What's Next for Afghanistan: U.S. Interests or Compromise with the Taliban?

What’s the U.S. endgame in Afghanistan now—and what role does the Taliban really play?

In this episode of At the Boundary, host Jim Cardoso speaks with Dr. Jonathan Schroden, a non-resident fellow at the Global and National Security Institute (GNSI), to explore how U.S. foreign policy toward Afghanistan has evolved under the the most recent presidential administrations.

Schroden examines the administration’s transactional relationship with the Taliban, which prioritizes counterterrorism cooperation and human rights advocacy, while contrasting it with the Trump administration’s more rhetorical approach. The conversation also breaks down the threat landscape in Afghanistan, identifying ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan) as the primary concern, alongside Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP).

Key topics include:

·       U.S. policy shifts from Trump to Biden

·       The rise of ISIS-K and regional terrorism threats

·       Challenges of working with the Taliban and neighboring powers

·       The moral and strategic dilemmas of engagement

This episode offers a timely, candid look at one of America’s most complex foreign policy challenges.

Links to the Show:

• 2025 Notes from Cambridge Student Blog

• Jonathan Schroden’s Article in the Journal of Strategic Security

• “Policy Options for Securing U.S. Interests in Afghanistan” Decision Briefs

• CNA Website

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

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The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

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Transcript

Jim Cardoso: 0:00

Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, a podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for genusi, and your host for at the boundary. Today on the show, we're going to talk to genocide. Non resident fellow, Dr Jonathan schroeden. He recently wrote both a decision brief and a longer article in our journal of strategic security, examining foreign policy decisions about Afghanistan to maintain and promote US interest in that consistently volatile country. Jonathan will join us shortly. Couple quick notes. First, we're excited about a new student blog that debuted on our website this week. GNSI sent two USF students may Burch and Kyle Rudd across the pond to the international security and intelligence program at Cambridge University, part of the world renowned Cambridge security initiative. It's a great opportunity for students to learn from the world's leading academics and practitioners in the security and intelligence communities. May and Kyle agreed to write a blog for us, letting us experience the ISI program, along with them. Notes from Cambridge is on our website right now, and there's a link in the show notes. By the way, we plan to send up to four students to isI every summer. That's something you'd like to support. Check our website for ways to support GNSI. And if you're a student and it's something you'd like to do, start building your resume. Also want to mention a major event happening in Tampa Bay on October 13 through the 15th. Cyber Bay 2025. Is a collaboration between USF, new Bellini College of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and computing, along with cyber Florida, Bellini, capital, and the USF Institute for ai plus x cyberbay is where talent, technology and national security converge to build the future of digital defense. GNSI will be partnering on this event and providing speakers and panelists focused on the impacts of cyberspace activities on national security. We put a registration link in the show notes, and I highly recommend you check it out. All right, let's bring Dr Jonathan troden GNSI, non resident fellow and one of the world's leading experts on Afghanistan. He was recently named Chief Research Officer at the Center for naval analysis, otherwise known as the CNA Corporation. All in all, he spent over 20 years with CNA. He took a small break in 2023 to assume the high profile role of research director for the Bipartisan Congressional Afghanistan war commission. He was also instrumental in helping us build our policy dialogs conference in Afghanistan last November, which in turn led to our first special issue of our journal of strategic security. The special issue is dedicated to Afghanistan, and Dr Sheridan wrote the lead off article entitled terrorism and counterterrorism in the Taliban's Afghanistan. He's also a Tampa Bay resident, so it's our pleasure to have him live and in person on at the boundary today. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So before we get into Afghanistan, let's you were originally named the Chief Research Officer at CNA Corporation. Tell us a bit about the CNA and what you're doing there in your new

Jonathan Schroden: 3:31

role. Yeah, it's a great question. So CNA is a not for profit, non partisan research and analysis organization primarily based up in the DC area, and there are two components to it. There is a largely Defense Department component, which is called the Center for naval analyzes, and that is the federally funded research and development center for the Department of the Navy. So it primarily supports the Navy and the Marine Corps, a lot of different types of analysis, but really focused on helping those two organizations be as effective as they can be in whatever missions they get asked by the President and the Secretary of Defense to undertake. We also have a non DoD part of CNA, which is called the Institute for Public research, and they do a lot of work on homeland security incident response, disaster response, support to the Federal Aviation Administration and a lot of other work for the sort of non defense executive branch agencies. As the Chief Research Officer, I've got a bunch of different duties, as you might imagine, but first and foremost is to ensure that the work that CNA is doing is of the utmost quality, and that the research and analysis that we do supports our sponsors in their mission to the best of our ability to do so. And so I do a lot of assessing the quality of our work, giving feedback to people. But also looking systemically at our ability to do the work. So for example, are we using the most cutting edge research tools and methods? Do we have access to the right types of data sets and those types of things? So it's a really interesting job. I get to be involved in a lot of different things that CNA is doing. It's fascinating every day.

Jim Cardoso: 5:18

Yeah, and you get to stay, you live in Tampa. You get to stay in the Tampa Bay area for the most part, traveling to DC every once in a while. Of course, that's right, yes, excellent, great arrangement. Yeah, and CNA, now, they've been around a while, right? We

Jonathan Schroden: 5:29

are, in fact, the nation's oldest operations research organization, founded in the midst of World War Two. So yes, we've been around for over eight decades.

Jim Cardoso: 5:38

Wow. Okay, so a lot, a lot of capability there, no doubt. So yeah, I would, I would check that out. We can put a link to the show notes, maybe to your to your website as well, so people can check that out. So let's go ahead now that's let's turn to Afghanistan a little bit. You wrote two pieces for us recently. First, you wrote a decision brief, which kind of was more broadly, discussing the policy options available as the Trump administration comes in. What major differences have you seen between the Biden administration and the Trump administration with respect to Afghanistan?

Jonathan Schroden: 6:09

Yeah, it's an excellent question, and here I'll start by giving an answer, sort of post collapse of Kabul and sort of post ascendance of the Taliban government, because obviously that happened early in the Biden administration. So when I when I speak comparatively, I'll talk sort of post Taliban takeover. What we saw with the Biden administration after that occurred was what I would call sort of transactional, or, you know, conditional engagement with the Taliban, albeit not directly in Afghanistan. So the US did not recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. The Biden administration did not allow any officials to actually travel to Afghanistan or engage with members of the Taliban in Kabul, for example, for example. But they did do a fair amount of engagement with the Taliban's political office and members of the Taliban who would travel there in Doha in Qatar, and a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do was to, you know, secure various counterterrorism cooperate, you know, maybe not deliberate cooperation, or any type of, you know, formal agreements, but at least sort of informal means of sharing information or trying to get the Taliban to take certain actions on counterterrorism interests, as well as trying to get the Taliban to be less draconian in their stance on human rights, and especially rights of women and girls. And there were sort of intermittent engagements that would take place. The Biden administration had a designated special envoy for Afghanistan. They had one that focused largely on security, that was Thomas West. And then they had another that focused largely on women and girls rights and human rights, and that was Rina Amiri. And the two of them did lots of engagements all around the world, with other countries, special envoys in Doha, with the Taliban, with lots of I went to numerous Think Tank events at which one or both of them were engaging, sort of the expert community as well. And so that was sort of largely the Biden approach. Now the Trump administration when it came in on the campaign trail, Trump talked about being a lot tougher with the Taliban. He talked about trying to get them to give back the weapons that they had captured in their takeover of Afghanistan. He talked about the possibility of re establishing US presence at Bagram Air Base, which we obviously turned over to the Afghan security forces and then was eventually captured by the Taliban. He talked about a lot more economic and potentially sanction type pressure on the Taliban as well. So he talked a much, you know, much more pressurized sort of tougher approach. What we've seen in practice is a little less than that, shall we say. The really, the administration has not done a whole lot on Afghanistan. So far. They've not sort of made, you know, published, any kind of actual policy. I have not heard anything sort of behind the scenes that there is some kind of, like National Security Council policy in the works, as best I can tell. No one is actively working on that type of thing, and they have, then they have not named any special envoys for Afghanistan, either. So it's been a lot, you know, less attention overall placed on them. What we have seen in terms of actual actions, though, has been interesting, for example, very early in the Trump administration, and without much in the way, or if any prior notice, suddenly the White House's lead for hostage negotiations and sort of, you know, trying to get. Uh, wrongfully detained Americans freed. Uh, Adam bowler, suddenly, he's in Kabul meeting with the Taliban's uh, acting foreign minister, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who you know played a large role in negotiating us withdrawal from Afghanistan, was there with them, and they successfully negotiated the release of an American citizen who had been, in our view, wrongfully detained for over two years by the Taliban. And as part of the the quid pro quo to secure his release, the Trump administration agreed to de list the sort of infamous Acting Minister of Interior, Sira Juden Haqqani, from the State Department's Rewards for Justice list, which was a pretty significant move. I mean, this is a guy who undoubtedly has the blood of, you know, numerous, if not many, US citizens on his hand, and certainly vastly more Afghans. And so they agreed to delist him in order to secure the release of this US citizens. So we've seen some, you know, some definite changes in approach, both in terms of perhaps less focus, but the focus that has been applied has been in stark contrast to sort of red lines that the Biden administration had, for example, sending officials to Kabul.

Jim Cardoso: 11:17

So, I mean, you talk about, I mean, I mean, the Trump administration has done some things, but you did also say that really, really, not much. It's almost been a, I won't say disengagement, but just has been a lot of attention from the Trump administration. A lot of other things have been going on as we watch the Trump administration, you know, pursue from when they, when they, when they took over. But, I mean, can the US really afford to disengage from Afghanistan without strategic consequences. I

Jonathan Schroden: 11:45

think the there's sort of security and perhaps a moral component to that question. So you could, you could arguably disengage on some of the humanitarian things that the Biden administration was doing. So, you know, overall, the Biden administration spent something like $2 billion on humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, which it largely routed, or almost entirely routed through third party, international organizations, nonprofits and the like, to try and avoid having any of that money, you know, benefit the Taliban, or end up in the Taliban's coffers in any way. So far, what we've seen from the Trump administration is vastly less interest in the provision of humanitarian aid, not just to Afghanistan, but but all around the world. I mean, the the obvious, obviously the complete disestablishment of us a ID as well as, you know, specific things like the Food for Peace program, and you know, some of these major programs that the US had had for a long time focused on humanitarian assistance, this administration has quite clearly said we're not interested in doing those types of things. And so you can disengage in that way, and and probably, you know, sort of get away with it, if you will, to be a little bit flip when it comes to US national security interests, although there is, of course, a moral argument that one could make that, you know, if you, if you withhold that type of humanitarian assistance, then there's going to be a lot more suffering in places like Afghanistan, and we can have a long debate about to what extent the US should be responsible for that. Should feel responsible for it, et cetera. But that's sort of a fact of the matter on the security side, though, I think it's a little bit less obvious that the US can or should disengage from Afghanistan and expect no eventual blowback from that type of decision. And I know we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about sort of terrorism and terrorist groups there, so I won't go too far into the weeds here now, but suffice to say, there are a number of active terrorist groups still present in Afghanistan and the sort of Pakistan border region. Every time those groups have had pressure removed from them, they have shown the ability to reconstitute capability and to cause problems beyond the borders of Afghanistan. And so the idea that the US could or should completely withdraw its attention from those particular problem sets, I think is problematic. From a US national security focus,

Jim Cardoso: 14:27

you know, you rewrote the decision brief for for GNSI, and in it you outlined, you know, policy options for the Trump administration, and you had four different policy possibilities. Which one do you think is, what have you seen so far, and what do you expect going forward? Yeah,

Jonathan Schroden: 14:53

I've seen, perhaps bits and pieces of of each of them, and which is, which is fair. I mean, I Yes. Said in the article that these were not mutually exclusive options, and some degree of menu picking from among them may be an appropriate way to sort of think about things overall. I would say I've seen the most alignment with the fourth option I listed, which is effectively de prioritizing Afghanistan and ignoring it as much as you possibly can. Yeah, and to your point, there are obviously a lot of higher priority things going on. Certainly the Department of Defense is, you know, bore sighted on China, in its in its planning and acquisitions, and a lot of other things. Although operationally, of course, it's fighting multiple, shall we call them, campaigns against Iran, against the Houthis, supporting Ukraine, on and off, against the Russians. So there's a lot going on that is not Afghanistan. And certainly Afghanistan doesn't need to be a top tier priority. Shouldn't be even under the Biden administration, Thomas West, the special envoy at some point, stated that his express orders from the White House were to keep Afghanistan off their radar. And so I think that's in some ways, you know, a continued goal is to have this be as low a priority as possible. So that's primarily what we've seen, but we have also seen elements of the third option, which is conditional engagement. So again, the sort of release of the US citizen is an example of that. We haven't actually seen increase in economic or political pressure on the Taliban, which is a little interesting to me, given the sort of rhetoric we heard on the campaign trail. So we haven't seen much of that. And in fact, the delisting of Siraj Khani was an interesting move that I certainly didn't anticipate coming. And then on the first part, sort of increased military or counterterrorism pressure we haven't seen that specific to Afghanistan, although it has been publicly stated by Sebastian Gorka, who's the the lead for counterterrorism in the White House, that one of the things Trump uh did early on was to devolve authorities for counterterrorism targeting that were closely held by the Biden White House at the sort of NSC level in The Trump administration, they have pushed those authorities down more to the combatant commander level, or in some cases, even below that. And so that has enabled, you know, more aggressive and more rapid strikes against targets in Somalia and against the Houthis. We haven't yet seen those authorities applied to Afghanistan. And you know, there, you could speculate as to why that is, either they haven't found targets that would warrant it, or the intelligence isn't there to sort of support that. That's sort of my my speculation. Yeah, it's hard to

Jim Cardoso: 17:52

say how much capability we have to find, you know, the old find, fix and finish motif,

Jonathan Schroden: 17:57

and those capabilities may be, you know, saturated in in prosecuting strikes against ISIS Somalia and Houthis, which, which we've seen a number of those types of actions in recent months.

Jim Cardoso: 18:10

So you also wrote the the article for the journal strategic security, a little little more in depth. And you really, you know, kind of you dig more into the terrorist aspects that are going on in Afghanistan. So could you briefly describe, you know, there's three. You kind of settled on three main terrorist groups of most interest in Afghanistan, and what distinguishes them? That's kind of part one and then part two. You can kind of delve into which one should we care the most about, and why?

Jonathan Schroden: 18:42

Sure, so, yeah, so the US military, when it was in Afghanistan, was very fond of saying there's 20 designated terrorist organizations operating in this region. And while that's technically true, if you look at the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organization list, there's really three that are the ones that the US cares the most about, and those are al Qaeda, the Islamic State Khorasan province, and the Pakistani Taliban, which is usually abbreviated TTP. So Al Qaeda, obvious historical, longtime enemy of the US, responsible for 911 they are still present in Afghanistan. The degree to which they're present is a bit of an item of sort of hot debate, or at least it was during the Biden administration, between the Biden intel community and folks like Special Envoy West and the UN the United Nations terrorism monitoring team. So the Biden administration, their argument was that al Qaeda was at a to use an exact phrase from them at a historical Nadir, and Tom West, at one point, said that he his conclusion was that al Qaeda is capability to. In Afghanistan was the lowest it had been since Osama bin Laden moved there from Sudan pre 911 and that was the sort of assessment of the US intelligence community. The UN monitoring group, had a different view, which is their their conclusion was there are still several 100, possibly as many as 400 members of Afghan al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And while they haven't, you know, they haven't performed any external operations from Afghanistan. There's no indication that, you know there are sort of Osama bin Laden 911 style training camps or planning activities, or those types of things happening that there is nonetheless this cadre of very dangerous people who are active and who are actively connected to other affiliates of al Qaeda, other members of the International jihadist communities, and are still doing nefarious things that we should be concerned about. So there was this sort of, you know, debate, and honestly, I don't think any of us know for sure the truth may be somewhere in the middle, as it often is when you have intelligence entities that disagree, but that's sort of the case for al Qaeda. The bottom line there, though, is Al Qaeda is a much diminished organization, at least in Afghanistan from what it was historically the US killed bin Laden's successor as the head of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, about a year after the withdrawal from Kabul, roughly three years to today's date, and Al Qaeda has not publicly named a successor. It's sort of widely believed that Saif al Adil is who was the al Qaeda number three guy for a long time, is probably the current leader of al Qaeda, but they've not announced that publicly, and nobody sort of really knows where he is. He was long known to be in Iran for a long time. Some people believe he's still there. Other people argue that he has, in fact, emigrated to Afghanistan at this point in time. But nobody really knows for sure, at least not publicly so. So Al Qaeda still exists. It is still dangerous. We should not forget about them or take our eye off of that ball. But they are much diminished in Afghanistan, from where they were, the Islamic State Khorasan province, or ISK for short, is the group that pretty much everyone agrees is the major concern in Afghanistan. They are a virulent arm of the Islamic State, sort of enterprise, if you will. Their capabilities have ebbed and flowed over time, but they have always shown an ability to rebound from losses that they sustained, either at the hands of the United States or at the hands of the Taliban or both. And so the US, even during the Biden administration, was very clear that is k was their primary concern. The same is true of pretty much every regional country and other countries that pay attention to what's happening in Afghanistan. Everybody believes that this group is the major problem. And what's interesting is the Taliban also believe that, and there's sort of two reasons. One is the if you think about, you know, challenges to the Taliban's complete control and a security sense of Afghanistan. Yes, there are some Afghan resistance groups that you know have the ability to challenge them in certain areas. But those groups capabilities are relatively low and and relative and they're, they're relatively well contained. ISK is the predominant group that could challenge the Taliban's complete control of Afghanistan from a security perspective, it's also the most virulent ideological competitor to the Taliban. The Taliban are a religious movement who claim to be the defenders of the faith in both this region, but also in some instances, much more broadly than that. And is ks one of their primary vectors of attack against the Taliban, is to say that, in fact, that's not true, that the Taliban lost the way that they have failed to continue to act in sort of a pure jihadist sense, for example, by engaging with the United States at all. And so ISK argues that in fact, they are the vanguard of pure Islam in this region. And the Taliban are apostates at this point in time. So for both of those reasons, the Taliban hate this group as well, and have taken significant actions to try and limit them, to reduce their capability, et cetera. And those activities have had mixed results. So ISK still maintains a lot of capability. They have not been able to attack the. US, homeland, but they have carried out, over the last year, year and a half, some very significant attacks in Russia, in a couple of European countries. They were unsuccessful, but were on the verge of something fairly significant. You know, there was a Taylor Swift concert that had to be canceled, for example, because of a no kidding ISIS threat,

Jim Cardoso: 25:21

catastrophe, right there economic, economic impact.

Jonathan Schroden: 25:28

So, you know, so there were some real examples of ISK being able to reach out and touch people beyond the borders of Afghanistan, in in very violent and and in some ways, horrific ways. So that group is still a major concern. And then you have the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban, and they are primarily of concern to Pakistan. They don't have the capability, nor do they have any sort of expressed wherewithal, to attack much beyond the borders of Pakistan or the Afghan Pakistan border region, and the US is not nearly as concerned about TTP, nor are most other countries really. It's mostly Pakistan that sees them as a sort of existential threat to the Pakistani state, and Pakistan has done all kinds of things to try and deal with that. They've they've tried targeting them, they've tried negotiating with them, they've tried pressuring the Taliban to do something about them, because they argue that the TTP have sanctuary on the Afghan side of the border, and that the Taliban are either actively or tacitly supporting them as well. And so you have this sort of like tit for tat between Pakistan and the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, about the Pakistani Taliban, which is all very ironic, because, as you know, and as many people listening would appreciate, the Pakistanis supported the Afghan Taliban on their side of the border and provided them sanctuary against US forces and the Afghan government for decades. And so this is you know, as they say, when you keep snakes up your sleeve, you are likely to get bitten. And Pakistan is being bitten right now, and they don't like it. They do not

Jim Cardoso: 27:07

but they're not really TTP, UNC them as a significant concern to the US, no. And in fact, the after the even across the region beyond like Pakistan after the

Jonathan Schroden: 27:18

US withdrew from Afghanistan, I would say it cared vastly less about GDP than it did when it was present. Do

Jim Cardoso: 27:26

you think that the US? I mean, you know, you mentioned al Qaeda, they're well, I mean, a lot of Americans recognize that name go I think I've heard of them. They had something to do with 911 which was, yeah, they were the genesis of 911 they had been degraded significantly. As you said, Where do you think the US? So, what do you think the US stands on that? I mean, you talked about that, but maybe you know a little bit deeper on that, in terms of, you know us, how they viewed al Qaeda as this kind of historic enemy. And Al Qaeda is known, you know, hatred of the US, with ISK more emerging, but now seen as the most concern from the US and their international community. Do you think that the activities of the US, whatever they may be, although, as we talked about, a lot of it has been kind of almost ignoring the problem. Do you think that's going to make that shift? Or where do you think the US is going to

Jonathan Schroden: 28:17

sit on that? I think the US is still concerned about al Qaeda, I don't get the sense that we have completely taken our eye off of that ball in terms of writing them off entirely. As you know, we don't need to be concerned about these guys anymore. They're a washed up organization. They don't have any capability that I do not sense that in any form or fashion. The and there are still a few, you know, high value targets, if you want to use that term associated with al Qaeda, I mean say fall Auto is, you know, an original member of the band, if you will, one of the few surviving and someone who had, you know, some degree of responsibility for 911 and I'm Sure the US would love to exact some type of, you know, Justice on him, in some form or fashion. So there is, I have no doubt, a continuing effort to try and locate him, and, you know, some of the other surviving senior members of al Qaeda and either capture or kill them as a result of their involvement in 911 so there is sort of that that, you know, desire to not sort of forget what these guys did, and to use whatever capabilities we still have to try and bring them to some form of justice.

Jim Cardoso: 29:34

How much should, or how much are the US cooperating with the partners in the region against these different groups. And you kind of mentioned how each group has a different, you know, main, you know, enemy that is is more concerned about their growth and their activities. How, how do you see the US is, is, again, not just inside Afghanistan, but even across outside of. Afghanistan as sort of regional problems as these things spill over. Where do you where do you see the US going now, or taking that as far as their their their partnership with other players in the region against these groups, or even players outside the region who see these group, the growth of these groups, maybe could be, you know, Saudi partners, or things like that, who see the growth of these groups as a as a threat.

Jonathan Schroden: 30:19

So that's a really good question. And as you know, the US doesn't have much in the way of friends, reliable, trusted friends in this region. You can start with Afghanistan itself. The Taliban are there, obviously, and we talked about how we have this sort of shared enemy in the Islamic State during the Biden administration, they sort of made clear that they had had been sharing some form or fashion of information with the Taliban. They said it wasn't actionable intelligence, but they did give the Taliban information that might help them do some things against ISK, and there were numerous engagements that were reported publicly, albeit with very little detail between senior officials of the CIA and the Taliban's equivalent, which is called GDI. And so you sort of assume that in those engagements that US was again giving information, or perhaps establishing some type of information sharing arrangements with the Taliban. Beyond that, though, you know that there's no indication that the Trump administration has done much of that, or if they have, they haven't said anything about it publicly. And you know, if you look beyond the Taliban, certainly the US is never going to get to a situation where, you know, sort of embodies full throated partnership with the Taliban. From a counterterrorism perspective, we just don't trust them in that way. Beyond Afghanistan, if you look at Iran, clearly they're not going to be helpful to us, even before we bombed their nuclear sites, and certainly not after. You can look at the Central Asian states. I think there was hope in the wake of the US withdrawal, that the US might be able to negotiate a presence in one of those countries for some special operations or other counterterrorism assets. They certainly tried. There's public statements that they tried to negotiate like that, but those countries are still largely under the political sway of Russia. And with the war in Ukraine and the US support to Ukraine, Russia is in no headspace to allow the US to maintain any type of military, you know, presence, either overtly or otherwise, in the Central Asian states. And so that leaves you with Pakistan, and certainly the US, you know, relationship with Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the war in Afghanistan, but it ended on a real sour note, right the Taliban Ascendance in Kabul, which the US sort of looks at Pakistan as having had a very strong hand in via their longstanding allowance of the Taliban to have sanctuary in Pakistan, for its senior leaders, to live there, et cetera. So the US left Afghanistan with a very bad taste in its mouth for Pakistan and a very, very poor relationship with Pakistan. And that has largely continued. I mean, there's been some high points. The Trump administration did negotiate the sort of surrender of an ISIS K member that it believed was responsible for the attack at Abbey gate that killed 13 US service members, and President Trump talked about that in his State of the Union address. But beyond that, there's not much love between the US and Pakistan at this point in time, so you don't really have a lot in the way of great options in the region, which is why the US approach to counterterrorism in Afghanistan right now is primarily still the over the horizon approach that the Biden administration crafted, which entails flying drones from various bases in the on the Arabian Peninsula, presumably through Pakistani airspace, and lingering them over Afghanistan for as long as they can in order to collect whatever intelligence they can. But if you think about how far that distance is, even for unmanned drones which have the ability to fly for quite some time. It's still a long ways to go there and back, which leaves you with very little time. You know, as sort of a percentage of each sortie, you have a very small percentage that you're actually able to collect intelligence over Afghanistan. And so that's primarily where the US is. There have been some experiments, apparently, to identify drones that would have longer loitering times over Afghanistan. The extent to which those have been put into operational practice has not been publicly made known, and honestly, I don't, I don't know either, but there are, you know, in the paper that you reference. To the Journal of strategic security paper, I do give a number of other specific ideas that the US might think about using in order to do better in terms of collecting Intel, because ultimately, that's what we need, right? We need to know where, where the bad guys are. What are they up to? And we just don't have the same level of visibility that we had when we were there. I mean, general McKenzie, the GNSI director, now, when he was still the CENTCOM commander, testified right that we had maybe one to 2% of the capability post withdrawal to see what was happening in Afghanistan that we did when we were on the ground. So obviously, it's a very limited picture that we're able to keep track of now. Yeah,

Jim Cardoso: 35:43

there's some great over the horizon capabilities, but compared to what we had when we were in country and with the human capabilities as well, in addition to the technical capabilities, yeah, it's just, it just can't be the same. So that's something we have to work around. One last question, I'm going to pull back a little bit, and this one just, I'm kind of curious on this, and this is more of a, I guess, more of a political than a policy question. And I know we don't get too much into the policy aspects of it, but I'm curious, you know, you talk about, you know, partnering in any way with the Taliban, or working with the Taliban, how does the Trump administration right? For that matter, any administration navigate the moral aspects of that, the Human Rights aspects of of who the Taliban are and how they've proven themselves to be, versus the unsavory reality of they are the government of Afghanistan. It's something that I think multiple administrations have struggled with, and will continue to struggle with. How is that navigated going forward?

Jonathan Schroden: 36:52

It's, I mean, it's a it's sort of the million dollar question, not only for the Trump administration. It was for the Biden administration as well, and really, for every country around the world, right? You have this regime that pretty much every country looks at and says, what you're doing is horrific, especially to women and girls. There is no other country. I mean, even the most authoritarian countries you can imagine do not treat their women and girl populations the way the Taliban are treating them, and certainly within the Islamic world, there are no other Islamic countries. I mean, as strict as some of those countries are with respect to the way women dress and how they're allowed to behave publicly, their strictures are still vastly less restrictive than what the Taliban have put in place. So they are the Taliban are an outlier in every sense of the word when it comes to sort of international stage and human rights on the on the international stage. So every country that engages with them has the same challenge. To what extent is your engagement legitimizing them as a government and therefore contributing to their ability to enact these policies, and conversely, to what extent would disengagement further the suffering of the Afghan people by not allowing the delivery of humanitarian aid and these types of things? So it is a very thorny path to walk, and we've seen various iterations and attempts at this. Some countries have decided to be a bit more realpolitik towards the Taliban and to sort of take them more as they are with the under, with the sort of hope, if you will, that if you engage them in a limited way and try and build some degree of trust with them that maybe then you can expand the conversation to things that are in this vein, right? So more specifically, for example, if you engage the Taliban on things like climate change, which is impacting Afghanistan in ways that are detrimental to the Afghan people, and that the Taliban may actually want to do something about, things like water scarcity, food scarcity. Maybe you could build some bridges there. The Taliban have also taken, somewhat surprisingly, I think, a very strong stance against the cultivation of narcotics, precursors, you know, Poppy, most notably, but also various plants, you know, marijuana, things that lead to the plants that they used to build various speed drugs as well, the Taliban have clamped down on a lot of that which a lot of European countries for years had been trying to Do and wanting, you know, the Afghan government, to do, and so, you know, maybe you could work with the Taliban on Counter Narcotics as a bridge of mutual interest. So there have been these attempts to try and, okay, let's, let's set aside the, you know, the al Qaeda part, which we would like you to do something about. But the Taliban don't want to, because they have this historic. Relationship there. Let's set aside for the moment, human rights. Let's focus on this other group of topics that we have mutual interest in, and maybe over time, we could then start to broach, you know, into these other other areas that it's, it's a it is as reasonable a strategy as one might be able to craft, I think. But the countries that have tried to do that so far, and the UN has tried to walk this path as well, have found it very, very difficult to get beyond those initial set of topics. The Taliban are just steadfastly refusing to move into discussions on some of these other topics, and they have proven themselves willing and able to absorb a vast amount of international pressure. So the sort of Converse argument is, you've been doing all these engagements. You haven't gotten anything for it. You should stop doing that, and instead, put the screws to them. There is little, if any, indication that putting the screws to the Taliban will change their behavior in any meaningful way at all. So it is the million dollar question, and there is no great answer to that. Unfortunately,

Jim Cardoso: 41:13

it's, you know, it's not, not the end the podcast on sort of a downbeat but, I mean, it is just the challenge. That's why we have these discussions to get these insights out there and help policy makers, whatever the policy for Afghanistan is going to be going forward. And I think we would both probably agree that it should be something beyond kind of almost nothing like it seems to be right now, but some significant challenges for either the Trump administration, or administrations beyond him, and how they deal with Afghanistan. Any final thoughts as we close out the podcast,

Jonathan Schroden: 41:48

I would just say, you know it Afghanistan has been a challenging topic for the United States for a long time. We put a lot of attention on it in the last 20 years, and there were probably some detrimental effects that accrued from that much attention. But if you go back more than, you know, pre, pre, 2001 we put very little attention on it, and there were negative effects that accrued from that too. So, you know this, this pendulum swing from almost no attention to probably way too much back to almost no attention certainly doesn't look like the right approach from a longer, you know, term, historical lens. So I would really like to see something in the middle, right? It doesn't have to be a lot, but it shouldn't be none, or shouldn't be almost none. And so that's really what I would hope the Trump administration would would sort of find its way to at some point in the near future. Is, is a sort of limited but, but actually proactively stated and executed policy on Afghanistan, whatever that may look like. John,

Jim Cardoso: 42:50

thank you. Appreciate you being here in studio to have this discussion. Thanks for your

Jonathan Schroden: 42:55

time today. Yeah, again. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. We hope you enjoyed our conversation

Jim Cardoso: 42:59

with Dr Jonathan schroeden, the Chief Research Officer at CNA Corporation, and one of the world's leading experts on Afghanistan. If you'd like to read the decision brief and the Journal of strategic security article that we discussed a bit today, you can find them both on our website under publications. Next week, on at the boundary, we'll be talking with USF researcher William Parker, he recently authored a decision brief analyzing the gold holdings of BRICS, that consortium led by China and Russia is trying to leverage its growing position in the world gold reserves to counter the dominance of the US Dollar as a global currency, and to provide an alternative to Western institutions. It's an overlooked topic on the world economic and national security stage, but it shouldn't be. We're looking forward to our discussion with William Parker, thanks for listening today. If you like the podcast, please subscribe and let your friends and colleagues know. You can follow GNSI on our LinkedIn next accounts at USF, underscore GNSI And check out our website as well, at usf.edu/gnsi, when you're there, don't forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter that's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary. You.