Angry Planet

Afghanistan. If you’re listening to this show you’ve probably been following the news. Despite what the Pentagon or White House will tell you, the evacuation isn’t going great. There is a dichotomy between what officials tell us and what’s actually happening that—in the age of mass communication—seems … insulting. That dichotomy and how it affected America’s view of Afghanistan is at the heart of...

Conquerors and nations have been trying to rebuild Afghanistan in their own image for thousands of years. The U.S. is just the latest to fail. The Soviet Union also failed, with a little push from the United States. But they learned their lesson in only 10 years, from 1979-1989. Mark Galeotti joins us today to talk about the lessons the U.S. probably should have learned from the USSR. He’s Se...

America is leaving Afghanistan. President Joe Biden has set a September 11th withdrawal date and things are continuing apace. As America packs up its gear and goes home it’s leaving behind something far more valuable than MRAPs and M16s—people. For two decades individual Afghans have stepped up to help the United States and as it leaves the battlefield, some of these interpreters are being left be...

Are we living in a declining empire in need of renewal? Maybe. But one thing to keep in mind? Romans thought the same thing centuries before the great empire fell. So what’s up with the fascination with the decline and fall of Rome? And what lessons does it have for US politics? To help us answer that question, we’ve got Edward J. Watts. He’s a professor of history at UC San Diego and the author o...

Life in Haiti has rarely been easy. It’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Corruption is rampant. And it’s been invaded more than once since independence, including by the United States. It’s little wonder that the half-Island nation has suffered repression and political turmoil And, on July 7, it’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. To help us understand the current situatio...

When I was a kid I learned about the Alamo. It’s 1836. Houston said to Travis, fortify the Alamo. Volunteers came from across the continent to fight and die for the dream of a free and independent Texas.  Like the Ballad said, One hundred and eighty five holding back five thousand. In the southern part of Texas, near the town of San Antone, like a statue on his pinto rides a cowboy all alone....

Afghanistan, the site of America’s longest war, is changing. The Taliban is gaining ground in the North while peace talks stall. The U.S. continues its withdrawal and the Afghan military is left to pick up the pieces. Here to help us understand what’s going on is Ali M. Latifi. Latifi is an Afghan journalist living in Kabul. His work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Business Insider, and NBC News. Supp...

It doesn’t take high technology to kill someone. Simple chemicals propel pieces of lead out of steel tubes. Other simple chemicals are placed in larger vessels and are triggered by the weight of a vehicle or even a human body. Some are even set off by strings attached to fuses. Not one computer involved. But the weapons of warfare do evolve - some into trillion dollar monsters that gobble up whole...

So far, in the political battles at the heart of our democracy, they have been AWOL. Just as they should be. The military is an expressly non-political institution, even if they do report to an elected commander-in-chief. But with political divisions deepening, could that change? Eliott Ackerman took on just that issue in a recent column for the New York Times. Ackerman is a combat veteran, journa...

Over the past few months the world watched as the conflict between Israel and Palestine flared up. I’m not interested in litigating the facts of that conflict in this opening and you’ve likely already decided where you stand on the conflict. For some, it’s complicated. For others, the very idea that someone would call it complicated is an insult. Here to help us untangle some of what’s happened an...

For the last two decades, America has been possessed with a Global War on Terror. The threat of militant Islam has funded the security state and given the Pentagon an overarching goal. But that threat feels increasingly distant and a new specter is haunting America—that of white nationalism. Both groups are complicated, varied, and prone to in-fighting. Both groups rely on apocalyptic visions of t...

When you hear the word Sparta, there’s an immediate association with war and the military. Of the Greek City States, it’s the one most associated with battle. Spartan men were expected to be warriors and their society was geared almost entirely toward training for war. For generations, military leaders have drawn inspiration from Sparta. Much of the romance around Sparta centers Around the battle...

There’s a maxim that says “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” This so-called Golden Arches theory enjoyed a brief moment of prominence in the 1990s, got shaky after 9/11, and has been out-right assaulted by pundits and political theorists in the past ten years. It died it’s final death in October when McDonald’s Azerbaijan took public side...

In the summer of 2020, violent riots broke out across America between ordinary citizens and police. These riots led to groups finding ways to develop their own security forces to deal with violence from police, opposition groups, and other antagonists on the ground. Here to help us understand what’s going on is Nikki West. West is a local Seattle photojournalist who was previously on the show talk...

Literally recorded as missiles hit and news broke. Guest: Noga Tarnopolsky, a reporter on Israel and Palestine. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes , Stitcher , Google Play or follow our RSS directl...

Russia and Ukraine have been fighting ever since Little Green Men invaded Crimea in 2014. That wasn’t enough for Russia. The former evil empire then aided separatist enclaves inside the rest of Ukraine. The Ukrainian military was unprepared, the world mostly sat back and watched, and an ugly stalemate ensued. If a stalemate includes tanks firing at each other. Recently, Russia massed troops on Ukr...

“From mud, through blood, to the green fields beyond.” The tank was meant to push through entrenched enemy lines and put an end to the stale-mate of trench warfare during The Great War. It created a whole new kind of combat. It was high risk, high reward, as men in armored units trundled across the world. With us today is comics writer Garth Ennis. Ennis is the diabolical mind behind Sara , Hitman...

The Taliban - we all know them, few of us love them, and it looks like they’re going to rule Afghanistan - again. So, what was it like the first time the Islamic militants took over, in 1996? Today, we have two journalists who were in Afghanistan in the 90s. Scott Neuman was working for United Press International and wrote from the scene. Alan Chin is a photographer who went to Afghanistan to take...

When Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, finally fell in late 2017, America wasn’t really paying close attention. We’d had nearly a year of turmoil here at home, and, in many ways, Islamic State was old news. And if we weren’t paying that much attention to the fight, we paid even less attention to the fighters. So, today we’ll tell the story of the Kurdish men and women who led the Syrian Democratic F...

Guns, guns, guns. America loves them and their use is enshrined in the second amendment. It’s such a big deal here that an entire culture has grown around it. From the outside looking in, gun culture can seem...surreal and fetishistic. The truth is more complicated. The overwhelming majority of American gun owners are responsible and are not taking photos of themselves aiming a loaded weapon at th...

Billions of people eat fish every day and as the global population has exploded, so too have human efforts to catch more and more fish. As more people take to the high seas looking for protein, very human problems have followed them. We’re fighting over fish. Here to walk us through this is someone actively working on the problem in Washington D.C. Captain Kate Higgins-Bloom is the Strategic Fores...

Syria’s Bashar Al Assad had no such hesitancy. Thousands of people died. The U.S. threatened to strike Syria, but Russia suggested striking a deal instead. It was weird. To talk us through the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons throughout the country’s civil war is Joby Warrick of the Washington Post. Warrick is the winner of an improbable two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his book on ISI...

What do mid-century funnyman Tom Lehrer, nuclear Armageddon, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action have in common? They’re all features of the excellent podcast The Deal —a show all about the Iran nuclear deal. As its host once said, he’s not here to fix problems. He’s just here to narrate the collapse. Well, that narrator is here with us today. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is an expert on all things nu...

Ah international waters. A quiet place to do some crimes or have crimes done to you. Welcome to Angry Ocean, a series we’re doing that examines the underreported topic of conflict on the high seas. This is part one - Outlaw Ocean . With us today is Ian Urbina. Urbina is an investigative reporter and the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project , a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington...

It’s a weird time for the US military. Endless small-scale wars. Veterans joining the riots at the capital. Right-wing extremism in the ranks. Tens of thousands of troops refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. So, time for a status check. To help us understand what’s going on, we have Meghann Myers who is the Pentagon Bureau Chief for Military Times. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War t...