The War on Terror to the Present Day | UK Column Interviews

0:00Hello, this is Charles Malik with the UK Column interview and today I'm joined by Dr Lucy Morgan Edwards who has intimate knowledge of the system from the inside having worked for both the United Nations and the European Union in Afghanistan, possibly the most significant case study of Western intervention in the 21st century. Lucy, thank you very much indeed for joining me and a warm welcome to UK Column. Thank you for having me, Charles. Not at all. Now, there is by way of that introduction, obviously going to be an awful lot to get through, but I think we'll start with the background, I suppose, to a degree in the sort of personal sphere. What drew you to Afghanistan or that region? Because I think you were in Pakistan initially. What drew you to that part of the world in the first instance? I went out to Pakistan to visit a family friend in 1999 who was working for

1:05the United Nations and her housemate at the time was a Canadian woman who had had to evacuate from Afghanistan while Clinton was doing the bombings of Eastern Afghanistan of course. And just that my discussions and conversations with this woman really drew me in. She obviously loved the place and was working as an engineer doing urban reconstruction there. And in fact, a year later, she came to London and invited me to go and work with her. This was a year before 9-11 and I had a very old contract situation because at that stage British and Americans were supposed to be under a fatwa. So I was subcontracted through an NGO actually to work for UN Habitat and was taken by her and sort of dropped off in Kandahar and pretty much left and had to find my own way and in fact ended up staying with a couple of chaps who worked for an NGO handicap international, but I was working

2:08in our office. So it really gave me an amazing insight into Afghanistan at a time when they're only about 64 in the whole country. The country had pretty much been forgotten. It was in the midst of a four-year drought and you would see Pakistani ISI and Al-Qaeda representatives flying in or people coming in from Saudi Arabia to do Hawking and so on. And at the time bin Laden was living in Kandahar so his staff would come around to our compound. So it was an amazing insight and I think at a time that was very special because it was before the war began and it enabled me to really see Afghans in the light of, for example, how they later reacted to 9-11 and how they were forced to deal with this massive intervention that took place and lasted for 20 years after that. It is an extraordinary perspective as you say and this might

3:10be hard to answer objectively but from your perspective or any of those around you, did anybody have any inkling of what was to come? No, I mean I was there in the summer the year 2000 and ended the autumn and then had to leave and went to Pakistan. In fact I evacuated myself at the time of the bombing of the US as coal in Aden and because people were trying to link that to Al-Qaeda, they were linking it to Al-Qaeda in the media, now in fact perhaps people are starting to say that it was potentially a false flag to lead people into this idea that bin Laden would then be behind the attacks of 9-11 but no I had no inkling of what was to come and then when 9-11 did happen at the time I was actually in England and I wrote to some of my former colleagues and because it's very hard to communicate with people at that stage there were no mobile phones, there was a sort of you could go to a telephone booth in the town and phone home but then you'd be

4:16exposed to all these Arab Afghans who weren't really Afghans and of course the Arab, the Afghans didn't really want them there or not most of them didn't really want them there. So communications were very difficult but my staff who were very, they were very sweet, I mean they supported the Taliban, they were pushed in and potentially because of that I was quite surprised, I thought being educated of course they're not going to support the Taliban but they did because they saw the Taliban as a stabilizing force that had cleared out the warlordism of the early 90s and actually they were quite happy when the Taliban took Taliban in the northeast of the country which was a Northern Alliance territory and we're really hoping that they were going to then take the whole country which they had almost had by the time of 9-11. Okay well that sort of takes us forward to one of the things obviously that I did want to talk about which is that you know this issue endlessly debated about the influence of the Taliban and indeed you know whether they were in a position

5:18of controlling Afghanistan or whether they were being controlled and and all of that and also how that relates to like you say the events of September the 11th 2001 to you know very nearly 25 years ago and and I think if I'm right you know regardless of what one thinks was actually behind those events the view held by most people that you came across in Afghanistan was one of complete ignorance they had no idea that that either had even happened or was related to what was going on in their country. Absolutely yes they expressed massive surprise that this could have come from Afghanistan and for the first few days were pretty much ignorant of it actually I mean they weren't completely cut off they were starting to break Taliban edicts and bringing in DVDs from Pakistan and so on but we didn't have the internet access and email to the same extent that we do nowadays I mean you pretty much if you're going to write an email home you had to put it on a disc and then take it to the UN office and have it sent from from the UN satellite system there so you know there

6:26was really a feeling much more isolation and after 9-11 when as I say when I was in touch with colleagues who I consider to have been well educated people many of them have been educated actually under the Soviets as engineers so they were I was mostly working with engineers they were water engineers and so on considered that this was something completely alien to them and in fact as we know although bin Laden was there he was actually pretty sick at the time and I read in the Pakistani press in late 2001 that he had been treated for with dialysis and had in fact died I think that was in it was either Friday Times or Dawn one of the main Pakistan papers and I got my word it was Royal Pindi where he died or I think it was in Pakistan where they said he died so yeah a lot of the when he looked back a lot of what we were told just didn't add up and it's only

7:28I mean I I came to a new realization about the events of 9-11 when I moved to New York and that was in 2014 and it wasn't something that I'd given a great deal of thought to although I considered that it was a rather a bizarre story but I was very focused immediately on Afghanistan and on the people I'd met and my colleagues who I was very concerned for as the American bombing campaign started yeah well there you go that I mean I think what you've just touched on there is so significant because you know we've mentioned the Taliban we've mentioned bin Laden and of course he was the poster boy for so much that people were almost distracted beyond their control by any other information any other sort of credible story particularly about about September 11th but also about Afghanistan and and yet somehow all of this was supposed to make some sort of and to make the case for what became you know the decades of horrific turmoil I think just just

8:36to go back to your own personal circumstances and situation here we are in the UK or at least I am many of the audience will be in the UK now in a year where we are being convinced or at least there is an attempt to convince us that migration is the greatest of all our problems that in particular it is people who come from South Asia or in many cases specifically Afghanistan people are who are holding the Islamic faith and all that kind of thing and that there's a huge amount of sort of contrived narrative baggage that goes with that having spent that time in Afghanistan in a society that has been so demonized let's say in the Western media what were your experiences living as a as a lady at that time doing what you were doing well at the time I mean at the time that I was invited to go and work in Afghanistan I was actually working in Belgrade Square for the

9:37country landowners association and asked my boss whether I could have a sabbatical and he just looked at me in astonishment and said why do you want to go to a country where they're so awful to women and of course it was different for me once I was there because I was treated a little bit as a third sex particularly when I started working as a freelance journalist but at the beginning when I first arrived in Kandahar the overwhelming thing was the the sense of hospitality and the sense of humour that the people had that the people that I worked with had and of course I didn't meet their wives but they used to talk about their wives as the sort of commander of the household I did meet women in Kandahar and then later in Harat because I was doing I was organising sort of basic training in public health for them with the world health health organisation and also working on what later became known as community forum projects where habitat was trying to establish a sort of community system whereby after the the war and the civil war that had lasted for 23

10:44years you could start to rebuild some sort of structures and then programme the aid through those consensus driven models and so yes my my feeling was that I was the the first thing that struck me when I walked into our office in Kandahar was that they had all these Victorian English Proverbs hanging on the wall and it just seemed so sweet and innocent actually and that yep the people were incredibly welcoming and protective of me and kind so you know that's why after 9-11 my immediate reaction was distress that they were being targeted with blame or that the the Afghans in general were being targeted with blame for having held bin Laden and of course in relation to what's going on now you just see the same churning over of the media the repetition the the drumming into people's brains that this is a regime that has to be demonised and of course fun enough I mean when I

11:51went there part of the reason my boss said to me oh well why do you want to go to a place where they're treating women so badly was because Christian I'm on pour of CNN and Emma Bonino who was a European commissioner a very liberal European commissioner had been there a few months before and had made a small segment of news about how awful the Taliban were and how badly they were treated and how they were detained in jail in Kandahar well in the years to come I found out from another friend who'd been working for the Afghan wireless telephone company and then other people who worked for the Red Cross who were some of the few foreigners that were there that actually Christian I'm on pour and Emma Bonino had gone to the local hospital and into the women's section and had been asked to stop filming and had consistently refused and carried on filming and it was actually the female chief of the ward who'd asked them so it was the female chief who denounced them to the Taliban and then they were taken briefly to some police station and detained very very briefly but

12:57they made a huge stink out of it in the media and Emma Bonino was one of the chief cheerleaders or not defending the Taliban's treatment of women of course it's a very conservative society but it's equally conservative in Pakistan and also potentially in Saudi Arabia where they also have a sharia law that means that people might have their and cut off if if they're convicted of stealing so why is it that we focus just on Afghanistan I mean aren't my feeling is definitely that the relentless propaganda that you would see round the clock of footage of a woman being executed in the stadium etc etc it was very much aimed at convincing the domestic population in Britain that you know that we were coming in there to save women and and to about human rights and democracy and so on and it was massively effective but completely wrong and what I subsequently saw during my six years staying in in the country where I was involved with election monitoring

14:03journalism and worked for NGOs like the International Crisis Group where I looked at justice issues I was very interested in justice because you can't have democracy unless you've had you have somehow had a process of transitional justice where you sideline and indict people who have been involved in earlier phases of the conflict and so that they don't then become the government but the West didn't do any sort of process real process of justice they didn't want to focus on justice issues because they wanted to partner up with warlords many of whom had been an exile during the Taliban regime and who were facilitated by the West to come back and brought back from places like Paris and and Turkey and London and basically given cash and weapons and enabled to go back to their fiefdoms where they then became the partners of the West in this whole process of governance yeah I mean you know the situation is in so many ways it appears to be so

15:08complicated because there are so many different moving parts and apparent influences but in some sense there's also very simple and we see we see this MO being carried out in so many different places at least when you do peel back the layers and you understand what is going on and I think you know something you've certainly said is to follow the money and you've just talked about the the warlords I mean in terms of how that money did travel where was it coming from and how was it moving how was the money influencing the situation well I think Julian Assange encapsulated it most accurately when he said that the war on terror particularly the war in Afghanistan was about washing money out to the West and taxpayer base into Afghanistan through Afghanistan and then of course the money was coming out in the drugs trade where it could then be redirected to a small elite now whether that elite was related to military intelligence agencies freelance intelligence

16:12agencies in order that it could be redirected into black operations in other theatres of conflict for example on the underbelly of former USSR now Russia in the Caucasus and so on where of course you've seen the support for Islamic fundamentalism whether it was just about enriching the the Western banking system and keeping it liquid because of course I think now what I've learned since I've become much more interested in economics and finances that you know so much of what we see geopolitically has to be directly related to what's going on in the financial system and if you don't understand what's going on in the financial system I think it's quite hard to understand what's going on with these major events whether it's COVID or whether it's wars or so on and so forth absolutely and I think that that takes us in some ways neatly to the excellent book that you wrote about your experiences where I'm just going to hold up now the Afghan solution and indeed

17:15you posit that there was a viable solution that was put forward by Abdul Hack and this was in effect in short dismissed now I mean that Abdul Hack is perhaps a name that many won't know just give a bit of background because I think again although we are talking specifically about one country and one person this actually does speak to the model for intervening and and how hope is effectively crushed at the earliest possible stage so regularly and of course the results is exactly like you've just been describing with the the passage of money but just give a bit of background on on his sort of life and times. Well Commander Abdul Hack was a well-known commander during the 1980s G had against the Soviets and he came from a family that were known as resistance royalty they were dubbed resistance royalty by many of the Western journalists who

18:16were traveling in Afghanistan and who had to go into Afghanistan with with members of the resistance his family came from South Eastern Afghanistan from a place called Jalalabad and in fact I met the family I was taken to that family year after the events of Torah Borah by a journalist who'd been in Torah Borah and she had you know that I'd said I was interested in covering the drug story so she said well I'm going to Jalalabad why didn't you come with me so that was how I met the family. Abdul Hack had been killed a year before in October 2001 but the significance of him and what I found was that he as someone who had he was a leading Pashtun but he had been working to bring back the former king as an umbrella beneath which the various tribes and even senior Taliban had agreed to collapse the Taliban regime and to work together in forging a new Afghanistan a new

19:19solution for Afghanistan and this would have been an internal solution so having much more legitimacy and bearing a lot more relevance to local structures whether they were tribal from the south which is of course the area where the Taliban are from but also involving the Northern Alliance which Commander Masood was the head of so really my investigation was into why it was that the West ignored this plan and I found documents and letters that he'd written to various Western leaders and ambassadors in the early 90s where he was warning about the fundamentalism being fostered in the training camps along the border of Pakistan and he was just ignored at every turn and in fact I ended up meeting a group of British one was a former cameraman and another was a British baronette and another was the former head of the special boat service who had been trying to get support for him within the British establishment and failing so I've got they've

20:21given me their various sit reps which are in the back of the book and oh there was also an American wing trying to find support for him in Washington DC and the two brothers called the Richies Joe and James Richie who had been brought up in Afghanistan in the 1950s 60s and who'd made a lot of money on the Chicago options exchange and so really it's the story of what they were trying to do and what Abdul Huck was trying to do and why he felt that the bombing campaign would just completely destroy this this plan that he had made with Masood obviously Masood was killed two days before 9-11 where we are led to believe that it was al-Qaeda that killed him I I now have my doubts about that but you know just extremely interesting how he basically said that he had people ready in positions throughout the southern arc of the the the southern cities of Afghanistan sort of Guadalajas, Pakhtiapakhtiqa, Ghazni and so on and that they would be ready to turn over their

21:26core commands to the new regime but it required the West not to bomb because if if bombing took place all these moderate Taliban because the Taliban being a stratified entity the moderates would leave and go back to their families leaving the more extremists and charge the more extreme al-Qaeda related elements the Taliban some of whom were of course foreigners and of course that's really what happened and the West ignored him the West wanted to work with its with its partners people that thought that it could control these warlords I mean there seems to be an absolute obsession about working with strong men and of course you see that with Jalani in Syria or I remember going to give evidence to I think it's a House of Lords or House of Commons select committee on defense and all the MP could think to ask I think it was Caroline Moon all she wanted to know was who's the next strong man that we can support and I just said it's not about that but she's not interested to listen they don't understand it's about legitimacy it's about history it's about

22:31trust it's about building relationships which takes time and you know I'm afraid the West just wants to impose its cookie cutter solutions everywhere it goes it doesn't have the time or the interest all the patients to try to understand the people that it's dealing with you know most of our people in the foreign office we now understand and also the military don't speak Pashtun or I mean some of them speak Dari but they you know they're just they're just sort of they want to do a quick in and a quick out and of course it's not a quick thing and we ended up being there for 20 years and you know spending a huge amount trillions of dollars worth of of money that went into it and of course complete disaster I mean I I was speaking to someone who's just come back from Afghanistan two days ago and he said it's just so depressing and there's no hope for anybody you've got the Chinese in the northeast who are extracting gold you've got Khalil Zad

23:32who was the American Afghan envoy who who concocted so much of this disastrous plan still overseeing Afghanistan apparently flying in every few months and the rumors are that the Americans are sending in plain loads of dollars every week or so so that the feeling is that the Americans are actually still in control that they're flying drones around Kabul they control the airspace according to this person and the Taliban are enriched and happy and very confident and very arrogant and completely unwilling to take a sort of more moderate and sensible approach to the population the population are just collateral they they don't appear to care about them they don't need to have any legitimacy with them in terms of providing services education etc that there's just no hope for the people there and this was all predicated and predicted by Abdul Hark who understood that there

24:34was a window of opportunity that needed to be exploited and that if that window of opportunity was lost there wouldn't be another opportunity it wouldn't be easy to row back the political situation once it had unraveled and you know I found it very hard trying to explain this to people you know people in London and military people you know a lot of them you know they might have good intent but they just feel that if you just dig a few wells and you pay off a few elders that you can achieve marvelous results that that's just a fundamental misreading the complexity of a complicated tribal society I'm afraid and you know I feel that we've lost so much since the colonial times when we used to have people like my grandfather who was with Gladpasha and Jordan building up the Arab Legion that people really you know they spoke the local languages they were respected by the soldiers and the people that they worked with because they they really took the

25:34time to try to understand the local culture and I think we've completely lost that these days and particularly in the era of drone war where everyone thinks that it's just a quick fix to to to get what we want out of a situation which appears to be a monetary well it appears that what we wanted out of Afghanistan wasn't just about sort of geopolitical in terms of occupying a slice of central Asia that was very strategic but it also seems to have been related to the drugs trade and potentially smuggling of people, artefacts, children you know women et cetera into the Middle East and other places so I'm afraid it's it's it was predictable but it's extremely depressing that it certainly is and I think that you've sent many more compensation points to come out from that I mean you've just talked about colonialism which is

26:37of course been turned into a hand grenade of of some magnitude these days in terms of discussion or debate but exactly you know the point you make about having subject matter experts and people who actually knew the people for good or for ill you know let's put the outcomes to one side and I think you know how better to articulate that than the the memoirs of Jonathan Powell who was a chief of staff in Downing Street through this period and he wrote some years later after the events of September the 11th 2001 were pointing towards Afghanistan or at least an Afghan incursion did he call the foreign office did he call the secret intelligence service you know did he call anybody who might have had some sort of background on the area no he didn't he went to Waterstones on Piccadilly and bought Akhmed Rashid's book on the Taliban that that was his first action and not only that it absolutely beg his belief he then told Tony Blair and

27:42Alistair Campbell that it was a really good book and he said Tony could borrow it once he'd finished it I mean you know that that was the sort of the state of affairs so so you know what you say I think absolutely speaks to that and I think also for so many people who are conditioned into thinking well say what you know why why does this matter it's got nothing to do with us well I would say of course the you know taking Assange's point the brincing of the money like you say it's taxpayer's money it's our money that this is our money that is paying for this and and of course the the very obvious effect whether or not one believes that migration is either organic or indeed a problem the fact of it is that a huge amount is driven either directly or indirectly by exactly what it is you're describing and and how better to explain that than the absolute disaster with the so-called sort of data issue and the inflow of of Afghans into this country so I mean I think there are so many things that point back I I slightly disagree about the migration I

28:46definitely think the migration is being weaponized I mean Afghans weren't allowed to come into the country before 9-11 it was much more controlled they still had just as much need as they do now the UN had no budget really to pay anything in relation to the drought at that stage and people were literally starving and having to sell all their final possessions and we're living in refugee camps in in Iran and in Pakistan and we're basically ignored and forgotten I I do think that the the migration is definitely being weaponized it seems to be systematic and it it seems to be also about you know Britain seems to have this horrendous sort of schism now where everything is blamed on the Muslims and the Jews have become the victims and I think that that is very much something that I see for example the daily telegraph that I used to write for is a freelance journalist I'm astonished by the fact that they don't seem to have any foreign correspondence they have people

29:50like Hamish de Breton Gordon and well Concofflin with them all the times who are basically pure propagandists they're warmongering drum beating fervid sort of warmongers and there seems to be a massive Zionist bent to everything in the telegraph it seems to be edited as a friend commented by conservative friends of Israel it's not the newspaper that I used to know and whether it's the comments section which is potentially you know infiltrated or the editorial that there's no nothing is graduated nothing is moderate in the way that it used to be and it's all sort of the Muslims that have blamed for everything and you know isn't the anti-Semitism horrendous in Britain and I just think it's completely nonsensical because you look at how Israel has infiltrated all of our political class how they're all I mean you basically have to be a member of labor conservative or now even reformed friends of Israel and you know why do we have our parliamentary

30:57representative serving a foreign state that's what people need to start asking and you know seems to be there's some evidence that a lot of the migration which has been weaponized is actually being promoted by some Israeli or Zionist groups so I think it's a little you know it's it's a it's neither sort of it's not one thing or the other but I think it's definitely being weaponized against Britain to destabilize the population no I mean that I evidently did not articulate it correctly that is exactly the point I was I was intending to make it was exactly about the weaponization particularly and in so far as setting up what could really be described as a civil war but but also to lead people down the down the path of accepting digital ID and so many other things besides but but you know this just to go back to the beginning was why I asked you how you felt you were treated in that society because that you know such a number has been done on places that are over there and full of Muslims you know so people therefore cannot countenance

32:02that there could be any any way in which that could possibly work here but but but but absolutely it is a weaponized situation now what I wanted to come on to just just to go back because I think we should really just flesh out the the Abdul Hack point because it is stunning to to read some of the correspondence and you referred not by name but to Sir John Gunnston who was out there and I'm just going to read from the appendix that contains a fax sent from him to Charles Guthrie who was then chief of the defence staff and this is sent in October 2001 and and just a couple of bits you talked about the the special forces chap he major seeker he was with and Gunnston writes that they have been over the last few weeks trying to bring to notice to those who have an interest in solving the Afghan business the potential of a remarkable pushdune guerrilla commander Haji Abdul Hack and then they go on and have a meeting with a small sort of portfolio of people

33:06from the foreign Commonwealth office and the secret intelligence service and the result of that Gunnston summarises is the response was polite they disinterested in Hack as they FCO and SIS are looking at other pushdune assets they will contact Hack if interested and and then it goes on to say that basically nothing has happened and they're not at all interested in Abdul Hack and Gunnston keen to give the benefit of the doubt presumably knowing which side his bread was buttered says this reluctance is probably for good operational reasons unknown to ourselves so that's his sort of very benevolent line on it but the first line of his proposed solution to Charles Guthrie is we believe that the quickest least damaging least controversial and most long lasting solution for achieving a terrorist free Afghanistan can be achieved from within in bold by Afghans and yet look what happened

34:11and again for people to think oh well you know that was just Afghanistan look at what's happened since and I mean I just be interested on you know your thoughts on on that exact that situation Guthrie running running the Ministry of Defence and you know had the air of the Prime Minister everybody else that needed to hear what what was to be said from the ground in Afghanistan and yet completely ignored you know we see this time and again do we not? I think so and I think it's because the people like Guthrie aren't making the decisions so that he's just a cog in the wheel fairly low level actually I think the the decision makers are much higher up and they have to do with the banks the capital markets and you know the currency and I think we make the mistake and particularly where you see all this sort of Trump derangement syndrome going on in our society and I'm not the supporter of Trump but I think that one needs to understand

35:12that there are different groups they're almost like mafia factions and he potentially represents one and he's the sort of loss of justice for the United States as it goes bankrupt now and he's everything that he's doing with Greenland with Venezuela it's all about resources and trying to extend the the value of the dollar as it basically goes under consumed by the interest payments they have to pay as they roll over 30 in 10 year debt bonds and or guilt or treasury bills whatever you want to call them and so you know Trump is beholden to the financial paymasters in the same way as our own political class are and our own our own military leaders see and I suppose it's all come since particularly since the mass financialisation of everything in the 1990s where we had that we no longer have the separation of retail banking and investment banking you know what used to be the Chinese wall the Glass-Steagall Act which Bill Clinton removed so you have all

36:14this massive debt proliferation and all these huge problems you know it just seems that these decisions are made at a much higher level and I think that it you know had to do with money and black operations and of course Poppy is something that feeds into that very nicely because it's easily easy to transport it's it's a cash crop it's in its very cash rich and so on and I'm afraid that when I look back on what the British and the Americans were doing more and more hints throughout my book that they were very involved with the drug trade and that these these strong men that they brought back the first thing that they did in October 2001 was to sow the next poppy poppy crop which was harvested in spring 2002 and from then on if you look at the UNODC figures the poppy crop in increased exponentially year after year whereas it had been at zero metric tons per year in the last year of the Taliban yeah I mean that is perfectly extraordinary and actually just on

37:18on a personal note in terms of who cares and who makes decisions it was absolutely pathetic to be on the cusp of deploying to Helmand with the army in 2007 and to have a briefing from I think what was then called the stabilization unit for the foreign Commonwealth Office Diffit and MD and we had a briefing from a young lady who was clearly out of a depth but very enthusiastic and when asked about exactly this issue and what the economic plan for Afghanistan was and very mind this is you know we're six years in and not just six years in but two years into the sort of surge from 2005 her answer rather globally was oh we're working on that and it was it was perfectly astonishing it was just sort of stunned silence it was a you know commander's briefing and everyone just sat there looking at her thinking what what are you on and again the same with you know you've talked about sort of building wells and stuff I remember during that same sort of rotation of

38:20of talks being spoken to by somebody from Diffit who stuck a map on the wall saying um yeah well you know this is where we've had some some of the projects going on and it then transpired that this map was I think 20 or 30 years out of date and he had absolutely no idea what else had gone on they hadn't they'd kept no records they had no idea where the money had gone or anything like that but but what I wanted to get to in terms of decision making just just to really flesh this out who who does decide and also who cares you have an anecdote about meeting David Cameron when he was yeah yeah the opposition to tell me what happened then yes well at the time I was it was 2005 and I was working for the European Union ambassador to Afghanistan so he was heading up the the political part of the EU there was also the European Commission which was dispersing aid money and for him my responsibilities were counter narcotics security sector reform which was centralising and building up the Afghan National Army and police and going around the the PRTs you know the

39:26provincial reconstruction teams and of course NATO so I had to go to various NATO meetings in CFC Alpha which was the main American base in in Kabul where we had all these coordination meetings of various people and I flew back for my R&R to London in May I'd just been to Helmand and they were talking about the British coming out to Helmand I think it was the following year so there was quite a lot in the press about it and Cameron was leader of the opposition at the time and I was invited by a friend who was very close to David Cameron to a dinner party and it was I think it was just about three couples I mean we're about six people and I was introduced as to Cameron as as having just come back from Afghanistan at the time I'd been freelancing for the economist the telegraph and the Scotsman and I was now a political adviser to the EU ambassador and I was introduced to Cameron as someone who knew Lord about Afghanistan and he basically he didn't talk to me didn't ask me anything about what was going on what was my perspective or point

40:31of view he had no interest and in fact he spent the evening being very glib and giggling really with with a couple of the other people there about how they just managed to topple some female labour MP and not sure what the context was of that but it was I just felt incredibly childish and incredibly boys club and no sense of curiosity because I think you know apparently David Cameron was really much more interested in polls and was given his talking points by others and didn't really seem to avail himself of of the facts or show any curiosity about soldiers that he was about to be sending out to Hellman to their death so you know I was shocked by that I'm not surprised I mean you know that that has largely been not just his reputation but that of those in his circle and others besides but to actually hear a first-hand account of that is

41:32is rather eye-watering now you've just mentioned NATO and of course we've spoken about Russia and I think you know as we look at well Ukraine in particular but also of course Greenland and really anywhere else that's in line in the firing line this year we cannot ignore the relationship between NATO and Russia but also between Afghanistan and NATO and Russia and I mean just give me your take on on how you see that but in a not not sort of going back necessarily too far but at least going back to the sort of 70s and 80s and how that pertains to where we are now and where you see things going. I know I think the mistake many people in Britain make and I find it various donishing when I come back to the UK how anti-Russia the the whole media is and there seems to be a sense that we're still dealing with a Soviet Union there's there's no kind of awareness that actually we've moved on from the Soviet Union and when you go back to people like even Kissinger

42:35and George Kennan who was the great American Cold War strategist he was the ambassador post-war in Moscow and he's written memoirs and Darius and in fact one thing that I read in Scott Horton's very excellent book about George Kennan's attitude to NATO eastward expansion was that we should be supporting Putin as a moderate rather than you know trying to to act in the very belligerent way that that we have by continuing to expand NATO eastward that you know that actually Putin has his own neocorns to deal with behind him and that there are people that in his administration and also in the country who are angry that he hasn't been a lot more severe on the situation with Ukraine they've been running a war of attrition in terms of grinding down the Ukrainian army rather than taking territory very quickly and so I think I mean actually when I I went to Russia

43:35in June I want I was desperate to go to St. Petersburg into National Economic Forum and I went there as a freelance journalist and was just amazed by how advanced the system is in terms of their relationship with other Eurasian countries in terms of transit routes, resources, development and so on and it was 30 years since I'd been to Russia I the last time I was there was the mid-90s and I was in St. Petersburg for two weeks at that stage and there were shortages there were cues for food there were people shooting at each other on the corners and everything was destroyed and of course when I went back this time I was very surprised by how well developed it was and it seemed just like a western any sort of western European town and the same with Moscow which was really quite beautiful and yet when I come back I flew into Southampton Airport last month and December I was stopped at the the the border and essentially really hassled

44:36by the the border guard and asked why I'd been to Russia he clearly knew I'd been to Russia because I just applied to renew my British passport but I was flying in on my Swiss passport and I was then told I had to see the policeman behind him so I just thought well first of all I'm not British I'm Swiss now I'm flying in on my I might be a dual national but I'm flying in on a foreign passport and I'm it's not illegal to go to Russia so why are you trying to rough me up so I yeah I just think it's got really out of hand I think people have become quite hysterical about the situation if only people would read more stop listening to the mainstream media try to inform themselves listen to people who do know as for example Glendizan and all the people that he interviews on on YouTube a lot of former CIA and former American military who are very well versed in what's going on people like Larry Johnson kind of Lawrence Wilkerson and so on he people who were Cold War specialists who talk about why this relentless Eastwood expansion of NATO

45:42by I think a thousand miles was of course going to provoke Russia it was going to be unacceptable to them in terms of the security architecture and it was something that America would never allow to take place on its own borders so why would they expect the Russians to yeah absolutely but we're not allowed to think like that are we and and and that leads us into you know the the influence of the media but what I'd like to ask you about is the influence that the security and intelligence services have on the media and how that relationship works and how you've seen that work yeah I mean I I've faced a huge amount of censorship with my book and ultimately had to self publish it it then got taken over by Paul Grave met Willen and Pluto press but I found it very very hard to get my story out even though I the book was very very well received and is available throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and it can be found on Amazon but for example if I appeared on the today program which I I was able to get on to say program I think largely because at the

46:47time they have been criticised for not having had women interviewees most of the people that they interviewed at a certain time and at the time my book was published had been men but I then found that people like Sir Sherrod Cooper Culls who is SIS that his book came out at the same time as mine fun enough the publisher had who had wanted to publish my book his daughter was going to edit it so that's why I pulled it and published it myself because I didn't feel comfortable with having Sherrod Cooper Culls daughter involved in my book but I then found that of course Rory Stewart was the only lens through which anyone wanted to talk about Afghan affairs and I found that this was the same with publishers with radio programs everything Rory Stewart was everywhere and despite the fact that I'd been living in Kandahar as a sort of blonde girl from London during the the time of the height of bin Laden no one was interested you know that I spent all that time

47:51there he'd gone off to Iraq and done his own thing but I was asked did I know him and did he approve of my work sort of thing so that was another kind of way that one was censored and then also I forgot to say that with the today program you would be drilled the day before they were going to have you on and if you didn't answer the way that they wanted you to and within the tram lines that they'd set you basically would be sort of asked not to come so it was very very controlled and then of course for example I had an interview with Philip Hammond where I wasn't given a right of reply and he was sort of saying oh well she's just sitting in Geneva I mean this is the same Philip Hammond who is responsible according to Ian Proud's book for basically reducing all of communication and diplomacy with Russia when he was head of the foreign office so yes I mean there are many ways that censorship takes place but you know thankfully I was able to promote my book through Facebook at the time that was published and then through doing

48:52a lot of talks and ultimately social media has been a good thing because it's been a sort of democratization of knowledge whereas before all of this information only existed in silos that are controlled by intelligence agencies because I definitely feel that a lot of the journalists that I knew in Afghanistan were working for MI6 and that you know that they're masquerading as journalists I mean one of them even weren't often spent years working back in the foreign office and and then suddenly reappeared at the telegraph so yeah what were the way that information has presented within the mainstream is very very controlled and it's not going to help the public to understand the world. No well I don't think there's anyone who's in the business of making money who's in who's interested is that people do understand what's going on and I think you know really that strikes to the to the heart of the concern for the people which is can can people do anything

49:58to stop this from happening over and over and over again and and you know do people have agency I mean via democracy or via a supposedly democratic process perhaps not but but you know I mean for example Chris Coverdale is somebody that I've interviewed now a couple of times for UK column talking you know his point being no no taxation for the war so so you know holding government to account by by that means clearly back in 2003 and whatnot there were large demonstrations against going to war in Iraq and whatnot but I mean do you see that that there is a way to stop this this sort of intervention war machine I mean I suppose that what I haven't seen those interviews that you've done with him but I have heard of this through other channels and I'd say yes definitely people should ask where their council tax is going and whether it's legitimate and legal that their council tax is potentially going to fund these wars and is that why it keeps

51:00increasing is it all going to Zelensky and and his big money laundering operation in Ukraine I think people need to start asking the questions where is our money actually going and what are we getting in return for it and is it really the case that I mean I I saw a little clip of Kristia Freeland being interviewed but being sort of door stepped in in Davos yesterday and she was asked about Ukraine and she kept saying Ukraine is we're fighting in Ukraine for Canada's democracy and I just thought I can't think of anything more ludicrous to say it's nothing to do with Canada you've got a massive ocean in between you Russia there's no proof of Russia's expansionist you know that Russia's about to invade Canada it's completely ludicrous why would people still believe all of this nonsense and I think I'm afraid that I feel that people are quite apathetic and possibly because they feel they have no agency but so therefore it means that things are going to have to get to the stage where people's pensions are maybe worth a cup of coffee

52:05once a month and they can't afford to buy anything else with them because our purchasing power is going to decline hugely particularly I mean if you look at what's going on in the gold and silver markets and the guilt market and so on you know the currencies are falling all the time the British the paper markets and silver and London the LBMA are blowing up right now which is why the silver price is going through the roof I think until people really start to feel it in their pocket they're not going to find the courage to really stand up to this and say no more yeah I think that's a very good point I mean of course in the UK and I think in a lot of European nations the specter of conscription is looming ever larger and that would be something that makes it a rather more stark reality now I know you don't have a crystal ball none of us really does but clearly you have a you know a very well-rounded and deeply researched background into the subjects that we're discussing the pace of change through the end of 2025 the beginning of 2026 has seemed sort of alarmingly

53:10fast how at least in general terms how do you see events panning out over the course of this year that's a big question I mean there's so much going on in the background and I think one has to take a step back and not be emotionally tied for example I mean everyone's getting hysterical about Trump and Greenland and what's going on in Davos and what's been going on with Venezuela I think that one needs to try to inform oneself by looking at a more diverse set of analysts on for example YouTube and people like Alex Grainer Tom Luongo maybe those I mean some people say they're sort of apologists for this idea that Trump is really trying to rebuild America to reshore industry to America's shores whereas the sort of Davos elite the Davos crowd the Black rock people are you know telling us that you'll own nothing and you'll be happy so I think it's people need to be a little less emotional and to understand perhaps that what Trump is trying

54:17to do is to defend the interest as the United States to consolidate the position of the United States in their hemisphere which is about more influence in Canada more influence in Greenland I mean I understand there's a separatist movement in Alberta people are fed up with the globalists fed up with the Davos crowd fed up with Mark Carney all of this green washing the high taxes the inability to run businesses whether it's mining or whatever that people want to be free to to build a future for their children and not to be taxed to the hilt for these sort of globalist initiatives and so yes I think I'm afraid I think Europe looks to be a very bad future immediately you know the Americans are looking after themselves they're looking after the the fact they've got all these interest payments to make on their debt which of course Europe has as well but we've managed to cut ourselves off from cheap energy from Russia while importing

55:19energy from the United States at three times the cost and we have a massive welfare bill which is growing as we have more immigration and we have people who don't want to work because they're working from homes so they're completely unproductive and you know I mean there are some benefits to working from home but I think when it becomes a sort of a real thing where people are very defensive if they're right but they don't you know they need to see the the bigger picture that actually how effective can I really be when I'm not going into the office I mean you know are people productive if they're all working from home and looking after their kids at the same time we have obviously also a massive demographic problem I am one person who feels that women should be allowed to bring up their children that there has been this horrible kind of demonization of women who choose to do that and they're called trad wives or something and children need to be protected you know we hear all these awful stories of what happens to them in daycare with these

56:22sexual predators and so on I mean what's more precious than the next generation so I think also if women didn't have to you know if we didn't need two salaries to keep life and body and soul together women would be able to have more children and then we might not have the demographic problems that we have had so I think there's going to be a massive wake up call in Europe you know all these issues like LGBT and transgender are going to be kicked into touch as it becomes increasingly obvious that they're not fundamental to actually putting bread and water on the table and you know as we become progressively more impoverished I'm afraid given the appalling decisions I've been taken by our political class over things like Ukraine which I I see is definitely has been a project by the Neocons and I've seen this since 2014 when Paul Craig Roberts has been talking about it in the United States that this has been a project to support corporate interests

57:25of black rock and monsanto and so on and I thought for example two or three years ago when the British hosted a pledging conference for reconstruction of Ukraine while the war had only just started and then they were starting to sort of try to parcel out interest to people like black or concern and it just seemed completely absurd what world are they living in did they really believe their own propaganda that they were winning the war and yeah I mean it's you know some of the propaganda is very deeply evil as we've seen with butcher as we've seen with the OPCW situation in Duma and Syria and I'm afraid British intelligence has played a very evil role in a lot of these psychological operations to confuse the public about what's really going on and ultimately the British people will pay the price for for these massive mistakes which have cost millions billions of pounds yeah I mean unfortunately I can't pick a hole in your logic

58:33but I think you know this is this is heavy heavy material which is not at all to say that it shouldn't be discussed it absolutely should and I think you gave some very sound advice earlier about encouraging people to read and to think more and to push beyond the boundaries within which we are expected to exist and so you know just just on a positive note as we sort of wind up I mean the fact is we're here we've got to get on with it how do we how do you keep yourself sane and happy I mean I keep myself I actually like to know what's going on I have a great sense of curiosity I started to distrust the mainstream media when I learned that the story of 9-11 was nothing to do with what we had been told and ever since then I've been I've had a voracious appetite for reading books that aren't the the ones that are reviewed in the in the mainstream news I mean through the process of publishing my own book and the the blockages that I faced

59:36and then learning about 9-11 just a few years later when I moved to New York I I have really changed the way that I think about the world radically I mean I've gone sort of 180 degrees and I think you know people need to think for themselves and that means potentially I mean I can't say I've got a massive vegetable garden but I think really trying to be more self-sufficient and understanding that the state and the government is not going to look after you and if you need to disinvest from the financial system and invest in gold and silver or buy some land of course if you've got any resources most people don't have any resources but just to try to inform yourself about what's going on and to to take measures whether it's you know trying to build a pantry or build a vegetable garden an alternative to supply of fuel you know having a wood burner for example I mean the government is trying to get rid of all of this to make us dependent upon the state dependent on on them with this sort of e-grid of electric casings

1:00:41keep independent and understand why they're doing this and reject digital ID and you know try to keep as much of your life non-digital as you can whether it's using cash as people like Catherine Austin Fitz advise and just being self-sufficient as much as you can good sound advice and simple steps that's absolutely I think the right note to draw to a close-on but before I do let you go just just remind viewers and listeners about your book and where you would prefer that they went to purchase a bit well it's been a while now since it's published so I'm afraid I'm at the moment I did have a website at one stage but then it got knocked down I'm afraid probably Amazon possibly yeah I'm not in the UK at the moment so I can't just easily resupply people but if they wanted maybe if people desperately wanted they can't get on Amazon maybe you could give them my email address if they come to you but you know I've certainly

1:01:44still got some copies but I think they'll find on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk okay super well as I say there will be notes about all of this in the below the interview on the UK column website and otherwise in terms of sort of getting in touch we're following your your thinking and what about social media or any other activity that people can follow over yours. I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook so I think Twitter is at El Morgan Edwards something like that and Facebook it's just Lucy Morgan Edwards okay now I can be followed all right perfect I'm not sure that something like that quite gets there these days but I'll put the I'll put the exact link in the in the notes Lucy it's it's been a huge amount of information to get through not just information but opinion and and also evidence of your own experiences and I think that is absolutely invaluable beyond compare so thank you very much indeed for joining me at UK column and I hope we'll speak again. Thanks very much Charles kind of you to have me.