The Taliban is now in charge of Afghanistan. It's the worst foreign policy debacle for the U.S. since America's withdrawal from Vietnam. Ben Shapiro explains why, and why it's worse than anything we've experienced in the past 20 years. He also compares it to the fall of the US Embassy in Saigon in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and how it's nothing like what we're seeing in Afghanistan today. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your data from big tech with the VPN I trust. Visit ExpressVPN to get 20% off your first month with discount code "VPN20" and receive $20 off your next purchase when you use the discount code: "I trust" at checkout. You can get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just $30 a month, plus you'll get unlimited access to the latest iPhones and Androids for free! If you're spending too much on your cell phone service, you can save a bundle on your service by switching to PeerTalk USA, where you get the same great coverage as all the big 3, except at a fraction of the price. Go over there and get 50% off for the first month! You're not going to want to charge you for it! Go check them out right now! You'll get a lot more coverage than you'd be better than what you're getting with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile, or Sprint, and other major networks like Vue, and you'll be getting the same coverage as you're used to get by paying $800 a year for a phone plan, plus they'll get FREE 3 times a month for a whole bunch of service like that you're paying $300 a month. That's not even close to $200 a year! Ben Shapiro's show is all about saving you the same thing you get when you go over there, plus an extra $150 a year, you get $100 a month and get an additional $50 a month? Want to upgrade your phone plan? Subscribe to the show by becoming a VIP membership when you sign up for VIP access and get 10% off the show gets you get an ad-free version of the show? That's $5,000 in the show, plus I'll get $50,000 when you upgrade my service gets you an ad discount when you become VIP access gets my VIP membership?
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00:01:28.000Well, obviously the big news of the day and of the year, and frankly of the last 20 years, is the Taliban is now in charge of Afghanistan again because Joe Biden decided it would be a wonderful, wonderful idea to simply leave.
00:01:40.000With no plan, with no actual transition, with no support for the people who are still there.
00:01:45.000And so what we have on our hands is a full-scale disaster area.
00:01:48.000Now remember, it was just one month ago that Joe Biden was saying that, don't worry, it's not going to be like Saigon.
00:01:55.000It's not going to be like the United States leaving Vietnam with helicopters taking off from roofs and the Viet Cong simply rushing in and killing everybody they don't like.
00:02:02.000It's not going to be anything like that.
00:03:52.000Okay, so on your left-hand side, you'll see Saigon.
00:03:56.000You have people attempting to escape, attempting to climb onto U.S.
00:04:00.000helicopters to get out of the way before the Viet Cong rushed in and killed everybody.
00:04:04.000And on the right, that is an American ferry helicopter that is taking off from the top of the United States Embassy, trying to evacuate people from the top.
00:04:59.000Okay, remember last week, last week, the Biden administration said it would be somewhere between 30 and 90 days before the Taliban even had the capacity to take over Kabul.
00:05:08.000It took about 30 to 90 hours for them to actually do it.
00:05:23.000The withdrawal of embassy personnel is happening, quote, incredibly rapidly today.
00:05:27.000And the process is now expected to conclude by this evening, she says, minus the small number of diplomats who will stay at the Kabul airport for now.
00:05:37.000This is so bad and so rushed and such a botched job that the United States left behind billions of dollars in equipment for the Afghan Taliban to simply take over.
00:05:47.000According to the Agence France-Presse, the United States spent billions supplying the Afghan military with the tools to defeat the Taliban.
00:05:54.000The rapid capitulation of the armed forces means that that weaponry is now fueling the insurgents' astonishing battlefield successes.
00:06:01.000President Joe Biden said, we provided our Afghan partners with all the tools.
00:06:12.000They've picked up Apache attack helicopters.
00:06:16.000In the western city of Farah, fighters are patrolling in a car marked with an eagle swooping on a snake, which is the official insignia of the country's intelligence services.
00:06:23.000The Taliban Blitz has handed the group vehicles, Humvees, small arms and light weapons, as well as ammunition, according to the Weapons Tracking Group Conflict Armament Research.
00:06:35.000Experts say that such hauls have given the Taliban a massive boost.
00:06:39.000The weapons will not only help the Taliban march on Kabul, but strengthen its authority in the cities it has already captured.
00:06:45.000So they just ended up with a bunch of your taxpayer dollars in their hands, in the form of actual weaponry.
00:06:51.000According to the New York Times, Taliban fighters poured into the Afghan capital on Sunday amid scenes of panic and chaos, bringing a swift and shocking close to the Afghan government and the 20-year American era in the country.
00:07:01.000President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan fled the country.
00:07:04.000A council of Afghan officials, including former President Hamid Karzai, said they would open negotiations with the Taliban over the shape of the insurgencies at takeover.
00:07:10.000By day's end, the insurgents had all but officially sealed their control of the entire country.
00:07:16.000Hastily arranged American military helicopter flights evacuating the sprawling American embassy compound in Kabul, ferrying American diplomats and Afghan embassy workers to the Kabul military airport.
00:07:25.000At the civilian airport next door, Afghans wept as they begged airline workers to put their families on outbound commercial flights, even as most were grounded, in favor of military aircraft.
00:07:34.000There are apparently reports as well that some of the airlines, the civilian airliners, wouldn't let people aboard because they didn't have a COVID test.
00:07:39.000So they're just gonna stay behind and get slaughtered because they didn't have a COVID test.
00:07:43.000Really solid stuff all the way around for the West.
00:07:46.000A bunch of 8th century barbarians who are now taking over sophisticated military equipment from Western powers.
00:07:53.000They just took over auspices of the 700 million dollar American embassy in Kabul.
00:07:59.000Sovereign American territory that was just taken over by the Taliban.
00:08:03.000And of course, the people who are let out were let out largely by fools in the West.
00:08:09.000And by the way, this is a bipartisan problem.
00:08:13.000So Georgia, let's start from the beginning.
00:08:14.000George W. Bush mystified the mission in Afghanistan.
00:08:17.000The mission in Afghanistan was very clearly to get rid of Al Qaeda and get rid of the Taliban to prevent them from taking over again and letting Al Qaeda back in.
00:08:35.000If that had been made clear over and over and over again, perhaps the American people would have been willing to make the, what amounts to at this point, a relatively minute sacrifice to maintain a small troop presence in Afghanistan.
00:08:46.000At the time the United States left, there were 3,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, largely to control, for example, Bagram Air Base, which is now controlled by the Taliban.
00:08:55.000Those 3,500 combat troops represented a tiny, minute proportion of American military power all over the world.
00:09:02.000The last American soldier who had died in combat was killed February 8th, 2020.
00:09:09.000The United States is spending on average about $40-45 billion a year on Afghanistan, which amounts to approximately 1% of the federal budget before COVID.
00:09:18.000Now with the new budgets, it's going to amount to half a percentage point of our federal budget.
00:09:23.000This was not a quote unquote endless war that required the United States to pull out forthwith, leaving people to be slaughtered in the streets and the Taliban to rush back in to take back over the entire country with no possibility by the way of America now being able to stage attacks on actual terrorist positions because we don't have air bases there anymore.
00:09:39.000Okay, so George W. Bush misdefined the mission, fair.
00:09:44.000Then Barack Obama runs on the platform of pulling out in 2008.
00:09:47.000And then as president, he realizes that this is actually not such a great idea.
00:09:52.000And so he sort of takes a halfway position.
00:09:53.000Instead of actually securing our position in Afghanistan, he starts doing like a mid range surge.
00:09:59.000And then, he starts making backdoor overtures to the Taliban.
00:10:02.000That continues under President Trump, who also campaigned on ending the war in Afghanistan, and was making pretty open overtures to the Taliban.
00:10:09.000I mean, there was American negotiation going on with the Taliban in Qatar.
00:10:13.000And then, that was followed by Joe Biden, who decided to finish this thing by simply pulling out with no negotiations, with no possibility of real commitment, with nothing.
00:10:27.000Hey, and the net result is going to be that look, the American people apparently are willing to go to war, but we are not willing at this point to see these things through, even if it means a minor, and it is in the scheme of how America's spending goes in the scheme of America's military commitment, a minor commitment to baseline security in places like Afghanistan.
00:10:46.000And by the way, that gap will be filled by somebody.
00:10:49.000Now, what's funny about this is that was Joe Biden's calculation all along.
00:10:52.000Joe Biden's calculation was, if I pull out, there will be some sort of political boon for me.
00:10:56.000I think the American people are going to be reawakened to the threats that the Taliban represent, and that Al Qaeda represents, and that terrorist states in the Middle East represent, when there is no militating backlash by the United States and or its allies.
00:11:10.000In the meantime, however, the United States made a bunch of crucial errors.
00:11:13.000For example, emptying out Gitmo under Barack Obama, negotiating with the Taliban.
00:11:18.000Okay, here is a Taliban fighter literally saying, oh yeah, by the way, I was in Gitmo for eight years.
00:11:23.000The United States released a bunch of the leaders who are currently in charge of the Taliban were released at the behest of the United States.
00:11:44.000According to The Guardian, Abdul Ghani Baradar, who's the Taliban leader, he was freed from a Pakistani jail at the request of the United States less than three years ago.
00:11:53.000He has now emerged as an undisputed victor of the 20-year war.
00:11:57.000Baradar is the political chief in the most public face.
00:11:59.000He was said to be on his way from his office in Doha to Kabul on Sunday evening.
00:12:02.000In a televised statement on the fall of Kabul, he said the Taliban's real test was only just beginning.
00:12:06.000They had to serve the nation by presumably stuffing women back into bags and or into basements, making sure none of them ever read again, and ensuring that women don't walk publicly without a male next to them.
00:12:20.000Operating in the 8th century seems to be a way of running the nation.
00:12:27.000Bardar played a succession of military and administrative roles in the five-year Taliban regime.
00:12:30.000By the time it was ousted, he was deputy minister of defense.
00:12:32.000During the Taliban's 20-year exile, Bardar had the reputation of being a potent military leader and a subtle political operator.
00:12:38.000Western diplomats came to view him as on the wing of the Qatar Shura, the Taliban's regrouped leadership in exile that was most resistant to ISI control, that's the Pakistani intelligence service, and most amenable to political contacts with Kabul.
00:12:50.000The Obama administration was more fearful of his military expertise than hopeful about his supposedly moderate leanings.
00:12:55.000The CIA tracked him down in Karachi in 2010, and then persuaded the ISI, which is the Pakistani Secret Service, to arrest him.
00:13:18.000But even if you think all of that is right, what is certainly wrong is the insane way that Joe Biden just decided to pull out of this thing.
00:13:26.000Even if you think it's good policy for the United States not to be involved in Afghanistan, the way that Joe Biden has performed this is the crappiest way anyone could have ever performed this.
00:13:35.000It truly is an astonishing failure by Joe Biden, who also is saying that he's not going to do any pressers.
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00:15:38.000Maybe it's just World War Z. Because these videos look like World War Z. It looks like the zombie invasion is coming, and people are attempting to get on planes.
00:15:45.000They're climbing up the on-ramps on the planes, and they're just flooding them.
00:16:11.000The evacuations underway at Kabul airport are shocking.
00:16:15.000Some of the video shows people, it's a lot closer up, you can see people actually climbing up the stairs and they're just falling off the railings.
00:16:24.000And Afghans are of course being stranded by the thousands by the thousands by the hundreds of thousands at this point.
00:16:31.000None of this should be any sort of shock at all because it isn't according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:16:38.000Rahmat said he was relieved when the Central Intelligence Agency phoned him for an interview and weeks later, arranged to shelter him on an Afghan base while the State Department processed his application for a visa to flee Afghanistan.
00:16:47.000He feared the Taliban were hunting him down for his work spying for the CIA in a remote border area of Afghanistan for almost a decade, and lacked the paperwork to apply for a visa.
00:16:59.000Even if he can make it to the capital from his hideout in a province hours away, the Afghan commander of the base has since told him he can't shelter there.
00:17:05.000I'm very worried, he said in a text message.
00:17:39.000Half of those are outside Kabul, in areas either already under Taliban control or likely to fall soon, which now is everything, because it's all fallen.
00:17:46.000In addition, the State Department this month said tens of thousands more Afghans would be eligible for priority treatment under a U.S.
00:18:12.000Former soldiers, aid workers, others who previously worked in Afghanistan have been inundated with requests from former Afghan colleagues and employees seeking letters of recommendation and help in fleeing the country.
00:18:24.000This is just obviously horrifying stuff.
00:18:27.000It's going to get more horrifying, by the way.
00:18:28.000The footage will eventually emerge of people simply being shot because the Taliban is apparently doing this.
00:18:33.000The Taliban is simply taking places over and murdering people.
00:18:37.000The New York Times reporting on what it's like living under the Taliban as they rush into Kunduz.
00:18:41.000It was his first day as the Taliban-appointed mayor of Kunduz, and Gul Muhammad Elias was on a charm offensive.
00:18:46.000Last Sunday, the insurgents seized control of the city in northern Afghanistan, which was in shambles after weeks of fighting.
00:18:52.000The water supplied powered by generators did not reach most residents.
00:18:55.000Trash and rubble littered the streets.
00:18:56.000The civil servants who could fix those problems were hiding at home, terrified of the Taliban.
00:19:00.000So the insurgent commander-turned-mayor summoned some to his new office to persuade them to return to work.
00:19:05.000I said our jihad is not with the municipality.
00:19:07.000Our jihad is against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers.
00:19:10.000But day by day, as municipal offices stayed mostly empty, Mr. Elias grew more frustrated and his rhetoric grew harsher.
00:19:16.000Taliban fighters began going door to door searching for absentee city workers.
00:19:19.000Hundreds of armed men set up checkpoints across the city.
00:19:22.000At the entrance to the regional hospital, a new notice appeared on the wall.
00:19:25.000Employees must return to work or face punishment from the Taliban.
00:19:28.000Just a week after the fall of Kunduz, the insurgents are now in effective control of Afghanistan.
00:19:32.000Now they must function as administrators who can provide basic services to hundreds of thousands of people.
00:19:38.000In just days, the insurgents, frustrated by their failed efforts to cajole civil servants back to work, began instilling terror, according to residents reached by telephone.
00:19:45.000I don't know what will happen and what they will do, said one.
00:19:47.000We have to smile at them because we are scared, but we are deeply unhappy.
00:19:50.000Three days after the Taliban took control in Kunduz, Atikullah Omar Khil, a civil servant, received a call from an insurgent fighter telling him to go to his office.
00:19:57.000The mayor of Kunduz wanted to speak with him.
00:19:59.000Mr. Omar Khil had been staying home since the retreat of government forces as insurgents flooded into the streets and a sense of unease gripped the battered city.
00:20:06.000He had experienced a similar moment twice before when the Taliban seized Kunduz in 2015 and 2016.
00:20:11.000Both times the insurgents were pushed back with help from the American airstrikes.
00:20:14.000This time, days after the Taliban took control, the entire Afghan Army Corps charged with reclaiming the city surrendered to the insurgents.
00:20:20.000They gave them their weapons and they gave them their vehicles.
00:20:23.000All of the government's vehicles, garbage trucks, and computers were exactly where he had left them before the Taliban took over and young fighters poured into the city.
00:20:29.000The only sign of change was blank spaces on the walls where photos of President Ashraf Ghani had been.
00:20:34.000Instead, the Taliban's white flags had been hung.
00:20:38.000Mr. Elias assured the workers they would not be targeted by the Taliban and instructed them to return to work to improve morale.
00:20:44.000Halfway through the meeting, a shopkeeper pleaded with the Taliban bodyguard to see the mayor.
00:20:47.000Like hundreds of others, his kiosk had been mostly destroyed by fire during the Taliban's final push.
00:20:51.000He said shopkeepers wanted the Taliban's promise they could return to the market to collect their things safely.
00:21:38.000Things are going to go just beautifully.
00:21:39.000Okay, so it's not just that there are terrible ramifications for everybody who is stuck in Afghanistan, of course.
00:21:44.000It's that there are bad ramifications for the United States.
00:21:48.000The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, when he's not lecturing everybody about the evils of white privilege, he told senators on Sunday a previous assessment of how soon terrorist groups will reconstitute in Afghanistan will speed up.
00:22:01.000On a Sunday phone call between top Biden officials and senators from both parties, Senator Lindsey Graham asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Milley whether they will revise an assessment to Congress in June of a medium risk of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan within two years.
00:22:15.000He would have to assume that timeline would now be moved up.
00:22:18.000He would be happy to brief senators in the classified setting.
00:22:22.000Sources on the call described a surreal experience listening in on the Biden officials brief them on the situation while checking their cell phones and seeing real-time chaos unfolding in Kabul.
00:22:32.000Senators from both parties pressed Milley and Austin on efforts to evacuate U.S.
00:22:35.000personnel and the many thousands of Afghans who helped Americans in the war effort and are desperately trying to escape.
00:22:40.000A source said the sad reality is there's no way they can evacuate by August 31st the more than 20,000 Afghans who want to escape the country.
00:22:46.000And that's not including their families.
00:22:48.000You're probably talking more like 75 or 80,000 people who want to escape the country and are not going to be able to get out.
00:22:54.000Two takeaways for me, what said one source, we're going to leave tens of thousands of people behind and a timeline in terms of threats has now accelerated.
00:23:00.000Remember, that was the original reason we went there in the first place. Anthony Blinken was asked, is the Taliban controlled territory now going to become a hotbed of terrorism again? He just avoided the question, as he is apt to do. You don't think that Afghanistan now is going to become a hotbed of terrorism? Jake, we have tremendously more capacity than we had before 9-11 when it comes to counterterrorism.
00:23:23.000In places around the world where we don't have forces on the ground, in Yemen, in parts of Africa, in parts of Syria, we're able to deal with any potential terrorist threat to our country.
00:23:33.000And we're doing that every single day.
00:23:36.000And look, I can't tell you what the Taliban is going to do.
00:23:41.000Um, that would be a complete non-answer.
00:23:43.000So he asked him, is Afghanistan going to become a terror hotbed?
00:24:16.000presence in Afghanistan, though not always appreciated, has nevertheless served as a predictable and stabilizing force.
00:24:21.000Now, the prospect of renewed Taliban rule has sparked major anxiety among the region's powers.
00:24:25.000For example, Earlier this month, Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar visited Moscow and Tehran while Taliban representatives were in each city, raising questions about whether back-channel negotiations are ongoing.
00:24:36.000So India doesn't want to be on the outside looking in because Afghanistan, which will ally presumably with Pakistan, now provides a threat to India.
00:24:44.000So India is going to start making overtures to Afghanistan.
00:24:47.000Meanwhile, China is going to be making overtures to Afghanistan as well.
00:24:51.000Russia is making overtures to the Taliban.
00:24:53.000Moscow is preparing to leverage the Six Nation Collective Security Treaty Organization to address potential trouble at the Afghan-Tajik border, which is being taken over by the Taliban on the Afghan side.
00:25:03.000Islamabad has now negotiated, that's Pakistan, a quid pro quo with the Taliban to reject U.S.
00:25:08.000bases on Pakistani territory in exchange for the Taliban's assistance in combating Pakistan's own Taliban-style militants.
00:25:14.000So now, it's not even that the United States is going to lose its bases in Afghanistan.
00:25:23.000So there went the security cooperation with Pakistan, whatever that was worth.
00:25:27.000Amid all of this regional angst, China is quietly attempting to secure its interests in post-US Afghanistan.
00:25:32.000Beijing has been actively engaging with Kabul on construction of a Peshawar-Kabul motorway, which will connect Pakistan to Afghanistan and make Kabul a participant in China's Belt and Road Initiative.
00:25:42.000Up until now, Kabul didn't want to do that because the United States was helping them out.
00:25:45.000Now, Beijing is building a major road through the Wakhan Corridor, a slim strip of mountainous territory connecting China's westernmost province of Zhejiang to Afghanistan and onward to Pakistan and Central Asia.
00:25:57.000According to a 2014 report, Afghanistan may possess nearly a trillion dollars worth of extractable rare earth metals locked within its mountains.
00:26:05.000China will now have some control over that.
00:26:09.000Yes, when the United States leaves a vacuum, bad things happen.
00:26:11.000Okay, so time to ask a serious question.
00:26:15.000How did this happen in the first place?
00:26:16.000I gave you a sort of brief history of Afghanistan and the failures of all the administrations prior, but let's talk for just one second about Joe Biden.
00:26:29.000He, of course, says, well, it's not my fault that I decided to simply precipitously withdraw.
00:26:32.000They put out a pathetic picture, like over the weekend.
00:26:36.000This White House tweet, they tweeted out a picture of Joe Biden alone in the Situation Room saying, this morning, the president and vice president met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the drawdown of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies and the ongoing security situation in Kabul.
00:27:17.000Bottom line is, Joe Biden is not present.
00:27:20.000According to the Wall Street Journal, during the 2020 political campaign, Biden presented himself as a globe-trotting leader who had helmed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as Barack Obama's point man on complex international issues, and who was determined to bring a steady hand to national security.
00:27:34.000Yet the turmoil that has now engulfed Afghanistan, which has led Biden to send 5,000 troops back to the country, by the way, which, by the way, that's double the number of troops that he was taking out in April.
00:27:43.000So remember that time when we were supposed to withdraw?
00:27:44.000Now we have 6,000 troops total into the country, apparently.
00:27:48.000confronted the White House with a rather large crisis.
00:27:52.000Biden said in a statement on Saturday, one more year or five more years of US military presence would not, would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.
00:28:02.000And an endless American presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me.
00:28:08.000It wasn't about us being present in the middle of another country's civil conflict.
00:28:12.000It was, do we have the capacity to back allies in killing terrorists or not?
00:28:17.000That we do all over the world, by the way.
00:28:18.000The United States military is present in over a hundred countries.
00:28:22.000This apparently will not be one of them, even though it is now a chief terror target.
00:28:26.000Meanwhile, by the way, Blinken ramped up the Biden administration's effort to deflect criticism, saying that Trump had allowed the Taliban threat to grow.
00:28:34.000Even assuming that's true, even assuming that Trump blew it with regard to the Taliban, you came in and then just handed them the country, along with all of our allies who will now be slaughtered, along with all of our resources, because you decided to precipitously pull out, announce the date, and then just leave.
00:28:49.000And by the way, it's even worse than that.
00:28:52.000Joe Biden wants to take credit for that.
00:29:08.000and allied personnel, according to the Wall Street Journal, a force slightly larger than the 3,000 personnel who are already in transit back to Afghanistan and the 1,000 already there.
00:29:16.000But this spectacular failure stemmed from built-in flaws of the Afghan military, compounded by strategic blundering of the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
00:29:25.000The Taliban took advantage of U.S.-sponsored peace talks to deceive Kabul about their intentions as they prepared and executed a lightning offensive.
00:29:35.000The Afghan army, fighting alongside American troops, was molded to match the way the Americans operate.
00:29:41.000The US military, the world's most advanced, relies heavily on combining ground operations with air power, using aircraft to resupply outposts, strike targets, ferry the wounded, and collect reconnaissance and intelligence.
00:29:52.000In the wake of President Biden's withdrawal decision, the U.S.
00:29:54.000pulled its air support, intelligence, and contractors servicing Afghanistan's planes and helicopters.
00:30:00.000That meant the Afghan military simply could not operate anymore.
00:30:04.000The same happened with another failed American effort, the South Vietnamese Army in the 1970s, said retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger, who commanded the U.S.-led coalition's mission to train Afghan forces in 2011 and 2013.
00:30:14.000So, just to reiterate, the United States worked with the Afghan forces.
00:30:17.000They trained them in a certain type of combat, namely, they could call American airstrikes in.
00:30:21.000They had the ability to call in American air resources to clear an area or to pick up the wounded.
00:30:42.000That is like a house that exists in the Hollywood Hills and the foundations are not particularly stable.
00:30:48.000You could shore up those foundations or theoretically you could just dynamite them and then be surprised when the house falls down.
00:30:54.000Joe Biden decided to dynamite the foundations for whatever the security strategy was here.
00:31:00.000There's always a tendency to use the model you know, which is your own model.
00:31:03.000So General Bulger, who now teaches history at North Carolina State University, when you build an army like that, and it's meant to be a partner with a sophisticated force like the Americans, you can't pull the Americans out all of a sudden because then they lose the day-to-day assistance they need.
00:31:15.000forces were still operating here, the Afghan government sought to maximize its presence through the country's far-flung countryside, maintaining more than 200 bases and outposts that could be resupplied only by air.
00:31:26.000There were no resupplies available once the United States removed its support.
00:31:30.000Extending government operations to Afghanistan's more than 400 districts has long been the main pillar of America's counterinsurgency strategy.
00:31:40.000Mr. Ghani had ample warning of the American departure after the Trump administration signed a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban calling on U.S.
00:31:47.000forces and contractors to leave by May 2021, but the Afghan government failed to adjust its military footprint to match the new reality.
00:31:54.000Many officials didn't believe that they would actually leave.
00:31:56.000Okay, by the way, Joe Biden was informed of all of this.
00:32:01.000He was told about all of this, and then he just did it anyway.
00:32:54.000According to the Daily Beast, in the last few weeks, Afghanistan's air force became a sticking point in negotiations between the Biden administration and Afghan officials, according to one person familiar with the talks.
00:33:09.000withdrawal took hold, the Biden administration refused to even allow contractors into the country to service the Afghan military's aircraft.
00:33:18.000The United States effectively grounded the Afghan air force So we took away our planes, and we said, you can't use those anymore.
00:33:26.000And the Afghan government said, okay, fine, we'll use ours.
00:33:28.000Can we at least borrow some of your contractors so that, you know, our airplanes fly?
00:33:40.000And then they're surprised at what happened?
00:33:42.000In the interim, Afghan air crews were forced to get creative.
00:33:45.000Maintenance personnel were relying on Zoom calls with American experts in order to figure out how to maintain the aircraft left behind by the Americans.
00:34:12.000Photos posted to social media show that Taliban fighters have captured US-provided A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft and MD-530F helicopters.
00:34:21.000Former British International Development Secretary Rory Stewart told the BBC on Sunday, everything is going wrong. Schools are shutting down across the country. Clinics are shutting down across the country. People are taking refuge in their home. Looting is taking place.
00:34:32.000And of course, again, everybody who had the temerity to work with us is going to be murdered.
00:34:43.000Now, the good news is that, again, the State Department is making some very strong statements here.
00:34:47.000Like, some very, very strong statements.
00:34:49.000In fact, the State Department put out this particular statement, and it is a stunning masterpiece of just self-importance and delusion.
00:34:56.000Quote, Given the deteriorating security situation, we support, are working to secure, and call on all parties to respect and facilitate the safe and orderly departure of foreign nationals and Afghans who wish to leave the country.
00:35:07.000Those in positions of power and authority across Afghanistan bear responsibility and accountability for the protection of human life and property and for the immediate restoration of security and civil order.
00:35:16.000Afghans and international citizens who wish to depart must be allowed to do so.
00:35:19.000Roads, airports, and border crossings must remain open and calm must be maintained.
00:35:23.000The Afghan people deserve to live in safety, security, and dignity.
00:35:26.000We in the international community stand ready to assist them.
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00:40:14.000Quote, the U.S., the international community, and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.
00:40:21.000As we strive to assist them, we must recognize that their voices are important and respect their culture.
00:41:02.000The international community will hold you responsible by completely leaving and letting those girls get hit with acid in the face for going to school.
00:41:09.000But Nancy Pelosi cares so deeply about women.
00:41:10.000She's so much for women's rights that she tweets angrily about things that don't even make any sense.
00:41:24.000Hey, Tony Blinken, for his part, the State Department Secretary, he says, you know, it's not in our interest to stay after all.
00:41:31.000Like it or not, there was an agreement that the forces would come out on May 1st.
00:41:36.000Had we not begun that process, which is what the president did, and the Taliban saw, then we would have been back at war with the Taliban.
00:41:42.000By the way, from the perspective of our strategic competitors around the world, there's nothing they would like more than to see us in Afghanistan for another 5, 10, 20 years.
00:41:50.000It's simply not in the national interest.
00:43:17.000Well, if you don't invite them to your Georgetown cocktail party, I'm sure the Taliban are going to be super pissed.
00:43:23.000If they can't get a nice Manhattan, they'll probably just cry themselves to sleep with their AK-47s and the Apache attack helicopters you just gave them.
00:43:32.000Probably they will weep into their beer over not being able to eat caviar with Anthony Blinken.
00:43:39.000Here's Blinken saying, we're not going to legitimize their government.
00:44:08.000A future Afghan government that upholds the basic rights of its people and that doesn't harbor terrorists is a government we can work with and recognize.
00:44:19.000Conversely, A government that doesn't do that, that doesn't uphold the basic rights of its people, including women and girls, that harbors terrorist groups that have designs on the United States for allies and partners, certainly that's not going to happen.
00:45:04.000He's at Camp David, cutting his toenails and making sure that he eats his cream of wheat in the proper measure.
00:45:11.000He, the man needs his can of Ensure every morning.
00:45:14.000He doesn't have time for you and your petty worries about, you know, the destruction of an entire nation because we failed to keep any sort of basic level of moral or foreign policy commitment.