good evening from los angeles. i've tavis smily. this is 16 years since the start of the u.s. war in afghanistan. we will speak to jerry van dike who covered afghanistan for decades. he was kidnap and held captive. we will talk about his book, the trade, my journey into political kidnapping. and a journalist joins us and the triumph of fear and the end of the american dream. we are glad you joined us. coming up in a moment.

please welcome jerry van dike to his program. the latest text is called the trade. the labyrinth of political kidnapping. it is a gripping follow-up to his memoire about his 2008 abducti abduction. good to have you on the program. i started the show a moment ago.

this is the 16th year of this 2001. >> the campaign. what do you make of the fact that 16 years later the beat goes on? >> it's an old afghan saying that said it is very easy to enter. very hard to leave. >> yeah. >> in the early 1979 -- july 1979 and robert gates, former secretary of defense was written about this in his memoirs. jimmy carter's national security adviser said the same thing. we begin to fund in order to lure them into afghanistan in july 1979. and december 1979 they entered. and we got involved backing them and that's when i went. i went two years later lived with them. they are fighting in many respects. their sons and grandsons.

and the leaders are the same men who were once our allies. >> what are makes it so hard to get out? >> they are not going to give in, number one. the men i lived with get up before dawn and pray in the snow and the rifles in the ground in front of them. sandals. very thin clothes and snow on the ground and all they had was green tea and rice to eat. but a belief in god and a combination of nationalism and sense of this is our land. you are the invaders. and also pride. we held off people for so long. when i was in prison they said the british are here for revenge. there is a saying that mothers in afghanistan used today to theirs or to their daughters if they are misbehaving. be careful, behave yourself or the british will get you. they hold on to this and there

is a sense of pride that they were never colonized. the fact that they have god as their most powerful force behind them. they look upon us up in the mountains, the taliban and villagers look upon them the same way they look upon the russians. we went to get rid of al qaeda. they are arabic. they speak a form of persian. a different culture. i only similarity and it's big is islam. >> take me back to your captivity for those who haven't read. >> in 2007, a manager with times books in new york who knew about my background came to me and we had breakfast in the diner in new york. he said the cia doesn't know

where bin laden is. we don't seem to understand or have a comprehension of what is called the tribal areas of pakistan. can you go into this area? you were there before and understand these people. can you find out what the u.s. government cannot find? it was the opportunity i was looking for. i wanted to go back. a part of me had not articulated it that well in my mind. the search for the wild to go back to that ro mannedic time for the common cause and fighting against soviet invaders that treated me with such respect. made sure i had food before i did. extremely dangerous. it was war. i lived in the mountains for seven months. i went with the taliban four times and crossed the border and on the last time i was betrayed, we were hiking in the tribal areas in pakistan. 12 men, first i saw this very

small tinge of black move behind a rock. we were walking up in single file with two body guards. being a guide. i knew immediately that's not a black sheep. that's the taliban. this is it. like indians in a movie. they came running down the mountain and get down, get down. that's on my body guard and i said this is it. it's over. they took me and separated me in the car and blind folded me and put me on a ridge and faced west and tied me and i heard the rifle caulk and i was like a sheep that first time. i was in shock. they untied the blind fold and i saw chains on the floor and looked for blood on the walls.

i said i am in a taliban prison up in the mountains. they told me i was now called a golden goose. i was a commodity. one becomes a business. all of a sudden i had value to them. so this good cop, bad cop situation that achieves in movies, one said i am here to protect you and the others are not. so that led to my going back. haunted by not knowing what happened. >> you go back to the trade and my journey to the labyrinth of political kidnapping. how big of a business is political kidnapping? >> since 9/11 and the first case is the kidnapping and slaughter of daniel in 2002. well over $1.5 billion.

it is so sophisticated that they have a protocol for how it regulates kidnapping and the amount of money they make to nigeria to somalia. i was in yemen pursuing parts of this and in 2013, a former prime minister said al qaeda had $35 million in their bank account in yemen alone. what we have seen started with daniel pearl. here's the ransom money. if you recall this f-16s and to treat the people better in guantanamo. that's different. that means something else rather than them being kidnapped by the simple group of taliban. i was taken by the taliban. that was completely different. not always, but in my case it was definitely different. then in 2004, nicholas berg who was kidnap and beheaded by sbhon

established himself and his credentials in afghanistan. that same year, three un workers were kidnapped in kabul. the ransom demand, it's hard to pinpoint. i was told by people fale million euros. all of a sudden a week to pass the strong. 1995 in afghanistan. and then it was the case of a foreign correspondent in march who was taken and his driver and his fixer were both besided. president karzai released and

they wanted the man there who was not initially money. they wanted the prisoners out. we released some, but the two afghans were murdered. the missionaries went to afghanistan who were kidnapped and work in a hospital in the south. according to reuters, they tell you the truth. $22 million. they killed two and $22 million. the u.s. has official policy. we do not pay. is that true? >> we pay.

under the bush administration, two christian minsteries. ran son was paid and money lost. i know in other cases prominent people whose names everybody knows. i had permission to do this and i department say it publicly, but privately. everybody else in the world is paying. how does it stop or does it not? if everybody is paying, how does it not? >> the shell oil would have people kidnapped in nigeria.

there is nothing you can do. you have to pay. >> it's very hard for -- we had a meeting with president obama. those of us who survived in the families of those who were murdered. one of the first thing he said, if one of my daughters was kidnapped i would do everything in the world to get her back. >> another time when the assistant director at the fbi, they took him and said you don't have any more credentials. you can't say that. it's not your son. it's not your daughter. when it is your son, daughter, mother, father or bother and sister, everything changes. >> political kidnapping. he was kidnap and released himself. >> up next, sasha abram ski. stay with us.

>> a provocative look at the signs and psychology behind fear-based politics. jumping in shadows, the triumph of fear and the end of the american dream. good to have you on this program. >> glad to be back. >> a good book and title. fascinating to get into. me about the triumph of fear and whether or not you think fear has won. >> i never think fear won. as long as we have will power and the personality to do differently, we have the potential to do differently. an increasing number of people think if the worse thing can happen, it will happen. from how we police our borders and the children and even to the

kind of medicines we take and why. through this catastrophic lens, it has been going on for years. this has been developing over the last 20, 30, 40 years. it's on steroids at the moment and we have politics where everything is viewed through fear. you should be fearful of x, y, and z. you should be fearful of this religion and this color. it's a moment whose country is optimistic. >> when you say this started, donald trump stoked the fires as it were of fear this this country. what happened as you research it in the body politics that led to the rise and the increasing use of fear as a weapon. >> it's not just by research. i'm old enough now to have been a journalist for a quarter of a

century. one of the things before i had gray hair and everything else, one of the things that fascinated me is mass incarceration. as we were becoming more unequal, we were dealing with a lot of people that we got scared of by putting them behind bars. whether it was drug addicts or the mentally ill or the homeless, it was a substitute for meaningful social policy. if you look at that and add on top of it what happened to 911, the sense that the entire country and culture was under threat and you then add into the mix all of the economic catastrophe that surrounds 2008, you get the perfect storm and the complicating factor that if you inject the media into it, they compress the space and time. a bad event happens.

it happens 10,000 miles away. and if you keep opening headlines, another bomb attack and another child kidnapping and plane crash. you get very, very scared and very, very anxious. our brain releases stress chemicals. one of the problems is we are acting as if it is besieged. you always stress. you get adrenaline running through you. you are badly positioned to avoid all the problems and the complexities of the modern world. >> it's like the chicken or the egg. what's the relationship between the nativism that so many people are feeling and engaging and acting upon and the fear that we

feel? >> that's a great question. >> if you are feeling very, very fearful, you start looking out for your own and guard other people. someone like donald trump preys on that and has a set of fears. the only thing to fear is fear itself. fear is his driving force. trump fears ult michelle. if society feels like it's on the right track, if we don't regard ourselves as being torn apart, someone like trump is implausible. he is only plausible when i was talking to people and researching this book, it's clear that time and time and time again, trump only becomes plausible when we have already been predisposed to view other

people as dangerous. that's an extraordinary moment. the president, the most powerful man on earth would feed and thrive off of fears. denigrate other people and would demagogue his way to power. it's a very sad moment we are in. >> i'm struck by your phraseology of trump being afraid of optimism. i see how that works politically for him, but that runs counter to what he has done as a businessman. you can't be in business and be afraid of success. yet he flipped that and made it work for him politically. >> trump's career as a politician is fascinating. i say that with no liking of the man. i don't like anything he has done. he has realized if you make outrageous comments and make them loud enough and that's the risk he takes and where it's

compatible and if you make outlandish enough claims, a critical mass will fear you. your body and mind looks down and vision goes out the window. you are good at monofocus and the immediate threat in front of you. the snake in the grass and the wild animal trying to attack you. our ancestors in caves. so you respond very well in that scared state to drastically oversimple fix. i will ban all muslims from the country and that will cure terrorism. it won't. that's a crazy idea, but it plays to a scared audience. i will build a big and beautiful wall and immigration will be solved. desperate people find ways to come to places they regard as safer. it sounds good to a scared audience. one of the things that astonished me is a willingness

to take a grab bag of fears. doesn't matter if he believes it or not. his audience was suspicious of vaccinations and he realized a bunch of them didn't like environmentalists and didn't trust climate change. suddenly china is behind the hoax. you can see it time and time again. you can see this man feeding off of fear. it really is a bottom feeder kind of thing. >> your congress raised two questions. the first is what are all these people whoever they are, what are they afraid of? we spent 15 minutes talking about fear, but what are they afraid of? >> all kinds of things. i started this book a couple of years before trump declared candidacy and one of the things that interested me is we don't know how to calculate brisk anymore. one of the things that should scare us tend to terrify us.

for example, we are very, very scared of great sharks. people my age all saw jaws. we are not scared of ticks or mosquitos, but those particular insects kill far more people than great white sharks. another example is we are very, very afraid of air travel and get in the car without second-guessing. by orders of magnitude, but by tens and 50s and hundreds of times more, it's more dangerous to get behind the wheel of a car. other things, we should be very, very nervous of nuclear weapons. one goes off and not just five or 10 people die, but hundreds of thousands of people. we have been doing everything we can to make sure they are never used. when you look at the data, more americaning are scared of gun control than of nuclear weapons. to me, one of the things that happened is we are not very good anymore. maybe we never were.

we are not good at the momental calculating risk and the scale of events and the likely hood of events. trump plays on that. the fears he highlights are not necessarily the biggest things we should be worried about and the things that are politically expedient. >> this may be a bad example or parallel, but because there is so much in the news lately, we are talking about it and it's hard to avoid the harvey weinstein situation. a number of things occurred to me on that drama. one of them is it is far better to be respected than to be feared. it seems to me of all the takeaways, people may have been afraid of harvey weinstein because of the power he wielded. the point of that is fear can only take you so far. how far can fear take donald trump? >> that's a great question. i think when you talk about all the other things in that question. the answer is fear only does

take you so far. as soon as people cease to be afraid, as soon as they stand up and testify in public and say no, we are not going to live our lives this way and we are not going to be intimidated. that fear breaks down very fast. your question about trump. he has this ambition of remaking america at this nativist state. it's the most ethnically and racially and religiously diverse. certainly on earth today and arguably in human history. it's wondrous. you go to any great city and you see the entire world and experience the entire world. trump wants to shut that down and shut it down through fear. he wants to shut it down through intimidati intimidation. how far does it take you? it took him to the white house. how far and how long will this last? i suspect not very long. these incredibly destructive

movements that come in on a firestorm and do a lot of damage over a few years and have these long-term ambitions and without analogies, but hitler came into power in a destroyed post world war germany and he said we were stabbed in the back by traitors and we will get germany back on their feet. their version of america first. we have a 1,000 year right. it caused mast amount was of damage and that was 1,000 years. i suspect donald trump's vision of a nasty self limiting enclosed predatory america, i suspect it will not last because we are better than that as a people. i believe that from the interviews i did in the book and

all the people i talked to said we are not going to be bound by fear. it put a hold on the american dream. i do think in the long run we are going to bounce back and trump in the long run will go down in history as a miserable, miserable leader. >> it's called jumping at shadows, the triumph of fear and the end of the american dream written by sasha. good to have you on the program. >> always a pleasure. >> thanks for watching and as always, keep the fighting. for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. >> join me next time with a conversation with michael donald. his album wide open. that's next time. see you then.

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angeles i'm tavis smiley. tonight a conversation with ben stein. he joins us to discuss the president's proposed tax plan and his latest book "the capitalist code." then drew carey joins us to discuss his ten-year anniversary as host of the price is right. ben stein and drew carey in just a moment.