Toby Harnden
Toby Harnden’s next book, The 39: Uncovering the CIA's Secret Heroes, about the undisclosed recipients of the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the Agency's equ...
“We kind of won it in two or three months and then spent 20 years losing it.”
Mission Implausible · October 2026
Harnden is discussing the warlords the US relied on in Afghanistan after 9/11, whom the State Department couldn't stand. In his telling, the quick early victory by a handful of CIA officers and Special Forces gave way to two decades of losing ground.
Transcript
And I remember J.R. Seager telling me this, that Afghanistan's not really a country. It's a patchwork of ethnicities. You have all these warlords who the State Department absolutely couldn't stand.
But how do you wield power?
And survive in Afghanistan if you're not a warlord, which involves kind of corruption, brutality, all sorts of stuff that we sort of... And so, you know, we kind of won it in, you know, two or three months and then spent 20 years losing it.
And it's tragic. Now, it's not simple.
I think it would have been a lot better to have done negotiations with the rump of a defeated Taliban at the end of 2001, rather than this sort of surrender deal that was done in 2020. But I understand that politically, and certainly with the Bush administration at the end of 2001, they were in…
But I guess.
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