Michael: The common story of the Afghan war is that America went to fight the Taliban. But the real, untold story is that America built the second Taliban. The insurgency that plagued the US for two decades wasn't inevitable; it was a direct result of America’s earliest mistakes. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. That's a huge claim. We built the enemy we were fighting? That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Michael: It does, but it's the devastating argument at the heart of Anand Gopal's masterpiece, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. Kevin: Anand Gopal... he's the real deal, right? Not just some armchair analyst. Michael: Absolutely. This isn't just opinion; it's deeply reported. Gopal is a Pulitzer finalist who spent years on the ground in Afghanistan as a correspondent for outlets like The Wall Street Journal. He learned the languages, lived in the villages. This book is the result of that incredibly brave, immersive journalism, which is why it's been so widely acclaimed and also so controversial. Kevin: Controversial how? Michael: Because it completely flips the script on who the good guys and bad guys were. Gopal shows that this whole catastrophe happened because of a fundamental misunderstanding, a belief that you could neatly categorize an entire country of people into 'friends' and 'foes'. Kevin: But after 9/11, wasn't that the whole point? President Bush’s famous line: 'You're either with us or against us.' You have to know who your friends are. Michael: Exactly. And in Afghanistan, that simple, black-and-white idea became a weapon. A weapon that was turned not just on the enemy, but on America’s own allies.

Kevin: What do you mean a weapon? How does a clear principle like that backfire? Michael: Well, the US military arrived in a country they didn't understand. They needed local partners to point out the 'bad guys'. So, they allied themselves with the most powerful and ruthless warlords they could find, gave them cash, guns, and air support. Let's take a guy the book introduces, Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar. Kevin: Okay, a US-backed governor. Sounds like an ally. Michael: To the Americans, yes. To himself, he was a businessman. He realized the Americans were in the business of finding enemies, and he was happy to supply them. He and his network started fabricating intelligence, labeling their personal and tribal rivals as 'Taliban' or 'Al-Qaeda'. Kevin: You're kidding. So they were just pointing at their enemies and the US would... take them out? Michael: Precisely. The US military, with its incredible power, effectively became a private army for warlords to settle their local feuds. Sherzai had this cynical analogy. He said dealing with these supposed 'terrorists' was like peeling an egg. You don't just crack it open at once. You make a lot of small cracks, arresting and releasing them repeatedly, to get as much as you can out of it—meaning, as much money and power from the Americans as possible. Kevin: That is unbelievably cynical. So the US was being played. Is there a specific case where this went horribly, tragically wrong? Michael: Tragically, yes. And this leads to one ofr the most heartbreaking stories in the book: the raid on a man named Hajji Burget Khan. This wasn't a Taliban sympathizer. He was a revered, elderly tribal chief, a war hero who had fought the Soviets. He was so respected that his community had just elected him as their delegate to the new national assembly, the loya jirga. He was, by every definition, a pro-American leader. Kevin: Okay, so he's exactly the kind of guy you'd want on your side. Michael: You would think. But he was a rival to the warlords the US was backing. So one night, US special forces, acting on false intelligence, raided his compound. They didn't just arrest him. They shot him. They shackled his bodyguard and beat him. And in a profound violation of Pashtun culture, they rounded up the women of the village, gagged them, and herded them into a dry well. Kevin: Oh, man. I know enough to know that dishonoring women like that is the one line you never, ever cross in that culture. That's not just a mistake; that's pouring gasoline on a fire. Michael: It's the ultimate insult. It’s an act of war. Hajji Burget Khan died in US custody. In total, 54 men from that village—nearly the entire adult male population—were captured and humiliated. The US declared the mission a success. But on the ground, they had just killed a key ally and created a generation of men who now had a blood feud with America. Kevin: And you said this wasn't a one-off? Michael: Not at all. The book details another incident, the Khas Uruzgan massacre, where US forces, again acting on bad intel from rival factions, attacked two different compounds. They ended up killing twenty-one pro-American officials. They literally wiped out both sides of a local pro-government power dispute. Kevin: They killed their own allies. It’s hard to even wrap your head around that level of failure. Michael: And this is what Gopal calls the 'original sin' of the war. It created a world where no one was safe, where being pro-American could get you killed by Americans, and where the official government was seen as a corrupt, predatory force. Trust was impossible.

Kevin: That sets a terrifying stage. It explains how you lose 'hearts and minds' from day one. And this is where the book's three main characters come in, right? We see how this broken world shapes their lives. Michael: Exactly. We see the human cost. Let's start with the character who is, on the surface, the 'enemy'—a Taliban commander. Why would anyone rejoin the Taliban after they were so thoroughly defeated in 2001? Kevin: Yeah, that’s the big question. You'd think they'd just want to go home and disappear. Michael: Many did. The book follows a man named Akbar Gul, who went by the nickname 'Mullah Cable' for the whip he used to carry. After the Taliban fell, he was done. He just wanted a normal life. He fled to Pakistan, then came back to Afghanistan full of hope. He tried to be a taxi driver, then a cell phone repairman in his village. He was actually good at it. Kevin: So he was integrating. He was becoming a civilian. What went wrong? Michael: The new US-backed Afghan police. They weren't a professional force; they were just the old militias in new uniforms. They were thugs. They started extorting money from his shop. When he refused to pay, they beat him and kicked his stall over. He saw them abduct and rape his neighbors. His livelihood was destroyed, and there was no justice, no one to turn to. Kevin: So the new 'good guys' were actually worse than the old 'bad guys'. Michael: For him, yes. And one day, after his shop is destroyed for good, he gets a call from an old Taliban friend. The friend doesn't give a big ideological speech. He just asks a simple question: "You know the situation. What do you want to do about it?" And at that moment, for Akbar Gul, rejoining the Taliban wasn't about religious fanaticism. It was about survival and a desperate search for some form of justice. Kevin: That is a powerful, and deeply uncomfortable, insight. It reframes the entire idea of the insurgency. It wasn't just die-hard ideologues; it was people pushed to the brink by the very system we helped create. Michael: Precisely. And then you have the story of Heela, the housewife. Her journey shows the impossible position of ordinary civilians, especially women, caught in the middle of all this. Kevin: What was her story? Michael: Heela was an educated woman from Kabul. The civil war and Taliban rule had already forced her into a very traditional, confined life in a rural village. But the real tragedy comes after the American invasion. Her husband, who was a good man trying to work with the new government, is murdered by a corrupt, US-backed police chief over a personal dispute. Kevin: My god. So the 'allies' killed her husband. What happens to her? Michael: She's a widow with young sons, completely destitute and vulnerable. She's shunned, she's starving, and she's terrified. And in this desperation, she ends up making a pragmatic choice. The local Taliban, who are now resurgent, start threatening her for her past association with aid groups. But they also need things. So, she makes a deal. She uses her connections to get medical supplies and leaves them on her doorstep in exchange for her family's safety. Kevin: Wow. So she's caught between a corrupt, murderous government and the threatening Taliban, and she has to make a deal with the 'enemy' just to keep her children alive. Michael: Yes. And that experience perfectly captures the meaning of the book's title, which comes from an old Pashtun proverb: 'There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead.' In the world she was forced to inhabit, the neat categories of good and evil, ally and enemy, had completely dissolved. There was only survival.

Kevin: That is just devastating. It paints a picture of a war that was lost before it even really began, not on the battlefield, but in the realm of trust and justice. Michael: And that's the core conclusion Anand Gopal leads us to. The war wasn't a simple fight between democracy and terror. The US, by imposing that simplistic frame, created a system of corruption and injustice that made the Taliban's return not just possible, but for many Afghans, a logical and even necessary choice. Kevin: It's a system that devours everyone. There's a quote in the book from an Afghan policeman who was wrongfully arrested and tortured by US forces. He looks back at the chaos and says, "It was as if the whole system just devoured everyone." It didn't matter if you were pro-US, anti-Taliban, or just trying to get by. The machine of war, fueled by these bad categories, consumed you. Michael: Right. And that leads to Gopal's final, profound insight, which is about what 'winning' even means in a war like this. It's not about planting flags or political ideologies. He writes that to win a war like this was to resist the categories chosen for you. It was about stubbornness in the face of grand designs. Kevin: It was about the small, human things. Michael: Exactly. To win was to comfort your children when the air outside throbs in the middle of the night. To go to school, or the fields, or a wedding, and return to tell about it. To win was simply to survive. Kevin: That's a powerful and humbling thought. It forces you to look past the political debates and the military strategy and see the raw human reality. For anyone who wants to understand why Afghanistan turned out the way it did, this book feels absolutely essential. Michael: It truly is. It's a difficult read, but a necessary one. Kevin: We'd love to hear what you all think. The stories in this book are shocking and challenge so much of what we thought we knew. Join the conversation on our social channels—what was the most surprising or heartbreaking revelation for you? Let us know. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.