Afghanistan was pretty cut off from the world and ravaged by war. These people have Facebook and Twitter, they have social media, and they're used to being connected to the outside world. They've had freedoms. They can go into coffee shops, their versions of Starbucks, and so forth. That's all over. They're not going to just say, 'Okay, I'm going to go with this new...' There will be a reaction, and how that takes place is yet to be seen. When the communists took over in 1978, that was a big shock to the system. For a few months, everybody was just in a state of shock, but gradually leaders emerged and resistance started, and these Mujahideen groups began to try to overthrow the communist regime, and that's when the Russians invaded, and then it just went worse from there. So action, reaction. The Afghans aren't going to take this sitting down. They've had a good taste of freedom, despite all the faults that this invasion by us brought.

Well, my life changed the first day I ever stepped foot in Afghanistan, I'll say that. Because I saw then a different path for myself, and I played it out. I found a fascination with that part of the world, and it has greatly enriched me. So that was a big break point for me. That was in 1972. And I don't know, Marianne, I just find it so tremendously disappointing, heartbreaking. It's hard to imagine that all the things you worked on and built, and I didn't do so much, but the Afghans did, apart from the government, this just goes away so quickly. I still have faith in them, and I do believe that there will be a reaction to this. I guess I haven't had that much time for reflection. I'm sort of just moving forward with what can we do to make this bad situation better. I don't think that this is the end of the story. It has been a series of wars. They use that term 'the forever war,' which was the title of Dexter Filkins' book. This is not going to end. They have a lot of ingenuity.

I would say that the Taliban orchestrated this campaign. The Pakistanis have given sanctuary to the Taliban. They gave birth to the Taliban. They see the Taliban as a product providing what they call strategic depth against India on their northern border. They don't want to see Afghanistan going away. They don't want to see part of their Pashtun areas being hacked away like what happened with Bangladesh. Right away, Pakistanis entered there and took out all their computers and all their files with all their agents and all their contacts, which nobody even thought to destroy. So yeah, Pakistan has been in up to their neck on this, and they're very happy. You could say that Pakistan is the winner of this war. And they did it while accepting American money all these years and playing us, and we never stood up to them. There's a very good chance that American soldiers were killed by weapons supplied by the United States to Pakistan, which were then supplied to the Taliban. Count on that. The Taliban were saying, 'The Americans are leaving. Your government is not worth it. We're going to win. We're stronger than ever.' So when we come around to surrender without a shot, that's essentially what happened. It was a really well-run guerrilla medieval blitzkrieg.

Trump just wanted to get out of there. He saw no value to the place. He's been quoted saying the worst things about Afghanistan. I think, let's face it, most of the American people were tired of this. I do think myself that the continuation of the war the way it was structured was just untenable, ridiculous. Biden has never been to Afghanistan. He famously walked out on a big dinner with Hamid Karzai, pounded on the table and left. And it's been interesting watching him defending his decision so boldly. I mean, he believes this to his core. And I don't know that the Republicans are used to a Democrat who doesn't apologize for anything. We needed to leave, but the way we left, Tom, that's what I don't understand. I understand Biden defending the decision to leave. We were probably there 17, 18 years too long. But how could we have executed an exit so lacking in wisdom and strategy? I mean, it was unconscionable. Take out the soldiers first. There were so many other ways to do this, Marianne. Well, God forgive us.

Oh yeah, it was... They had quite a time there for a while.

Well, I've spent today talking to different groups of people who I know from the not-for-profit world, people who are in the military, people who were in the Peace Corps years ago, former diplomats, and people who ran ad agencies in Afghanistan, if you can imagine such a thing. How they all, conservative and liberal, have bonded together and figured out how to get friends out. I know that they deserve better.