The Taliban is the Afghan movement John Kiriakou characterises first by what it is not: an ally of anybody. “The Taliban is loyal to nobody — and if you look historically, they never have been.”[1]
2001, as the Taliban understood it
Kiriakou’s account of the invasion is that its target did not expect it. “The Taliban leadership was shocked, for example, in 2001 when we began attacking them, because they made clear that Osama bin Laden aside, they had no beef with the United States.”[2]
The reason they gave for harbouring al-Qaeda was custom rather than alignment: “they were compelled by their culture to provide shelter for al-Qaeda, because al-Qaeda had asked for it, and their culture compelled them to provide aid to an outsider, a foreigner, who requested that aid. It’s just the way it’s been for thousands of years.”[2]
From which followed their incomprehension: “they argued that they had no problem with the United States, they had not raised arms against the United States, and they couldn’t understand why we wanted to overthrow them and fight them — that if we wanted to fight al-Qaeda on their soil that was perfectly fine and good, but there was no reason for us to overthrow them.” Kiriakou’s closing line on it is four words: “and then overthrow them we did.”[3]
The power-sharing letter
On the leaked 2021 State Department letter pressing Kabul into a power-sharing arrangement, Kiriakou’s verdict was that it conceded rather than settled. “I think this is embarrassing, actually. I was all for the peace process — most Americans were all for the peace process — that was taking place in Doha during the Trump administration. But it just seems to me that the Biden administration is giving up.”[4]
His condition was specific. “Power sharing is great, but there have to be guarantees. Guarantees like rights for women, guarantees like right for education for girls, guarantees like voting rights for citizens. What we don’t want to see is another coup by the Taliban, or a taking of power by force by the Taliban like we saw in the 1990s — whereby you either get with the program or you’re beheaded. That’s not what we’ve been fighting for for the last 20 years.”[5][6]
The writing on the wall
He read the Kabul government as already conceding — “the Afghan government is kowtowing to the Taliban right now, because they see the writing on the wall” — and offered that morning’s news as the evidence: “the Afghan ministry of education announced a new ban on girls over the age of 12 singing in public. So if you are a girl over the age of 12, you are no longer allowed to sing in public — and if you’re caught singing, you will be jailed. We should expect to see things like that.”[1]
The poppy ban, and why it was lifted
Kiriakou credits the Taliban’s prohibition of poppy cultivation as real and effective: it stood until the September 11 attacks, and had virtually wiped the crop out.[7]
What changed, on his account, was arithmetic rather than doctrine — “they decided that they just needed the money more than they needed to ban drugs.”[7]
He is careful to state the doctrine they set aside. Drug use and addiction are un-Islamic and the Quran specifically forbids such things; but they decided that their own survival was more important than a strict adherence to it, and legalised cultivation to raise funds to fight the Americans when they came into Afghanistan.[8]
He treats the frequently repeated claim that the Taliban are anti-narcotics as a line rather than a fact — “that’s what they like to tell everybody; that’s their pitch” — while conceding that the pre-2001 ban itself was genuine.[7]
Backed for being anti-communist
Asked directly in 2021 whether Bill Clinton’s government had supported the Taliban’s rise while Kiriakou was in the agency, his answer is unqualified: “Absolutely, absolutely — because the Taliban were anti-communist. They were anti-Russian. And yeah, I mean, it was good for our sphere of influence.”[9]
The interval he treats as the point. The movement took Kabul in 1996 with that backing, and five years later “we’re pretending like I don’t know these guys” — the campaign that followed being directed, in the words of the Grenier op-ed’s author himself, “primarily to remove the supportive environment” rather than at the men who had carried out the attacks.[10][11]