Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - August 17, 2021


Ep 472 ｜ Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster & How We Can Help ｜ Guest： Morgan Ortagus


Episode Stats

Length

56 minutes

Words per Minute

180.625

Word Count

10,138

Sentence Count

595

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

33


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone is having a good week so far.
00:00:15.660 Yesterday, we kind of took a break from the new cycle and I gave you some encouragement
00:00:21.140 and a lot of you guys said that that was really helpful. So if you are feeling like you're
00:00:27.040 in a pit of despair or you're feeling really hopeless, especially about what's going on in
00:00:31.800 the world, I really encourage you to listen to or watch yesterday's episode if you haven't done
00:00:36.080 that. And as promised today, we are talking about Afghanistan. We are talking to Morgan Ortegas.
00:00:42.940 She was spokesperson for the State Department, working with Mike Pompeo in the Trump administration.
00:00:50.120 And she has been in Afghanistan several times over the past 20 years or in the Middle East,
00:00:56.340 at least several times since 9-11. So in a few minutes, she's going to give us some context.
00:01:01.820 She's going to set this all up for us and back us up and remind us, okay, why we're here?
00:01:08.260 What's going on? How did this unfold? Because a lot of us, you know, we vaguely know, of course,
00:01:14.420 there have been wars in the Middle East and we know about 9-11. Some of you, as I will say with Morgan,
00:01:20.500 were not even alive when 9-11 happened, but you kind of understand, okay, we've been there for a
00:01:24.740 long time. It's been very popular among the American people to get out of Afghanistan,
00:01:30.040 but it's a lot more complicated than just, okay, let's leave. And that's what we are watching
00:01:36.320 unfold. So Morgan's going to talk about that and talk about some of the implications and the
00:01:40.940 consequences and how we need to look at how, you know, China and Russia play into all of this and
00:01:46.100 what we need to be concerned about and also what we need to be praying for. Then after that conversation,
00:01:50.940 I'm going to give us, once again, a little bit more perspective and encouragement. I'm just going
00:01:55.860 to continue to do that a lot because I feel that many of us are carrying this heavy burden of wanting
00:02:02.840 to know so much and do so much and feeling incapable and just kind of powerless. On top of all the things
00:02:08.900 that are going on in this country and in your own personal life, it can be a very stressful and
00:02:15.100 just a very exhausting time for a lot of people right now. So I want to try to refresh us with
00:02:21.660 that eternal perspective as much as I possibly can. But first, before we get into the conversation
00:02:26.420 with Morgan Ortegas, I want to talk about what's been going on for the past few days. So if you just
00:02:32.020 haven't been paying attention quite yet, I don't blame you. There's a lot of news out there and it
00:02:37.480 can be very overwhelming. I really didn't look into all of this over the weekend because I just said,
00:02:43.960 you know what, I'm going to start looking at this on Monday because it's just too much. People who
00:02:50.580 know a lot more than I do can kind of give me a rundown of what's been going on. And so that's
00:02:56.340 kind of how I spent a lot of my day yesterday, really trying to understand. So this is from the
00:03:03.740 AP. The Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was set to complete its
00:03:09.180 troop withdrawal after a costly two-decade war. So this is something that President Trump promised
00:03:14.880 to do. And this is something that Biden said that he was going to follow through on. And he promised
00:03:21.200 that troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9-11, by the 20th year anniversary of 9-11.
00:03:29.920 The AP goes on to say,
00:03:31.380 the insurgents stormed across the country, capturing all major cities in a matter of days as Afghan
00:03:35.900 security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. and its allies melted away. So we've spent the past
00:03:42.380 20 years trying to train these Afghan forces, arming them. And so that when we did actually
00:03:50.240 withdraw, that the Taliban wouldn't take over because these 300,000 troops that we have spent
00:03:57.580 so much money and so much time and so much energy and so many lives training and fighting with and
00:04:03.280 fighting for, they would be able to fight after the Taliban. And obviously that has not happened.
00:04:11.240 And it's, you know, it's very strange. I saw some videos across social media that
00:04:15.440 made me feel, I don't know if it was like a cringy feeling, a sad feeling, like a pitiful feeling,
00:04:21.780 but there were videos of American troops trying to train the Afghan forces over there. And it's just
00:04:28.420 a completely different world. It's a completely different
00:04:32.140 setting and a completely different visual of how you see American troops being trained. Like,
00:04:39.640 I think that one of the faulty premises that we have had, America has had a nation building,
00:04:45.720 is thinking that all people are basically the same, which of course, as Christians,
00:04:49.320 we know that everyone is made in the image of God and has the same value, but not everyone has
00:04:53.680 the same values. Like not everyone has the same worldview, the same desires, the same commitment
00:05:00.440 to fighting for individual liberty and all of that, that people in the Western world and particularly
00:05:05.740 people in America do. And so it just didn't, our vision for Afghanistan and the Western world's vision
00:05:16.240 for Afghanistan that has really been driving foreign policy in the Western world for the past,
00:05:22.820 not 20 years, but 200 years. It just failed to manifest in the way that I think a lot of idealists
00:05:29.980 in the United States thought that it would. So that's part of the disappointment and part of the
00:05:35.700 disarray that we are seeing right now is that the vision that a lot of Americans had of how things
00:05:41.560 would kind of settle themselves after 20 years of what's typically called nation building.
00:05:48.340 It just has been a shock, I think, to a lot of people, and maybe it shouldn't have been, but Morgan
00:05:53.320 will answer that question for us. So here's a little bit more about what's going on right now.
00:05:59.720 So people are fleeing the country. The Taliban took over and they, so basically what's happening
00:06:07.000 right now is that if you are a man left in Afghanistan, you will be forced to join the
00:06:12.120 Taliban. If you are a woman or a girl that's left in the Taliban, you will be, and this is explicit,
00:06:19.220 I'm just warning you, you will likely be raped. You will likely be taken in as a sex slave. You will
00:06:24.460 not be allowed to be educated, so you won't go to school. You will not be allowed to have a job unless
00:06:30.580 it's in healthcare, which is just an interesting caveat that they have. They will be forced to wear full
00:06:35.960 burqa, so really only their eyes through like a very thin window will be able to barely be seen.
00:06:44.860 And so these are the most extreme of extreme Islamists. They have a sincere hatred for women
00:06:54.040 and girls. They don't have the same perspective on human life, certainly not the same perspective
00:06:59.900 of equality. And it's just silly for anyone to imagine that they do, but they truly don't have
00:07:06.320 the same idea of human value. People really are, especially women and girls, are just treated as
00:07:14.860 objects. And there are Afghans who are left there right now who have absolutely no hope of anything
00:07:22.880 else except to be subjugated by this terrorist regime. There were thousands of people who have been
00:07:29.680 trying to get out of Afghanistan. The scenes that we've seen on Twitter of people literally trying
00:07:35.140 to cling to American airplanes that are leaving are just devastating. I'm going to play a few of
00:07:41.540 those clips. I encourage you to watch on YouTube so you can see this for yourself. It really is
00:07:47.040 heartbreaking. Here that is.
00:07:54.880 A video that I did not play, which was just, I mean, it reminded me so much of 9-11. So that plane
00:08:03.980 that you watched that Afghan men were clinging to, I don't know what they assumed would happen. I mean,
00:08:11.940 of course, you're just desperate in that case until you're not necessarily thinking rationally,
00:08:16.460 and I can't blame them for that. But there were people who, there were men who managed to hold
00:08:21.680 on to the plane as it was taking off. And there are videos as the plane is going into the sky of
00:08:28.080 these people falling to the ground. At least seven people fell to their deaths as they were trying to
00:08:35.220 cling to the side of the plane. So desperate were they to get out of Afghanistan and out from under
00:08:40.300 the Taliban rule. And one thing that you'll notice in these videos and in some of the pictures that
00:08:48.640 you see of these planes that are full of Afghans trying to escape is that the vast majority of these
00:08:56.380 people are men. And the question that a lot of people ask is like, where are the women and children?
00:09:02.400 Like, why are the women and children out first? And we don't know completely the answer to that
00:09:08.160 question. But again, I would remind us that not every worldview is the same. Not every culture is
00:09:14.620 the same. I think we think here in the West that everyone has the same kind of chivalrous mentality
00:09:21.780 that, of course, you allow the most vulnerable to go first. And of course, the men stay back and they
00:09:26.960 fight and they allow the women to escape. That's not how it is everywhere. And certainly America is not
00:09:34.260 like the exemplar of chivalry these days. But that mentality that we have of trying to protect the
00:09:40.880 most vulnerable, which in this case, of course, is women and girls, almost in every case is women and
00:09:45.880 girls. But especially in this scenario, they just that's not their priority. That's not necessarily
00:09:53.600 their value. Now, I don't blame these men for wanting to get out at all. Of course, they would be
00:10:01.280 forced to join the Taliban. Like, they would have a very hard life. Like, they would also be subject
00:10:07.860 to abuse. So I don't blame them at all for wanting to get out. But I would be lying if I said it didn't
00:10:14.600 break my heart that the women and girls apparently, obviously, were left behind in many of these cases.
00:10:23.920 America has, and we'll talk about this with Morgan, they have agreed to accept 30,000
00:10:30.240 of these Afghan refugees, and I'm sure that it will be a lot more. Now, as a Christian,
00:10:36.260 we have hearts of compassion for people that are fleeing torture, that are fleeing the threat of
00:10:43.900 murder. We especially have compassion for our brothers and our sisters in Christ who are facing
00:10:48.220 persecution. Some of the pictures and the videos and the testimonies that we've seen from Christians
00:10:53.840 there literally being tied to what look like crosses and blinded and beaten, I'm sure they will
00:11:00.220 be slaughtered as is so prevalent among Christians in the Islamic world. We want those people to be
00:11:09.460 able to escape. Like, we want them to come here. Like, that is our instinct. I think that's a good
00:11:14.560 instinct. And I, by the way, I think it's good policy to accept especially the people that are facing
00:11:22.180 religious persecution, especially our allies, especially the people that worked with us there.
00:11:27.740 It's good policy to accept those people into the United States. It's not good policy. And this is
00:11:33.320 just true. Like, it's not lacking empathy or compassion to say this. It's not good policy to just
00:11:39.060 make a blanket number and say, we're accepting this many refugees no matter what. Because what I worry
00:11:47.820 about, and I think what a lot of people worry about, is that these people are going to be vetted.
00:11:52.520 How do we know there aren't Taliban sympathizers that are coming in with this group of refugees?
00:11:58.180 Like, do we have any confidence at this point in this administration that they will be vetted,
00:12:03.580 and that this will be a process that is characterized by integrity and safety and security? I don't have
00:12:10.320 any confidence in that. And it is absolutely the job of this administration to think about that.
00:12:16.500 Like, it's not, we can't just have such narrow compassion that we only have compassion for the
00:12:22.640 people that are fleeing Afghanistan. You have to also have compassion for people here that are
00:12:27.420 impacted, especially the most vulnerable people here, that are impacted by these kinds of public
00:12:32.400 policy decisions. You've already seen Emmanuel Macron, the leader of France, say that he said,
00:12:39.520 you know, it's not France's responsibility to accept a bunch of these, accept a bunch of these
00:12:45.760 refugees. The reason why he's saying that is number one, I mean, this is kind of America's mess at this
00:12:50.440 point, at least mostly, primarily. But he's also saying this because of this very inconvenient fact
00:12:58.140 that Afghan refugees, unfortunately, around the world have a much higher or a disproportionate crime
00:13:04.760 rate than refugees from other countries. So Emmanuel Macron said that. I mean, this is a guy who is
00:13:10.300 certainly seen as a progressive. France is battling, though, Islamist extremism, and has been for quite a
00:13:17.840 while because of much more liberal immigration and refugee policies that they've had in the past.
00:13:22.760 They've really tightened that up. A bunch of these Scandinavian countries have extremely tight
00:13:27.480 controls on immigration. It's really America is very unique in its willingness to simply basically open
00:13:36.280 the borders and open the doors for people without a whole lot of conditions. On the one hand, that can be
00:13:42.740 seen as compassion. And I think it is in a lot of cases. On the other hand, it can be seen as a lack of
00:13:47.600 prudence. And even you could see it as just a bad, irresponsible, even wicked leadership to put the interest in the
00:13:55.240 safety and the security of your own people last. And that, of course, is what we have seen from this
00:14:01.020 administration and other administrations in the past. So there has to be a balance. Like there has
00:14:07.980 to be a balance of looking at and prioritizing first and foremost our own national security and then
00:14:16.580 looking at ways, OK, how can we help the refugees that are fleeing this violence and fleeing this danger
00:14:22.460 while still keeping our country safe? Hopefully there's a way to do that. Like I would like to
00:14:28.480 prioritize the women and the girls and the babies and the children, the Christian refugees, the religious
00:14:34.660 refugees that are fleeing that kind of violence. We have to prioritize our allies, people that helped
00:14:39.860 us there. Of course, we have to prioritize the American citizens. There are American citizens still left
00:14:44.940 there right now. So we have to prioritize that. And maybe this administration will do that.
00:14:51.240 I'm not really sure. This is Joe Biden and his administration's fault. It's not entirely his
00:14:58.620 fault. This has been going on for a long time. But the fact that not that we left every most people
00:15:05.080 wanted to leave Afghanistan at some point, the so-called forever wars, people were over that.
00:15:12.100 There are different perspectives on that, of course, within conservatism, within progressivism.
00:15:16.060 But I would say most people, this is kind of a bipartisan issue and didn't want to have such a
00:15:21.800 large presence in Afghanistan anymore. People understood that. People did not think that we
00:15:27.000 would leave in this way. And Morgan's going to talk to us more about that, completely haphazard,
00:15:33.280 going to talk about, and you've probably heard about this being Joe Biden's Saigon, that the same
00:15:41.140 thing happened when America left or ended the Vietnam War and left in such a haphazard and chaotic
00:15:49.760 way. That's what we're seeing now, except worse. I mean, left billions of dollars of weaponry for the
00:15:55.540 Taliban to take over. It is an absolute mess. It's an absolute mess. And Joe Biden responded to this.
00:16:01.760 Another big thing about this is that Joe Biden was he wasn't talking about it. Like all of this was
00:16:08.620 unfolding over the weekend due to Biden's decision making, or at least whoever makes the decisions in
00:16:14.080 the Biden administration. I have my doubts that it's Joe Biden himself. He was absent. Like he wasn't
00:16:19.600 making his statement. The press secretary was on vacation. So Joe Biden was at Camp David.
00:16:28.780 And we finally heard yesterday that he was going to make a statement at 345 Eastern time. It was a
00:16:34.500 it was a little late. And he made his speech. And it was, in my opinion, disappointing, to say the
00:16:43.540 least. Let me play just a few clips of that. And then I'll explain what I'm talking about.
00:16:48.280 When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
00:16:54.400 The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement
00:17:00.580 or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
00:17:07.620 So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.
00:17:15.460 The Afghan military collapsed sometime without trying to fight. American troops cannot and should not
00:17:24.940 be fighting in a war be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight
00:17:31.160 for themselves. We gave them every chance to determine their own future.
00:17:37.420 We could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
00:17:42.780 So here's where I agree and disagree with Joe Biden. If you listen to the whole speech,
00:17:48.440 you watch the whole speech. It's not very long, so I encourage you to do that.
00:17:52.420 It doesn't sound all bad, and it's not all bad. And what I mean by that is that the thing that I
00:18:00.280 found that was bad is that he created straw man arguments. So basically, he spent however many
00:18:06.120 minutes the speech was defending his decision, his administration's decision to withdraw from
00:18:14.600 Afghanistan and talked about how this has been going on forever. He blames Trump, basically said,
00:18:20.360 look, this was Trump's plan, and we just executed on it. Morgan is going to bust that myth, though,
00:18:26.100 once we talk to her. And he even went on to blame, we didn't play it in this clip, Obama and past
00:18:34.780 administrations. And then, of course, you heard him blame the Afghan army. And the problem is that
00:18:42.400 no one is arguing. Like I said, that's a straw man. No one is arguing that we should not have
00:18:46.880 withdrawn. Like no one is saying that we needed to stay there forever. We're saying that maybe we
00:18:52.400 could have done it in a more responsible way. Like maybe we could have planned for contingencies.
00:18:57.100 Maybe we shouldn't have left our millions of dollars of weapons there. Maybe we should have
00:19:01.500 gotten our American diplomats and the allies out first. Like maybe we should have had a better plan
00:19:07.620 in place. Of course, he knows that, though. He's setting up a false dichotomy, and he is trying to
00:19:14.000 defend something that no one is arguing against. Like no one is saying that we should have stayed
00:19:18.840 there forever. And yet that's what he spends his speech saying, defending that we shouldn't have
00:19:23.740 stayed there forever. No one's saying that. He knows that, though. He doesn't even want to address
00:19:27.800 the fact that this was an absolute failure of his administration. It wasn't the Trump administration
00:19:33.300 that executed this. It wasn't Obama. It wasn't Bush. And maybe all of them, I would say definitely
00:19:38.700 all of them have blame to take 100 percent. But this is very different than the foreign policy,
00:19:46.660 the successful foreign policy that we saw under Donald Trump. That is an objective fact.
00:19:50.940 That's not partisan politics. That is just true. Even if you like Joe Biden, you can see that how
00:19:56.300 this was handled was a failure. And he does not own this. Brian Williams on MSNBC tried to say,
00:20:02.860 oh, yeah, he owned this. He didn't run away from it. It was awesome. His guest,
00:20:06.300 who is a veteran, immediately pushed back and said, I feel like I was watching a different
00:20:10.000 speech than you because he did not own anything. And that is absolutely true.
00:20:13.620 Now, where I agree with Joe Biden in this speech and in just the couple clips that we just played
00:20:20.100 is that Americans should not be dying in a war, that the Afghans are not willing to fight for
00:20:29.000 themselves. And that is true. They at the end of the day, I don't think the Afghan army was prepared.
00:20:37.640 Like I said, there were videos of training the Afghan army. They didn't look prepared. And also like
00:20:42.000 the American troops ran into a lot of problems in trying to train the Afghan army. This is a
00:20:47.840 completely different place. Many of many of the Afghans that they were working with could not read.
00:20:54.480 They could not count. They did not know their numbers. They were illiterate. They didn't know
00:21:00.400 their colors. In a lot of cases, it's being reported. And so think about the challenge that
00:21:06.660 the American troops are faced in trying to train these people that they really kind of have to go
00:21:10.960 back to the basics of just elementary education. And then on top of that, like teach them military
00:21:16.400 strategy, teach them how to use weapons. And it was just our idealistic view of what was going to
00:21:27.200 happen, like I said a few minutes ago, just was never, was probably never going to pan out how we
00:21:32.820 thought that it would 20 years ago. And also, like there was a lot of corruption. According to the AP,
00:21:40.540 the U.S. and its NATO allies spent billions of dollars over two decades to train and equip Afghan
00:21:44.960 security forces. But the Western backed government was rife with corruption. So the Afghan government
00:21:50.920 was rife with corruption. And this is the government that, again, the West, the West helped
00:21:55.980 to install. Commanders exaggerated the number of soldiers to siphon off resources and troops in the
00:22:01.580 field often lacked ammunition, supplies or even food. There is also reported by several outlets,
00:22:08.920 there was rampant sexual abuse of young boys by the Afghan troops that the United States was told not
00:22:16.140 to report and just to ignore. And so certainly I think that the United States could have had at least
00:22:24.440 enabled some of some of this corruption. So so much of this was ill-advised. And then there, of course,
00:22:32.500 is the concern that our enemies are going to seize on this, as Morgan will talk about, and it's going to
00:22:42.240 spell trouble for us. And for anyone who thinks that, OK, you know, this is they just want to be they
00:22:50.200 just want to, you know, deal with their own problems. They just want to live by their own values and be
00:22:57.540 left alone. CNN did in did an interview and Michael Knowles pointed out that the Taliban has actually
00:23:04.420 done more interviews with with the press than the president of the United States has about the
00:23:10.680 Taliban takeover. After Joe Biden did his speech, he he didn't say anything to the press like he
00:23:19.460 ignored the press and he went back to Camp David. So we've got an absentee. I mean, a complete failure,
00:23:24.920 a complete failure of leadership. But one of the one of the people in the Taliban talked to CNN
00:23:31.780 and he said this. It's our belief that one day Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan,
00:23:36.180 but all over the world. Jihad will not end until the last day. And so you've probably heard this
00:23:43.960 phrase before, like you have all the watches we have all the time. Like this is a this is a goal,
00:23:50.920 this worldwide jihad, this worldwide takeover by Islamic law, Sharia law is generational. It has
00:24:00.320 been around for a long time. And the people in the Taliban don't see themselves as necessarily
00:24:06.800 wanting to see themselves the takeover of the world. They see themselves as one part of a grand
00:24:12.760 collective and a grand narrative that they are just helping move along. They're absolutely willing
00:24:17.900 to give their life for that. And so this is not just about them wanting to be independent of
00:24:24.480 American rule. This is they want worldwide, worldwide domination. And so that's where we are.
00:24:36.140 This is a very scary time for a lot of people over there. It's a scary time for people here. I hope
00:24:43.800 that it's a wake up call for people to see not just the failures of this administration,
00:24:49.700 but the failure of a particular worldview that clings to cultural and moral relativism that says,
00:24:56.880 you know, everyone has a basically good value system. Every set of beliefs is basically morally
00:25:03.440 equivalent. There's no culture that's better than another culture. There's no worldview that's better
00:25:07.920 than another culture. There's no set of politics or set of beliefs that's better than another.
00:25:12.200 And that is simply not true. That kind of cultural and moral relativism, that kind of
00:25:19.760 postmodernism, that there is no objective morality, there is no objective higher good, there is no
00:25:25.100 objectively good or bad worldview. It's part of what has gotten us into this mess and has led to bad
00:25:31.440 foreign policy and naive foreign policy decisions. So I hope that this just shakes us of that. And I hope
00:25:39.080 it also reminds us that so many of the things that we complain about here, so many of the things that
00:25:45.220 we call injustice here, which are really just things that we don't like, so many of the things that we
00:25:50.580 are offended by and riled up by here are such small potatoes compared to what most of the people in the
00:25:57.660 world suffer through. And so allow that to give us a little bit of perspective as well.
00:26:06.080 We're going to get into this conversation with Morgan Ortegas, and she's going to give us some
00:26:12.540 more information about all of this.
00:26:20.220 Morgan, thank you so much for joining us. For everyone who may not know, can you tell us who
00:26:24.540 you are and what you do? Sure. Well, I was just recently Mike Pompeo. I'm President Trump's
00:26:30.520 spokesperson at the Department of State, but I've been in the intelligence community defense
00:26:35.160 foreign policy for like the past 15 years or so, lived a lot in the Middle East, been in and out
00:26:40.620 of Afghanistan a lot. And now I'm in Nashville, hence the sign, and working in investment private
00:26:47.620 equity. Okay, I gotcha. And you are the perfect person to give us all the context of what's going
00:26:52.720 on, because a lot of people listening, they feel like they have a vague idea of why we're there and
00:26:58.680 what's happening. But some people may not know. Some people listening to this podcast may not have
00:27:03.200 even been alive at 9-11. So can we back up a little bit? And can you just start from the
00:27:09.040 beginning? Tell us why we're here and why is all of this happening right now? You know, it is amazing
00:27:15.240 to think that there's plenty of people listening to this podcast that were born after or watching
00:27:19.660 this who were born after 9-11. It is kind of amazing. So I think we all who are old enough
00:27:24.460 remember that dark day. I was in college. I was a sophomore in college, actually.
00:27:28.680 When 9-11 happened, and quickly switched my major to start studying these sorts of things. But back
00:27:34.820 then, Afghanistan was mostly controlled by the Taliban, but not entirely. I think, sadly,
00:27:41.580 actually, they have probably, in many ways, more control today than they did have in 2001. And we
00:27:47.600 have the Northern Alliance and various factions within Afghanistan that would fight with the Taliban.
00:27:53.820 Of course, why would any of this be our problem? The reason why it was our problem is because,
00:27:58.420 of course, the Taliban offered a safe harbor to al-Qaeda. They let them plan, execute plots against
00:28:06.100 the United States from Afghanistan. So when we went in in 2001, President Bush said, you know,
00:28:12.100 we are going to make sure that we root out this terrorist group, that they are never a threat to
00:28:15.860 the homeland again. And fast forward, here we are 20 years later. I think we had, we obviously,
00:28:21.560 there's no doubt, we had a lot of mission creep. We got into nation building, into counterinsurgency,
00:28:27.200 and a lot of things that went beyond the scope that I think President Bush and his team imagined.
00:28:33.440 And so that's why in the Trump administration, President Trump asked Mike Pompeo how we start to
00:28:39.780 responsibly draw down from Afghanistan. And that is the effort that I worked on, or that Mike Pompeo
00:28:47.020 worked on very closely with President Trump. Of course, the way that we were planning on exiting was
00:28:52.500 very, very different than the chaos that you've seen over the past few days.
00:28:56.480 Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. Because in President Biden's speech, which we'll play a
00:29:01.720 couple clips from it in a couple minutes, he talked about, you know, defending his position that we
00:29:07.760 needed to leave Afghanistan. Of course, that's besides the point. President Trump wanted to do that. I think
00:29:12.440 that's backed by the majority of Americans. What we saw, though, was a lot of recklessness
00:29:16.940 and a lot of chaos. What would the Trump administration have done differently to try
00:29:24.500 to avoid some of the just anarchy that we're seeing right now?
00:29:29.340 So first of all, it starts with who are the negotiating partners at both sides of the table?
00:29:35.920 So you have to remember that President Trump, I think this is quite obvious, is very different
00:29:40.380 than President Biden. And President Trump's, I think it was the first year in office, he released
00:29:46.360 what we have nicknamed the Moab, the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan. And whenever General Miller,
00:29:53.120 who was the last commander in charge in Afghanistan, when he took charge, he really took the fight to
00:29:58.700 the Taliban. So whenever we came to the negotiating table, the Taliban knew a few things. They knew it was
00:30:05.180 a president who was willing to use Moabs if necessary. And they knew it was a president that had empowered
00:30:10.520 a general to go after them. And they were seeing casualties under General Miller that they had not seen
00:30:16.100 in a very, very long time. So why does that matter? It matters because who is at the negotiating table
00:30:23.940 determines the outcomes. So we were there with a credible threat of force. During this whole process,
00:30:30.600 they saw that we took out Qasem Soleimani, who was the head of the IRGC Quds Force in Iran,
00:30:35.640 the world's leading terrorist. And they knew that we were serious and that we meant business.
00:30:40.980 So when President Trump gave Mike Pompeo this directive, Pompeo said, you know, we have to
00:30:46.380 withdraw responsibly, but we have to do it in a way that Afghanistan cannot be a place where al-Qaeda
00:30:52.800 is given safe harbor to plan terrorist attacks against the United States. That was our number one
00:30:58.340 guiding principle, is how do we ensure that America is safe? So we put provisions in the deal
00:31:05.400 that we negotiated with the Taliban, that Mike Pompeo and the team did, that said, you know,
00:31:11.340 that the Taliban had to break with al-Qaeda. Now, everybody was really skeptical. If the Taliban
00:31:17.560 was actually going to do it, that's fine. We were very skeptical as well. It's not like we trusted these
00:31:22.160 guys. But we knew that they had to abide by all of the conditions of the deal for our drawdown.
00:31:29.220 Now, the thing that we were really, you know, very, very focused on, obviously, is do we need to keep
00:31:35.140 a residual force, a small counterterrorism presence? So it's good to think about Iraq, right? So right now
00:31:41.140 in Iraq, we have a small number of troops. We are not at a war in Iraq. We are not facing American
00:31:46.180 casualties, but they are there and advise, train and equip mission. And I think that that's something
00:31:53.320 that we probably could have responsibly done in Afghanistan. President Biden had a very, you know,
00:31:59.080 he wanted to review the deal. He wanted to come up with his own plan. Fine. Totally understand.
00:32:03.900 You're the new president. You've got a new team. You want to do it your way. And I have no problem
00:32:08.380 with that. But if you were going to review that and make a decision about withdrawing from Afghanistan
00:32:13.680 or not, why did you not keep your foot on the neck of the Taliban during the process? Why did you
00:32:20.260 disengage during the height in the middle of the summer during fighting season? Why was there no
00:32:25.760 plan? I mean, there's a lot of unanswered questions, but probably would have made a little
00:32:28.900 bit more sense as for President Biden and his team to say to the Taliban, listen, you guys have not
00:32:33.780 totally abided by the terms of this deal. We're going to keep a small presence here. We're going to
00:32:38.000 continue to negotiate with you. And if you start following the terms of the deal, if you start
00:32:42.520 negotiating with the government of Afghanistan, then we will consider drawing down. But President
00:32:47.540 Biden wanted out no matter what. And so when you set a timeline, when you say you want out no matter
00:32:52.920 what, when you say, you know what, we're not leaving any troops at all. Well, what, you know,
00:32:57.520 what incentive does the other side have to abide by anything? They don't. Yeah, right. There were media
00:33:02.940 reports. I think there was something in the Wall Street Journal. I believe it was Friday.
00:33:08.000 So as this was kind of starting to unfold, saying, look, if we pull completely out of
00:33:13.540 Afghanistan, it looks like the Taliban could take over. And so we knew that. I mean, there were people
00:33:19.460 in the media who knew that. Surely there were people in the Biden administration that knew that
00:33:22.940 was a possibility. I think Blinken said that, you know, it could happen within maybe 30 to 90 days.
00:33:29.480 Joe Biden said that this is not a foregone conclusion. We've equipped the Afghan army,
00:33:33.780 300,000 of them. You know, they're going to be able to push back on this if it happens. Obviously,
00:33:39.660 it actually happened really in a matter of just a few days and maybe 30 to 90 hours.
00:33:47.280 Where where do you think that where do you think that maybe naivete came from
00:33:53.220 in the Biden administration that didn't allow them to see what even some people in the media seemed
00:34:00.100 seemed to see? I mean, surely they've got the intelligence to know that this kind of thing
00:34:04.880 was a possibility. And just trying to be as charitable and giving the benefit of the doubt
00:34:09.460 is as much as possible. Like, surely, I mean, surely they thought that something else was going to
00:34:17.400 happen and they thought that they had planned for every contingency. But obviously, that wasn't the
00:34:21.300 case. So, like, where did they fumble the ball in this is what I guess I'm trying to ask.
00:34:25.780 Sure. So it's funny that you mentioned what Secretary Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State
00:34:32.260 said about how he thought it would take longer. I think he said 60 to 90 days. One of the things
00:34:38.200 that he quoted and he was quoted as saying in congressional testimony, it could have been
00:34:43.160 congressional testimony or an interview. Anyway, he said it's not going to happen from a Friday to
00:34:47.740 a Monday. And it literally literally did Friday to a Monday. Right. So we've got a little thing that,
00:34:53.340 you know, we're going to need to get through this crisis. But we have a few things I think
00:34:57.700 that Congress is going to need to investigate and take a look at because you have people in
00:35:01.540 the administration trying to blame the intelligence community saying, oh, they gave us, you know,
00:35:06.660 they gave us wrong estimates or we weren't alerted. But you have people in Congress like Congressman
00:35:11.860 Mike McCall from Texas and others who are also breached by the intelligence community. And they're
00:35:17.180 saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. The intelligence community painted a very, very stark picture for us. So if the
00:35:24.560 intelligence community briefed one thing to Congress and then one thing to the president, that would be
00:35:30.300 really, really bad. And we need to know if that happens. I'm a little skeptical that that's what
00:35:34.580 happened. I would think what makes more sense is that they were briefed the same things by the
00:35:39.060 intelligence community and this administration did not listen to the intelligence. That's my gut.
00:35:43.840 We'll see what happens. I'm sure all of this will be investigated. But you have to understand if you
00:35:48.140 step back and you look at the worldview of this administration, remember, these are the same people
00:35:53.400 that were in the Obama administration. Same exact people. Tony Lincoln was deputy secretary of state.
00:35:59.500 Wendy Sherman, the current deputy secretary of state, is the person who is the lead negotiator on the
00:36:04.700 JCPOA, the deal, the Iran deal, as it is popularly known. So if you remember, these are the same people
00:36:10.900 that thought that Iran was actually going to abide by their deal and become a responsible international
00:36:17.340 actor. Right. So they negotiated the JCPOA. They gave away billions of dollars in sanctions relief to
00:36:23.700 Iran. They put no limits on their terrorist activity in the region. They put no limits in this deal on
00:36:30.900 ballistic missile expansion. For example, it was only focused on the nuclear deal. And so because it
00:36:36.880 wasn't a broad deal, they get billions of dollars of sanctions relief, pallets of cash, as we all
00:36:41.940 famously know about. And what do they do with it? Well, they do what any, what the world's leading
00:36:47.620 state sponsor of terrorism would do, which is they foment more terrorism. They fund their groups. They
00:36:53.860 build more ballistic missiles. So why do I bring that up? Why is that relevant to Afghanistan? Because
00:37:01.740 it's the same group of people that really believe that the Taliban and Iran and other actors, they
00:37:08.500 just want to be liked. Yeah. Right. They want to be recognized by the international. So they say a lot
00:37:13.040 of things like in diplo speak, the way we talk saying, you know, that they want to be recognized by the
00:37:18.520 international community, that they want to be in good standing. No, they don't. They want power. They
00:37:23.480 want hegemony. They want control. They're terrorists. Yeah. I mean, you've seen the UN. I think it was also
00:37:30.800 the leader of New Zealand who came out and said, you know, we are really urging the Taliban to have
00:37:37.280 an inclusive representative government and to recognize the rights of women and girls. And I
00:37:43.100 shouldn't be laughing at that, but it is laughable. It's funny in a very sad kind of way that anyone has
00:37:52.420 that kind of mentality when it comes to a group of people that is only bent on destruction. And
00:38:00.760 is that what's going to happen to Afghanistan? I mean, will it completely be dominated by the
00:38:06.980 Taliban forevermore until, I don't know, another group tries to come on? Until the next invasion.
00:38:11.580 Yeah. Tries to dominate. I mean, what's going to happen? And also within that question,
00:38:17.240 where do China and Russia play a part in all of this?
00:38:21.300 Well, let me answer that part first, because that's easy. They have kept their embassies open
00:38:26.200 in Afghanistan. They have decent relationships, you know, good relationships. Some of the Taliban
00:38:32.220 have already met with the Chinese publicly. They've talked about this with the Russians.
00:38:36.580 So a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is a win. There's no two ways about it. A win for China and
00:38:42.680 Russia. We no longer control Afghanistan, which does actually share a tiny border with China. So that
00:38:50.080 opens up part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is their Chinese trade initiative to,
00:38:56.800 that's a whole other thing that I could go into what the Chinese are doing there.
00:38:59.960 Right. So, so yeah, so the Chinese Russians, even the Iranians, they're keeping their embassies open.
00:39:05.400 They're talking to the Taliban. Big win for our enemies. I think the question that you're getting
00:39:11.180 into is, you know, why would this administration, you know, think, or the UN think that the Taliban
00:39:15.740 could have a representative government? I do think that one's a little bit more complicated,
00:39:20.240 because I will say, in our administration, in the Trump administration, what we were trying to do
00:39:26.300 was to end America's longest war. And we knew that there was no military end to the war. So what we
00:39:33.660 were attempting to do, but again, this is the crucial point that this administration is missing. You have
00:39:38.260 to do this from a position of strength. And that's what they miss in all of their negotiations.
00:39:42.420 But we were trying to get the government of Afghanistan. So that was until he fled a few
00:39:48.520 days ago, led by President Ghani. We were trying to get the government of Afghanistan, the Taliban,
00:39:53.920 women, human rights. We were trying to get everyone at the table to negotiate what the future of
00:39:59.580 Afghanistan looks like for their people. So that was a goal we had. Some people may have said that
00:40:07.360 was a naive goal. But the bottom line is that the Afghan forces, with our support, were never able
00:40:14.900 to fully defeat the Taliban. So we were trying to bring everyone to the table. But again, it's hard
00:40:21.000 to compare apples and apples, in my opinion, to the effort that Mike Pompeo led at the State Department
00:40:26.540 versus the Biden effort. Because again, we felt like we were very much negotiating from a position of strength.
00:40:33.040 I think that the world sees this, obviously. I think Americans on both sides of the aisle sees that
00:40:48.440 this was fumbled. Now, I think we probably disagree on the why behind it. And it's that worldview piece
00:40:54.960 that you very well brought up a few minutes ago that I think really kind of divides us of really what
00:41:01.120 should have been the tactics leading up to this that would have at least mitigated some of the chaos
00:41:07.480 and the loss of life that we're seeing right now. And this doesn't all lay at President Biden's feet,
00:41:15.160 of course, as you started out saying, you know, this has been a longstanding failure of policy in
00:41:22.040 some ways for the past 20 or so years. Do you think that there's a way for the Biden administration
00:41:28.760 to fix this in any way? Like, are we going to be able to regain any kind of good reputation on the
00:41:35.640 world stage? Are we going to be able to regain the trust of our allies and the respect of our
00:41:40.780 enemies? Or are we done for at least for the next couple decades?
00:41:45.460 So that's that's a big, very big question. I would say in Afghanistan, it is going to be very,
00:41:53.940 very dicey over the next few days. And in the coming weeks and months, right? It's going to be
00:41:58.500 dicey for a long time. One thing that I think that we should pay close attention to is what happens to
00:42:03.560 all of our equipment that was left behind, right? We're seeing multiple planning failures by this
00:42:08.460 administration. We're seeing a lack of a plan to get the people who were interpreters with us,
00:42:14.060 we call them civs, SIV, people who actually worked with us. We have, they didn't get visas in time.
00:42:20.340 Whenever Ghani left, there was a scramble to get to the airport. So you've got a humanitarian
00:42:24.400 situation on top of everything else. And by the way, these, everything does need to be carefully
00:42:29.860 vetted. I want all of our civs and interpreters and people who were crucial to the fight to come
00:42:35.900 over, but we have no clue how this administration is vetting extended family members. Are they,
00:42:43.700 are they letting extended families? Is it just immediate, immediate family? There's a lot of just
00:42:47.700 process questions and things that should have been planned out and explained to the American public
00:42:52.320 and to the Afghans ahead of time. I think one of the reasons it wasn't planned out is because they
00:42:57.320 just didn't think Afghanistan would fall right away and they didn't think it was going to be an issue
00:43:00.680 right away. But that's why you have contingency plans in place just in case things happen that you
00:43:07.840 don't expect. I'm very concerned about our equipment. Not that I think that the Taliban necessarily has
00:43:13.660 the capability to, to use the equipment over the long run, but we have some of America's most
00:43:18.760 expensive and precious machinery. And why wouldn't they turn it over to the Iranians or the Russians
00:43:25.380 or the Chinese, right? Like, or to the highest bidder, whoever, whoever wants it. So all of that
00:43:30.840 is very concerning. Then as it relates to getting our reputation back, I think, you know, it was funny
00:43:36.360 just a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I think it was in June, Biden was at the NATO summit and he was at
00:43:42.840 the G7. And there was all of this talk about how America was back. Diplomacy is back. Adults are in
00:43:48.480 the room. I think it will be a long time before the Europeans say that again. This is not, you know,
00:43:54.980 what they expected. I think that it's funny, the behavior that Biden is doing right now is what they
00:44:00.040 expected from Trump, but he didn't do. And so it is going to be, you know, it's going to be tough, not just
00:44:07.540 for Afghanistan, but if you think about the countries, here's what I think is like key. And this is what
00:44:11.860 I get, you know, in my nerd world, the things that I focus on, uh, the countries in central Asia, like
00:44:17.380 Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, all of these countries, um, are in between Afghanistan and
00:44:24.720 China, right? And these countries are crucial, crucial to, in my opinion, to being a part of the
00:44:31.820 alliance that we build of democratic countries, um, of, of pro-Western countries, uh, that are going to be a part of
00:44:39.500 the alliance that we should be building to counter China. I think that the argument for all of those
00:44:44.780 countries in central Asia, uh, that we have been, you know, courting and then trying to get them not
00:44:50.700 to take all the money from the Belt and Road Chinese program, not to let the Chinese, you know, in own
00:44:55.940 ports and own their critical infrastructure. You know, we've, we've been trying to get them not to
00:45:00.520 have Huawei, right? The Chinese authoritarian 5G company. We've been trying to convince them not to
00:45:05.660 have that in their systems. Um, so if you look at these countries in central Asia and in Southeast
00:45:11.120 Asia, in my opinion, are, are the most crucial countries, um, in the long-term fight that we are
00:45:17.500 up against with the Chinese communist party. And all of those countries are up a lot closer to
00:45:23.560 Afghanistan than we are in terms of proximity. And how are those countries going to now ally with us in
00:45:28.960 the fight against China? That's my big concern. Yeah. Well, hopefully that's a concern of the Biden
00:45:33.860 administration as well. I think best case scenario, this is some kind of wake up call for the Biden
00:45:40.240 administration and maybe the American people in, in general, not everyone knows the ins and outs of
00:45:44.960 foreign policy. I certainly don't. Um, but we do know what it looks like to be humiliated on the
00:45:50.520 world stage and we don't like it. We do know what weakness looks like and we do, no matter how much,
00:45:55.780 you know, no matter how much, you know, about foreign policy, people don't like to feel that their
00:46:01.400 leaders are not doing what is in the best interest and in the safety interests, um, of their
00:46:08.320 constituents. And I think that's one concern right now. Like, does this possibly pose a threat, um,
00:46:15.200 to America in our, in our homeland? That's a really important question. And here's part of the
00:46:22.220 problem that we're going to have in answering that question going forward. Um, how do you have
00:46:27.200 intelligence collection capabilities, right? Uh, you have that whenever you have, wherever you are
00:46:32.900 in the world, not just Afghanistan, uh, you have assets in the region, right? You have, um, you know,
00:46:38.980 wherever you are, you've got embassies, you've got, you know, uh, maybe bases, you have friendly
00:46:43.600 countries. Um, we have a variety of different methods, um, which I'm not going to go into to collect
00:46:48.620 intelligence. Um, but when we have pulled everything out, including our embassy and our entire presence
00:46:54.900 in Afghanistan, for me, I see a massive intelligence gap. Now the U S military is saying we have these
00:47:01.260 over the horizon capabilities. Um, that's, I remain highly skeptical of that. Like if you think,
00:47:08.120 for example, we have a base in Doha, Qatar, uh, that's, I think a four and a half hour flight
00:47:12.600 from Afghanistan. So it's not like Iraq. So if you, if you go back and you think about like 2009
00:47:18.560 in Iraq, whenever Obama started pulling everyone out, and then we started seeing the rise of ISIS and it
00:47:24.140 took a couple of years for Obama to go back in, but eventually Obama had to go back into Iraq
00:47:28.580 because, um, there was, you know, because ISIS constituted forms taking over the country and
00:47:33.940 was chopping off heads, right. And the American people woke up, right. Especially in that 2012
00:47:39.700 and other elections was like, uh, wait a minute, we don't want them coming over here and chopping
00:47:43.720 off heads. So we need to take care of this over there. Well, in Iraq, if you think about the map of
00:47:48.340 the Middle East, uh, we have bases, right. All, you know, all over the place. We have people in
00:47:52.820 Bahrain. We have people in Qatar. Um, we have, we have so many, uh, uh, you know, things that we
00:47:59.400 can use in what we call the CENTCOM, what military, what the military calls CENTCOM. Um, we are not
00:48:04.460 nearly as prolific in Southeast Asia. So it's, it's going to be, I know this is a long-winded
00:48:10.180 explanation, but it's important to think about the geography when we say, well, what is the,
00:48:14.320 is the intelligence community going to watch, you know, what happens to Al Qaeda? Okay, well,
00:48:18.940 they'll try, but they have just had, you know, an arm and a leg chopped off in terms of their
00:48:23.700 collection abilities. Right. So we're going to have to rely on a lot of partners and we're going
00:48:28.180 to have to watch it very closely. Um, the, if the Taliban once again allows Al Qaeda to, uh,
00:48:35.100 reconstitute and to green ground and to start planning attacks in Afghanistan, we're going to
00:48:39.300 have a very, very, very big problem. We're going to need to go back in. Um, and it's going to be a lot
00:48:44.180 harder and, and a lot more, uh, expensive and not, not as easy to do as everyone thinks.
00:48:50.120 Right. I think people probably have good reason to wonder if the Biden administration is going to be
00:48:56.140 as cautious and careful as we think they should be in trying to prevent, uh, America from having
00:49:03.700 those vulnerabilities. We already know we're accepting, you know, I think it's 30,000 refugees,
00:49:08.260 which I think most Americans understand. Okay. America kind of helped cause this mess.
00:49:13.020 It seems like our responsibility to accept a lot of these people and especially the women and
00:49:17.820 children that are there. I think most people have a heart to do that. At the same time,
00:49:21.840 there's a lot of fighting age men that are also coming to the United States and we want to make
00:49:28.220 sure that they're carefully vetted. How do you do that? Is this administration committed to doing
00:49:33.180 that? Very hard to believe when the Southern border is basically wide open where there's been
00:49:37.640 hundreds of thousands of migrants who I guarantee are not vetted, um, who are coming in.
00:49:42.880 And so it feels very much like an America last situation in a lot of, in a lot of ways and
00:49:49.600 just swinging from president Trump, who was so adamant about putting America first and,
00:49:54.940 you know, progressives complaining about that. Well, I would say that's probably a better
00:49:59.420 alternative to America last, which is what we're seeing right now. Unfortunately, um, last question
00:50:04.620 for you, you said that you've got friends that you are trying to get out right now. Tell us like
00:50:10.340 what, what the state is, what people can be thinking about, what people can be doing here
00:50:14.600 and what people can be even, um, praying about as we're thinking about the situation right now.
00:50:20.320 Yeah. Thank you so much. That's a, that's a great question. First of all, if anybody wants
00:50:24.140 to donate, I know there's several organizations out there. The one that I've been promoting is
00:50:28.340 no one left behind. You can just Google it. The website will, will come up. Um, and they're
00:50:33.260 working very studiously, um, to try and get the right people out. They're really focused on,
00:50:37.980 uh, people who were interpreters, people who have, uh, letters proving that they worked with,
00:50:43.480 um, the military, the U S embassy. Um, and so that's a fantastic organization. Um, obviously I'll
00:50:50.480 keep the, uh, you know, names quiet because we're still, uh, trying to, trying to get them out. But,
00:50:56.240 you know, I have a friend, um, who we actually, um, brought over to the U S. He did an LLM at Harvard,
00:51:02.640 uh, went back to Afghanistan, uh, was a lawyer there, has a family. Um, and he employed other
00:51:08.740 lawyers. I mean, he did so much to advance, uh, the cause over the past decade or so that,
00:51:14.260 that I've known him. Um, and so he is, um, we're trying to, we're trying to get him out. I, I guess
00:51:20.360 I'm a little hesitant to say too many details because I'm very, I'm holding my breath, hoping that we can
00:51:25.940 get him out. But of course, you know, there's also other people, a friend of mine, um, sent me a picture,
00:51:30.940 uh, just, uh, just last night, uh, of a, of a guy who was interpreter with the military young guy
00:51:37.540 has a, has a young wife and they have three month old, um, babies, twins. Um, and they are just,
00:51:42.900 they were just sitting there at the airport, no food, no water, uh, holding the babies. And,
00:51:47.880 uh, the mom is nursing, but you know, as you and I know with little babies that doesn't, you know,
00:51:52.820 you got to drink some water to be able to nurse those twins, right? Where are the diapers?
00:51:56.900 Where are the things? Um, so getting his information to the state department and there's,
00:52:02.080 uh, you know, a million more tragic, uh, cases like that for sure. There's obviously some people
00:52:07.480 there. Listen, we know this. There's some people there who are just desperate to get out. They may
00:52:10.600 not have worked with us and they're just, you know, trying to get out. And, um, this administration
00:52:14.960 does really needs to do a very thorough job of vetting that. But I can tell you the people that have
00:52:20.180 been brought to my attention that I've worked with, um, you know, are all people, um, you know,
00:52:25.200 with babies, you know, small children and, um, they're fearful for their lives. You know,
00:52:30.400 one of my friends with small children yesterday that had worked for years texted me, I think it
00:52:34.700 was in the morning, our time and just said, I've given up. It's hopeless. You know, it's I'm done
00:52:39.220 for it. I said, do not give up, do not give up. I said, I know you're frustrated, but you have
00:52:44.280 three children, you have a wife, you have a family, you cannot give up. And hopefully,
00:52:49.900 hopefully we can get them out of there.
00:52:51.280 Yeah. Gosh. Well, we will be thinking about that and praying, praying about that adamantly. Thank
00:52:56.860 you so much for taking the time to explain all of this to us. Your insight is really,
00:53:01.400 really valuable. And thank you for just kind of setting the scene, um, for what's going on. So
00:53:06.160 people can kind of get a better sense of what to focus on. Um, I really appreciate it. I encourage
00:53:11.980 everyone to follow you, to keep getting your insight. Thank you so much.
00:53:16.700 Thanks. Appreciate it.
00:53:21.280 All right. So I know there's so much going on in the world. And as we've talked about so much,
00:53:32.740 like sometimes we're just at a capacity, um, to, we can't care about anything else. Like we are just
00:53:40.300 filled to the limit of things that we have to care about, not just when it comes to ourselves,
00:53:44.140 but maybe your family is going through a really hard time right now. Maybe you were dealing with
00:53:48.420 relatives. Maybe you're going through a hard time financially. Like you already feel the weight of
00:53:53.620 your own world on your shoulders and then adding everything else can just be really tough. And maybe
00:53:58.340 you're taking care of your community and you're fighting for a variety of different causes. Let
00:54:02.720 me just relieve you of the burden of having to carry everything yourself. You don't. God is completely
00:54:08.300 in control. We don't know why things happen the way that we do. We don't, uh, understand how
00:54:13.820 things are going to come together, but we have to trust that God still works all things together for
00:54:19.080 the good of those who love him. We have to pray for our brothers and our sisters in Christ who are
00:54:24.280 in Afghanistan, whom we have more of a connection with that spiritual connection that, uh, that kinship
00:54:31.540 that we have with them as, as members of the body of Christ is greater than the connection that we
00:54:37.740 have to our fellow Americans. Um, we have to be praying for them. We have to be thinking about them.
00:54:43.240 Be careful about who you donate to. I don't have a list of organizations in front of me that are
00:54:48.140 necessarily trustworthy, but I do think that we have to use a lot of discernment and giving our
00:54:53.220 financial aid and our support. I'm sure there are people that you trust that can kind of point you in
00:54:58.860 the right direction, but let's be just praying that the Holy Spirit would protect them, strengthen them,
00:55:04.240 especially the women and the girls in the region. I just think about the babies. I think about the
00:55:08.780 mothers. I think about just, I can't imagine the panic that they're feeling, the desperation that
00:55:13.960 they're feeling right now, and just that the Lord would comfort them and, and would be with them.
00:55:19.300 Um, we don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know when Jesus is coming back.
00:55:23.680 We don't know when we're going to be rescued, when they're going to be rescued from all of this
00:55:26.940 stuff. Right now, what we're called to do is all Christians are called to do is to be grateful,
00:55:31.160 to rejoice in the Lord always, to continue to pray, to cast our cares on Him because He cares for us.
00:55:37.040 Let's be thankful for the freedom, for the privileges, for the luxuries and the blessings
00:55:40.680 that we have right now that so many in the world will never be able to enjoy. Let us give,
00:55:45.400 let that give us some perspective and let us even more than just having an American and temporal
00:55:50.680 perspective, let us also have an eternal perspective that one day God will rule in perfect
00:55:55.040 peace and He will avenge all of the wrong that's been done and He will end the wrongdoer
00:56:00.220 forevermore and let our joy and our hope come from that. All right, we'll be back here tomorrow.
00:56:06.660 I'll see you guys then.