On this episode of the News World.

During an interrogation in Afghanistan, when asked how long the jahadis intended to fight, a Taliban commander uttered the words, if it takes a thousand years.

This chilling statement illustrates both how terrorists at this level operate and the generational approach they take when it comes to bringing destruction to the world.

The West is facing a determined enemy with a fundamentally different worldview.

In his new book, If it Takes a Thousand Years From Al Khayeda to Hamas, how the Jahadas think and how to defeat them, Former Army Captain Jesse Petrilla provides unique insight into the Jahada's mind, featuring interviews with Taliban and Al Khalida members just after their capture, interviews with international journalists and professors, warnings from Europelo politicians, as well as experiences from his travels throughout the London world.

I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Former Army Captain Jesse Patrolla.

He served as a civilian advisor to the US Department of State and he was a liaison officer in the Army to the Afghan Secret Police, facilitating the interrogations.

However, four hundred captured Taliban and Al Kaeda members.

Jesse, Welcome and thank you for joining me on neutral.

Thanks for having me, mister speaker.

Let's start with your own career.

Talk about when you joined the army and worked your way up to captain.

Sure, my interest in the jihadist movement really started after September eleventh.

I turned eighteen actually that year, just a few months prior to the attacks, and so my entire adult life and my generation really was shaped by that moment.

We really felt that there was a real threat out there and very few people, I should say, understood the threat.

And so I embarked on a journey to research the mindset of our enemies and who would do such a thing, and spent a decade prior to going to Afghanistan in twenty twelve.

It was really the culmination of a decade of research on the mindset of our enemies that really came together there where I joined the military after farting around.

For several years.

I mean, most kids are pretty lost, and I was no exception really what I was given that opportunity.

I was at the detention facility in Parwan there which was where we kept several thousand of the highest level of Taliban, al Qaeda and other terrorist detainees.

As I mentioned, I had been researching this previously, so I had this list of questions.

I actually already wrote most of the book, or so I thought on the subject, and I went into the cells.

I had all access badge.

I took full advantage of it, sat down with senior Taliban members and said.

Hey, what makes you tick?

Why do you do this?

How did you get started.

I would go back to my shipping container home and write down everything I learned that day, so it was very firsthand.

I used their words.

The book is filled with first hand accounts of how the Taliban, how the Jihatis in general, think, and how they tick.

The more that I would learn, the more eye opening it would be, because it's just such a fundamentally different mindset than what people in the West are used to.

It's a very long term thinking.

Those words the title of the book, if it takes a thousand years, were told to me by a captured Taliban commander where I asked him.

I said, hey, look, we've got you caught.

How long are you going to keep fighting us?

And he said you have me in a cage, but my children will fight you, and their children will fight you.

If it takes a thousand years, we will win.

I would say the number one if I had to summarize how they operate, That sums it up.

They fight these generational wars, whereas Americans and those in the West typically it's rare to even get us to think a couple years out, let alone a thousand years.

Americans typically think two to four years at a time at most, because that's our re election cycle.

So our politicians are looking at their next election and thinking, Okay, what can I do for the next two to four years and leave a legacy and get re elected.

Whereas our enemies don't think like that.

They just focus on the next generation.

And that's where we've got to change our mind.

Even though they're determined to defeat us.

At a personality level, you make the point that they're very different from say prisoners you'd find in an American prison.

Their interpersonal attitude, their skills are very very different.

What was it like talking to them directly?

That was one of the biggest surprises, if not the biggest, participating in these interrogations, and there were over four hundred of them that I sat in on that I was directly talking to these folks.

You would go in there and they would say, hello, mister Jesse, how are you?

Just very genuinely warm seeming.

And the takeaway from that that I got was it really isn't personal.

They don't want you dead, they don't want me dead.

They want all of us to submit or die.

It's a much more macro, longer term thinking.

They're really looking at our kids, their kids as well.

They're trying to indoctrinate and get to the next generation.

There's just this slow chipping away strategy.

If you go to San Quentin or one of the other prisons that we've got in America.

I mean, these are tough folks that don't have the best inner personal skills.

But it was very scary and to a person that's untrained, they would think that this is legitimate.

Whereas these people, they'd easily have given the opportunity to just slit your throat without even thinking about it.

I mean, they don't.

I don't respect life like we do.

It's a completely different mindset.

I'll give you a couple examples.

One of the Taliban commanders that I talked to the way that it works.

You're not pouring water over their ends.

Saying tell us what you know like in the movies, you're drinking tea with them.

You're their friend.

In fact, the first chapter of the book is called Tea with the Taliban.

And one of the guys that I was talking to you start out, you say, hey, tell me about your family.

And he said, just very nonchalantly, he said, I have nine kids.

I had ten, but my daughter dishonored the family.

So I killed her, just like taking out the trash, just a normal everyday thing.

And what was scary about that?

It was so cold how he said it, just so nonchalantly.

And I would hear similar stuff again and again, and it goes so much deeper than just one individual action.

It's a cultural thing.

If he had not killed his daughter, his life might be in danger in that culture, where his friends and family would say, what's wrong with you?

Why didn't you kill your daughter?

She dishonored the family?

Are you without honor?

And you can see that even played out in the West.

There was the case in Texas of Yaser Sayad, who was on America's Most Wanted If you recall that that was about ten or fifteen years ago.

He made the most wanted list.

That was the taxi driver that killed his two daughters, Sarah and Amina Sayad.

And he was on the run for over a decade.

And what happened when they finally caught him, it was just because a neighbor saw him over the fence.

He was essentially living out in the open.

They arrested and convicted his own son, his brother, and there were other members of the community that had helped him along the way, and it just shows that they thought he did the right thing.

He murdered his two daughters because they had non Muslim boyfriends.

They refused to.

Wear a he job.

It was a very clear honor killing.

And so this goes so much deeper than just a criminal element.

It really is a cultural element.

These are fundamentally different cultures that jihad has come from.

Another example I'll give in Afghanistan, there's a tribe called the Neuri standing to be the equivalent of a city council member in a Nuristani tribe, there.

Are three prerequisites.

You have to be a good orator, and you have to host the entire village at a banquet ten times, all right, and you have to kill five rival tribe members.

I mean, I was a city council member in another life in southern California, and I'm glad I didn't have to murder five people in the town next door to get my seat.

But this is a very normal thing in that part of the world, and so it's very much intertwined.

It's not so much of a religious thing.

It's intertwined as well with tribalism because Islam grew out of these tribes, and these tribes grew up for the last fourteen hundred years, they evolved with Islam.

It's very intertwined, this tribal culture.

So you see a lot of crossover when it comes to respect for life or lack thereof.

There was a kid that was brought in that was caught with a suicide vest and thankfully they disarmed it.

It was probably about fifteen years old, but a lot of these guys, they don't know how old they are.

That's another thing.

It's a very timeless society.

And he comes in, he looks very young.

And I told the Afghan that I was working with that was part of the prosecution team.

Wow, this guy looks so young.

That's just so sad, like a teenager putting on a suicide vest going to kill himself.

He said, that's not the youngest.

And I said, what's the youngest suicide bomber you've ever caught?

He said six years old.

And so you think about it, it's like somebody strapped a bomb on a six year old.

And this is the ideology that we're up against.

And this is not somebody that you can sit down and sign a peace treaty with.

It's not something it's not a government that you can negotiate with and have them surrender and have a nice ceremony and be done with it.

The jihadis adhere to this very sick belief that just does not value life.

It's an absolutely fundamentally different viewpoint than our own.

One of the things I found fascinating in your book, you actually encountered detainees who had lived in the US, some of whom had actually grown up in the US.

To what extent did they just sort of reject American culture and revert what what's going on in their heads?

That was one of the scarier realizations or discoveries there.

One guy that I told him I needed him to sign a document.

I go up to him and I said, well, I got to wait for a translator, and he says, I don't need a translator, just very clearly, no accent.

And then I said, wait, you so you speak English?

He said yeah, I speak it fine.

And where are you from?

And he said, Ohio.

What would stop him from doing jihadis activity at them all of America or something.

I mean, it's really scary and it shows that immigration reform we need common sense policies that protect America from this.

It's not so much about defeating the jihatas it's about protecting what we've got.

And you have folks that come here.

He came here as a small kid.

We've got to look at realistically, where are their allegiances.

It's very tricky.

I mean, we haven't really dealt with this in the first couple hundred years of our existence as a nation because it's intertwined with a religion.

But you can see where these people are coming from and the cultures that are from there, and unfortunately, there's this fallacy of cultural relativism, as I call it, where people think that all cultures are equal, and the reality is that cultures, like some of the examples I just gave are certainly not equal to Western Judeo Christian values that our nation is built upon, because even if somebody isn't religious, if they grow up in this culture, they are still adhering by our laws are largely based off of Judeo Christian values that is our culture.

But this is just so counter and we can look at Europe to see the problems that a more or less open immigration system has created, and we need to start addressing it.

And thankfully this is starting to come out.

We need to look at what policies will force assimilation that out of all of the solutions, that's the number one.

We need to find ways to promote patriotism in our schools, to promote Jenao Christian values in our youth, because we're failing this next generation.

You have kids, and it's both immigrant and natural born as well, children that do not feel allegiance to our country.

And it's not just the Taliban fighter that decided as a teenager to go fight in Afghanistan and leave Ohio.

You have kids that are born and raised here that have nothing to do with those cultures that are marching with the queers for Palestine.

Banners and completely ignorant and misinformed.

Over the last few decades, unfortunately, the left has been attacking institutions that promote patriotism, that promote assimilation.

You have, like the Boy Scouts, for example, has.

Been completely neutered.

They're trying to take the Pledge of Allegiance out of schools, all these different things, and then they filled the universities with these whack job professors that are giving children a terrible education.

I think we have completely failed to educate the next generation about our enemies.

And that was no more evident than when we saw the pro Hamas protests on colleges.

There was a survey that was actually done that was reported by NBC, conducted by a group called Generation Lab.

It showed one out of eight college students in the weeks after the Hamas attack outright supported it.

There was another survey they did a few months later that it had increased.

It was one out of four actually supported, one out of four on American college campuses.

And they just are completely ignorant to what kind of people they're supporting.

I mean, if they think that they support women's rights or.

What have you.

I mean, they're very ignorant on the subject.

So if you're listening to this, you're probably already aware.

But the question I would ask the listeners to ask themselves is are your children or grandchildren aware of the threats that we are facing from not just the jihadist enemies, but others as well.

So, I mean, what's worse if we have isolated terrorist attacks or a generation of children that are turned into pro jihatas zombies that we see on these campuses, that would open the doors for our enemies.

So I would recommend get them books on this subject, talk to them.

There's a great book called If It Takes a Thousand Years available on Amazon that I would recommend.

It's a good read, easy for a teenager to read or a young adult.

But this is an ideological war, and they have our children in their sights.

It's not something that is going to slip by them.

I mean, they're very much focused on the next generation.

In fact, on their own.

That's the primary way that jihadist recruit is getting to kids.

Does the Jihad seem attractive to join as an adult?

It's a lot easier to get to a kid, And let's face it, a kid's brain is mush until they reach maybe twenty five.

I'm going to ask you one question about the Taliban.

The great deal of Afghanistan has to be understood as tribal rather than religious.

The tribal ties are very, very, very deep to what a cent in that sense is the talibana geographically defined threat, whereas Al Khalida, for example, is by definition a global threat.

Taliban is kind of a misnomer.

I think, even though it is technically it's an organization, it does have leadership, they don't really look at themselves like that.

They're really the students of the madrasa.

And so in the Pasto language, talib singular means student, Taliban means students.

These are the students of the Islamic schools.

And out of the four hundred interrogations or so that I participated in, I don't recall a single one that did not go through these Islamic madrasas.

And so their primary focus is on educating kids to this fundamentalist ideology.

How they recruit, that's how they grow.

It's not just specifically focused on that region.

Their allies around the world.

They all operate in roughly the same way that jihadis really share two commonalities all the groups, whether it's the Taliban, al Qaeda, Hakani, what have you.

Their number one goal is to establish a global Islamic caliphate, which is a government under Sharia Islamic law.

They only split the world into two parts.

They call it Dar al Islam, which is the land of Islam, and Dar al Harb the land of war, and so it's one or the other.

Dar al Islam is the land that's been conquered that's under Sharia law, Daryl Harb being where they're trying to conquer.

And that's the ideology that the Taliban, that these students of the Islamic schools are taught to believe.

And so the second commonality is that they all have this long term emphasis on indoctrinating the next generation, and so that is shared by all of them.

I think are saving grace is that they are split into this tribal mindset.

Humans are wired that way.

We have the republican tribe, we have the democrat tribe.

We have all these different groups, and even within that, we have different groups that we get into and that's just how we're wired as a species.

But they take it to the extreme and the Islamic world is so fractured, and it's really our saving grace.

I mean, the fact that they're so disjointed that they're all fighting each other.

I mean, I think the conflicts that we face are not against governments of the Middle East, but the Variousjihattist factions, and so heaven forbid, there'd be a month's raider that would unite the clans north of the Wall and get all the tribes together, because we'd be in a lot of trouble.

Those tribal differences where they fight each other, whether it's Sunni tribe or Shia tribe, or or the Palestinian tribe or all these other so called tribes that have started that stuff seems to come first.

Their hatred of each other is deeper than their hatred of the West.

And it's wild to see it play out.

I mean, I saw it there where we would have to separate detainees that were from different tribes because they would kill each other on site.

Pashtune would see a hazarda and be at his neck, and it's just like, okay, it's very different.

I remember even in more western Islamic nations.

I remember my first trip to the Middle East was to Jordan and driving along the desert Highway there.

I wanted to stop at some of the different villages that look neat.

I wanted to go get something to eat, and the taxi driver said, no, we can't stop there.

We're not part of the tribe.

You can't go there.

You'll get killed.

It's crazy, And I'm just thinking, it's like, Okay, that's a little different than where I grew up.

I mean, imagine driving to New York and being like, we can't stop in Jersey City.

We're not part of the tribe.

So it's very, very different, that's for sure.

Now, when you were done in Afghanishan, you went on and toured a large part of the Islamic world.

What did that teach you?

The biggest takeaway, as I alluded to earlier, is it's really not personal.

A lot of these cultures were very warm, very welcoming, especially from the Arab world.

It's very different.

In visiting Islamic nations throughout the world and studying their history, I realized what works in that part of the world, because you do have so many of these different tribes or tribal mindsets that are all at each other's throat.

It's the only things that work.

The only forms of government that works is a dictator, unfortunately, and so you see the most stable places in the Islamic world were led by a king, by some kind of a strong man, and this is true throughout recent history.

You look at Kamal auto Turk, I think is the best example that these people need an auto turk to keep them in line.

And that's where our foreign policy, I think failed to understand just what a different mindset we're up against.

I'm guilty of in two thousand and four of going along with it when President Bush was saying democracy is on the march, and you remember that.

I was like, yeah, this is great.

We're going to free them and they're gonna love us.

This is great.

And it really fails to take into account all these differences and.

Where they're at culturally.

In the Federalist papers they mentioned, you know, even Plato alluded to this as well and some of the older writings that for a democracy to work, a culture has to have reached that level of thought to handle it, and these cultures, certainly most of them.

Have not yet and it takes time.

I mean, I remember one of the Taliban guy as one of the fighters was brought in and the interrogator came out laughing.

You said, you never believe what just happened.

This guy I was taking notes during the interrogation and he stopped me in the middle.

This is the interrogator speaking, he said.

He stopped me in the middle of the interrogation and said, through the translator, what's that stick in your hand?

He had never seen a pen before in his life.

And these are the people that were trying to teach Western democratic republican style governance.

He didn't know what a.

Pen was, never seen one.

Granted this was thirteen years ago.

So the big game changer, though, I think in that.

Part of the world is the Internet.

Now that guy that doesn't know what a pen was probably has a smartphone in his hand, and much of the Middle East is getting connected.

They're seeing there's another way.

I think that's causing a lot of the unrest.

It certainly sparks the Arab spring with social media, it will shake out.

I think over the next few generations.

I am optimistic that you will have huge swaths of the Islamic world that will be going through a reformation.

And it's already happening they don't like what they're seeing.

So I'm optimistic.

I think it's a game changer.

But again, you can look at history, recent history, very recent every time that open elections have been held in that part of the world, that jihadis always find a way to seize power, even if they're not in the majority.

It happened in Libya.

You could see in Egypt when we sold Hosnimabarak down the river.

They held an open.

Election, the Muslim Brotherhood took charge Tunisia where the Arab spring started.

Kaza Is another examples.

Gave them the vote, and who do they vote for.

They voted for Hamas and so you can see the Auto Turk's reforms being unwound in Turkey where they're now becoming more and more of an Islamist state.

And so anytime there's open elections, they vote for what they know.

They vote for Sharia, and it's something that will take generations to get away from.

And it's not up to us.

That's the thing is, it's really not up to us.

But it should be reflected in our foreign policy that we understand that because we've made that mistake twice now where we knock out a secular dictatorship, and it's actually more than twice because through other foreign policy missteps where we knock out secular dictators and then they replace it with Islamist governments, and we fail to understand that a strong man is what's needed in these parts of the world.

From that standpoint, though, I'm watching what is happening in Turkey and it's frankly very sobering to see what was probably the most methodical effort to get to a post religious Islamic country may outa Turk just gradually being peeled back by ord to one who clearly is moving towards an Islamis state.

Would you agree with them absolutely?

Is?

I mean, it's really disappointing to see before our eyes that happen.

It's unfortunately not a surprise when you understand who these people are and how aggressive they are.

Just to give you an example of how they seized power in Egypt, this was just undermined Mubarik.

There.

They do the same things.

They're very aggressive in Turkey as well.

Whenever their elections.

There was a priest that I talked to.

He organized a bus of Christians from a village to vote in one of the referendums and the bus shows up and the Muslim Brotherhood there is the largest Islamist movement in the country.

They have made themselves easily recognizable.

They grow a beard, they mark themselves on their forehead so they know who.

Each other is.

And what happened is they were standing out in front of many of the polling places with knives and just threatening anybody who didn't have a bruise on their forehead and didn't have a beard.

And this bus shows up to vote.

Guys with knives came out, the beard had bruised Muslim Brotherhood members and they said no, turn the bus around, and none of those people from that village got to vote.

That is how they intimidate, that's how they operate, and it doesn't even need to be the majority of a country to do that.

And so we need to understand that.

I mean, that's why it's so important to support these secular leaders that are the strong men in these types of nations, because if we don't, if we say, yeah, let's give them some democratic reforms or undermine the leadership, we see the results.

I mean, you can look at Syria.

I mean you can look at what they did when they toppled as odd.

We're sure he was a brutal, wicked dictator, but the alternative now we have the former head of ices now in charge.

I was talking to somebody just this morning about that, where they would say, no, what happened to isis didn't iis go away?

And it's like, well, no, they just trim their beards and put on a suit and change their plans.

It's the same thing.

They realized that drowning people in cages and setting them on fire wasn't winning the hearts and minds, so they decided to think a little bit more long term and strategically, and that's what they do.

They're fighting these long term battles and that's why we need to be educated on it.

Talk a little bit about what you see happening on campuses and the scale of organization and money that's going into things like the Muslim Student Association that now is all across the country.

Right.

Yeah, I think it really comes down to parents being involved.

We're in a country that is the product of affluence.

We've had a pretty affluent country for the last entry.

There really hasn't been a lot of hardships since World War Two and so you have kids that are searching for purpose.

I think we have a purpose problem in this country.

We had a purpose problem after World We're two as well, where you had the Baby Boomers came in one of the best times, just after one of the worst times.

The previous generation, the Greatest generation, they lived through the Great Depression.

They felt purposeful.

I mean, they were plowing the fields, working in the factories, trying to figure out how to eat, and they had to go storm the beaches of Normandy.

They had real threats that they had to face.

And then what happened is the Baby Boomers came and it was great economy.

I mean, there were sure individual hardships, but overall life was pretty easy and it's been pretty easy since then.

So they lacked purpose.

There were some legitimate causes like the Civil Rights Act and others that they got behind and passed.

But then so many of them got into teaching.

They started having their own or view that it's like, Okay, now they're searching for something to do, and they're grabbing these purposes that they really don't know much about.

Some of them aren't that big of an issue.

I mean, you look at the transgender causes and other things that they're pushing that it's like, Okay, they're just looking for something someone to champion, whether or not they even care about the individual cause.

And so if you look at these protests on the college campuses or on not just college campuses, but protests everywhere that are in favor of Palestinians or what have you, or over as I say, prohamas people under twenty five and people over sixty five.

There isn't a whole lot in between.

And I think part of that, of course, is attributed to the fact that when you're in your working age of life, you're busy.

But a lot of it I think has to do with nine to eleven.

I mentioned I was eighteen when nine to eleven happened.

My generation, a lot of us went, and we went overseas, we joined the military, and if even if we didn't, we felt that there was a real thread out there, and it kicked the can down the road a little bit.

But this next generation, though, they're searching, they're very much searching for purpose.

If you're searching for purpose and finding it in in different groups like Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ rights or what have you, it might be misguided and a few people might do stupid things, but you're not going to march off a cliff supporting those things.

But supporting hamas you will.

This is a real threat to the West.

The Jihadis are a threat.

It's a very long term threat, and if you want to open the door for these guys, it's going to have a very negative impact on Western civilization.

And so for them to be getting behind this issue, it's suicidal, it really is.

Dennis Brager actually wrote the blurb for my book and the opening thing, and he called the Jihadis the monsters of our time, and that's just it.

These really are monsters.

And I tell my kids the monsters are not real, but it's a lie.

These are the monsters of our time, and the children need to understand that.

To what extent do you think there's a genuine danger that we are going to lose the internal ability to oppose those these kind of moves.

I think we need to understand that these students that are protesting on college campuses are the future voters of America.

These are our future presidents, these are our future senators, our future members of Congress, and if we don't do something in the next thirty or forty years as they're taking over, they will enact disastrous policies that will have incredible long term consequences.

You could look at.

Europe as the example of what some of these policies did.

They had this open immigration, they perpetuated it with this generous welfare system that enabled these welfare reliant slums.

And I mean, the surest way to make sure that people don't assimilate is to throw money at them and build a bureaucracy of helpers whose jobs depend on these people staying as part of the system.

And so you see the same types of demands from AOC and others that are pushing for similar terrible policies, and you have young people getting behind it without knowing the consequences, and so it is a legitimate threat.

I have full confidence, though, if it gets too far, that Americans will step up and right it.

Unfortunately, I think that it might get worse before or will get worse before it gets better.

But there are an awful lot of people yourself included myself that if you served in any elected position, if you served in law enforcement, if you join the military, you swore an oath to defend the Constitution, and there are an awful lot of us who have, and I have full faith in the American people, especially now that the Internet is more or less open through X and other means, that they'll see what's going on.

They're not going to like it, and they'll right the wrong.

But I don't know what changes unless it gets really bad, because you've seen that classic saying we're hard times creates strong men.

Strong men create good times.

Good times creates weak men, and weak men create hard times.

So we are in the last glory there right now, and I don't see how things get better without this next generation feeling some kind of hardship.

Because those people that storm the beaches of Normandy, that lived through the Great Depression, they're the ones that put a man on the moon.

They built the Interstates, they invented the internet.

Al Gore did not invent the Internet, but they did, they worked, and they persevered, and I think it really takes that hardship to find purpose and to really have a reckoning, And unfortunately that's.

Where we're heading.

Buy silver, learn how to grow your own crops and be able to weather the storm, and teach your kids the values that are so important to keeping this nation free.

Well to thank you for joining me, because in a sense, your new book, If it Takes a Thousand Years from Al Khalida to almas how the Jahadas think and how to defeat them.

In a way, you are part of the wake up call and you are laying out for the American people how great the danger is and what we're going to have to do.

It is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, and I want to really thank you for helping us and being part of this podcast.

Well, thank you very much, mister speaker.

I think it's important that we remember we're not fighting against the Jihadiss, We're fighting for America.

We're fighting for freedom, and that's what it's all about.

It's about preserving what we've got.

Thank you to my guest, Jesse Patrol.

You can get a link to buy his new book, If it Takes a Thousand Years on our show page at newtworld dot com.

Newtworld is produced by Ginglishree sixty and iHeartMedia.

Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slow.

Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley Special thanks to the.

Team at ginglishree sixty.

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I'm Newt Gingrich.

This is Newtsworld.