Fear & silence: inside the Taliban's Afghanistan - with Lyse Doucet

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:02)
This is a Global Production. Women can't go to the parks on their own, they can't go in cars on their own, they can't be heard in public.

**Lyse Doucet** (0:11)
This ultra conservative reclusive emir who sits in Kandahar in the south and issues hundreds of edicts, most of them with a singular focus on erasing girls and women from public life. There's no floor anymore that once girls reach puberty, which of course can happen 6, 7, 8, 9, that child marriage is allowed.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:32)
Women have to be educated and they have to do something to be more acceptable to the west, the Taliban, otherwise the whole country is just going to be a poverty stricken, you know, disease ridden, uneducated hell hole.

**Lyse Doucet** (0:45)
I said to him, are you going to be proud to represent a country which, if this continues, has no women doctors, no women teachers, no women professionals? And he admitted, this is a problem for us. We've got to do something to fix it.

**Christiane Amanpour** (1:03)
Hi everyone, it's me, Christiane Amanpour, in France with The Ex Files this week. And I'm joined by a very special guest while Jamie remains on holiday. She is Lyse Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, and she is one of the most distinguished reporters in the world. Yes, you are.
And you've just come back from Kabul, a place we both love and have visited to report many, many, many times. And you've been there reporting on five years since the US withdrawal. You've also, Lyse, just won the women's book for the women's prize for non-fiction for your amazing book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, A People's History of Afghanistan. We're going to talk a little bit about that as well. And we'll talk about Iran because you were there for a couple of times during this war.
So Lyse, welcome.

**Lyse Doucet** (1:53)
Frisell, it's a great honor to be on your podcast and a double honor because I seem to be standing in for your ex. So that's your double, double. And Jamie, I don't know what Jamie is going to think. What? You took a Canadian to stand in for me?
Anyway, and it's a great honor.

**Christiane Amanpour** (2:09)
Oh, don't mention Canada. Anytime now, you could be the 51st state. You could be, you know, crippled by tariffs. Who knows what your neighbor to the south is going to do to you, which we will come to, in fact, at least about your neighbor to the south, because it is what he did in 2020 before leaving office, Donald Trump negotiated, if you could use that word, an end and a withdrawal to American troops and therefore NATO troops in Afghanistan after a period of some 20 years since 9-11. So let me go back a little bit to the beginning, Lyse, you first reported from Afghanistan when the Soviets were withdrawing. Isn't that correct? Like that was 1988-89?

**Lyse Doucet** (2:53)
Yes, way back in the dust of history.
Yes, it was. Does anyone remember? I'm sure your loyal podcasters remember those dark days of the Cold War. And I arrived in Kabul on Christmas Day, when Afghanistan was in the depths of the harshest winter in decades. And in the midst of what turned out to be the dying days of the Cold War, it was the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I was taken immediately by the country. And of course, you know, the feeling, Christiane, when I suppose that was the Ukraine war of the time. It never left the headlines. It was part of that age-old battle between the United States and what was then at the time the Soviet Union fighting against Afghanistan. Fighting about for Afghanistan.

**Christiane Amanpour** (3:49)
Yeah, and Afghanistan has been, I think, rightly termed the graveyard of empires. It's just one empire after the other, from the British to the Soviets, to the Americans, that have been defeated by the Afghan resistance. And it is actually extraordinary when you think that they have nowhere near the capabilities, whether it's in manpower, in military power, that these other empires have had. And yet, they have done that. Take us back to 89 before we move on.
Why is it and what was it about the Afghan people, the Afghan resistance that was able to defeat, I think it was, what, nine, ten years of Soviet occupation?

**Lyse Doucet** (4:34)
Yes, which left the country in utter ruin. It was the biggest refugee crisis in the world at that time, more than six million Afghans. And at that time, they were fleeing mostly to neighboring countries, most of all to Pakistan and Iran. It was the most vicious, the bloodiest war of that time. And of course, Afghans like to say that they brought down the Soviet Empire, we'll leave that for the historians, but they certainly dealt it a blow. And I think it's just to sheer persistence, determination, their pride in their own country, their anger at being invaded by not just the Soviet Union, but as they saw it, the infidels. And of course, remember Christiane, at that time, the United States asked no questions about what kind of mujahideen they were backing. They didn't mind that they were part of the emergence of Osama bin Laden. And that, of course, takes you all the way to the next phase of US led intervention in 2001, when the al-Qaeda leader who was living in Afghanistan, there, having sought refuge. So it is an extraordinary part of history that the Afghans were able to, through a war of attrition, to basically wear down the Soviet Empire, the fact that not only did the Soviet Union pull out its troops, but then it pulled the plug on the financial support to the embattled regime of President Najibullah. And I remember, Christiane, in those last days, before the Taliban returned to power, there were many scholars saying, look at the lessons of history. It's one thing to take out your troops, but don't pull out all your aid. Don't abandon Afghanistan again, as you did after the Soviet troops left in 1989 So I'm afraid, 1989, February 1989, Soviet troops left. I remember American diplomats saying to us, well, we're not concerned anymore.