Remotely Saving Lives During Withdrawal From Afghanistan

David:

Welcome to Disarming Data. We're looking at data and privacy from the perspective of two generations.

Paige:

I'm Paige Biderman. I'm a millennial who grew up in the tech generation.

David:

I'm David Biderman. I'm the boomer. I don't know anything about tech. I usually lose my cell phone rather than use my cell phone. I'm a tech novice. In this podcast, we'll be having conversations with cyber hackers, privacy experts, and guardians of security who can explain some of this to me.

Paige:

And Dad, you forgot about whistleblowers and other people who are interesting and influential to us.

David:

And Paige, you forgot to say thank you for listening to the show.

Paige:

Thanks for listening.

David:

Hey, I'm David Biderman. Welcome.

Paige:

And I'm Paige.

Joe:

Hi, David, Paige, thanks for having me.

David:

We're very pleased to have you. You're a true hero and a veteran of our wars, but we're talking about heroism, caring and technology. That's our theme for today.

Paige:

Last year, during our very hasty evacuation from Afghanistan, Joe organized a group called Team America, which was an impromptu network of veterans and citizens that came together to evacuate and execute an ad hoc mission to get American citizens and Afghan allies safely out of Afghanistan. From thousands miles away, Joe organized what was called a Digital Dunkirk. His group channeled and flew basically hundreds of people out. I really want him to be able to talk about it. Welcome to our podcast, and we only have an hour, so we just want to get right into it. But we always ask our guests to kind of provide a background to themselves, where you grew up, how you got to into the army and military, and/or military, and about your time in Iraq.

Joe:

I was born in Bangor, Maine. "Banger," I guess it's pronounced, has a 30-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunion at the entrance to the town. My dad was a coast Guardsman, like a career coast Guardsman. That's a branch of the military. So, we moved around a lot. I lived in Norfolk, Virginia Beach area. I lived in the DC area several times. I lived in West Virginia. Lived in Washington DC.

So, when it came time for me to go to college, I was in the DC area. That's where my dad's most recent duty station was. He was still active duty. And it was just really clear my parents did not have the money to send me to college. And I'd been clear since I was a kid, like really young, that that would likely be the case. And so, I was very familiar with the military, and I decided to use it as a way to pay for school.

I also sort of grew up in the generation that was about to graduate high school right when 9/11 happened, and so being in the DC area, had a front row seat to that. Thought my dad was in the Pentagon the day that 9/11 happened. He wasn't. Also, had to sort of live through the DC sniper attacks and the anthrax attacks, sort of just a lot swirling in that environment at the time.

But I got a full Army ROTC scholarship to Georgetown University. No way I would have afforded it otherwise. They pay your tuition, they pay for your books, and then you get a small stipend. It wasn't enough to pay for all my dorm and everything else, so I worked another job all through Georgetown. And when I was commissioned as an army officer in 2007, I was commissioned the day I graduated, took the oath and became an infantry officer, a lieutenant. And so, that's how I got in the Army. That's how I grew up.

David:

Wow, that's fascinating. And do you want to talk for a minute about your service in Iraq?

Joe:

Sure, yeah. It was pretty boring, run of the mill. I would stress that I'm a very average, I was a very average infantry officer. There's lots of people that did many more tours and more difficult situations, and I personally had very little interest in the time in trying to be involved in some of those wars. I didn't believe in the war in Iraq at all, but it was at a time when I just sort of understood that I had to do the best I could with the situation I was given. I even talked to my soldiers about it. I was like, "We all know by now, our government lied to us about the reasons to go Iraq, but that's not something you have control over. You're going there anyway. And the best thing we can do with the situation we have is to try to make it better, to try to help the people that are here, to pursue those perpetrating violence, and then bring each other home alive."

We were supposed to deploy to Kirkuk, Iraq. And then, the hardest part about it for me was we found out right before the deployment, my wife was pregnant. I met my wife in college. She ran track at Georgetown, was on a track scholarship. So, we were expecting a baby, right? And so, I'm going to war and it's like, this is supposed to happen in the movies, not in your life. Yeah, we just put our game face on. My game face had to be on for the entire time I was in the Army. I think it was while I was on the plane, they changed where we were going. I was supposed to go to Kirkuk, and they're like, "Well, you're going to Mosul, because they need more infantry." And when a place needs more infantry, it's not good.

So, yeah, Mosul at the time was the most violent city in the world, as you saw in later years. It was later captured by ISIS. So, we were hunting proto-ISIS groups, hadn't yet coalesced to become ISIS. I was also doing a lot of ribbon cuttings of school rebuilds and clinic rebuilds and road rebuilds that we'd funded. I was a 24-year-old lieutenant. I had to meet with these sheiks, these leaders of towns, and they're like three times my age, and say, "Tell me how we can help your town," and just hope they take you somewhat seriously, don't laugh you out of the room.

That was most of my experience. I wasn't like running around pulling the trigger all the time or anything like that. We did have a number of serious attacks on our unit. We lost some guys, we had some wounded and all that. But I came home to my daughter and wife in one piece, and then I quickly got out of the Army and went to graduate school. Then I stayed as an Army drilling reservist, so I taught ROTC for a few years in Colorado.

David:

Oh, wow. And did you go to graduate school, business school, or what did you do?

Joe:

I went to get a master's in education at Stanford University. I decided that what I wanted to do after the military was to be a teacher, and then be a school principal and start a school. That's what I wanted to do.

David:

Wow.

Paige:

And you coach soccer, right?

Joe:

Yeah. I love, I'm obsessed with soccer. I love soccer. It's like our thing in this house. So yeah, I coach elites. I have coached elite soccer, I should say. I grew up playing elite soccer. My daughters are, I mean, my older daughter, who's about to turn 13, she's on the number one team in the nation for her age. I mean, they're like...

Paige:

Oh, that's incredible.

Joe:

Yeah, some of these kids are studs. I mean, not just my kids, but the kids in this age, they're amazing, what they're able to do. Yeah, so I do that as... I had been doing that as a volunteer in Colorado for a bunch of years.

David:

Is your goal still to start a school someday?

Joe:

Probably not. No. I think I would love to, but I think that ship has sailed. I really deeply care about social impact and fighting poverty. That's kind of where I've spent my career. But yeah, I think, for whatever reason, it sort of took some other turns and I'm doing some other stuff that I love. It's more focused on workforce education and whatnot. But yeah, starting a school is probably not in the cards, but who knows? I didn't expect that an international evacuation would be, either.

David:

Yeah, we probably ought to switch to that. I know it's a tough subject for you, but could you describe how you came to help the Afghans who had helped America, and then were left behind?

Joe:

Yeah, I mean, I pay attention to the news a lot. I mean, my undergrad is in foreign service, foreign affairs, so I read voraciously. And so, I'm always up to date on what's going on pretty much anywhere in the world. And I've been following Afghanistan for a while, and I could tell that 2021 was going to be the year that the Taliban took it back. But, like everybody else, there was nothing I was going to do about it. There was nothing I could do about it. I hadn't even been to Afghanistan. I served in Iraq, right?

And so, I think I'm on a soccer field coaching, or setting up a drill, or a weave drill or something, and my brother Dan calls me. I don't normally pick up during practice, but in this case I did, because it was early in practice. And he is like... And Dan's an engineer in Arizona. He's a water engineer, PhD level, does international development for water projects.

He's like, "Hey, I need your help. I've got a friend in Afghanistan. He's going to be killed. I need you to..." It's August 12th, 2021. "I need you to help get him out." I was like, "Dan, I have no idea how to get somebody out of Afghanistan, but let me ask around." The one thing I do have is, I do have a big network. So, I think I put something on social media or something, and one of my friends who's a serving officer in the Pentagon, we'd done ROTC together in college, responded, and he said, "Hey, just give me a call." I haven't talked to this guy in 20 years.

He said, "Well, here's what you need to do. You got to write him a letter vouching for him, and then say he's going to come live with you and your family, because you own your house. Your brother doesn't own his house yet. He rents. Say he's going to come live with you and your family, and you have a big spacious loft where he's going to come and live." And I was like, "Awesome." And he's like, "Oh, and get it notarized." So then I was like, I quickly write it, this letter. I run over to my neighbor who's a lawyer. I'm like, "Notarize this." Great. Send it in. Boom. Good, right?

David:

Yeah.

Joe:

And then it got a little more dire. You saw the Taliban show up the gates of the city and encircle the city. And I'd managed to get in ahold of a Georgetown graduate, an alumni, just through a connection of a friend at the embassy in Kabul, and I spoke to them on the phone and I explained the situation, and he said, "No worries. We're going to get a phone call in the hour telling them where to go. We got you."

Phone call never comes. Embassy Falls, city falls. And so, at that point I was like, well, I don't know, maybe we can try to help him. I don't know. That's kind of how it started.

David:

Wow. I'll let you expand, because it became a network and with using a lot of technology. If you could describe that for our listeners, that'd be great.

Joe:

Initially, there was no intention of forming a network or an organization, or pulling off some massive evacuation. I very reluctantly got involved and had no... It was like, it's not a stunt. It was not something I planned to do. I think I was just a few days back from a vacation in Hawaii. That's where my head was at, right? And I agreed to try to talk to these people, and it really quickly got intense. They made several attempts to go near the airport. There was a curfew put in the city. There was shooting everywhere. And wow, this is bad.

But I realized early on that there was one really important thing in talking to my brother Dan, and talking to this friend at the Pentagon, who then brought in a couple other friends. We actually had a network right there. I mean, there was maybe five of us, but everybody was talking to one Afghan family who could see or hear one other thing, right? And they might get information from other relatives around the city.

So I realized, we actually had the makings of a network. And so, this later snowballed significantly, but we were crowdsourcing information from people in crisis, and then crowdsharing that information back with other people in crisis.

We had some early luck getting some people in. We were able to communicate with the Marine Corps manning one of the gates, and through one of the members of that early team. One of the team members, unbeknownst to me, decided to contact Military Times, which is a military-oriented newspaper, wrote an article about it. The guy calls me up and I say, "Oh yeah, here's what we're doing." And he said, "What do you call yourself?" And I was like, "I don't know. Team America?" And people thought it was a joke about the profane movie, you know, the cartoon movie?

I'd never seen it, actually, believe it or not. Yeah, it's super offensive. It's horrible. My wife almost divorced me after she found out what I named it after. And the goal was, I was just thinking we were spread out across the United States. It was more corny than profane, really, was what it was. And he's like, "Well, how can people contact you?" I was like, "I don't know." And so, Dan, my brother made up an email. It really quickly became clear. I think we got a thousand emails in the first 24 hours.

Paige:

Oh, wow.

Joe:

So, I was like, all right, we're going to need some help here. So, I reached out to my network on Facebook and LinkedIn and I said, "Look, I'm working with a few friends. We're trying to get people out. We've had some early successes. Will you join us?" And within a week, I think we've reached 200 volunteers.

There's no simple way to describe to you what that took. We went from a ragtag group of five people who had just associated together, to we had to have onboardings daily, multiple times a day. We had different functions on the team. There were different departments on the team, all informal. And only two requirements, that you were US citizens. We weren't going to work with foreign nationals, just because of security reasons. I didn't know if somebody was connected to Russia or Iran, or somebody who wanted to do us harm. And you just had to be willing to work within an intense environment and tell us when you could work.

We had people that focused on moving families. We had people that focused on the case management of families and their paperwork. We had somebody that focused on just onboarding new team. We had someone that focused on communications, because we were still trying to signal to the US government, we need more time.

And along the way, I got a call from a guy named Worth Parker, who had read the article and was retired Special Forces Marine colonel. And he basically, after the end of the phone call says, "We want to help you. I've got all these high ranking CIA and special operators, and we're going to help you." And I kind of quickly realized, he just opened up the Rolodex of the entire US military and intelligence establishment.

And so, the real method through which we got people out, so it was tricky, right? You had tens of thousands of people trying to get through a certain number of gates that weren't always open. The only way we got sort of the right people through the ones that had worked with the American military, versus a shopkeeper who just wanted to get out of Afghanistan, was to use what we call near recognition signals.

And at first, we didn't have the presence in mind to do this, and it was just sort of through frustration. I just sort of had this light bulb went on. I'm sitting in my closet in my loft looking up, and I'm staring at these coat hangers, and I'm like, I was like... And that's the light bulb. I was like, I'm going to send these people to the gate, and they're going to wave a coat hanger in the face of the Marines, and that's going to be the signal. No one in the right mind is going to go wave a coat hanger at a US Marine, but that's going to be the signal that they're with us.

And so, somebody else is like "Coat hangers, bad idea. They're not big enough, they're not bright enough." So, we did better, and it went from red scarves, to bright green folders, to pomegranates, to later on, we were creating unique QR codes for every family and scanning them in, and certain images, like Minnesota Vikings and Texas Longhorns kind of made their way into this. You could see some military veteran humor sort of making its way into this.

At one point, one the guys was like, "I need you to have them do the YMCA thing." I was like, "No. Stop. Just stop." That is, I mean, it's funny, but it's also a super dangerous situation, and anybody on the street could repeat that easily and knows what we're doing. But our signal was like, if you haven't left the house with a pomegranate, you're probably not going to wave one in the face of a marine, right?

Paige:

Right.

Joe:

So, they had to be easy but not easily repeatable by someone standing nearby. And so, we had prearranged basically covert linkups with various military units, US Special Forces, US Marines, some intelligence agencies to go out and grab these people once they'd identified the ones that were the correct people.

And so, those really dramatic moments, but that's how we got in. And sometimes it was one family at a time, a mother and a boy, and sometimes we managed to bundle everybody together and we brought 92 people in at once. You can imagine the level of intensity with the team is, we expected anybody that had worked with the Americans to be killed after September 1st. So this wasn't, again, it wasn't like an exercise, and look at me helping. It was, I mean, we thought this was as dire as it gets. These people will die hard deaths if we don't do something.

We realized, I was in contact at that point... The network's developed. I was in contact with US Senate Foreign Relations and all kinds of other people I had no connection. I'm like a tech startup dude in Denver who coaches youth soccer. It's just totally abnormal. They're like, you have better information than the Senate Foreign Relations and Senate Intelligence committee, because you're crowdsourcing this now from what had grown to be 65,000 people fleeing.

And so, I'm going to transition. Stop me if you have questions, but back to the tech. You asked about the tech. We used basic apps for communication, WhatsApp and Signal, and I would say, honestly, this is more at the doing of the Afghans than us. I mean, they're like, "We're using WhatsApp, and they're great."

We had so many of them, we had to organize it some way, and at first it was like team one, team two, team eight. And I was like, "Well, that's too many, and they all have the same last names, so we're going to give them evac numbers." I called them evacuation chalks. It's like named after World War II Paratroopers. So the first group, my brother's friend, was EVAC 0001, and it goes on and on and on. There's EVAC 5,643, and we had to have a better way to keep track of this.

And so, what started in Google Sheets led to Airtable, and we worked really closely with the CEO of Rownd, R-O-W-N-D, and Airtable and Google to devise a customized solution for what we needed in days. Because we need to be able to process images of these families, not just their passports or tazkiras, which is their ID cards, but also proof of life photos. What that means is, the person holding up the red scarf for the green folder, and we put these into baseball cards, we called them baseball cards, that would be then given to the Special Forces teams that would evacuate them from certain grid locations that were prearranged.

So, Airtable was our primary database. WhatsApp and Signal were our primary methods of communication externally. And then internally, we were primarily using Slack. At one point we made some efforts to disguise our communications in the form of a prayer app, but that never really took off the way we envisioned the need for. People just had to be more careful with the Taliban finding things on their phones that had American phone numbers. So, we ended up purchasing a bunch of phone numbers from another Middle Eastern country, and were using those instead, so that it looked more innocuous to a Taliban guard that would take your phone from you and see if there was someone you wanted to kill.

Paige:

How long did it take to get everyone out, ultimately?

Joe:

Well, I guess the important point here is, we didn't get everybody out. We got about 500, maybe up to 500 people out in August. Since then, we got another thousand people out, so we got about 1500 people out. Just men, women, children. And they're all in the US.

Paige:

That's incredible.

Joe:

Yeah, and I've gotten to meet a lot of them, which is honestly where I find some of the closure. You'd imagine this was incredibly traumatic for a lot of the team members. 40% of our team was military veterans, but the other 60% were like, soccer moms, teachers. These are normal people. My neighbors. My dad. Members of the public. And who, everyone had to be known by somebody on the team. You couldn't just join our team. And we had some weird requests to join. I was like, all right, well, we're not going to take a Russian mercenary on the team. Delete. Things like that.

But yeah, our database, let's put it this way, is still the largest, most reliable, trusted source by the State Department, and you can ask them that and they'll tell you that, because we built it in such a methodical way. It's good data, basically. It's good, clean data, and if they've had to burn their information, we have all the documents. They put them in there. If they decide they don't trust our government, they can turn their stuff on or turn it off, right? Because there was some trust issues back then. I felt that that was important.

David:

So they had the option of they could delete for your database from where they were?

Joe:

They could just turn it off. They could delete, too, but they could turn it off, and so that way if they didn't want... if they felt like the US government was turning over too much. Because it turned out the US government had given lists of names to Taliban. That came out in August. And so, then people said, "Wow, I don't know if I trust you guys anymore." And we're like, "Well, number one, we're not the government. Number two, you're in the driver's seat. We're going to put you in the driver's seat."

But yeah, I mean, our database had 65,000. We only got 1500 out. Some of that is still ongoing. I'm not involved anymore. I had to step away back in January of 2022, just for the sake of my family, for my own mental health, for my business. I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for stepping away, I mean, even after we were able to help so many people. There isn't a week that doesn't go by where I don't get someone telling me that the Taliban came to their house and beat them up, or they're going to force their sister to marry them, or some horrible thing. And you're like, their children are doomed.

I've kind of hit the point where it's like, I don't have any capabilities anymore, and I'm also just so emotionally spent on this. I cannot... I've been carrying a heavy rucksack for a long time on this. And so, there are other people doing it now, but I'm personally no longer leading it, as of January.

Paige:

Right.

David:

But is Team America still in existence? I know you guys have a website.

Joe:

Team America Relief is still in existence. Yeah, we added relief to the name so that people didn't think we named it after the profane sex puppet movie. So yeah, they're still in existence. There's several people. I want to say that there's a good 15 of them that still work on this every week around the United States.

David:

Now that the Taliban have taken over, how do you get people out after that time? If you can talk about it?

Joe:

Yeah, there were a number of really out there ideas proposed. People proposed we run an underground railroad, which I learned in the intelligence world is called rat lines, and is apparently, it's just incredibly dangerous, right? If you roll up a network, you roll up the whole network, so it puts everybody at risk. Some people wanted to fly in helicopters. I was like, "I'm not Rambo. I don't know how you even get a helicopter. I don't know the time for this. This doesn't make sense."

But if the State Department can find a way to negotiate for the Taliban to let people out, and we have their data, we'll continue to work on that. And so, our database, that list is life. If you're on that list and you saved your documents with us, it can save your life. It can get you out. And the state department each week would meet with our team twice a week for many months to decide who was next, and we'd put them on planes and get them in.

If you were someone who'd been a low level interpreter or a low level contractor, the Taliban didn't have a particular interest in killing you. They were like, "Eh, you can leave. That's fine." But if you were someone that was deemed a threat to their power, being a commando or Special Forces, someone that could overthrow them, a minister in the former government or a member of parliament, then you were a real threat. Then there's no persuasion. They're just going to kill you and hunt you down.

And so, a lot of families went into hiding, regardless of which category they fell into. One of our team members organized food distribution to these families. I won't get into all that detail, but we were able to ensure that these families we were directly working with could get food. The country's in famine. So, those that we thought had the best chance, we'd make sure, honestly, just keep them alive long enough until we were able to get them out. And that sounds horrible.

There was a lot of Sophie's Choice moments in this for us. And you've got to remember, the overwhelming majority of the people we're talking about, that 1500, 65,000, they're children. And really horrible choices. But right now, again, if your paperwork gets all the way through the State Department, you turn it over to Taliban, maybe they beat you up a little bit, but they'll let you out on that airplane. There are other ways out, but we don't engage in that. We've just deemed it too risky.

David:

The proof that you asked for, in terms of their work with the United States, or what kind of proof would you ask for? I should ask that.

Joe:

There's all sorts of stuff that people... We're not too picky, that there's all sorts of stuff that they'll provide. They'll provide them wearing a military uniform next to American officers. They'll provide letters of recommendation a lot. And a lot of times, they already had a special immigrant visa and SIV in process, It just hadn't been approved yet. There'd been a backlog for years that various administrations slowed that down or really limited the number.

In the case of my brother's friend, they hadn't been in that category. He actually joined a program for professors. So, he was going to teach engineering at the university, and basically said, "I'm going to stay and help Afghanistan. I believe it's getting better. I'm going to help it get better." And so in 2016 or whatever, he started working with my sister-in-law and my brother. He was like, "I'm going to stay in Afghanistan." And that was a requirement of the program that he was doing with them. So, they personally felt responsible for him staying.

But he had a visa that had been in process. He had a master's degree from Germany. He just had stopped going through the process, because he thought it was getting better. He believed in the direction it was headed. So, he decided to stay there with his family. So, some people were also in those categories. It's like, they're just like, "No, it's getting better. I'm going to put this on hold. I believe in my country now."

David:

That's unbelievable, what you've done. I mean, who collated all the information, the network? It sounds like almost like a, what's that app called? Drive, or whatever it's called? Waves? Waves, where you collect all the information about auto accidents, or something?

Joe:

Yeah. Basically, I realized I had two big components in my network. I had military veterans, and I had a bunch of people who worked in social services and education, and they both wanted to help. And so, among the two major teams on our team that I broke people into, one were battle captains, which is a term in the military for someone that runs a command center, a tactical operation center that's gathering information.

It's running 24/7. It's making decisions. It's in contact with moving units. That's what military veterans did, and to be on that team, you had to be a military veteran, primarily just because I knew we were going to see some awful stuff, and we did. And I didn't want a person without military training in a scenario where they were having to make life and death decisions and witnessing people being killed and stampeded and all that. I mean, I personally witnessed some of that, because some of this was on live video feed.

And so, the rest, generally most of the rest of the team fell into the category of case managers. And so, I knew that people in social services were good at case management, like paperwork and communication, just throughput of intake, basically. We had a way we split up the inbox. We created sort of different teams that would go through the inbox 24/7. Like I said, we had hundreds of people, and this was the primary role that you do, is process an email, decide if it's real, look at the paperwork, put them into the system, make sure all the paperwork's right, and then you can mark them gate ready if they've already got, if they're a US citizen, they have a green card, or they have an approved visa, and if they're not, they're in these other categories.

So, we were triaging them as well, because we knew certain ones had a better chance of actually getting through with our contacts. And at one point, we got really lucky. One of my friends in St. Louis that I served with in the military contacted an accounting firm. Head of the accounting firm was a military vet. It's called Hauk, Kruse and Associates. They put their entire 75-person accounting firm at our disposal for 10 days. That's all these people did, was case management for our team.

And so, the battle captains would take the people in the database that were gate ready, mobilize them to certain grid locations to start movement, coordinate signals with CIA, DIA, Special Forces Marines and say, "Okay, here's where you're going to go, here's when you go." And then, that's how the two main teams worked together.

There were other teams around this, but you can imagine the timelines we were under, and stuff would change. Suddenly there's a huge change in the baseball card format. It's like, my God, do you realize what you've just done to us? Your fear of making a word processing error in your haste to get it done with two hours sleep was like, if I get their passport number wrong and I don't double-check that, because I forget to double-check, because I'm so sleep-deprived, they might not let them through the gate.

Paige:

Yeah. It seems very stressful.

Joe:

And then, some of the case managers, despite my best efforts to shield... And we basically said, "Don't click on anything that anyone sends you." We had some people try to infiltrate us a few times. Taliban and Russia. We got some weird thing from the Chinese state media. So, information only goes out, nothing comes in, was as the idea. But they basically had, sometimes they'll send photos and videos that appear in the body of the email. And so, "This is my murdered father. This is my brother being stuffed in the trunk of a car." So then suddenly, you have these people who have never served in the military seeing that, and it's just a ton of drama on that side, as well.

Paige:

Why do you think, just in general, there was such a lack of American government involvement, essentially? And why... We got out of there very quickly. I mean, I was seven when we went to Afghanistan. I was 28... And it felt overnight, and I feel like people that don't pay attention to foreign policy, it was, everyone was aware we were leaving. That was the one thing that, if people don't pay attention, suddenly everyone knew, everyone was talking about it. It was very clear, and it just felt like this overnight effect.

I'm just curious what your personal opinion about the whole government aspect of it is, and where they were. It almost felt like American citizens were getting left behind, as well, almost, for a second there. I could be wrong about that. But it felt very, very quick.

Joe:

Yeah. I think there's a cocktail of things going on here, Paige. I think the speed at which it happened surprised even the US. I mean, I think they expected there was going to be another six months to execute this pull out of saving people, and it just didn't... I mean, the city crumbled, right? There was clear collaboration between the Afghan army and the Taliban. They'd been bought off. They just walked away from the gates, right?

Paige:

Oh, wow.

Joe:

Right when it went down. And so, defenses you thought you had weren't really there. So, the only ones really fighting in the end were Afghan commandos, which is why they're so hated by the Taliban.

So, I think that's part of it. I think, I mentioned several times we worked extensively with US intelligence agencies and military units, and the reality is, these people were choosing to do this on their own, within their official powers in those agencies and these units, and putting their lives in the line, and the people that were there.

I was safe in my office, right? But these people were choosing to put their lives in the line to work with other Americans who care, not at the direction of the US government. And I think there was, perhaps I've heard there was a tacit nod from the White House, like do what you have to do, but it was never officially sanctioned. There's some more stuff that's far more heart pounding that I can't get into in this call, but it was really clear that it was not done... Anything that, any collaboration that we had was not officially sanctioned by big government. It was people going outside their lane.

We did have several people on our team who were serving members in the Pentagon and serving members in the state Department, and the thing we heard repeatedly from members of the State Department was, it's disorganized, they're overwhelmed. Just the sheer number of people. This is not a political critique on anybody. It's just, they could not process the number of people that they were seeing, and there was no way it was going to speed up, no matter what they did. And so, there was some just, "Hey, work with these American ad hoc groups and see what you can do."

I even communicated directly with the senior-most state department officials on the ground and the senior-most military leaders, and they were completely overwhelmed, sleep deprived, all the rest, and their lives were in danger. They were not really able to suddenly ramp up capacity in any meaningful way. I think they were just slow moving.

I got a letter later from a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he said, "You've once again proven that the private sector can run circles around the United States government. The way of warfare will never be the same, including and even more so for humanitarian assistance and evacuations." It never occurred to them to crowdsource intelligence. It's not just something you do. I'm not bound by any rules, I'm not working for anybody yet. I was just trying to help my brother.

Paige:

Right.

Joe:

And then, suddenly it's like, how did this happen? How am I at the helm? And I'm like, meanwhile I'm talking to my COO. I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to take another week off work." And yeah, I think our government can be slow moving about innovation, and I also think multiple administrations before this had not really laid a lot of the groundwork for this to succeed. There's probably four presidential administrations you could put responsibility on for us being underprepared for this.

But the thing that bothered me the most, as you alluded to this, Paige, is that at the end, there was this big press conference, there was some general talking, and it was September 1st or August 31st or something. Because we didn't actually get the full day on August 31st. They pulled out at like 12:01 AM on the 31st. And we knew. They'd warned me. I said, "Last call for alcohol?" And the guy said, "Yeah, you've got a few hours. That's it."

David:

Wow. Somebody with the Taliban told you that, or?

Joe:

No, a senior American official.

David:

Oh, okay.

Joe:

So, I knew we didn't get another 24 hours. And so, we were able to know factually that there were many more Blue Pass holders, and they were Afghan Americans. They were Afghans, but there are Blue Pass holders, there are Americans, green card holders that were still stuck there, that we didn't get out, far above the numbers that the US initially reported for several weeks, just because they didn't know.

And so, we kept going back to the Senate Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, saying, "Here's the numbers we have. They're still there. I'm talking to them. I've seen their passports, and they're green card holders." And so, eventually, several weeks later, they corrected themselves and said, "Oh, we got everybody out who wanted to get out." And I think at some point it ended up being true, but those first few weeks, it was not. It was not factual. They were just reporting it as this major victory.

And for all those that participated in it directly, it felt worse than Saigon. It felt... It did not feel like a success. It felt like a devastating, devastating failure. And again, that's because we expected everyone to be killed in September, and I think to the State Department's credit, I think the one thing that went really well here is they'd negotiated enough with the Taliban to say, "Look, you can't round up and kill everybody." I mean, I guess they gave them permission, "You can go after some people, but we expect to have a process through which we can continue to get some people out." And they have done that.

David:

And they continue to do that as we speak.

Joe:

Yeah. I don't know how long, but yes. I mean, the State Department still uses our data for that purpose each week.

Paige:

In your opinion, was it really clear for a few years that the Taliban would gain control again?

Joe:

As someone who served in Mosul in Iraq, and being there, we all knew what was going to happen when we left. Everybody knew it. We talked about it. And there was more than one possibility. In fact, the Kurds and the Arabs in that area, there's a fault line called the Riyadh line, and they really hate each other. And my interpreter was like, "Hey, when you guys leave, we're going to have a big war and kill each other." And I was like, "That's horrible. You really should bury the hatchet here, try to move forward." We also knew that proto-ISIS was on the rise.

So, yeah, it was very predictable that if you pull out US forces, many, many people will die. In the case of Iraq, the Iraqi army did the right thing ultimately, and they won the city back, hard fought, right? In Afghanistan, yeah, it was really clear, the more we drew down, the only thing preventing the Taliban from... They took our signal to depart as open campaign season to take the whole country back. They knew. They were just biding their time. It was really obvious. Everyone there knew it. The average Afghan that had worked with the military at that point, they were just not in a position where they wanted to fight back anymore. They'd given up and were in fear of their lives, for their families.

Paige:

Which is understandable. Amazing.

Joe:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean if you have... And Afghan families are big, right? So, if you have eight kids and a wife, and you know that when you die, they're going to starve, right? I mean, you're going to look for a flight out, too. And I don't fault them at all for that. It's understandable. You can never say what you would do if you were in someone else's shoes. I really wish things had gone differently, but as it is, I'm really glad they're here, and they're making excellent Americans, and they're really wonderful people. A bunch of them have been to our house, and we've had soccer and cookouts and things like that, and they're just excited to be the next Americans and make a contribution here, and I think they will.

Paige:

That's amazing. That's really amazing.

David:

That is. And I've got to ask you, because you said that you were against the Iraq war. What were your thoughts about us going into Afghanistan?

Joe:

I think that made all the sense in the world to me. I mean, we were attacked by Al-Qaeda, who were hosted by the Taliban pre-2001, and they very clearly coordinated an attack that killed thousands of Americans on US soil. There's a number of components of war that you've got to always process, and in leadership and in ethics, and one is justice into war. Are we going in for just reasons, and are we honest about that? And Afghanistan made sense. We were attacked, we were responding to that. They killed innocent people.

Iraq, our government fabricated the reasons for which we went into that war, and that's known. Every intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but they didn't have proof, definitive proof, so they fabricated it. I mean, it's a reasonable assumption, but you didn't have proof, so you made it up, you lied. That's not justice into war.

Then, the second dimension is justice in war. How do you conduct yourself? Are you abusing people? Are you killing innocent people? Are your soldiers shooting dogs for sport? All kinds of horrible things happen over there, and that's the responsibility of leaders, to be the moral compass for your troops and say, "That's not who we are. We're not going to do that. Not on our watch. If you do that, you're no better than ISIS or Al Qaeda. We're not that. We're not that."

And then, there's the last part, which is really key here, is a just exit, right? And if you leave it worse than it was before you're out, or potentially worse, you may have done a lot more harm than good. So, think of it as some hippocratic ethics here, is maybe a good analogy. And I think we can look at Afghanistan and say, wow. I mean, maybe in the long run it's good US is not there. And there's a lot of veterans who agree with that.

It's controversial because, at the same time, look at the human toll this took, I mean, in our departure. This will stay with me as long as I live. Some of these scenes are just... The stampedes, people being... I mean, I was on video feeds with people being killed around them, stuff like that. And it's like, that will stay with you the rest of your days. And yeah, I wish that that had not been as chaotic and reckless as it seems.

David:

Do you think at some point there could have been an exit that made sense?

Joe:

I'm not a geopolitical strategist.

David:

Yeah, sure.

Joe:

It is maybe not my place to say, but there's always options on the table. I think there were always other options. The analogy I might use, wrongly or rightly, is Japan or Germany. We still have bases in Japan and Germany, well after the second World War, and those situations never did... In South Korea, as well. Like, South Korea, if we pulled out of South Korea, and I served a little bit in South Korea, that country would have been steamrolled. Steamrolled. Steamrolled. I mean, the plan is, it's honestly not even to try to defend Seoul. Their plan is to blow the bridges, right? the country would be steamrolled by the north.

And the US's presence in the world, and I don't want us to be the policeman in the world more than anybody else, but when you are in a situation that you've found yourself in, you have a responsibility, and I think our country sort of looked at Afghanistan and said, "No more loss of life, no more political damage." And that's why... "No more death toll." I mean, I lost 11 friends in these two wars. The death toll that's happened since and throughout that, I mean...

And also just, people always say that, they're like, "What was Afghanistan for? Why were we even there? What was it for?" And what I loved to say in response to that is, they had 20 years of freedom. Their girls were educated. They could go to school. They could do sports. The women could work. They don't have any of that now, and that's why it's so horrible, is they're faced with complete and total loss of all their freedoms. Everyone finally sees what they had. My daughter, my older daughter, if she were there, she wouldn't be in school. 13 years old.

David:

I'm told that we came fairly close to capturing Bin Laden in Afghanistan before we got out. Or did I mishear that?

Joe:

No, that's right. Early in 2002, I think, or maybe 2001, Operation Anaconda, the Tora Bora cave complex, he very narrowly escaped. I'm not sure that would've made a huge difference whether we got him early or not. I think there's a bit of, I don't know if the word is self-determination going on here. I mean, a lot of the Pashtun ethnic group and a lot of the Pashtun-speaking peoples. Not all. I mean, my brother's friend that we got out there, Pashtun. That is sort of the ethnic group of the Taliban.

And they're not all Taliban, of course not. I want to be very clear, I'm not saying that. But there's widespread support for the Taliban in certain quarters. And if you're a Dari-speaking Hazara, you're not one of them. There's a lot of minorities in Afghanistan, and the Taliban would have found resurgence as long as the people believe that they do something that they support. And the Taliban are very clever. In addition to Sharia law and all the rest, they also provide social services, like water and schools and all the rest, and as long as the people aren't being shot at, they're not going to argue too much, sometimes.

David:

And you mentioned briefly, with your plans for the future, but we got to ask a little bit more detail. What are your plans for the future, in terms of this experience particularly? How did that affect your thoughts about the future?

Joe:

I'm going to be really honest with you, I'm trying to forget it. It's torture to think about and talk about. I limit my speaking about it to Fridays only, just so it doesn't disrupt my focus and my mental health. That's it on Afghanistan for me. The next chapter is going to be written in the United States.

And so, the way I'm finding my healing, incidentally, is probably also the next most important chapter here, when you get together with Afghan families, and I would encourage anybody listening to this to find a way to do that in your community. Get to know these people. Help them on their resume. Get your kids together. Play soccer. Go invite them over to your house. They're wonderful people. They're amazing people. I think the more we can do to welcome them and let them know we're happy that they're here as the newest Americans. Hire them, all that. That's the next most important part of this chapter.

Yeah, and so for me, that will be my remaining involvement in this, is I've now got a bunch of friends for life. I mean, I probably won't stay in contact with all 1,500, but there's some that I do, and I think that's... Somebody said, basically, generations and generations of Afghan Americans for years to come will come from that group.

Yeah, I think we really feel like... I don't know. I came from... One of my great-great-grandparents was a refugee, as well. Realize you're laying the seeds, helping lay the seeds of something profound, and for me, just helping to be a part of them succeeding and being happy and welcomed here is the road home, if you will.

Paige:

Well, we really appreciate you being willing to talk about it. Congrats again to your daughter being a [inaudible 00:44:13] soccer player.

Joe:

Yeah, through this weird network that I now have, my daughters get to meet the captain of the Afghan women's national team in the coming years.

Paige:

Oh, that's incredible. That's awesome.

Joe:

Yeah, they're pretty stoked.

Paige:

That's pretty awesome.

David:

That's great.

Paige:

But yeah, we really do appreciate you being willing to talk about it, because I know it must be very, very challenging, and it's awesome because I do think that people that get to come here and experience American culture, I think it all really does change the trajectory of people's lives for the good, and I really, really love that.

David:

Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Joe, for everything you've done, and we just wish you the very, very best in the future, and we really appreciate your time, and thanks again for what you did. That's great.

Joe:

Thank you both for the interest and the support. I appreciate it very much.

Paige:

Thank you for listening to Disarming Data, and thank you to Eric Montgomery for producing this podcast. To support the podcast, please rate, review and follow on Apple podcast or wherever you listen. If you'd like to learn more about the current state of data security, head on over to our website, DisarmingData.com.