Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/16/21: Afghanistan Collapse, Warmonger Tears, Census Trends, Haiti Earthquake, Truth & Lies Abroad, Media Attacks Workers, and More!

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Krystal and Saagar dive into the Afghanistan collapse to the Taliban, warmonger frustration over the withdrawal, trends in the new census data, Haiti natural disaster, whose to blame for Afghanistan, corporate attacks on workers, US failures abroad, and more! To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.tech/ To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them it on Apple and Spotify Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Afghanistan Papers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ Richard Hanania’s Substack: https://richardhanania.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. It's good to be back. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Very nice to have you back. Kyle did a good job holding down the front. He did a great job. Thank you, Kyle. Appreciate it. You were definitely missed. Listen, guys, today we're going deep on Afghanistan from a variety of angles. We'll bring you up to speed on everything that has happened as of this morning, how the media is handling it. I don't think you'll be all that surprised. We've got a great guest on, Richard Hanania, to break down exactly what happened and to sort of push back on some of the critiques, I think, of the Biden administration. But there's also other news that we want to get to as well. The census numbers have come out. They're quite interesting, quite revealing.

There was also a horrific earthquake in Haiti. That poor nation. We'll update you there on the absolute latest. I also have a Fox News segment that I could not let go unnoticed, so I'll bring in the details on that. But we do want to start this morning with the very latest coming out of Afghanistan. Yeah, I know a lot of you have probably seen, you're saying, what the hell is going on? The government collapse. So let's take it all the way back to the beginning. So what has happened is that the Trump administration, February of 2020, begins this peace process with the Taliban. They decide May 1st, 2020, all US forces be pulled out. Biden inherits this peace deal, says, okay, we're going to get out. He's revised his timeline, says August 31st,

2020. In the midst of all of that, the Taliban, because US forces are beginning to pull out, because we're beginning not to give the immense support to the Afghan National Security Forces, which we have, they launch an offensive. And so the Long War Journal, which is a very well respected journal here in DC that tracks kind of Taliban movements, put together this little animation. I just want to give you guys an idea of how quickly this began. So you can see here, the red districts are the Taliban. So you're beginning to see October of 2020, April 2021, the encroachment of the Taliban all across the country holding provincial capitals. But there, as it begins to move, for those who are just listening, July of 2021 is when things just absolutely speed up. And you can see

right there the encirclement, this date goes all the way up just to yesterday, of the Taliban and how they have captured every single major provincial capital within Afghanistan, which has a substantial population. And there's a lot to be said there, Crystal, which is that what we are seeing is the overnight essentially collapse of $100 billion of American money, of American blood, of American military might that we gave these people. We supported this army, gave them every chance they possibly could in order to fight for their own country, and they folded within three weeks. That's the absolute truth of the matter. And there's a lot to be said that we'll get throughout the show about Biden and more. But I think the brass tacks is that the Afghan army and the Afghan political, you know,

apparatus, you could barely call it a government, was so incompetent, corrupt, and inept that they folded in a manner that me, the biggest doomer on Afghanistan there probably is, I would never have predicted that they would fold this quickly. It was even worse than we thought. Way worse. We were lied to even more than we thought. I think these presidents have been lied to routinely. I think the military has been lying to themselves, too, by the way. The bottom line is the military was fake.

The government was fake. The development aid was fake. All we did was create a massive system of kleptocracy that had zero local support. And so, yeah, when these Afghan fighters, when they saw the writing on the wall, they already had deals ready to go with the Taliban. It all been paid off. So it was done. A lot of these, you know, takeovers were basically bloodless. They handed over the weapons. They ceded control. They left. They fled, etc. Our weapons. Yes. So people know. Exactly.

So, look, the bottom line is this was a long time coming. The reason why president after president kept us there is because they did not want the American people to learn the truth about how their money had been wasted and squandered and lives lost on literally nothing. that we're talking about here. We spent more in Afghanistan over these past 20 years than we spent adjusted for inflation in all of the Marshall Plan to rebuild all of Western Europe. All of Western Europe. You can only laugh because he makes you want to cry. And this is what there is to show for it. And I just want to be clear, like, it's heartbreaking.

The images, people are at the airport, they're hanging on to planes and losing their lives reportedly, just trying to flee the country. It has definitely not been a well-executed process, which we're going to get to more on. But I just want to say out of the gates, I give Biden so much credit for sticking to this. And this is where actually, and he's been all over the board in terms of foreign interventions and good on foreign policy sometimes and terrible on it other times. It appears like his long experience in Washington gave him the courage to move forward with what he knew was likely to be ugly. What he knew was very potentially likely to have political blowback and be politically unpopular. Although I would not say that that is as clear cut as those in the media are portraying it.

He came into office at the end of Vietnam. He saw the limits of American foreign intervention. He served eight years under the Obama administration. He opposed the surge. He saw the lies that were being told to the American people, and he came in determined to end this thing and had the courage to do it when president after president, Democrat and Republican, were unable to do it. So that's kind of the bottom line here as events continue to unfold. I think that's right. We've got some more elements here we can throw up. So in particular, of course, the president, President Ghani, fled the nation. Taliban is fully, we've got that Washington Post tear sheet. The Taliban is fully

taken over the government in Kabul. Effectively, there's pictures of them in the presidential palace. Again, this happened with a speed that none of us could have possibly imagined. And to give you a sense of the very aggressive and unrepentant, I would say, attitude that the Biden administration is taking, we have a piece of President Biden's statement on what has happened here. He says, look, and this is just a portion of what he said, over our country's 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in U.S. history. One more year or five more years of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the

Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me. And in fact, Sagar, some of the reporting this morning suggest that the speed of the collapse actually bolstered the Biden administration's case internally because it made them realize, look, these generals are trying to, oh, just give us six more months. I know. Just give us another year. Just give us five more years. Look. Would not have mattered. This was the outcome no matter how long we ultimately stayed. I completely agree. And on the strategic level, look, Joe Biden has got stones of steel as far as I'm concerned because the media onslaught, the foreign policy establishment, everybody is going after him trying to get out. And there's a lot of discussion here. I see a lot

of the right trying to paint this into some, you know, humiliation abroad. This is what ending a war looks like. There is a lot of discussion. Oh, we should have planned better and more. And look, I want to be clear. What is happening in Kabul is horrible. I mean, if you're one of those people

who relied on the government and then we weren't able to get you out, that is shameful. And we should do everything in our power in order to make sure that could happen. But the alternative, and we're going to talk about this with Richard Hanania, is what? We stay three more months, four more months. People need to realize we had a peace deal with the Taliban. If we all of a sudden change the timeline and we say we're going to stay three more months, four months, be honest. That means you are cool with weapons free on American soldiers.

And I'm not cool with that. I don't think one more life, one more American life, one more American limb, one more person coming back all screwed up from this war is worth staying there another day, especially given how you see this government and its military conduct itself. But look, the truth is, is that this is a horrible situation. And in terms of the optics of it, we have to be real. It's not great. This is what it looks like whenever you're defeated in a war. Let's put this up there in terms of the helicopter. This was going all around everywhere in terms of the photo, the photo of the helicopter that was

seen at the U.S. Embassy, the evacuation there underway, a lot of discussion and comparison there to Saigon. But, you know, I want to make a point here, which is that you want to know the truth, Crystal? The media hasn't cared about this. A U.S. embassy in Afghanistan has been so insecure for so many years that the U.S. cannot risk bringing people from Hamid Karzai or Bagram International Airport by road to the embassy as they were able to. They have had to shuttle back and forth by helicopter for years because the streets themselves are so insecure and so vulnerable to attack that they cannot risk it. That's the thing. Everybody wants to focus on the helicopter now. Let's talk about the helicopter

over the last five years, which is that over the last five years, we have spent so many billions of dollars in that country so that the security situation could deteriorate, thus that we cannot even move from the airport two miles away to the embassy except via helicopter in order to make sure that our people don't get killed on the ground. This is why I ask everybody to look. I know the images are sad and I know it's shameful and look, it's embarrassing. You know, as a nation and more, it's devastating really when you think about how many people came back and how many people lost limbs and lost lives and more. And we try to cling on to meaning and we are a great country, but we also have to admit the truth of what the monumental failure that has happened here. We already have, this is my

favorite part, the guy that Bush put in charge, let's put this up there, Hamid Karzai, who Dick Cheney and Bush, one of the most corrupt people on the planet, is now saying that he will form a coordination council to manage the peaceful transition of power to the Taliban. So the guy we picked, the guy whose brother was a drug dealer and who he himself has become a nice multimillionaire, suspiciously, you know, just out of nowhere, sure, where are that money? A lot of drug money. Wonder where all that money came from. You know, exactly. A lot of Lockheed Martin dollars and more. But Hamid Karzai, the guy we put in charge, is now managing the transition of power to the Taliban.

I think that those two images show you just the monumental failure of our general class, of our presidents. These people lied to us for 20 years. The lies were even worse than we thought. And we couldn't imagine. I couldn't even imagine. You spend $100 billion. Ashraf Ghani and more, who we have propped up, despite the fact he's one of the most useless people on the planet. I mean, all these governments, these elections that we ran,

how many American soldiers died in order to secure the ballot boxes so that corrupt people like Karzai and them could exist? And this is how it all ends. Well, and not to mention the over 100,000 Afghani people who died and that the media did not care about until this exact moment. We'll get to the media angle in a moment. But, you know, everybody wants to talk about Saigon now. And I think we should actually, because you know what? We should have learned a lot more from that experience than apparently we did. This whole thing was birthed in complete arrogance and hubris. If you were going to go in to get

bin Laden, fine, go get bin Laden and get the hell out. That's what this should have been from the beginning. The idea that you're going to remake this society and you're going to have schools and girls flourish, all of this, like this was complete arrogance, complete arrogance. And so now we see after two decades, all of it gone, poof, like it was never, ever there. And so, look, the bottom line for me with Biden is, was this executed perfectly, wonderfully? No. Incompetent mess based on terrible intelligence. Military either had no idea or they were lying to his face or whatever. But ultimately Obama's, and certainly over George W. Bush? Hell yes. Every single day of the week. And I think that is the perspective that is wildly missing from all of the media takes here. But look, let's talk about that wildly faulty,

inaccurate intelligence that was being provided to him. We shouldn't have believed it. We should have known better. Absolutely. So let's take a listen to what he was saying just about a month ago on July 8th. Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable? No, it is not. Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped, as well-equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the

Afghan government will likely collapse. That is not true. Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not? That is not true. They did not reach that conclusion. So, look. He set himself up for that one. Could not have been more wrong

because the intelligence community was wildly overestimating how effective the Afghan government and military would ultimately be. They thought that the Taliban would ultimately take over, but that it would take months, something like 18 months for that ultimately to happen. Giving the U.S. government time to evacuate their personnel because they didn't want these images of having to be forced down, rushed down. They also knew how symbolic the evacuation of embassy personnel ultimately is, so they were trying to hold off on that. But, yeah, I mean, he should have known better.

Even that 300,000 troop number is completely fake. They have tens of thousands of fake soldiers on the rosters where the money for the salary is really going to some warlord or whoever. So he should have known better. And I think it's good to close out this portion with reminding you all of something that we covered together long ago back on Rising that got very, very little attention. Afghanistan papers that revealed how much we had been lied to over the years. We can throw this Washington Post tear sheet up on the screen here. Craig Whitlock, who actually has a book that is just about to drop

on the Afghanistan papers and detailing the lies and the reality of what has really been going on in the ground in Afghanistan now for these two decades. But I don't know that anything sums it up better than Douglas Lute, who's a three-star army general, served as the White House's Afghan war czar during both the Bush and Obama administrations. He said from the beginning, we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. And that has continued clearly to be the case over all these many years. They also said, look, it was impossible during Obama's surge, which remember when we were being fed the lies about like, oh, the surge is working, the surge is working. A senior NSC official during that time says,

it was impossible to create good metrics about the surge. We tried using troop numbers, train violence levels, control of territory. None of it painted an accurate picture. The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war. So those are just a few of the quotes of officials when they were actually being honest about what was going on there. Another one said the only project was basically creating kleptocracy. Yes. Which is also, you know, what has become apparently abundantly clear. The government was fake.

It had zero local support. The army was fake. They were ready to turn things over to the Taliban the moment that that seemed like the right thing to do. And the entire project from the very beginning, they had no idea what they were doing. It was baked and bathed in hubris and arrogance, and it was always going to end exactly as it did. I think a lot of people have a much higher estimation of American capability than exists. I see many of my own friends very upset about what's happening about

the Afghan interpreters. I am too. I've met many of them here. Actually, a lot of them live here in the D.C. area. I feel for those people. We should do everything in our power in order to get them out. And if that entails striking deals with the Taliban, having to pay people off in order to get them out, so be it. I think they earned it and I think they're worth the money. But these papers, they detailed that if you're angry right now, emotions are high, think about who to blame. The intelligence community kept us there under false pretenses. They also fed bad information to the Biden administration, obviously, about the capability of the Afghans. The Pentagon themselves, where the hell have they been? They had 18 months

to plan for withdrawal. 18 months. Now, this is forgotten history. Back in 2011, we had an expiring deal with the Iraqi government called the Status of Forces Agreement. The Obama administration said, no, we're not going to renew it. We're going to get the hell out of there. All US forces were done with Iraq. The Pentagon did the exact same thing then that they did now. They knew the deadline was coming and they basically kept all of our supplies in Iraq in order to try and force the Obama administration's hand in order to try and stay. Who is to say that they didn't do the exact same thing? They've had 18 months in order to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Same with the State Department.

Why are you guys taking so long in order to process special Afghan visas? It's not rocket science in terms of how long it takes. You knew the deadline was coming. Here's the truth, Crystal, I believe to my bones. These people thought that Biden and everybody else would fold. They're going to say no president wants to see the images that we're seeing in Kabul. No president wants to see Humvees and all this stuff fall into the hands. And so they are going to blink. They'll go eyeball to eyeball.

The military wins every single time. And the lies and all of the money and all of the treasure, everything, the blood wasted of the Afghan people, of the American people, it's all detailed right here. From the beginning, since 2012, actually I'll point this out in my monologue. Every general who has commanded has lied to the American public about the capability of the Afghan forces. All of them should be dragged before Congress and say, why did you lie to us? Not one of them should be multimillionaires, which they are. They're all working for the defense contractors. John Allen is president of the freaking Brookings Institution, which just put out a new paper saying that we should bomb the civilian population of Afghanistan into submission

so that they fight against the Taliban. This is in 2021. They're proposing these types of things. Well, and it's easy to talk about the kleptocracy of Karzai and Ghani, but how about the kleptocracy that's based right here, inside and outside of Washington, D.C., here in Northern Virginia, where all these military industrial complex ghouls are located. This was the greatest grift known to man. Oh, yeah. There's so many millionaires minted off this war.

People got so rich off of this war, this immoral war that got the American people and the Afghani people absolutely nothing. And that's what fed this thing. That fed this for years and years. And the other thing that fed it for years and years is that commander-in-chief after commander-in-chief did not want people to actually see the truth. And that's what you're seeing right now. That's what we're really learning is the actual reality on the ground in Afghanistan and how little,

how nothing over these 20 years was gained whatsoever. And the last thing, and I'll say here to your point about, you know, about these people and their motives and their incentives and why they lie and why they do what they do and why they didn't prepare at all for this exit is also, look, for them, this benefits them and their narrative. To be in a disaster, to be in total chaos. All of that benefits the Hawks. But just think of that mindset, that what we're learning now is how unconscionable this entire conflict was and how ludicrous from the very beginning. And so what's

their response? Their response is, it's even worse than we told you, so listen to us again. Yes. I mean, really. And that's the piece. Put that to anyone who's saying that this is a disaster, we should have gotten out, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, what is your answer? What would you do? Would you have us go back in for a year, for five years, for 20 years, for 100 years?

Because whenever it is you leave, this is what the result is ultimately going to be. None of them have any answer for that whatsoever. Imagine if these people, everybody who's so outraged, these Republican officials and even some of these neocon Democrats and the media, imagine if they cared that much about the 20-year-olds who were blown to bits by a suicide bomb in order to protect a government which didn't want to govern and in order to protect an army which didn't want to govern and in order to protect an army that didn't want to fight. Ask any enlisted member who has deployed to Afghanistan since 2012.

All of them have a story about being in a firefight with the Taliban where they're on the front line and the Afghans turn and run. Every single one of them knows. And look, I don't want to erase the heroism. There are hundreds of thousands of Afghans who fought bravely and more.

But the vast majority of their force and especially their leadership and especially their presidential apparatus and more, they were corrupt as hell and they had no interest in fighting. And that is why they folded in a matter of weeks. If you are one of those people who believes that we should have stayed and had an alternative plan and all of this, really what you're doing is you're a patsy for the forever war game. And I know that you want to believe that America and the military is more competent than what we're seeing. But it's not. We have learned since 1975. I love all these comparisons of Saigon. What are you guys saying?

We should have stayed in Saigon? Actually leaving Saigon was the right move. And we should have done it sooner, too, by the way. Oh, yeah. We should have done it sooner. Should never have been there in the first place, as we should never have been in Afghanistan for the long term in the first place either. There's two other pieces of history that I just have to mention. One is the fact that the fact that we went into Iraq, that was an ultimate distraction that kept us from getting bin laden in afghanistan to start with which look the mission from the jump i mean what we were told is basically okay we're going to go

in and get bin laden get the hell out okay you know like people maybe could get on board with that and the fact that they were so fixated on iraq kept them from accomplishing that mission and that justified staying for all these years and years and years and then the other thing just in terms of learning the lessons of history and understanding the limits of American power and the arrogance and hubris with which we have operated in the world, I mean, we're a big part of the reason why the Taliban emerged and came to power in the first place, coming out of using Afghanistan as a Cold War plaything, as the Soviet Union did, and as we did as well, backing the Mujahideen, using Saudi and Pakistan as basically our proxies to pick which groups they

wanted to fund and back the most. They backed the most radical of these extremist Islamic groups. And that is like the seeds and the birthing of how the Taliban came to be in Afghanistan in the first place. So at every step of the way, what we have done in Afghanistan has only made things worse. We stayed for 20 years, and all we did was make the Taliban stronger. A lot stronger and a lot richer. That is a lot. Oh, and let's not even, let's not forget the fact now they've got a bunch of our weaponry. So now they're also one of the best equipped militaries on the freaking planet. That's what your 20 years and your tax dollars and all of that ultimately got us, a stronger Taliban.

And I hope people talk about this. I hope they remember the lessons of Saigon. And I hope to God we do not repeat these failures again. Do I have confidence that that will be the case? Maybe for a couple years. Maybe. Maybe for a minute we'll remember those lessons and then it'll be forgotten to history just like Saigon was. How are we supposed to remember when we have the media that we have? And this is a good transition to the next segment. Exactly right. So you won't be surprised to learn

that the media suddenly cares about the fate of the Afghan people. Oh, now, okay. Suddenly cares about, you know, our men and women in danger in Afghanistan that they've been ignoring for years and years and years. Here's just a little taste of the way that Jake Tapper and everybody at CNN, effectively everybody at MSNBC and everybody at Fox News, you got a real bipartisan consensus going on here, guys, have approached the end of this war. Let's take a listen.

Look, you told me a few months ago on this program that you thought it was entirely likely that the Taliban would be taking over the country. But President Biden, just last month, quote, the likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. He was wrong. Jake, what we've done, what the president has done, is make sure that we were able to adjust to anything happening on the ground. And the fact that he sent additional forces in, we had those forces at the ready, fully prepared to go in the event that this moved in a direction where we needed forces in place to ensure that our personnel was safe and secure, to ensure also that we could do everything possible to bring out of Afghanistan those Afghans most at risk.

That's exactly what we're doing. Why didn't you have the troops in there and then let that happen first before taking them out? Again, I come back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, which is that that status quo was not sustainable. Like it or not, there was an agreement that the forces would come out on May 1st. Had 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.

And we would have been back at war with tens of thousands of troops having to go in because the 2,500 troops we had there and the air power would not have sufficed to deal with the situation, especially as we see, alas, the hollowness of the Afghan security forces. And by 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. It's simply not in the national interest. I got to say, great answer. He's totally right. That was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for those who are listening. And look, every single question, every single segment is framed in this pro-Neocon way. It's framed in this forever war. Let's just stay forever. Let's put the troops back in. Why are we leaving now? Every single segment is framed in this exact same way. I had so many people attacking me yesterday, Chris. I broke my rare Twitter thing because I

felt that I had to go in and I wanted to fight in the elite consensus. And somebody needs to back up the fact that ending a forever war is messy. It's gross. But at the end of the day, these people need to acknowledge what they're saying. And I want to back up what Tony Blinken is, which the media is not reporting this responsibly. Everybody's saying, oh, the Biden administration, you know, they should have done more. Maybe we could have stayed three more months. If you stay three more months, you violate the peace agreement with the Taliban. Yes. And that's it. Weapons hot on all American soldiers. Do you want to see 20-year-olds get blown to bits by a suicide bomb for three more months of time in Afghanistan? You go ahead and make that case to the American people. I say, hell no. Not one more life. Not one more wasted

on this goddamn war. And this is what these people are presenting it as an option when it's not. The option is soldiers die and we stay a couple more months to try and do some sort of orderly transition because, of course, the entire war

is always conducted very orderly. Oh, right. And it's just been a total and complete success up until this point. They just needed three more months and then it would all

have gone perfectly. We have the absolute capability in order to do this, right? Apparently, I've been assured of this even though the entire 20 years in the country shows that it's always going to be a complete goddamn mess. And yet, how are they reporting it? Axios, it's supposed to be the straight news. Let's put this up there. They had the gall to put this in a story.

It's a stunning failure for the West and an embarrassment for Biden. It's a traumatic turn for veterans who sacrificed in Afghanistan for the past 20 years. The 20K plus wounded, the survivors of the more than 2.3 who were killed. On the latter part, I agree. It probably is really traumatic, you know, in order to say my buddy died over there, or I lost my leg, or I lost my hand, or I lost my nose, or an eyeball, something, whatever, a piece of me left behind, and to watch it all turn. And to those people, many of whom who are fans of this show, I want to say, this is not on you. You fought with heroism. Not a single part of this is on you. It is on the generals. It is on the political leadership. It is on the people who sent you there for nothing and who lied to you and who lied to us about what you were supposed to be doing. None of this is on the

soldiers themselves. But to say it's a stunning failure for the West, I keep coming back to this. Imagine if they cared that much. Whenever our troops were getting blown to bits for nothing, where was this reporting whenever in 2015 or in 2012, when our special operators were getting blown out of the sky in order to back up the Afghan forces to try and clear the Taliban out of cities, which they now control today. Imagine if they were that outraged. I will never forget watching, and what would really turn me, because I had a very different view on the Afghan war, not even five years ago, is when I had to become a Pentagon correspondent and I had to start writing the obituaries of guys who were not just younger than me, but a lot younger than me. 18, 19 years old, whose families are saying, what the hell did

he die for? And the Pentagon doesn't listen to them and their bodies come back to Dover and everybody forgets about them. Those are the people I think about whenever we talk about these stories. Yeah. And you know what? If you care about the people of Afghanistan, past few years have been the most deadly. Yes. Because of the civil war. That never gets reported. That never makes, you know, Jake Tapper's Sunday show. They never cared. They never, they only care when it comes to your actually ending the military engagement. And on that Axios piece, one of the

bombshell quotes they have in there is from Ryan Crocker, who is a U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama. And he said, I think this is already an indelible stain on his presidency. That's what he said publicly. He was one of the guys in the Afghanistan papers that admitted what an utter and complete disaster the whole thing has been. There, privately, he was saying our biggest, this is a direct quote, our biggest single project may have been the development of mass corruption. Okay, that's what he really thinks. Okay, you don't see that on the Sunday shows. You don't see that in the papers today and there's another piece of this too that we've been warning about as well as you know these resistance liberals

who rehabilitated bush suddenly i see a few democrats remembering this guy's a lying war criminal who definitely made he's in the rankings for the worst president in u.s history judging by what he did to our people and how he made the world a worse and more dangerous place. OK, but all of these people got rehabilitated during the Trump era. All of them got primetime. They got primetime shows. They got great speaking slots. They got contributorships on CNN, on MSNBC, Bill Kristol, all the rest. And now they're in positions of esteem with a broad swath of the country, with the Democratic base of the country. And so they're in position to go back to their roots of making their neocon case. And that's exactly what you see so many of them out

there aggressively doing. They've backed Biden on basically everything up to this point. And now the bipartisan consensus emerges and their whole lot. I mean, Democrats are not giving him much cover either. I mean, all these people who and the Republicans are absolutely ridiculous on this as well. They when it was Trump, they thought it was a great idea to end the war. They were all in favor of it. We're being told, you know, the reason to vote for Trump over Biden is because he's going to get us out of the forever wars and Biden's going to keep us there forever. And now that Biden has actually done it, suddenly they've done a complete 180. The thing is, the RNC pulled down their page on their website about the Taliban peace treaty that President Trump negotiated. So all of these people are total shameless cowards. And the fact that the media elevated all of I remember whenever he was kidnapped in Syria or whatever, and it was crazy. But he's revealing complete mask off in terms of the policy that he preferred. Look at what he tweeted out yesterday

from the streets of Kabul. Quote, more on intel failure. How did the US get duped into thinking there was ever a peace process with the Taliban? Outfoxed by the Taliban? I'd say that's embarrassing, but shameful is closer. So let's analyze that, shall we? What is Richard saying? That we should not have had a peace deal with the Taliban? So what Richard is saying is that more Americans should have stayed in Afghanistan forever and should have fought and died for the Afghan national security forces and for the government, which folded in 72 hours. That's what Richard is saying. You know what ending a war is like? It means shaking hands with people who killed your soldiers, looking people in the eyes, and stomaching the fact that you failed,

so you have to look your enemy in the face, and you have to sign a deal with the guy. Is it pretty? No, it's not pretty. Absolutely not. And yet I supported Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo whenever they went to Doha and they signed this agreement because it's the right thing to do. Yeah, it sucks. It pisses me off watching guys who take Taliban, who take Kabul, who were sitting in Guantanamo Bay or in prison not even that long ago. Really makes me mad. But what makes me more mad is to think of all the people who are going to come back in a wooden box from Afghanistan to land here and having watched some of these ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, it's worth it. That's what it requires. And yet, gung-ho Richard out there banging his chest, how dare we get outfoxed by the Taliban. The only people who got outfoxed

by the Taliban are the Afghan government themselves. They're the ones who got themselves beat. And it's just, can't we just have one person in the media representing the fact that maybe this was as good as it was ever going to get? Just one, one person. Or channeling their rage where it should be, which is that the people who lied for years and years and years, for the people who got us into this war in the first place, based on what was truly a radical notion that we were going to be able to remake the world in our image, that we were going to spread democracy around the globe. I mean, this was insane from the beginning and completely, completely anti-historical based on what our experiences in trying to do such things around the world have always

ended up exactly as this is ultimately ending up. So look, all these people who, you know, they're upset. And look, I do want to say like the images are, the reality of what's happening there, there is no doubt about it. It's horrific. It's terrible to watch. It's heart-wrenching. It's heartbreaking to watch.

The Biden administration should be—should have planned better. They should be doing more. That is absolutely the case. But there is no one that we are seeing in mainstream media who's saying the real problem here is that we were lied to for years and years and years, not the fact that now the American people are actually learning the truth. And to your earlier point, I just realized half the generals who lied to us, they're people who've been in the media now for five years talking about how Donald Trump is the worst person on earth. John Allen, head of the Brookings Institution, who lied to the American

Congress and the American people. He endorsed Hillary Clinton. You might remember him from the DNC 2016 space. And he's all over cable news, talking about all of that. Half of these generals have been on to talk about how Trump is the antichrist for doubting the NATO alliance. This is who they have elevated. The actual liars of the propaganda machine themselves have fused together. And in a time of crisis like now, we have not seen one honest perspective yet on the media. All I'm asking for is a debate. Have somebody who is articulating our view and the actual view that actually maybe the U.S. government is totally inept and that this is as good as it was ever going to get and that the alternative was more American dead. Go out and find somebody who's articulating that boo on cable. Instead, this is what we're getting

from Andrea Mitchell, who's apparently in tears over what's going on right now. Let's take a listen. To leave their villages, defy their fathers. I've seen it myself. I've been there. And I mean, I know this is not your sole job, but you are the person that is speaking for the U.S. government right now. And don't we have a moral responsibility to do something for these people? Just today, the White House repeated the president is not going to change his position. He's been consistent on that. Even when he was vice president, that was his position. He disagreed with the surge.

We all know that. There you go. Where's the care and concern for the women and girls in Saudi? Yeah, they don't care. We don't hear about that much. Right. And this is where, you know, Biden, again, I just have to give this guy a lot of credit because he's been really clear on this from the beginning. I mean, he got he had asked a while back, like, don't you bear some moral responsibility for the women and girls of Afghanistan? And he said, no. There are places all around the world where there are atrocities being committed, where women and girls are being subjected to horrific violence or oppression or LGBTQ people. I mean, there are so many places around the world that are completely screwed up. And that is a heartbreaking, horrible state of affairs.

And I wish there was more we could do about it. But if you learn nothing else from these 20 wasted years in Afghanistan, it is that we can't. We can't go in and change these places and make them into our own spread democracy. All of this foreign adventurism only ever comes back to bite us, but not just us, to make the world a worse and less safe place with more violence and more oppression. That is really the end result of these 20 years in Afghanistan. And is that hard to look at? Hell yes. It's horrible to look at, but it's about damn time that the American people actually knew the truth. Yes. Stare it in the face. Have the media tell you. Look, if enough Afghans care about Afghan girls and Afghan women to fight and die for it, then they can do that.

And we found out pretty clearly that they don't care enough in order to do any of that. In a way, I feel terrible. We gave a lot of people in Afghanistan false hope that we were going to stay there forever, that we were going to foster a liberal international democracy, that we were going to, you know, prop up a society. We can't do it. It's just simply not possible. But also this government we were propping up had no local support. Yes, exactly. It's fake. We were partnered with freaking warlords, some of whom were worse than the Taliban, or child sex slaves. Don't even get me started.

Part of the reason why the Taliban was ever, to anyone in the population is because the warlords were even worse. Yes. So those were our allies. They would kill the rapists. They would walk in and they would hang the people who were raping children in the village who were allied with the government. You're in the village. Who do you think you support? That's one of the worst stories I ever had to write in my junior days was about how dead Afghan widows of the Afghan National Security Forces were entitled to payouts, right? Like when you get killed. Yeah, well, the U.S.-backed government was performing these widows to make – was making them perform sexual favors on the officials in order to get their pay. Can you imagine? We paid that.

Those were our allies. That was our ally. That was also our money that we were paying out to these widows, and we were forcing them in order to sexually degrade themselves, in order to get the cash that they were owed because their husbands put their lives on it. You can go look it up. It was one of the worst stories that I ever had to write from john sopko the special inspector general of afghanistan so i can't say i really blame uh the you know afghan army for uh for giving up as quickly as they did because what were they really

fighting for they were fighting for this completely kleptocratic fake government um and a bunch of warlords i mean it's not like what we were propping up here was so incredibly amazing. So you may not have heard that on the news and you're probably not going to hear that on the news, but that was the truth and the reality of what was really happening in Afghanistan and is unconscionable all the way around. That's right.

Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to BreakingPoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Okay, we're going to try and do a lighter topic here.

I don't know. It's not that lighter, but it's a little bit less heavy. More domestic, less politically charged. So let's put this up there on the screen. We finally got the actual results of the new census data, and it is really stunning. And look, if I think you hold the position that Crystal and I have that what's happening right now in America probably is not a good thing, then you are seeing the real partisan effects of basically split. We have a split nation. We have half the country, which is growing. We have half the country, which is getting smaller. And you can see the

partisan implications of that in that graphic, which is up there, which is that the fastest growing counties have exclusively gotten more Democratic since 2012. Counties shifting towards Republicans have shrunk. Of the counties that grew, 70% shifted Democrat, 90% of shrinkers moved right. Now, before you pull a Hillary Clinton and say, I won all of the places which are growing, Nate Cohn actually has a pretty good point. Let's put the next tweet up there on the screen, which is that, look, for all of the demographics or destiny takes of the last 10 years, all the favorable quote-unquote demographic trends, Democrats are not stronger than they were

in the beginning of the decade. And I think what it comes down to is that we see here a nation which is bifurcating, which is that the industrial Midwest and many other places across the country are having the economic life out of them getting sucked dry. And all of it is being concentrated in different areas where permanent capital and more are very comfortable. And you are seeing that the people who have connections to that land, connections to their community, who don't maybe want to leave where they're from, are left behind for increasingly nothing. One of the worst takes that I've seen on this, Michael Moore, our old friend, was celebrating the fact that, you know,

there's less white people in the Midwest. Yeah, you know why? They're dead from opioid abuse. It's like, what is wrong with you? What I have seen, it's the worst thing I've seen. I mean, look, I don't care necessarily about the demographic makeup. More what I'm talking about is let's look at this data and we can see the fact that we are losing a lot

of people to opioid abuse, to economic complete destruction of their neighborhoods and livelihoods and more. And this is a very stark picture, I think, of the country. I saw a lot of triumphalism on it, but that is not how I see the data whatsoever. Well, and so in terms of if you want to look through this, that this through like a partisan lens, there was news in there that Democrats considered to be good. The country is getting more urban. It's getting more suburban. It's getting more diverse, more black and brown. And also some of the, you know, conservative takes about like, oh, this is the end of New York City. Well, New York City was one of the fastest growing,

larger cities in the country. So that was completely absurd. But I think Nate Cohn's take here, and it's not just a take, I mean, it's just a fact, is really interesting and really important to realize. Everything basically demographically went Democrats' way over this past decade. And yet they've made no progress. Why? It's not hard to figure out. It's because they've lost more of the white working class. And maybe that's been a sort of realignment that's happening, been happening over years and years as the white working class tends to be more culturally conservative. And as politics have become more and more about the culture war and not actually delivering for people's material well-being, well, that kind of made sense that they would

sort out to the Republican Party, ultimately, with Donald Trump really driving that change. The other part that Democrats really don't want to talk about very much is that the other piece of why they haven't been able to make up any ground and improve their situation nationally is because Latinos have moved increasingly over the Republican side. Now, Democrats still overwhelmingly win Latino demographic, but working class Latino men in particular have moved towards the Republican Party. So, look, I think if you're the Democratic Party, you should feel a lot of shame at the fact that the places that are struggling, the people who are struggling the most,

they don't see anything in your party for themselves. I mean, those are the places that the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the downtrodden, supposed to be the party of the working class, the party of the people. And yet the places that are struggling the most have moved the most rapidly to the right. Now, you should be doing some soul searching about that. Of course, we haven't seen any sign that that's actually what they're going to do here. So, it's a pretty revealing moment. Now, look, in terms of the big reason the census matters in political terms is because redistricting is about to happen. And so, the way that the lines

are going to be drawn, the way that the gerrymandering is ultimately going to happen is impacted greatly by what the census says, because you have to have the districts be roughly equivalent in size. So the fact that this went a little bit better for Democrats than they were expecting is going to make it a bit harder for Republicans who control more of the machinery of redistricting than Democrats do. It's going to make it a little bit harder for them to gerrymander. But Democrats are not in a great position here, even with everything going their way over the past decade. And the last thing I'll say about this, though,

is a hopeful thing, which is like, you know, we sort of have this idea that everybody's hardened in their political beliefs and political persuasion, their party identity, et cetera. Well, one lesson over the past 10 years, that's not the case. Not the case at all.

Because if that was the case, then Democrats would be doing a lot better than they are right now. Hillary would be president. This would be like her second term, if that was true. People can move between parties. They can change their minds. They can be persuaded. So you might want to actually try. That would be a sort of new approach for the party is actually try and persuade people ultimately here. One last note that I thought was interesting is a lot of the growth in the Latino population, it's no longer from incoming immigrants. It's from people who are, you coming from people who are here and who are citizens and having babies and having families and are as American as anyone else. It's pretty fascinating also if you look at the county by county data. So Dave Wasserman

actually has this up there on the fastest 10 counties from 2010, 2020. Every single one of them is Texas and Florida with the exception of Forsyth, Georgia. I hope I said that right. So Hayes, Texas was the top. Comal, Texas, 49%. Ocella, Florida. Williamson, Texas. St. John's, Florida.

Forsyth, Georgia. Kauffman, Texas. Fort Bend, Texas. Sumter, Florida. And Rockwall, Texas. So Texas and Florida just seeing explosive growth in the last 10 years. But to what I was saying earlier, look at what the 10 counties with the fastest shrinking counties. Let's throw this next one up there. Well, number one, Robeson, North Carolina. Number two,

Hins, Mississippi. Number three, Cambria, Pennsylvania. Four, Caddo, Louisiana. Five, San Juan, New Mexico. Six, Kanawa, West Virginia. Seven, Macon, Illinois. Eight, Fayette, Pennsylvania. Nine, Baltimore City, Maryland. Ten, St. Louis City, Missouri. So what do you see there? Industrial Midwest, Inter-Midwest, and more. They are the fastest shrinking counties in the United States. These are the more left behind places. And all of them became a lot more Republican in the last 10 years. All the ones at the top became a lot more Democrat, even though they are in Texas and Florida, they're that new like kind of suburban type. So the suburbanization of America continues. It is certainly going blue, but that doesn't mean that, you know, a lot of the left behind people are not going to vote or are not going to change in the way that they traditionally view the country.

So really in the data, all I see is the country continues to split apart almost entirely by economic lines. And where you live has become a much more – a much bigger indicator than ever before of how you vote. I think I did a whole monologue on Rising about there was all the spatial analysis data where if you live around people where two thirds don't have a college degree, you're most likely going to vote Trump. And if you live in places with two thirds of a college degree, you're mostly likely to vote for Biden. Same things in terms of dollars. It actually really holds regardless of race except whenever it comes to the black community. So all of that just shows me that we are increasingly splitting apart. You're seeing increasing concentration in the areas that are doing well, vast shrinking in the places that aren't doing well.

But you can't leave those people behind and just write them off like that famous Hillary quote of, I won all the places which were growing. It's like, that's not a good thing. You're supposed to be the ones who are representing the people who are left, but you're supposed to be speaking up for the powerless. And so, yeah, like I said, you would think there would be some soul searching going on, but there's clearly not. And it's what Democrats do is once they lose a place like Iowa or they lose a place like Ohio, they just forget about it. They're like, yeah, let's move on to Georgia. Let's move on to Arizona. Let's move over to greener pastures where there is more, you know, economic dynamism and people doing a little bit better. Maybe we'll do better in those places. One of the results that came out

of here is Georgia may already be majority minority. It's right, basically 50-50 right now. And so the new battlegrounds are what you would expect them to be. They are Georgia, that is Arizona, those Sunbelt states. And it is also, I mean, eventually Texas is probably going to come into play. Although again, demographics aren't destiny. So the fact that you have increasing browning of some of these places does not mean the Democrats are ultimately going to have a lock on any of them or even, you know, a realistic chance at any of them. They got to do a lot better. I would not, you know, I would not bet on this forever. I think I really, what it shows is to your point that people are up for grabs if you're willing to talk to them. You know, if you abandon

the cultural concerns of millions of people, they'll go elsewhere. And same thing whenever it comes on the Republican side, if you abandon the economic, you know, the economic tastes and more of millions of people, they'll also go elsewhere. So that's what's happening. It's weird right now. You're kind of watching in real time. The Republicans just go back to all the crap

that they used to say. I mean, it's just like- Neocons in Afghanistan. Yeah, now suddenly everybody on the Republican side is a total neocon again. Anything different that they said in the Trump years, they were clearly just like pretending. I mean, obviously, they did not actually believe the words they were saying if they said anything in favor of getting out of Afghanistan during those years. And on economics, it's the same thing, which is kind of what I'm tackling in my monologue. Like any divergence

from traditional Republican Reaganite orthodoxy on economics is also completely out the window. So, it is interesting to see in real time. And we'll watch what the political ramifications of that are. The last thing I'll say on your point regarding people being persuadable is I think that the Trump campaign and the Republicans proved this. They actually invested a lot of money in flipping Latinos and turning out more Latinos to vote for them. And they saw that in Florida. But it wasn't just in Florida. A lot of people want to make this just about Cubans.

This was an across-the-board phenomenon. No, Texas as well. And Texas, you know, maybe even more so than Florida. But this was a pretty consistent trend across the country. No mystery why. They actually invested in talking to those communities, and it had an impact. And I would say the Sanders campaign also proved that point in the Latino community, where they also spent a lot of money and took a lot of time and actually invested in talking to those communities and pitching Bernie

Sanders' platform to them. So people are movable. Don't give up on making the case by actually delivering for the American people. 100%. We have one more really horrific story that we wanted to bring you an update on because we've been tracking closely what's been happening in the country of Haiti. And unfortunately, they've just been struck by another horrific crisis. This time, it's a 7.2 magnitude earthquake. We can throw this tear sheet up on the screen. The latest death count is,

as of this morning, I checked right before we came on air, was 1,297 dead. You can see those photos. You can see these. We right now have on the screen, for those who are listening, photos of the complete devastation in several major population centers in that country. Just, I mean, they have another tropical storm apparently headed their way, Tropical Storm Grace, which is supposed to hit today and tomorrow, which is going to, of course, complicate the rescue effort, which is ongoing. I hate to say it, but I'm sure we're going to get a higher and higher death toll as the days and weeks go on. And of course, all of the backdrop

and the context for this is a nation that was already in not just a political crisis from the assassination of their president, but a humanitarian crisis with so many people lacking enough food to eat and just the basics of shelter, food, and ability to live. So tremendous devastation there. Haiti never really recovered from the previous earthquake that happened. Was that 2010? I think it was 2010. That caused hundreds of thousands of lives lost. So I mean, this is like a really low bar. The devastation is not as bad as that earthquake, but you're talking about thousands of people who are dead and several major population centers pretty devastated. Yeah. So this is a 7.2 magnitude

earthquake. Reading here accounts really terrible. One of the problems and why the reason that the death toll is so high is because so much of the hospital infrastructure is gone. So they don't have a real healthcare infrastructure, which means that people have to wait hours or days in order to get treated. There's only one surgeon in like one particular region of the entire country where this entire thing got hit. He gave an interview where he's like, I'm the only surgeon. It's just me. So in that situation, and especially with the rest of the world distracted, not just distracted, there's COVID. Because of that, international travel has basically run to a halt. A lot of international aid is really not working right now. Obviously, the US military has a lot of other stuff going on as opposed to what we

were doing in 2010. So it's a perfect storm that just wiped. I mean, I don't know what else to say. It's terrible. It really does show that they just can't catch a break. Like they had this earthquake, then they have now the political crisis of the last 10 years culminating the assassination of the president. And then now some guy is resigning and nobody knows who the hell was DEA informants and all this. There's still a lot of questions there. Same now, the earthquake hit. This is now a domestic political crisis.

They don't even have a proper president. They don't have any people who are coordinating. The hospital infrastructure is decaying. The international community is basically not there right now. So it's a perfect storm. Yeah, and now we've got this tropical storm that because, you know, it's really important what's going on in Afghanistan. But there's a lot of suffering going on around the world. And Haiti, our hearts go out to all of the people there. And look, I mean, it's another country, too, that we had a major hand in screwing up both politically and economically. So there is some some burden to bear there in terms of our moral responsibility to the people of that nation. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing,

realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Sagar in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at today? Well, everybody, I've missed you all desperately. So much to catch up on from vaccine passports, COVID hysteria, Afghanistan. I think I'm going to stick with the latter because it's where I have the most to say, and it directly relates to what I've been up to in the last week. Yesterday, we got the ignominious but inevitable news that the Taliban officially have taken control of Kabul in Afghanistan, with a U.S.-backed president literally fleeing the country only hours into the siege. Suddenly, I see a lot of takes flying around. Republicans have seemingly forgotten Donald

Trump is the one who penned this deal and actually pushed this same policy. No other than Trump himself says that Biden somehow has strayed from his deal and the plans. Of course, I knew this would happen since our politics does not allow for admitting that the other fella has a point every once in a while. And I wanted to take the opportunity to state this absolutely unequivocally. I'm with Joe Biden on his withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not enough people who are genuinely anti-endless war are coming out and saying it because they disagree with him elsewhere. And I do, of course. But the elite consensus right now is America is that Biden's withdrawal is a disaster. I'll say this. On the margins, some things absolutely could have been done differently. We should have done a much better job of ensuring our translators and more got out, 100%. But in the end, it was probably always going to be this way. I don't blame Joe Biden. No, I choose to focus my ire on the real enemy in this discussion, the American general class, the Pentagon, the State Department, the military contractors,

and more, who pushed lies upon the American people for 20 years, and whose fiction was finally revealed yesterday when the Taliban assumed control. Let's review, shall we? The same intelligence community which got us into this mess had three predictions on Afghanistan. First, it was that the Taliban would take three months to take the capital of Kabul. Then, they revised that date to 72 hours. Then it ended up doing it in 24. Which means, what? Even after 20 years, even after the failures of the Afghan forces

and the corruption of the Afghan government was evident, they still could not admit the truth, that our mission there has been nothing but a catastrophic failure. I wanted to start with that, just so you get an idea of how full of it these people still are to this day. But how far back should we go? Who is responsible for this mess?

Here's the answer. Everybody. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, for not just throwing everything we had at Tora Bora and killing bin Laden so that we could get the hell out of that country. For picking Karzai. Barack Obama for falling for the general's tricks, surging troops, withdrawing them, and more, keeping them forever. Donald Trump

for following them for the same trick. But look deeper, of course. They decided, and the buck stocks with them. But beneath the surface are the generals, commanders, and diplomats who justified these idiotic decisions and who pushed the presidents to make them. The people who were supposedly sworn to the American public sat in front of Congress, in front of the microphone, lied to the American people about the capability of the Afghan security forces to confront the Taliban, and who lied about our mission there to create a dependable ally in the Afghan government. The story of the Afghan war is complicated, but basically it goes like this. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to kill bin Laden and to punish the Taliban for giving him safe harbor to Plan 9-11. We partnered with the Northern Alliance. We told them to take power. We stayed and we backed them up. Then we invaded Iraq in 2003,

and we kind of forgot about the entire thing. In 2009, the situation was deteriorating because we had been backing the corrupt Karzai government, and the Taliban were actually starting to do really well. Obama said he would fight the good war. He sent thousands of American troops, but just for two years. It failed miserably. We transitioned to something called Resolute Support, or what the Pentagon calls Train, Advise, and Assist. That mission was this. We will stay with the limited force to train the Afghan army, advise them, and assist them in their fight against the Taliban.

We would do this for a limited period of time and give them the equipment so that they could handle the fight themselves. And every year since then, in 2012, since Obama ended the surge, the Pentagon and the generals in command of that effort have lied to the American public to keep their gravy train going. Consider these lies. In 2012, General John Allen said, quote, we're winning this war. In 2013, General Dunford, who later became the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said our victory there was, quote, inevitable by train, advise, and assist. In 2014, General Campbell, he said he had seen the change in strategy and we would win. General Nicholson, 2017, says the situation has, quote, fundamentally changed. In a way, Nicholson was the most honest, just that the situation fundamentally changed to ensure that

this would be the end result. Why all of these lies? Because the United States has spent to date $100 billion on the Afghan National Security Forces. Billion with a B. They collapsed within three weeks when they actually had to fight for themselves. Not just in the outer provinces. In their capital, where they simply put down their weapons and let anybody who wants get to them. That is what these people spent our money on, sent our sons and daughters to die for. The only people who won the Afghan war are the military contractors and bankers in Dubai,

who got to cash all of our checks from the corrupt Afghan officials, and of course, the Taliban drug dealers. The people who lose are the working class men and women who actually had to fight this war, and of course, the Afghan people who were mostly used as pawns in this entire game. Yesterday was a tragedy, certainly, but I choose to stand up for what I believe, ending the endless war. It is not pretty. Being anti-endless war requires telling the truth. It's real easy for me to say, yeah, I'm against the Afghan war. We should get out. It's harder to say this, to see the Taliban rolling into Kabul and saying, you know what, I accept that. Saying you're against the US invasion of Iraq, that's easy. It's harder to

say this, I was okay not taking the ultimate step by stopping Saddam Hussein from gassing women and children. That's the truth. The lesson of the Afghan war is that we just have to tell it, have to tell the truth. It's horrific and it's hard to confront. But the lies are what got us into this mess. And the lies are what kept us there for so long. Only Joe Biden was willing to stand up and say the truth. It is not on us whatever happens to that country. We did a lot and more. And from here on out, it's on them. And they made their choice. I support him for saying that, even though I have serious doubts about him as a leader in many other respects. I'll end with the real consequences. I was in

France for the last week. I had the chance to indulge a long interest of mine. I walked the battlefields of the Somme from World War I. And the thing that strikes you while they were there is driving along the road and you see cemeteries everywhere, every hill, every divot, every group of trees. And in those cemeteries, there was a grave that sticks with me, Private Vijay Strugwit. His photo of a gravestone is right there on the screen. He's 15 years old. He died on January 14, 1916, fighting for ground, which was taken, retaken, taken, retaken again. For what? 15 years old. Those are the people who pay the price, not the liars here in Washington. Ending this war means honoring the legacy of the millions of young men and women who senselessly sacrificed for nothing and confronting the truth of who we really are.

Because to this date, Crystal, over a million people have deployed to Afghanistan. One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long-form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky,

Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. What are you taking a look at, Crystal? Well, Fox News on Friday, Laura Ingram invited on John Taffer. He is host of Bar Rescue for a little chat about jobless workers. Here's how that went. I'm not an economic professor. If you get $800 a week unemployment benefits and you live with a partner who also is getting $800 a week unemployment benefits, $1,600 a week, Laura, $83,000 a year for that household and unemployment benefits. The median income in America is only sixty three thousand. We're incentivizing people to stay home. What if we gave that additional unemployment benefits to employers to incentivize people to go to work?

Well, what if we just cut off the unemployment? I mean, hunger is a pretty powerful thing. I don't mean physical hunger because people who truly are in need need help. I'm talking about people who can work but refuse to work. But the government is is literally putting anvils in many ways on people's shoulders, either through the mandates, regulations and now through free money, which obviously we're all going to the Piper eventually has to be paid. John, John, I want to ask you, though, about this this idea of work life balance, because, look, no one wants to miss their kids growing up. No one wants to you stay in the office your whole life. You never see your family. So that's really important. However, have we taken that a step too far when you think of, well, a lot of the millennials talking about, well, I need time for self-care. I don't know why I'm harping on that tonight, but the whole self-care movement is a little, I mean, my mother's not with us anymore, but she worked by the time she was 12 during the depression. If she heard the self-care thing, I think her head would explode. You know, I think

that's right. I have a friend in the military who trains military dogs, Laura, and they only feed a military dog at night because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we're not causing people to be hungry to work, then we're providing them with all the meals they need sitting at home. I'm completely with you, Laura. These benefits make absolutely no sense to us. And on top of the impact of not getting employees and not being able to run our businesses, in my industry, we have meat prices are up 10 percent. Chicken prices are up 15 percent. Inflation is killing, is killing, is going to kill business. I mean, it's going to, that's the next shoe to drop, the Democrats. Wow. So they really kind of gave up the game there, didn't they? Just two millionaires casually suggesting that the jobless be cut off and starve like dogs to force them back into waiting tables, cooking meals, and serving drinks to the well-off. Worth noting that in the restaurant industry, Taffer is particularly focused on the tipped minimum wage as a whole, $2.13 per hour. Can't imagine why

people might be reluctant to jump back in, especially with a variant surging that is freaking people out and keeping them home again. There is so much going on here, it's hard to honestly even know where to start. I do want to dispel this myth that somehow Americans are getting lazy and just going to spas for self-care all the time or indulging in endless mental health days. So in reality, Americans work more hours each week than their peers in other developed nations, 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. Not that I think that's a good thing, by the way. What's more, the typical American family works far more hours than their

grandparents did in the days of your lore, so fondly harkens back to primarily because women have fully entered the workforce, layering full-time employment on top of the household duties, which women still primarily handle, and meaning that many households have two full-time workers rather than one, as was the case in those glory days of yesteryear. But the deeper issue here is that this whole way of thinking about human beings, business, and the economy is disturbing and downright sociopathic. Workers are not treated as people with needs and wants and dreams and aspirations. Nope. They are just the inefficient flesh robots used to get the wealthy their damn drinks or drive them around or clean their houses or drop their packages on

their doorstep. Any deviation from this absolute obedience is completely unacceptable, according to these people. Now, you could make a good deal with workers. You could lift their wages. You could give them health care, reasonable working schedules, etc. But that might impose some minor costs on the upper class. So, in the view of Laura, John, and by the way, plenty more like them, the solution is obvious. Just starve them. Threaten them with eviction, hunger, the desperate shame of poverty that America insists we heap upon the poor. Because in this sadly dominant worldview, workers exist to serve the rich and the macroeconomy This is the dominant ethos held not just by Republicans, but quite a few Democrats as well. After all, it was only under duress that the eviction moratorium was extended.

The expanded unemployment program will be allowed to lapse, kicking millions of gig workers and freelancers off of that program. $15 minimum wage hike is nowhere near reality, even as Democrats control every single lever of power. Now, I should add, Taffer has apologized for his whole starve them like dogs comment, saying his remarks were, quote, an unfortunate attempt to express a desire for our lives to return to normal. I suppose for the rich, normal does, in in fact mean workers jumping right back into wage slavery. But don't be surprised if we hear more of these revealing quiet part-out loud moments, elite panic about insubordinate workers accidentally being spoken in public rather than kept to the salons of the wealthy and the powerful where such talk is normally sequestered.

Because actually, there are some signs that workers are becoming somewhat less obedient and experiencing a tiny uptick in power for the first time in a generation. In that way, I suppose Laura and Taffer are not wrong. Workers are being choosier in their employment. They're moving industries. They're seeing wage gains for the first time in 40 years. They're even striking and protesting and holding union elections. This very small assertion of power has been virtually unknown in America since the Reagan years. The starve them like dogs ethos has dominated through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, as the social safety net has been cut and cut and cut at the same time that taxes for the rich have been cut and cut and cut. But now there is a tiny glimmer of something a little bit different. A great rethink that I believe owes to at least three

factors. First of all, the pandemic separated workers from their employment, forcing them to reconsider what they were doing, whether they wanted to or not. Second, some small but significant cash benefits were administered through direct aid, unemployment, and the child tax credit, which has in fact given folks a little bit of breathing room and ability to evaluate their options. And finally, the pandemic effectively took some of the social shame out of joblessness and out of struggle. The government instituted a society-wide policy of job loss, and they were up front about it. Even the most skilled Fox News propagandists could not turn that state of affairs into some personal responsibility narrative. There was no bootstrapping during a pandemic that was killing hundreds of thousands and shuttering schools and businesses and everything else. So I suppose the powers that

be are feeling a little bit nervous that they've lost their iron grip on the narrative and on those disobedient workers, starting to feel like something must be done here to get these workers back in line. Well, all I have to say is that if your plan is to starve workers like dogs, don't be surprised when they turn around and eat the rich. And Sagar, we were talking earlier about the way that so many of these talking head people... Joining us now, a great guest, Richard Hanania, old friend of the show. He's the president of the CSPI Center, Fellow at Defense Priorities, longtime friend and

somebody that we turn to for insight. Richard, thanks for joining us, man. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Richard, you've been one of the most, I think, clairvoyant voices on this. I see a lot of people out there saying, oh, Joe Biden could have done more. We should have planned more for an exit from Afghanistan. How is this all a complete mess? What would have that actually entailed, Richard? What were our actual options in Afghanistan to try and mitigate the disaster that we see before us right now? Yeah, I mean, the war was such a terrible disaster. And there's so many anecdotes you could pick from to just sort of demonstrate that point. But one of my favorites,

and maybe the thing that stands out to me most, is in 2018, 60 Minutes, Laura Logan went to Afghanistan and they talked to the top general there. And what he basically told her was the U.S. had not secured the road between the U.S. embassy and the airport. That's about a two mile road. It's a straight line. And they had to travel by helicopter. I mean, these are the two most important places, you know, the Kabul airport and the U.S. embassy. And so I think the people, what they really don't understand is that the U.S. is massively incompetent. We can't do anything in Afghanistan. We spend trillions of dollars. The entire government was a phantom. It didn't exist. It had control over maybe a few buildings, maybe a few, you know, parts of a few provincial capitals and cities, but there really was no government to

actually speak of. So the U.S. is getting out. When the U.S. gets out, a lot of people are going to want to come with, even during peacetime, a lot of people want to leave Afghanistan. A lot of people would take a trip to the U.S. if they could. So even if you theoretically got out every, you know, every Afghan translator, everybody who worked with the United States, that's difficult. I mean, there's legal hurdles. You know, there's laws that the administration has to live under and work with. Even if you did that, the airport would get swamped.

Now, the U.S. can't drive to the airport, right? It has to go there in a helicopter. So, you know, this is what people are seeing. They're seeing the scenes from the airport where the Afghan's crowding there. And you have to believe is that the U.S., who could not do anything in 20 years in Afghanistan, if it stayed for a few more months, it would have competently run the Kabul airport under the most desperate conditions imaginable. That's what the Warhawks are saying. That's what they're saying.

Give us a few more months and this would have happened and it would have been somewhat of a clean withdrawal. Biden already delayed the withdrawal. Trump had a deal that said we were going to leave in May. Biden delayed it and people were wondering why Biden was delaying it. Was this just a plan to stay long term or was it that what Biden actually said that there was logistical problems and that basically the Trump administration didn't cooperate and they needed like more time to work it out. Since that time, I mean, I think we've seen pretty clearly that Biden actually does want to get out. So I think the most reasonable assumption is that he was telling the truth at the time that they were actually trying. And this was the best that they can do. This was probably the best any administration could do,

because we just have to learn our limits. I think people haven't realized that. They just think, oh, we could have done a little bit better. Oh, plan the evacuation better. You know, fight the insurgency a little bit better. Give it a little more time. These are the same arguments we've seen throughout the wars, throughout the war. And, you know, a couple of months, a couple of years, I mean, as the Biden administration is saying, would not have made a difference. There was just it was just time to get out. Yeah, I mean, what we're seeing right now is not an indictment so much of the Biden administration as it is all of the hawks, all of the neocons, all of the administrations that were happy to push this to the next president, push this to the next president. That's the real indictment.

The hawks that you're referring to, I mean, the fact that they got it so incredibly wrong and were happy to lie to people time and time again, and now we're happy to lie to people time and time again and now we're supposed to listen to them is completely absurd to me ultimately what the biden administration has been arguing is basically like look if we had stayed longer as you all are saying and planned by taking time to plan better get more of our people out we would have found ourselves in the middle of a hot civil war could you just unfold what that scenario, what that alternative that many, many, many are advocating for now, what that would have actually looked like? Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. I mean, the arguments that are being made. So Adam Kinzinger

was on Twitter and he was saying, we had a lot more troops 10 years ago and we haven't taken a casualty in a year and a half or something like that. And so things were getting better. And everyone knows that the reason that we weren't, or hopefully everyone knows, enough people know, that the reason we weren't taking casualties was that the Taliban had reached a deal with the Trump administration. What was going on when the U.S. wasn't taking casualties? Well, the Taliban was making gains. You can go look at the maps, what was happening month by month, year by year. And so they actually, so Kinzinger comes and now turns it around and says, this is a sign of progress. I mean, it's a joke. And so if you stayed, what situation you would be in now is that basically you're in worse shape than you ever were. I mean, the arguments

don't ever change. It's always give us a few more months. Pompeo says, make it conditions-based. Conditions-based is basically an argument of people who never want to leave. The entire point of this war, the entire point of understanding how incompetent we've been is that conditions are never good. That's why it's such a disaster. And so things weren't going to get better. The only thing that's actually, if there's anything that's changing over time, is that our position is getting worse. And we've tried a lot. I mean, we had the Bush administration, more of a hands-off approach, went into Iraq. People criticized that. It was actually more stable under the Bush administration. Obama comes in and he's boxed in by the generals. He sends a troop surge,

over 100,000 troops. Violence goes up. The government starts, the money just goes into the pockets of the warlords. It fuels corruption. American deaths go up. Afghan civilian deaths go up. The government loses territory. Trump comes in. He sends in more troops. He ups the bombing campaign. So it's a completely different strategy. It's not coin counterinsurgency like Obama boots it on the ground as much. It's just bombing from the air. The Taliban gains more territory. So it's like the harder you try, the ground as much. It's just bombing from the air. The Taliban gains more territory. So it's like the harder you try, the worse it gets. The only consistency is we keep failing and we keep failing consistently. And the hawks are always there saying just a little bit more time. I mean, I'm glad we finally, I mean, this is, you know, there's, you see these things

reoccurring and I've been watching this for years, and it's refreshing to see a president who just came in and said, no more. I mean, this is political courage, and I think everyone should acknowledge that. We've been saying the same thing all day. This is the most presidential thing I've ever seen. I've never respected Joe Biden more than for standing up against the media and saying, no, I'm absolutely not going to bow down. I want to drill down into that, Richard. I keep hearing this constantly. Oh, Sagar, you didn't know? We haven't lost a soldier there since February of 2020. Yeah, because we have a peace

deal. So let's go through this. We violate the peace deal. We say we're going to take six more months or whatever in order to evacuate our people. What happens, Richard? What is the actual, like, what is the policy consequence of that? It is dead American soldiers, is it not? Yeah, I mean, look, yeah, we had the peace deal. We didn't take any casualties, but we also lost more and more territory for the Afghan government. So I guess you could have ended up in a situation where you could leave troops there. The U.S., you know, you just lose more and more territory. And then what's going to happen?

You know, the conditions are even worse. They'll come back and say, you know, we're for withdrawal. We're in conditions based on withdrawal. We can't leave under this humiliating circumstances. It's on a downward slope, and it's always been on a downward slope. And so, yeah, you have to, I mean, the Afghan government, I mean, did not exist on paper. They were telling us 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, they're turning the corner. We're seeing great progress. They collapsed. I mean, Vietnam, people make the comparison to Vietnam.

The South Vietnamese government lasted two years after the United States fell. The government left behind in Afghanistan by the Soviets lasted for a while. This was even before we were out the door, and it wasn't like heavy fighting. It was just a complete collapse. What's very interesting, when the Taliban was trying to take Missouri Sharif, which is a large northern city in Afghanistan, the Afghan government wasn't even fighting. It was actually the militias, Dastur militia and other militias that were there. If you read the history of Afghanistan, these are the same names that were fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. And they were there, they were part of the Northern Alliance when the U.S. invaded.

So you have this 20 years, right? And then the U.S. just, you know, puts in this ungodly amount of money. And the result is like, you know, it's not just they lose to the Taliban. It's like the Afghan government is probably not even the second or third best fighting force in the country. So, you know, they just they just melt away. These militias, you know, they can't take on the Taliban either. They actually they're in a weaker state than they were when the U.S. invaded them. You know, the militias held off the Taliban for a while in the 1990s. It's just such an indication of what a disaster, you know, this has been. I don't know if you could have screwed this up worse if you tried to fail. I mean,

we just have to stop listening to these people. You know, there's no hope of them ever getting it right. And we need to deeply reflect on how things got to this point. What do you make of the fact, we played the sound here that's been passed around of Biden, you know, a little more than a month ago saying like, you know, we have three, they've got 300,000 Afghan army fighters, and it's not like the Taliban is just going to come in and overrun the place immediately. Clearly that turned out to be totally wrong. Was he lied to? Was the military just wildly off in their estimates? Why do you think that they were so wrong about their projections of how long it would take? They kind of knew the Taliban was likely to take over, but in the length of time it would take and this just utter collapse that we've witnessed.

Yeah, I mean, I think if we're going to say there was one mistake Biden made, it was promising too much from the Afghan government. Look, these things are very, very hard to forecast. So the Metaculous is a sort of a website where people go and they predict what's going to happen. And they gave it about a 50% chance that the Taliban would take the presidential palace by 2026. I was on Twitter. I said by 2026 is probably a 70 or 80% chance. So I was saying, you know, the Taliban is eventually going to win. And I said over 50% chance this year. So, you know, nobody can forecast these things. You know, the intelligence agencies, the military, they pretend to be scientific. I feel pretty good about my prediction.

I was more pessimistic about the Afghan government than most people. But there's no way to know for sure. The bottom line is they're incompetent. It was much worse than people thought. They were losing territory while they had the U.S. there supporting them. You can imagine what it does to morale. You know, you're losing territory with the U.S. The U.S. is leaving. It's not, you know, hard to see, like, the psychological effect of that. So what Biden should have said was, I mean, he should have probably lowered expectations. He probably, you know, was listening to his military and listening to the CIA.

You know, I'm sure they weren't telling him, you know, they weren't telling him the Afghan government was going to last forever, but maybe they thought it would be like South Vietnam. Maybe they thought it would be six months to a year. We poured all this money, we poured all this arms into there, and he should have just taken a more agnostic position on it. I think his messaging has been good, but that was a major mistake and people will, of course, hold it against him. Yeah, I think, you know, I think this is the most important point around the actual capability of the military. And this

is what, you know, Richard, you've tracked this for a long time, but something I can't help but notice is these people had 18 months to ensure a withdrawal from Afghanistan. They know they were going to do this since February of 2020. Why did they screw it up so badly? This is not just under Joe Biden. This is on the same military under Donald Trump. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, that's what being incompetent means. I mean, you have a lot of resources and you keep failing and you could do another, you know, 18 months. I mean, Biden, I think, you know, I think they thought it was going to be a complete disaster if they just took to the May 1st date. So all the government was doing on Afghanistan was preparing for leaving for three,

four months, and they screwed it up. Who knows, if they left in May, maybe it would have been 10 times worse. But yeah, there are deep problems in the system. It's not the Biden administration. I think the Biden administration did the most you can hope for realistically from the American government at this point, which is just stop investing lives, stop wasting money on this, and just, you know, moving on. I think that's pretty- Rip the Band-Aid off. Yeah. Let me ask you, Richard, finally, about the politics of this, which are interesting. Alex Thompson retweeted a tweet from Don Jr. in the months before the election, which said, a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for forever war in

the Middle East. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to finally bring our troops home. And he links to a Breitbart piece with Mike Pompeo talking about being on a pathway to achieve zero U.S. forces in Afghanistan by spring 2021. Haven't seen those folks really given Biden any credit here for doing what Trump promised and ultimately failed over his four years to do. Yeah, I mean, I made a joke on Twitter a few days ago that they were going to reinvent Trump as an Afghan feminist. And I thought it was a joke at the time. And they start doing it. So you have Hugh Hewitt, I've been saying that this is Biden's failure. And then you have, you know, it's like, OK, that's neocons. They want to stay anyway.

So they want to claim the Trump legacy. And then Stephen Miller comes and does the same thing. And Don Jr. comes and does the same thing. Yeah, they're pretty shameless and they're going to try to make hay out of it. I mean, you know, we'll see what happens. I always said that the politics of this is the only way, like, you know, we have pretty short memories. I mean, who remembers Hong Kong and Belarus? I mean, now, I mean, these were big stories not

that long ago. People have short memories. The only way it would matter for the midterms or for the 2024 election is if the U.S. was still there and still taking casualties. This looks bad. It may be to look bad for a month, maybe two months, maybe three months. But we're still, you know, over a year away from even the midterm elections. And I think long-term Biden probably made the right choice. I think you're absolutely right. Richard, really appreciate your analysis on all of this. I think it's a very useful counter to a lot of what people are hearing out there in the mainstream media, and they need to hear the actual truth, which is right here. So thanks for joining us, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, Richard. Good to see you.

My pleasure. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks, everybody, for watching. I missed you all so terribly. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks everybody for watching. I missed you all so terribly. We missed you too, Sagar. Thank you. You guys can become a premium subscriber today. You can help support the work that we do here. The link is right down there in the description. You get the show an hour early, listen to it, all of that. Your support is what makes it possible for us to offer you the actual counter to the mainstream media narrative in Afghanistan and more. I have never felt that our show is more important than at times like now.

Yeah. When there's a single uniform voice out there in the establishment about what needs to be done. And nobody seems to be standing up for the actual soldiers themselves, for the Afghans, for anybody. Yeah. Who is just left behind by this, like this colossal warmongering narrative. Or just the truth. Yeah, I mean, just tell the truth. This is one of those days where you could turn on

Fox News or CNN or MSNBC and you'd hear some version of the same damn thing. So thank you guys for making it possible for us to do what we do here, which is just literally try to be honest about the way you've been lied to and about the reality that's facing you and people around the world. We are incredibly grateful for you and we are grateful to have you back too. Thank you. Thank you. I miss you. Miss you terribly. All right. We will see you all on Tuesday. See y'all tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it.

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