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

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

Another checkered flag for the books.

Time to celebrate with Jamba.

Jump in at JambaCasino.com.

Let's Jamba.

No purchase necessary, VTW Group.

Boy, we're prohibited by law.

CCNC, 21 Plus, sponsored by JambaCasino.

Hello, 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're 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 the 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 in our office.

So it really gave me an amazing insight into Afghanistan at a time when there were 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 911 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 be 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 then to 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 911.

But no, I had no inkling of what was to come.

And then when 911 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 exposed to these Arab Afghans, who weren't really Afghans, and of course the Afghans

didn't even really want them there, or 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 I was 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

almost had by the time of 9-11.

OK, well, that sort of takes us forward to one of the things, obviously, that I did

want to talk about, which is that this issue endlessly debated about the influence of

the Taliban, and indeed whether they were in a position of controlling Afghanistan, whether

they were being controlled, and all of that, and also how that relates to, like you say,

the events of September the 11th, 2001, you know, very nearly 25 years ago, and I think

if I'm right, 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're 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 the UN satellite system

there.

So, you know, there was really a feeling much more isolation, and after 9-11, as I say,

when I was in touch with colleagues who I considered 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 with dialysis and had, in fact, died.

I think that was in, it was either Friday Times or Dawn, one of the main Pakistani papers,

and I got my way with 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 told just didn't add up,

and it's only, I mean, I came to a new realisation 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.

I mean, I think what you've just touched on there is so significant, because you know,

we've mentioned the Taliban, and we've mentioned bin Laden, and of course, you know, 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 September 11,

but also about Afghanistan, and yet somehow all of this was supposed to make some sort

of sense, and to make the case for what became, you know, decades of horrific turmoil.

I think just to 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, no, any 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 who are holding the Islamic faith and all

that kind of thing, and 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 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 country 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? 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 sense of hospitality and the sense of humour

that the people had, that the people that I worked with had. Of course, I didn't meet

their wives, but they used to talk about their wives as the commander of the household.

I did meet women in Kandahar and then later in Herat because I was doing, I was organising

sort of basic training in public health for them with the World Health Organization, 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 war and the civil war that

had lasted for 23 years, you could start to rebuild some sort of structures and then

programme the aid through those consensus-driven models. So, yes, my feeling was that I was 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 yup, 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 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 drumming into people's brains that this is a

regime that has to be demonised, and of course, fun enough. I mean, when I went there, part of the

reason my boss said to me, oh, well, why do you want to go to a place where their treating women

so badly was because Christian, I'm on poor 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

poor 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 they 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 they're convicted of

stealing. So why is it that we focus just on Afghanistan? I mean, 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, et cetera, et cetera. It was very much aimed at convincing the domestic

population in Britain that we were coming in to save women 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 the country where I was involved with election monitoring and

journalism 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 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. The situation is in so many ways it appears to be so complicated because

there are so many different moving parts and apparent influences but in some sense it's also

very simple and 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 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 and 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

agencies in order that it could be redirected into black operations in other theatres of conflict

for example on the underbelly of former USSR, Naurasha 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 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 that you

posit that there was a viable solution that was put forward by Abdul Haq and this was in effect in

short dismissed. Now I mean that Abdul Haq 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 you know 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 just give

a bit of background on on his sort of life and times. Well Commander Abdul Haq 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

were 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 Haq 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 solution 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 off. 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 given me their various sit reps which are in the back of the book

and 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 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 southern cities of Afghanistan, sort of Guards, Pakhtia, Pakhtia, Ghazni and so on

and that they would be ready to turn over their core 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 that the more extreme al-Qaeda-related elements that 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 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. I remember going to give evidence to I think it's a House of

Lords or House of Commons select committee on defence 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 was not interested to listen they don't understand

it's about legitimacy it's about history it's about trust 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 or the patience 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 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

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 who 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

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 was 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 Gloucestershire 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 time

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 etc and to 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

of course been turned into a hand grenade 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

Anastacamble 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 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 rinsing 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 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 slightly disagree about the migration I definitely think the migration

has been 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 do think that the the migration is definitely

being weaponized it seems to be systematic and 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 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 like Hamish,

Breton Gordon and well Concofflin with them all the times who are basically pure propagandists

they're warm-ungering drum beating fervid sort of warm-ungers 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

representative 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 the migration which has been weaponized

is actually being promoted by some Israeli or Zionist groups so I think it's a little like 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

that 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 seagull 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

from 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 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

and 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

he's just a cog in the wheel fairly low level actually I think 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

that there are different groups they're almost like mafia factions and he potentially represents

one and he's the sort of loss of just of 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

this 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 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 bearing in mind this

was six years in and not just six years in but two years into the sort of surge from 2005 her answer

rather glibly was oh we're working on that and it was it was perfectly astonishing it was just

stunned silence it was a you know commander's briefing and everyone just sat there looking her

thinking what what are you on and 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 of talks being

spoken to by somebody from Diffid who stuck a map on the wall saying 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 had 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 to really flesh this out who who does decide and also who

cares you have an anecdote about meeting David Cameron when he was in 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 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 provincial 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 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 advisor

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 he didn't ask me anything about what was going on what was

my perspective or point of 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 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 is 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 you know 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 think the mistake many people in Britain make

and I find it very astonishing 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 the 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 and George Kennan who was the great American Cold War strategist he was the

ambassador post-war in Moscow and he's written memoirs and diaries and in fact one thing that I

read in Scott Gordon'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 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 I mean that 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 went to Russia in 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 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 in December I was stopped at the border and essentially

really hassled by 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 it's not illegal to go to Russia so why are you trying to

rough me up so 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 Eastern expansion of NATO by I think

a thousand miles was of course going to provoke Russia it was going to be unacceptable to you

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 Graith met Willin 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 the day program I

think largely because at the time they have been criticised for not having had women

interviews most of the people that they interviewed at a certain time in 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 had 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 there 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 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

a lot of talks and ultimately social media has been a good thing because it's 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 their 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

to 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

increasing 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

once 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 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

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

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

reassure 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

to 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 it 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 energy

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 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

rights but they don't you know they need to see that 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 children need to be

protected you know we hear all these awful stories of what happens to them in daycare with these

sexual 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 it's been a project to support corporate

interests of 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 rock and so on 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 Bootsha as we've

seen with the OPCW situation and 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 of course millions billions have pounds yeah I mean unfortunately I can't pick a hole in your

logic but 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 he gave some very sound advice earlier

about encouraging people to read and to think more and to push beyond the boundaries within which

we're expected to exist and so you know 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 and 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 that I've got a massive

vegetable garden but I think really trying to be more self-sufficient and understanding that the

state in 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 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 as dependent upon the state dependent on

on them with this sort of e-grade of electric cars and just keep independent and understand

why they're doing this and reject digital ID and you know try to keep as much of 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 was 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 yeah I've certainly

still 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

what about social media or any other activity that people can follow of 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 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 this is

kind of you to have me.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing Victory Lane yeah it's even better with Jamba by my side

race to trumpacacino.com let's Jamba.

No purchase necessary VTW Group voidware prohibited by law CT and C's 21 plus

sponsored by Jamba Casino.

No purchase necessary VTW Group voidware prohibited by law CT and C's 21 plus sponsored by