We enter with the interview in progress…:

Millard: Go ahead, Abdul, do it.

Abdul: Millard, I know what you’re going to do, please don’t my friend.

Millard: Abdul… You know you want tooo. All you have to do is push-that-one-little-button?

Abdul: Allah forgive me. PUSH!

Millard’s phone rings ” HEY MR. TALIBAN TALLY ME BANNANA’S, DAYLIGHT COME AND I WANT TO GO HOME!”

Abdul: HA, DAY-O, DAYYYYYYY-O, DAYLIGHT COME AND IT WANNA GO HOME!!!

Millard: I knew you’d like it.

Abdul: Intoxicating Millard, Intoxicating.

Millard: So. You’re back in country, all you avenues of communication have been taken off line, and here I am? The interview of a lifetime

Abdul: You may live to see another one, take it one question at a time my friend.

Millard: ‘Baradar the Butcher’? That’s what they USED to call you. Recruiting poor illiterates with no chance in life from hovels and dirt poor villages? That’s what you USED to do. Young, Angry and full of Angst? That’s what you USED to be. What do we have now:

-to cut off communications you stopped an internet/facebook/instagram feed.

-your YOUNG recruits, like ALL kids, spend more time texting and on their phones than studying the Quoran.

-YOU have grown, and know that climate change, a developing economy NOT based on illegal drugs, and pernicious pandemic viruses are more of a challenge that will NOT be touched or solved by making your country full of illiterate barbarians again.

-and having neighbors like China and Russia, who have learned the lesson of others and history will NOT try to invade, but they can and will make sure that any number of accidents keep you firmly entrenched in the Middle Ages.

Abdul: How you have lived this long can only be a sign of Allah’s beneficence my friend. Of course, we may still end the day with a thrilling game of ‘Bunson Buzkashi’?

Millard: The point being Abdul, that if it was a video game most of the kids in your Taliban would know how to play, but the old ways are slipping through your fingers. They know more of Marvel and DC heroes than they do of their own culture. In all honesty, if the West wanted to destroy your country all they would have to do is deliver free internet and porn on demand. One generation, that’s all it would take. I think you know that too. To the question Abdul.

‘What are you going to do’

Abdul: look, breakfast is here.

to be continued.