The Taliban enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a test case for arguments about American foreign policy and, once, about immigration law. Across four episodes the group is named as the object of the 2001 intervention, as an example of a terrorist organization that uses forced labor, and as a party whose removal from power guests assess differently. The excerpts do not describe the Taliban’s formation, its rule in Afghanistan, or its composition; they record only what guests say about American action toward it.
The 2001 intervention and its aftermath
In a June 2011 episode, Nick Gillespie placed the Taliban inside a broader indictment of American war-making. He said the United States went to war with Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden, that the Taliban was gotten rid of, and that bin Laden was lost and eventually obtained on what he called basically a covert mission. He added that nobody knows what the United States is still doing in Afghanistan, and that the country had by then been at war there more than twice as long as it had been in World War II. In the same passage he described Iraq as having been spinning in the sand for years and Libya as the latest in a bizarre adventure, which at that point did not even have a fig leaf of constitutionally required congressional authorization Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Gillespie’s framing of the intervention was not one of opposition in principle. He rejected as nuts the caller’s implication that the 9/11 attacks were engineered by anyone other than Al-Qaeda, saying that Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and his confederates were behind it and that to question this was its own form of insanity. His criticism fell on cost and duration: defense spending since 2000 had essentially doubled, from about $400 billion a year in current dollars to closer to $800 billion, with President Obama’s ten-year projections approaching a trillion dollars. Bob Zadek added that the department had been called the Department of War until 1947, when consolidation changed its name to the Department of Defense while its mission remained that of a Department of War Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Preble: the mission, not the target, was the error
Chris Preble, speaking in February 2022, drew the distinction more sharply. Taking the case of the war in Afghanistan to go after the Taliban and to dislodge Al-Qaeda after 9/11, he said he did not think it was a mistake to have launched a military operation, or even to call it a war, to disrupt the Al-Qaeda camps and to dislodge the Taliban from power. The mistake, in his account, was in changing the terms of that mission to a much more expansive one: to try to establish a functioning government in Afghanistan, which he said ended in utter failure because the government the United States had spent thousands of American lives to create collapsed at the first sign as soon as the United States withdrew Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022).
Preble set out criteria for when war is justified: a compelling U.S. national interest, strong public support, a declaration of war, a clear mission with a defined end, and force as a last resort. He described himself as a libertarian but not a pacifist, and said the United States has waged war from time to time in ways that are justified. He applied the same criteria to the Second World War, which he called a tough case for libertarians, and to Vietnam, which he called tougher to defend and not ultimately in the U.S. national interest. His book The Power Problem supplied the governing image: when you have a really big hammer, everything looks like a nail Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022).
Mueller: the Taliban should not have been taken out
John Mueller, in a February 2022 episode, went further than either Gillespie or Preble. He argued that complacency after 9/11 would have been much better than the massive over-expenditure that followed, including the two wars overseas that he said should not have been fought. It would have been better, he said, to cut back, to go after Al-Qaeda itself, and not to take out the Taliban, which he described as not friendly that much with Al-Qaeda, dealing with the matter in a more complacent manner. He allowed that complete complacency after 9/11 would not have made much sense, but endorsed what he called a more moderate complacency: a cautious, careful, deliberate and limited pursuit of an enemy he characterized as mostly smoke and mirrors, without exaggerating the threat of further attacks China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller extended the principle to China and Russia, asking what those countries want and answering that, the Taiwan issue aside, they want to play a bigger role on the world stage and to have influence in some countries. He said neither has been doing too well at increasing its influence, and that being complacent rather than going into hysterics is better than militarized responses. On proliferation he noted that the number of people killed by nuclear weapons since 1945 is zero, while the number killed because of anti-proliferation efforts such as the war in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands. Bob Zadek closed the episode by identifying Mueller as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a member of the Political Science Department and a senior research scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, and by recommending The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
The Taliban and the asylum bar
The Taliban’s only appearance outside foreign-policy discussion comes in an August 2021 episode on asylum. Ilya Somin explained that asylum is an exception to the default rule that a person entering the United States without a visa or citizenship is barred or deportable, available where the government agrees the applicant has been persecuted or threatened with persecution on grounds including race, ethnicity, religion, gender and political views. He then described a further exception: even an otherwise eligible applicant cannot claim asylum after giving what the statute calls material support for terrorism Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Somin said the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled in 2018 that this principle applies even where the person was a slave laborer for a terrorist group. The case he described involved a woman from El Salvador kidnapped by left-wing guerrillas in the 1990s, whose husband was killed before her eyes after being forced to dig his own grave, and who was then forced to work as a slave laborer cooking, cleaning and washing clothes. The Board ruled that this qualified as material support for terrorism and that she was therefore not eligible to apply for asylum. Somin said the reasoning has broader applicability, reaching many terrorist groups including the Islamic State, or ISIS, or the Taliban, which he said often make use of forced labor of various kinds. He offered the extreme case of Yazidi women used as sexual slave laborers by ISIS, who on this theory would have provided material support for terrorism and been ineligible for asylum Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Bob Zadek compared the asylum grounds to hate crime legislation, in which the same violent crime draws an enhanced sentence when the motive is hatred, and asked whether the country had decided that it does not care if a person is oppressed but requires that they be oppressed for the right reason. Somin agreed the analogy made some sense but said it underestimated the problem: in the hate crimes context the underlying act remains a crime regardless of motive, whereas under the asylum rules an applicant who does not qualify on the listed characteristics is excluded completely Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Across episodes: the same question, three answers
The question of whether the Taliban should have been targeted in 2001 is argued in three episodes, and the answers move in one direction. Gillespie in 2011 treated the removal of the Taliban as an accomplished fact and located the error in the open-ended wars that followed, while affirming that Al-Qaeda and bin Laden were responsible for 9/11. Preble in 2022 defended the initial operation to dislodge the Taliban and attack Al-Qaeda and located the error in the expanded mission of building an Afghan government. Mueller, in the episode aired a week after Preble’s, located the error in the operation itself, saying the Taliban should not have been taken out. The 2021 asylum episode does not join this argument; it uses the Taliban only as an illustration of a group whose forced labor triggers the material support bar.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of the Taliban’s founding, its leadership, its ideology, its period in power, or its return to power in Afghanistan. Nothing in them describes the Taliban’s relationship to the Afghan population, to other armed groups, or to foreign governments beyond the assertions quoted above. The asylum discussion states that the Taliban often make use of forced labor but gives no instance, date or documentation. No excerpt names a statute, a case, or a bill by title in connection with the Taliban.