Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/19/21: Afghanistan Chaos, War Profiteering, Chris Cuomo Returns, Booster Shots, Terrible Afghan Takes, Reality on the Ground, Deep State Fight, and More!

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Of course, we're going to bring you up to date with the very latest out of Afghanistan. President Biden sat for a new interview. We have the details and some footage from that. We also want to break down for you what this thing was really all about. All of the billions and trillions of dollars that were made by many nefarious actors, both here and in Afghanistan. Chris Cuomo returned from his birthday vacation and had a little bit something to say. We could not let that slide, so we'll bring you the details there. New details on vaccines and these booster shots and the Biden administration requiring nursing homes and their employees to get vaccinated. What do we think about that?

I also wanted to have a little bit of fun with the worst Afghanistan takes. And as you know, we are bipartisan in our scorn. There's a lot to go around here. Plenty of cringe to go around. So we'll bring you that. We also have Michael Tracy on to help us sort fact from fiction in terms of what is actually happening on the ground versus the media presentation of what is happening on the ground. And that's actually kind of where we want to start with that interview I mentioned before with President Biden. Two significant pieces from this interview around what President Biden,

whether he's taking blame or not, also whether he will remain in Afghanistan as long as it takes to get all U.S. citizens out. We're not going to edit any of this. We'll just play it fully. So let's take a listen. It's going to be a couple minutes. When you look at what's happened over the last week, was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgment? Look, I don't think it was a failure. Look, it was a simple choice, George. When the Taliban, let me put it another way. When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, getting in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off. That was, you know, I'm not, that's what happened. That's simply what happened. But we've all seen the pictures. We've seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. We've seen Afghans falling. That was four days ago,

five days ago. What did you think when you first saw those pictures? What I thought was we have to gain control of this. We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did. So you don't think this could have been handled, this actually could have been handled better in any way? No mistakes? No, I don't think it could have been handled in a way that we're going to go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don't know how that happens. I don't know how that happened.

So for you, that was always priced into the decision? Yes. All troops are supposed to be out by August 31st. Even if Americans and our Afghan allies are still trying to get out, they're going to leave? We're going to do everything in our power to get all Americans out and our allies out. Does that mean troops will stay beyond August 31st if necessary? It depends on where we are and whether we can ramp these numbers up to 5,000 to 7,000 a day coming out.

If that's the case, they'll all be out. Because we've got like 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in the country right now, right? And are you committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American who wants to be out is out? Yes. How about our Afghan allies? We have about 80,000 people. Well, that's not the estimate. Is that too high?

That's too high. How many? The estimate we're giving is somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 folks total, counting their families. Does the commitment hold for them as well? The commitment holds to get everyone out that, in fact, we can get out and everyone should come out. And that's the objective. That's what we're doing now. That's the path we're on.

And I think we'll get there. So Americans should understand that troops might have to be there beyond August 31st. No, Americans should understand that we're going to try to get it done before August 31st. But if we don't, the troops will stay. If we don't, we'll determine at the time who's left. And? And if there's American citizens left, we're going to stay there and get them all out. That's the key piece of news that was out of that interview, Crystal, though pretty astounding.

And I think that there's been some confusion about where we're both standing here. Nobody is denying the chaos out of Afghanistan. What is happening there is a total and colossal military disaster. It is squarely on the shoulders, in my opinion, yes, of President Biden, but really of the Pentagon and many of these other people. And I don't think we should whitewash the chaos on the ground, the fact that there are 5,000 to 10,000 American citizens who are on the ground in Kabul. Many have been told that they cannot be guaranteed safe passage to the airport. I will get to this in my radar. I simply posit there. I don't know if there was

a better and a different way, given the set of circumstances that we have. I respectfully disagree with many people who would want thousands more American soldiers to stay there, get engaged in an Afghan civil war, which in my opinion would have dragged us on for many more months, if not years in that country. Well, and that's basically what Biden is saying. Yeah, that's what he's saying there. Stephanopoulos presses him on, you don't think you could have done this better? And he's effectively like, do you think it's going to be nice and clean and easy when you have a state that just completely collapsed?

Collapsed in 11 days. Of course it's going to be a disaster. Of course it's going to be horrifying. Of course people are going to be shocked by the images that are coming out of there. There's no doubt about any of that. There's another piece that I want to push back on, which is, you know, he's saying, look, we're staying until we get at least all the American citizens out. He's kind of like a little evasive on the people, the Afghans, the people who helped us. But I have seen some who are like, oh, I guess now we're just going to stay and now this is never going to end.

I've seen some of that commentary online of like they're bringing troops back in and now this thing's never going to end. That makes no sense. OK, politically, Biden has already taken the biggest hit he could possibly take over out of all of this. If we stay longer, then we do end up in hostilities in the middle of a civil war, having violated that agreement that was signed under the Trump administration with the Taliban. The Taliban does not want us there to stay there. We don't want to stay there. So I don't I just think it is very far fetched to imagine that this troop presence is going to somehow turn into endless war part two, because as I stated before, Biden has been totally unequivocal.

He's already stood up to everybody, essentially, in the foreign policy establishment. Everybody in the media is totally against him. He's already taken that hit. I would be shocked at this point if he ultimately went back on that. I completely agree with you. And, you know, to just get back to the basic facts of the ground in Afghanistan, here is the update as of this morning from the White House. The United States military has now evacuated 6,000 people since

August 14th, including 1,800 overnight per White House officials. There has not yet been a reported instance of the Taliban having any hostilities with American forces. That's according to the White House, sorry, to the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who's speaking yesterday, and to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. So as far as we can tell, according to them, there has not been an instance where they're blocking American citizens from coming into the airport. Now, the Afghan interpreters, that's a little bit of a different story. There's been some reports there that they're not being allowed. Clarissa Ward, I just want to say a very courageous CNN journalist who's been down in Kabul, outside of the airport, has been showing us firsthand

what the hell it actually looks like, this type of chaos. Let's take a listen from her dispatch yesterday from right outside the streets of the airport. There was a consistent stream of gunfire. We also were just accosted by people. John, it's so heartbreaking. Everybody coming up to us with their papers, their passports saying, please. You know, I worked at Camp Phoenix. I worked at this camp. I was a translator. Help me get in. Help me get to America. Help me get my SIF, my visa to get out of the country. And then the Taliban would just come through. At one stage, this one fighter just lifted his gun up in the air

as if he was about to start firing rounds. So we had to run and take cover. And then, you know, the most frightening moment for our team came when our producer Brent Swales was taking some video on his iPhone. Two Taliban fighters just came up with their pistols and they were ready to pistol whip him. And we had to intervene and scream. And it was actually another Taliban fighter who who came in and said, no, no, no, don't

do that. They're journalists. But I mean, really, you know, I've covered all sorts of crazy situations. This was mayhem. This was nuts. This is impossible for an ordinary civilian, even if they have their paperwork. No way they're running that gauntlet. No way they're going to be able to navigate that. It's it's very dicey. It's very dangerous and it's completely unpredictable. There's

no order. There's no coherent system for processing people, separating those with papers from those who don't have papers. And honestly, to me, it's a miracle that more people haven't been very, very seriously hurt. So that's a wild story. Props to her for actually staying there. And like we said, it's not like the Taliban are good people. Jalalabad, which is a city near the Pakistani border, there were some protests there yesterday Where the Afghan flag was raised And the Taliban immediately cracked down on that protest

Firing into there There were some reports of casualties It's pretty unclear of the situation We have a little bit of a video from the ground It's very brief, let's take a listen So there you have it, Crystal. I don't think anybody can say that we are whitewashing exactly what's going on on the ground there. Simply what we're saying is that this perhaps, and this is the title of my radar, is the best worst choice of exactly what it looks like whenever you withdraw from a horrific war of 20 years. And personally, my opinion, given what we have learned from the United States military, is that these people have absolutely no room in order to

say otherwise that they could have done a better job. Look at what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, said yesterday. Let's put this tweet up there on the screen. He says that, look, there was no intelligence. There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days. This is the same man, Crystal, who wanted us to stay in Afghanistan. These are the people who are pushing for this. It is a colossal failure upon their part. And as you're pointing out in your radar, they are leaking to the media who are just printing this stuff hook, line, and sinker being like, oh, the intelligence, we warned him. No, you didn't. It's complete and utter BS. This is a systemic failure by the United States government.

Yes, that's it. And here's the part that I find really galling that Michael Tracy can elaborate on because I think he laid this out extremely well in his latest Substack post. These people did not care about the Afghan people until five minutes ago, okay? Bodies have been piling up there of Afghan civilians, and we have been highly complicit in, because under Trump, what we did was ramp up the number of airstrikes. Changed rules of engagement. Yeah, changed rules of engagement, but also ramped up the number of airstrikes, increasing the number of civilian casualties. Did you hear about that? Did they care? Where were their humanitarian impulses then? Where are their humanitarian impulses when it comes to Yemen or any other number of atrocities? So look, they want to muddy the waters. They want to convince you that the thing you should be most horrified by are the truly horrifying

scenes that are coming out of Afghanistan. They want to ignore the 20 years of horror, okay, and push that aside as if that doesn't matter I saw people calling for you know Biden to resign or this person to resign or that person to resign or whatever and meanwhile they're giving like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice are being resuscitated like those are the people that should be should have resigned those are the ones that there should be accountability for because what we're really seeing is the extent of the lies that have occurred coming out of this war for 20 years now. So that's the part that I get really pissed about. Nobody here is whitewashing the chaotic scenes coming out of Afghanistan right now.

No one here is buying into the Taliban's charm offensive. Now they're like, women are great and equal rights. There's a video. We just played it for you of them shooting at people. One of them was even like, oh, we believe in freedom of speech. Okay. All right. Nobody here is falling for any of that crap. Although I will say, you know, I also think that the media, they want it to be total chaos all the way around. And the reality is on the streets of Kabul right now, the reports that are coming out is it is tense, but generally calm at the moment. The airport is another story. So I don't want to overplay it. I also don't want to underplay it. I want to accurate play it, which is what we're trying to do here. I want people to take away

from this that it's a terrible, terrible situation. There are a lot of partisans out there who are making a lot of claims about things they know nothing about. Yeah. For example, why did we abandon Bagram Air Base? That's a great question. Do any of these people know that Bagram is 70 kilometers away from the city of Kabul? So what were we supposed to do? Run Berlin-style airlifts from Kabul to Bagram and then airlift people out of there? Wouldn't it be even more responsible to encourage American citizens to go across the

desert towards Bagram's airbase and concentrate there where they're 10 times more likely in order to run into Afghan or Taliban forces? This is what I'm talking about. Look, if you really care about the Americans, and I truly do, what I have seen so far is that they have generally, generally, being the key word, been given safe passage by the Taliban to the airbase. There are still very terrifying stories. Many Americans are in safe houses near the airport. They're scared. They don't know if they're going to make it. Of the Afghans, it's a whole other story. The Afghan interpreters and more, some of them have been reportedly been beaten on their way to the airport. Taliban not necessarily honoring that. The U.S. military says they have an open channel of communication. And at the end of the day, if we leave behind scores of them, I guarantee you on this show, we're going to be excoriating the Biden administration

for doing so. But I think we need to present a very holistic picture. I continue to come back to the Pentagon, the generals, the chief liars of this engagement, General Milley and his ilk, who promised the American people with a straight face that the Afghans could fight by themselves, that we were continuing a successful mission of train, advise, and assist. He, his subordinates, and all of his predecessors lied to us about what they were doing with our money and our soldiers. That is where I'm going to direct the 100% of my ire, because they wanted this to continue. And look, I don't want to be Mr. Conspiracy, but I remember what happened in Iraq in 2010. They left behind all kinds of stuff, Crystal,

because they didn't actually want to pull out. And then when we left, they said, well, look at all this stuff that we left behind. They had 18 months in order to plan for this withdrawal. I also love all these MAGA people out there. Oh, you know, under Trump, it would have been different. Donald Trump's defense secretary, Mark Esper, gave an interview August 18th, 2021. That was yesterday, okay? Where he said, quote, we had no intention of withdrawing from Afghanistan. His own defense secretary said that.

Yes, he said, we had no intention. It would have been different. They own defense secretary said that. Yes. He said, we had no intention. It would have been different. They wouldn't have done it. Yes. He said it was a, quote, ruse in terms of trying to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is an interview with Defense One. We can put it out there in the show notes. Just so you all know about what the deep state was also pulling whenever Trump was president too. So that just gives you an idea of what Biden is up against when trying to do this.

And you see the unified, bipartisan opposition, Democrats coming out against him. Of course, all media opposed to him. And so that's also why I really want us to go out of our way to give him a lot of praise. Yeah, that's right. He's done something that president after president has failed to do. He's shown, you talk about political courage. Like, political courage isn't sending out some, like, own the libs tweet or, like, you know, own the conservatives tweet comparing them to the Taliban or whatever. Political courage is doing something like this that is extraordinarily difficult, that you know is going to be ugly, that is unpopular, that you know the entire press corps and people in your own party are going to come out against, and you do it anyway because you believe it is the right thing to do. That is the definition

of political courage. I agree with you. We very, very, very rarely actually see it in action. I loved the president's tone in this interview with Stephanopoulos. I think he was clear. I think he was direct. He got the dates a little muddy in terms of what was going on at the airport. It wasn't four or five days ago. He said it was four or five days ago. He had his Biden moment.

Anyway, but his general tone is defiance. And he's very clear. He's very committed. He doesn't seem to have any regrets. And the reporting we saw on the administration is that actually the fact that the Afghan army collapsed and the Afghan government collapsed so quickly made them more committed in their beliefs that, like, these generals were trying to tell him, oh, just give us another month, just give us another couple months or whatever. Another month, another year, another five years was not gonna forestall what we saw happen over these past several days.

So that's where we are right now. I think that people who are only, be very skeptical of people who are only focused on the events of the past couple of days and don't put in the context of the past 20 years of atrocities that no one seemed to really care about at the time. I would ask for a holistic view by everybody of the conflict. Go back and look at how many have been lied to by so many people.

Try and square what it really means to have a better, quote-unquote, withdrawal. What are the consequences to that? What are the consequences to many of the things that are being pushed? And do not find yourself blindly, partisanly agreeing with somebody just because of the way you may also feel about Biden in a different context. One quick addendum, it was Chris Miller, the last acting defense secretary, not Mark Esper, who said that about the Afghan withdrawal. But I still think it is a vitally important piece of news that his own defense secretary said it was a ruse that they were never actually going to withdraw from Afghanistan. So look, I mean, you have to look at what Biden has done and say

that it is the furthest an American president has been willing to go on Afghanistan in your and my lifetime. And I personally welcome that decision. Yes. One other cautionary note, there are a lot of rumors, uncorroborated rumors, flying around Twitter right now. Just be careful, because there are a lot of people who are very interested in spinning a narrative one way or another. So just, especially always, but especially in times like these, make sure anything that you see out there that's extreme or salacious or whatever it is, that it's actually corroborated by real sources before you go and, you know, give it a retweet or go and believe it or spread it. That's very true. Because there is a lot going

on right now. Very good. Speaking of the complete context, what was this conflict really ultimately about. Why did we stay there for so many, many years, long after bin Laden was dead, long after actually we defeated the Taliban early on, and then essentially our presence there allowed them to regrow and gain the strength that they have today. Well, as with so many things, follow the money. A fitting end to this,

and we can throw this first tweet up on the screen. I think this is the perfect fitting end to this conflict, which according to an Afghan ambassador in Tajikistan, Ashraf Ghani, the last president of Afghanistan, escaped with bags full of 169 million U.S. dollars as Kabul was falling. Full of cash, too, huh? It's a nice little haul. What I have been saying is it's perfect because that's really what this conflict was all about. That's nothing compared to what the defense contractors, the bags of cash that they figuratively escaped this conflict with. The amount of money that was thrown around and completely squandered, most of which, by the way, ended up not in development, not in schools, not in building roads and bridges in Afghanistan, which a lot of people would rightly say also, hey, we kind of need some roads and bridges here, too. But it didn't even go to that. It went 80 to 90 percent. Let's throw this next piece up there. According to foreign policy, 80 to 90% went to Washington defense contractors,

banditry they describe it as, and aid contractors. 80% to 90% of those trillions of dollars actually just returned to the U.S. economy. Gigantic beltway grift to end all beltway grifts. The amount of money that people made helps you to understand why there is such a reaction to Biden leaving and why there is such unified, complete opposition to ever getting out of this country. Oh, yeah. And here, our friend Lee Fong, he found this great little anecdote from Cigar, which is one of my favorite agencies. More than $300 million a year went to ghost soldiers in the Afghan security forces who didn't exist or show up while active duty soldiers across the country went unpaid for months. This is a phenomenon I tracked for so long whenever I was covering the Afghan war a lot back in 2015, 2016, and 2017, which is we were paying these fake salaries that these commanders would roll up, pay themselves in illicit cash, and then spirited out of the country, like Mr. Ghani, to Dubai, Doha, wherever, open up these fancy bank accounts. These

guys had penthouse apartments that you would not even believe. And one of my personal favorite stories on this, I remember watching, there was a whole vice thing on it even back in 2015. Let's put it up there. We spent $43 million on a gas station, not gas stations, gas station, 140 times more than what it should have cost. And what it is, is that you can see within this, is that the outrageous cost outlays that happened here were all because of a snowballing level of failure. Where we were like, oh, we're going to build it in this particular place, even though nobody can necessarily agree why. And then we need to defend the people who are building it. And then we need to bring the guy. And then at the end of the day, nobody even used the damn thing. Yeah. After we were done, the same thing happened with the roads. We would build

roads. The Taliban would then use those roads in order to take over an area. And then they would charge people in order to use the roads. This happens constantly. That was actually part of why the Taliban was able to move so swiftly. The ring roads. We built those. They were able to take control of the roads. That happened sometime back in the winter that they got control of a lot of the main roads. And then basically city after city fell as quickly as they could get there. Because the instant they got there, they'd negotiate a surrender and they'd move on to the next one. So we helped to build those roads. At least that

money actually went to something other than ghost soldiers. Something else I've been looking into as well is, you know, we kept hearing this number from Biden and from others of like, oh, we trained 300,000 Afghan army. No, we didn't. It was more like 50. No, we didn't. Yeah. The latest estimate I saw, I mean, you've got all the ghost soldiers and just people who had given up an abandoned ship already. The latest estimate I saw was that something like one-sixth of that 300,000

is a more accurate estimate in terms of who was actually in the fight at the end. So fake soldiers. We built some schools. Some schools we did not build. Some schools were completely fake. The one thing that was revealed in the Afghanistan papers was that also the girls' enrollment in those schools was consistently inflated. And they were built at dramatically higher costs than what- Which we would pay per student, and it's all fake. Even when Europeans would come in and build schools in Afghanistan, they did it at a much, much lower cost than we were able to do.

So this was all just a giant grift all the way around. This is another funny one from the Afghanistan papers. I almost kind of respect the game here with this one. One of the wealthiest people, we can throw this tweet up on the screen. I think this was from Richard Canadia. Yes. One of the wealthiest people in Afghanistan was actually started out as an interpreter for the US and would sell them things for a hundred times markup. And that's how he built his wealth. This actually, according to Michael Flynn, who was interviewed as part of this came out in the Afghanistan papers. So everybody was

on the take, but nobody, nobody more so, and this is the last element we have here, than all of the institutions of the military-industrial complex over the course of the Afghan war. So when you ask yourself, why did we stay for all of these many long years, when there was no defined mission, when there was the opposite of progress being made, where the Taliban was only getting stronger over the last decade or so of the last, let's say, 12, 13 years. Oh, they got exponentially stronger. Yeah. So why did we stay in spite of all of that? Why did we stay past the point when Bin Laden was dead? Why did we do that? That's a good question.

This is why, people. This is why. Follow the money. There were people who were making bank billions of dollars, making, you know, Ashraf Ghani's 169 million bags of cash. Oh, yeah, that looks like nothing. Looking like small potatoes compared to what a lot of the defense contractors here in this town were able to suck out of this engagement. So this is what it ultimately was really about.

And all the lies that were told to you over all of those years were about keeping this world historic grift going. That's right. And, you know, the worst part is American soldiers who were on the ground, the actual grunts, they saw all of this. They saw their commanders having to go out and give pallets of cash to these corrupt people so that we could build a well or whatever. And then the well would never get built and then the cash would disappear. And then, oh, all of a sudden, oh, now it's in the hands of some guy. Next thing you know, it all gets rolled up. And just so you know, this is everybody.

The Taliban, too. These guys became some of the most sophisticated drug dealers on the planet. They made $400 million just last year, which is the latest estimate. $400 million in a year. They have multiple cell phones. They got sophisticated bank accounts. All we did was prop up a kleptocracy on the one hand, where the entire government was basically focused on making sure they could steal as much from us as possible. And then the Taliban themselves became richer while they've continued

to sweep across the country. Now they're also incredibly well-armed. Now they're very well-armed. I will tell one story, though, that a U.S. Army colonel told me. I'm not going to reveal his name, but he told me this back several years, which is that one time he was sitting in Afghanistan, and they were trying to figure out why the Afghans kept running out of gas. They were like, what is happening? They're like, where are they driving? Because as far as they could tell, the Afghans weren't going hundreds of miles, and we were giving them the gas. Yeah, it turned out what they figured out is they kept requisitioning all of our gas because they were turning around and selling it on the black market. They never drove the vehicles

that we supplied them, MRAPs and Humvees and all these other things, one mile. They never even drove it. They would just take the gas, sell it on the black market, back to Pakistan, and those commanders made millions of dollars. You take that and you multiply it by a billion, that's what we did in that country. Nope, that's it. And if you don't think that the Taliban also very skillfully used that manifest corruption and evidence of abuse of the government that we were propping up as a propaganda victory. They very skillfully used that to undermine support, and understandably so, for the corrupt set of unsavory characters and warlords with child sex slaves and all of that who we were backing. So anyway, that is a piece of the story of why the Taliban was able to come back and become so strong because they used the evidence, very clear as day

evidence of all of this corruption and all of this grift in their favor to say, hey, look, we're going to be different. We won't be like this. We're going to clean things up. And so for some, that was an appealing prospect because our own legitimacy of the people that we were propping up was so dramatically undermined. Yeah. 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. Speaking of legitimacy being undermined. That's a good transition. Chris Cuomo, you will recall after everything broke with his

brother and he was forced to ultimately resign. Chris suddenly went on a birthday vacation, so we didn't hear from him for a week. And actually, I have to say, the fact that then, you know, Afghanistan collapsed and that was what he stepped back into kind of pushed the spotlight off of him and his brother, but we did not want to let them off the hook here. So he did respond to all of the events that have been unfolding and some of the allegations against him directly on CNN this week. Let's take a listen to what Chris Cuomo had to say. I've told you it's never easy being in this business and coming from a political family, especially now. This situation is unlike anything I could have imagined.

And yet I know what matters at work and at home. Everyone knows you support your family. I know and appreciate that you get that. But you should also know I never covered my brother's troubles because I obviously have a conflict. And there are rules at CNN about that. I said last year that his appearances on this show would be short-lived, and they were. The last was over a year ago, long before any kind of scandal. I also said back then that a day would come when he would have to be held to account, and I can't do that. I said point blank, I can't be objective when it comes to my family. So I never reported on the scandal. And when it happened, I tried to be there for my brother. I'm not an advisor. I'm a brother. I wasn't in control of

anything. I was there to listen and offer my take. And my advice to my brother was simple and consistent. Own what you did. Tell people what you'll do to be better, be contrite, and finally, accept that it doesn't matter what you intended. What matters is how your actions and words were perceived. And yes, while it was something I never imagined ever having to do, I did urge my brother to resign when the time came. There are stories and critics saying all kinds of things about me, many unsupported. But know this, my position has never changed. I never misled anyone about the information I was delivering or not delivering on this program. I never attacked nor encouraged anyone to attack any woman who came forward. I never made calls to

the press about my brother's situation. I never influenced or attempted to control CNN's coverage of my family. And as you know, back in May, when I was told to no longer communicate with my brother's aides in any group meetings, I acknowledged it was a mistake. I apologized to my colleagues, and I stopped, and I meant it. Oh, man. Wow. I feel sorry for everybody that we had to play them the entire thing. There's so much going on here. First of all, I want to tackle, I'm not an advisor.

I'm a brother. Okay. And he says, oh, some of these allegations are unsupported. We have the attorney general report that includes an email that you drafted for him. Drafted a literal statement. Drafted a statement for your brother

who you were clearly advising in a political sense. Basically being unrepentant about the allegations that were coming out around sexual harassment and ultimately

some allegations also of sexual assault. So the idea, and he was on, it wasn't like they were talking about it over Sunday dinner. He was on calls regularly and repeatedly. That's the other thing we got out of the AG report with not just his brother, but his brother's campaign advisors, with the lawyers, all of them part of a regular group, like a round table of advisors as he was moving through this crisis. So don't let him spin this nonsense on you. The other thing that is always just so incredibly disingenuous is he was happy to have his brother on his show when the times were good. And then the minute the news turned negative, then suddenly, oh, I can't talk

about my brother. Well, you could talk about him when the news was good. There was nothing wrong with doing that at the time in your view. So you have to be completely consistent. When you have a conflict of interest, it's not hard to figure out what to do. You're hands off. You're either completely hands on and you fully disclose or you're completely hands off. He tried to play it both ways. And then the last one I have to say is this idea of, well, I never put calls into the press. I never attempted to influence CNN's coverage. You are CNN's coverage. Exactly.

The highest rated. The highest rated. It's a low bar. Highest rated CNN primetime host. You don't think what happens on your hour affects CNN coverage? What a ridiculous thing to say. I think the second point you made was the most important, which is that, look, if they had a consistent standard, if they had a consistent standard that Chris Cuomo would never interview his brother ever. Fine. So be it. I actually be

like, actually, that's quite appropriate. Like if I had a family member and I'd be like, look, no matter whether it's good or bad, I ain't ever going to cover it. I think that is an entirely fair thing to say. But whenever you have the good times, and you're propping them up, and you're making jokes about mom, why don't you call mom, and you're schnoz, and holding up the thing, like, how did this fit into your colosal, joking around. And then all of a sudden, when the times turn bad, you come out and you say, look, obviously, I know what's going on. I can't cover it. Other people are going to cover it. That is the most ludicrous suggestion that there is. And there's,

this is a joke of a news organization. And really what it is, is it's shameful and cowardly. He should stand up and say, I screwed up. I put this network in a bad position when I did that, and now I apologize. Jake Tapper, his own colleague even called him out, saying that he had put us all in a bad position. And that I can't imagine how anyone would think that was appropriate. Right, and then Brian Stelter, though, the little janitor that he is, goes and he's like, well, it's just so crazy, right? Who would know what to do? It's actually pretty simple.

There's been entanglements before. You just don't do it. No one's ever had a conflict of interest before. That's never happened in journalism. And the funny thing is, Crystal, this goes back years. It's not just CNN. He interviewed Cuomo whenever he was at ABC. He has had his brother on his network for years. He has used his position

in power in order to prop up the political career of his brother. He is a grade-A liar. And really, what they are banking on is Afghanistan. Sadly, for everybody to just completely forget about it. So I don't think you should. I don't think you should forget. Oh, it'll work. It'll work. And also just think about the highly inconsistent standard that CNN has applied. They fired Mark Lamont Hill for comments that he made about Israel-Palestine. Yeah. They fired Rick Santorum for some,

look, they were gross comments in my opinion, but for some comments he made in a speech about Native Americans and this dude, he's not fired,

he's not even punished. He's not censored. He's not taken off the air. He doesn't even have to apologize. Nothing, nothing in the way

of any sort of punishment or accountability here. It just tells you, like, what their actually, what their bottom line is the bottom line. Like, it's just naked. It's complete mask off. Cuomo gets their highest ratings. And so they're not going to touch him.

They're going to let him do whatever he wants. Next time he's, you know, if his brother makes a political comeback and he's back in the news, he's going to do the same shit all over again. Clearly, he doesn't think anything he did. Well, not he thinks it's wrong, it's beside the point. He wouldn't change a thing. That's what comes out of this little statement. Yeah, no. It shows that not only would they not change anything, that they would do it all over again, that they're not sorry. But I think what's worse is this.

They know the CNN audience doesn't care. And actually, that's the part that makes me the most sad, which is that there are so many millions of people who are just so bought into the tribal warfare and the partisanship on all of this that they're willing to just forgive what really should be the unforgivable. And they're not willing to hold the people that give them the news to the standard

that they should be. And that's actually probably the saddest part of this whole thing. Yeah. He's going to get away with it. As long as he toes the line that the audience wants to hear, then I think you're right. He's going to be okay. I think you're right about that. Yeah, it really makes me sad.

Okay, well, speaking of something where people should be asking a whole lot of questions, there's some pretty big news that has been coming out. We already brought you that the Biden administration is going to be recommending booster shots for all Americans. But buried within that is some new data from the CDC, which is a pretty bombshell revelation, which I think they're downplaying and don't necessarily want to talk about. So let's put this predicated on the idea that early data shows a suggesting a rise in breakthrough infections and a smaller increase in hospitalizations amongst the variants amongst vaccinated as Delta variant spread in July, citing a decline in efficacy of the vaccine. Now, the certain decline in efficacy is disputed. Basically, Moderna and Pfizer were around 95% quote-unquote effective against hospitalization, death, and infection whenever it came to regular COVID, whatever was circulating several months ago. Now it's somewhere in the like

70-ish type percentile. Obviously the 20, the Delta in between there, that's thousands, millions of people if they get infected. So it matters. But there's a lot of questions that surround this crystal, which is that they have said they have no guidance currently on booster shots for people who have Johnson & Johnson. But get this, Johnson & Johnson was already only 70-something percent effective. So does that make it 50%? So wouldn't it make sense that they're the ones that need booster shots? The whole thing just seems completely crazy to me. And what they're recommending as of yesterday is booster shots for all Americans after eight months. Now, okay, maybe, but I've got a lot of questions here because isn't it the elderly and the immunocompromised who probably need those booster shots? Maybe even first.

I don't know if they can even get them. The guidance on this still remains clear. They said, oh, well, we still need the FDA. I think that the rollout of this has been a total and complete disaster. They're saying eight months. They're not being clear with the American people about the actual efficacy of the vaccine. But more importantly, they are not talking about the very basic fact that breakthrough infection is both continues to be on balance, extraordinarily rare, and B, that if you're vaccinated, you are not going to die from COVID. That's the part where it's just driving me

crazy. That's the really, really key point. And by the way, it's not just us who are raising these questions. There are a lot of experts who are saying maybe booster shots for the elderly, maybe people in nursing homes, maybe people who are immunocompromised. The entire population, the data doesn't really support that this is necessary. Why? Well, it is true that they are finding, at least in these few studies, that vaccine efficacy wanes over time in terms of breakthrough infections. However, the thing we really care about, severe illness and death, hospitalizations and death, there continues to be very strong efficacy with the vaccine.

So just to read this piece from The New York Times, it says, The studies show that although the vaccines remain highly effective against hospitalization and deaths, the bulwark they provide against infection with the virus has weakened in the past few months. So what does that mean? That means you're more likely to get a breakthrough infection, but it's going to be relatively minor. It's going to be like having a cold, having a minor flu,

like Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, is experiencing right now. That is the data that we have right now. Now look, if you go up the sort of risk spectrum, if you're an older person, if you have a lot of comorbidities, if you are immunocompromised, then it starts to make sense that you might be one of those rare people who gets the breakthrough infection and ends up in a really dire place because of it, just because you don't have that strong immune system to be able to fight back, then it starts to make more sense. But just a blanket decision that everyone should get the booster shots writ large without really explaining effectively the American people why, again, I think it's a very sketchy decision, I'll say. And I also think it does fuel those people who have been saying, look, this is all just about the money to start with. Pfizer was reportedly really

pushing for this, and it looks like the administration ultimately sided with Pfizer. Trump actually said that yesterday. Did he? And it undermines, like, these vaccines, I just want you guys to know, these vaccines work really well. Yes, there are breakthrough infections in rare cases. And that is apparently increasing over time as the vaccine efficacy on that particular front wanes. But in terms of the critical pieces, the vaccines work really, really well. So that's like the key point that people need to keep in mind.

Yeah. And that matters most for the elderly. Now, look, data out of Israel is pretty good. If you're elderly and you watch the show, I recommend that you get a booster shot, 86% effective in preventing infection amongst the elderly, according to the new Israeli data. That looks pretty good to me. But I can't tell you, Crystal, about how many people who are vaccine hesitant have been joking and creating memes around booster shots for months, being like, oh, when does it end? And look, they're not wrong. I mean, when does it end? What does it mean? How long does the efficacy last? Why are we focused purely on efficacy of breakthrough infection? Why are we not focused on the efficacy of hospitalization and death, which right now are really good? The reason we have even slight higher hospitalization right now across the country is what reason?

It's amongst people who aren't vaccinated and they made their choice. That's on them. I don't think there's anything like in terms of the public health discussion around all of this. Really, what I see is it's going to be the same thing like with masks. Already, if you're one of those people who's not going to get vaccinated, then the booster shot thing is just going to confirm your priors. And if you're one of those people who are vaccinated, you're like, oh, my God, I got to go get my booster. You know, have the date exactly eight months to the day. You're going to go. Those people were all probably fine anyway. And the country's just going to split apart.

I also have questions around the vaccine thing. First of all, I got my vaccine card laminated. So now what? Does that mean somebody's going to sign it? You're not supposed to do that, right? I didn't know, but it's because I went abroad and you can't take it out. It was getting all ratty. But the real thing is, how does this apply to the vaccine passports? Places like San Francisco, where are you going to need, so are you going to need a booster shot in order to go out and eat? Two shots enough. What about New York? Same thing. I mean, this is where things get real dicey in terms of what you're going to force people to do, whatnot, what the metrics are. And the American people just want answers. Do we care about

breakthrough infection? If we do, make the case. I haven't heard a good case yet. Why exactly we should care more about breakthrough infection when every single American on the planet has the ability, whenever they want, to go and get protection from COVID from the worst symptoms? You have to convince me firmly, given the fact that children, by and large, are not affected by this disease. Yes, I know they can get sick, but in terms of the children who have been killed by this virus, vast majority of them have the most insane comorbidities, right? Like leukemia or lymphoma or something, which I'm so sorry. I don't even know what to say. But, like, that doesn't mean you can shut down the rest of society.

And I would like them to prioritize approving a vaccine for kids over, you know, pushing booster shots on a population that probably doesn't need it. I just want to give you some numbers to underscore this again. This is from an epidemiologist, Ellie Murray at Boston University. Dr. Murray says, together the new studies indicate overall vaccines have an effectiveness of roughly 55% against all infections, 80% against symptomatic infection, so that you even know you have it, is 80%, and 90% or higher against hospitalization. That's really pretty good. That's what she says. Those numbers are actually very good. The only group that these data would suggest boosters for me, for, to me, is the immunocompromised, possibly the elderly as well. So those are just the

straight numbers. Still, these vaccines work extremely well when you're talking about hospitalization and death and even symptomatic infection at all. So that's kind of the bottom line with the boosters. Make your own decisions about it. If you're a person who's in a higher risk category, then certainly. Or if you're a person, I mean, if it ultimately ends up being that, like, you can't go out to eat or you can't enter your workplace, if you don't get that third shot, then yeah, that puts a lot of pressure on people to get it as well. But just, I want people to understand first and foremost that these vaccines continue to work. They continue to work very well, protecting against the most severe instances. And that's, I think, what we all ultimately most care about. I just wish that we would care about that. Let's protect the elderly. Let's protect,

you know, the immunocompromised. For everybody else, let's just live our lives. It's protect the elderly. Let's protect, you know, the immunocompromised. For everybody else, let's just live our lives. It's been 18 months now of this stuff. So there we go. Yeah. All right. We saved the best for last, which is the worst takes that we have been able to compile around Afghanistan. Now I can tell you there were many submissions for this contest. There are many, many contenders. We narrowed it down to the very best. I think the guy who does take the cake here is Stephen Colbert,

both for abandoning the legacy of actually being funny once upon a time, but giving probably the worst take yet that we've heard on Afghanistan. Let's take it away, Mr. Colbert. He's right. We've had troops there for 20 years. They fought, they sacrificed, their families sacrificed so that we wouldn't have a terrorist attack in America planned in a foreign country. Why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan? We've got our own on Capitol Hill. Then Biden pointed out. Then Biden pointed out the U.S. did everything we could for the Afghans.

We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. Just a thought. Maybe we should have checked with the Afghan army if they had the will before we gave them the tools and the weapons. Because now the Taliban has the will and the weapons. And the former Afghan army soldiers are at home rubbing Miracle-Gro on their face, trying to squeeze out a beard by dawn. In the end, Biden argued that whenever we pulled out, the Taliban would have taken over. The events proceed.

Okay, Crystal. I mean, I don't even know what to say. Because it's the worst thing of all would be, let's bring our troops home so we can fight the terrorists here. Right. I'm like, oh, my God. Come on. You're almost making me be like, all right, keep them over there. That's what you're going to do with them. Well, I saw a lot of this genre of quote unquote joke of like, really, the Taliban's like the right or really the Taliban's like the left.

Antifa or whatever. Please don't do this. Please just don't. It's not funny. It's not insightful. It's not true. It doesn't help anything but to make people like hate each other more. And yeah, just taking that at like face value that what you really want is to bring the troops home

so that they can wage war on our own citizenry? No, no. I don't think we're on board with that. Yeah, that's ten times worse. That's worse than the war in Afghanistan, and that's actually saying a lot. I did actually support his take, though, there about, maybe I should have checked with the Afghan army

before we gave them, that they had the will, before we gave them the weapon. We have to keep this one good joke in there. He had one good joke previously with a horrible joke. Yes. So there you go. Okay. The next one is very good too.

All right. So what we have is they, CNN, of course, you know, they have to give the people good information. Accurate. Unlike this channel here, they're unable to bring you, you know, somebody like Craig Whitlock at the Afghan papers who actually knows what he's talking about, broke the story about all the lies being told. Instead, they turned to one of the chief liars themselves in order to explain what was going on.

Not a joke. They invited John Bolton on the air of CNN in order to break down the Afghan war for their viewers. Let's take a listen. First of all, in your view, was it a mistake how the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan or that it withdrew at all? Well, there are two mistakes at work here. The first is the strategic mistake of withdrawing, which Biden made, but which Trump fully supported. Had Trump been reelected, he'd be doing the same thing. On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The second

question, though, is did the withdrawal occur in the best possible way? And the answer to that is no. It's been a catastrophe, and I'm afraid it's only going to get worse. I think Biden does bear a primary responsibility for that, although you see now fingers being pointed saying Trump didn't leave us with any plans. We'll have to see how that shakes out. There are two mistakes being made simultaneously right now. Just amazing. I can't, first of all, of course, he has to do like Tweedledee, Tweedledum. Yeah, I am so glad that he was kicked out of the White House. I mean, one of the best things that Trump did was fire him. One of the first things he did was hire him.

And one of the best things he did was fire him. Whenever he fired him because he was so upset that we were going to invite the Taliban to Camp David in order to have pizza talks, probably one of the best things that Trump even tried to do whenever he was president, just says everything you need to know, that these are the guys who get airtime. First of all, let's just say, no one should be listening to a goddamn word of what John Bolton has to say on anything,

especially something like war on terror in Afghanistan. I don't want to hear from you. I don't want to hear from George W. Bush, who put out his little statement. I don't want to hear from Condoleezza Rice, who published an op-ed. All of, like, the idea that you would treat seriously what any of these people have to say when we are watching the fruits of their manifest incompetence and insanity is just, like, I cannot wrap my mind around that. So that's number one. Number two on the substance of what he actually says, it just brings back for me the way that so much of the media, and especially guys like John Bolton, they would always criticize Trump for exactly the wrong things.

Like, they'd find, like, the one thing that he did that I actually support, and they'd be like, this is why. Can you believe this guy wanting to have peace? I'm out of here. So that's number one. Like that was a consistent theme both with them and with the media. Number two, I think the idea, and you've been making this point, that Trump would have actually followed through and done the same thing as Biden is highly, highly dubious. So I think he's just wrong there in terms of that the outcome is ultimately the same. But he would have supported, of course, the capitulation to the war machine and endless wars and not having the courage to do what Biden didn't ultimately stand up and get out. So terrible to have him on, terrible commentary, wrong in every single way.

But those are the sorts of people that CNN makes sure to make time for in their lineup. To be bipartisan here, we also had a bad take from one Senator Ted Cruz. We can throw this up on the screen. So we brought you earlier in the show Clarissa Ward, who's been a phenomenal voice on the ground, really just accurately reporting what's going on, whether it's the chaos at the airport or also being on the streets of Kabul and showing people what's going on there. She said in this piece, they're chanting about the Taliban. She's standing right there. The Taliban is right behind her. And she says they're chanting death to America, but they seem friendly at the same time. It's really bizarre. OK, she got dragged for this. And of course, Ted Cruz has to say, is there an enemy of America for whom CNN won't cheerlead in mandatory burqas,

no less? Well, listen, of course, if you're on the streets of Kabul reporting at this point, and you're a woman, you're going to wear a burqa so that you don't have any trouble on the streets being able to go and do the reporting. I can assure you, she probably doesn't want to wear it. I used to live in a Muslim country and my female friends and more used to drive them crazy, but they did it because they didn't want to be harassed. Yes. So thank you. Okay. So there you go. Second of all, what she was saying was actually a very interesting insight that you have this bizarre situation where it's the Taliban. They have this radical extremist ideology, but on the other hand, they're trying to put on this charm offensive to convince people like we're different this time. So her report, just accurately explaining what's going on the ground here,

provided a lot more useful information than so much of the propaganda that we've seen out of the media at this point. She has been one of the best voices, I would say, and most accurate in terms of depicting what's actually happening right now. Once again, this is culture war just rotting their brains. These guys all stood tall. First of all, they just want to dunk on CNN. And look, I am all for dunking on CNN. Look at our own show. But you got to do it whenever it's appropriate.

But this is the thing. They give you plenty to work with. They give you plenty. You don't have to create it. But watching, more importantly, the same people who didn't give a damn whenever Trump withdrew from Syria and left the Kurds because they were all like, this is a real commander. Like, this is what it looks like when you take strategic action

and stick it to the military industrial complex. I actually agreed with that at the time. But now all of a sudden they're like, oh, our allies. I just love, too, about how these same people are all like amateur logistics experts now, right? They're like, oh, well, if we had gotten these. I'm like, you don't give a damn. You don't actually care. 100% of Trump would have done this.

You would have supported it. 3,000%. Only a few of them were actually consistent people like Ben Sasse. The rest of them are just craven partisans. I'm not saying I respect Ben Sasse, but at least he's consistent, right? No, there are at least a few like war hawks that were like Adam Kinzinger. Same thing. He had the wrong take under Trump, and he has the wrong take now, but it's a consistent wrong take.

At least – I respect people who are principled. These are just the craven partisanship. And then, look, to wrap it all full circle in terms of the American Taliban and all that, Michael Moore, I referenced this. He's been having a lot of terrible takes lately. This is what I'm talking about. They're Taliban. Our Taliban. Everybody's got a Taliban. They're takes lately. This is what I'm talking about. They're Taliban. Our Taliban. Everybody's got a Taliban.

They're at their best when they confiscate the halls of power. And he has a picture juxtaposing the Taliban taking over the Afghan palace and these QAnon morons going into the Capitol on January 6th. The country's really been downhill ever since the Q shaman took control of Congress and named himself president and really grabbed control of the levers of power. This is what I'm talking about. It's like, why? It's not funny. And worse, what it is, is just inserting even more cultural partisan warfare

into a thing where we should try to do our best to say what is best for America, for the American citizens for there, for the Afghan interpreters that helped us. If we focus on those three things, we could get out of that country in two weeks and actually settle on, okay, what went wrong? What was good? How do we fix this in the future? But instead, it's just going to be endless cultural BS. This reminds me of Benghazi because I remember I was always so mystified. Yeah,

I think Benghazi was bad. But it's like the Republicans focused on the one thing like Benghazi and not the fact that we collapsed Libya. I always was like, what is going on here? Do we not see what the... I mean, look, I'm not saying I think it was tragedy what happened in Benghazi, but I think Libya is a way bigger tragedy. And they were like, look, I'm not saying, you know, I think it was tragedy what happened in Benghazi, but like I think Libya is a way bigger tragedy. And they were like, oh, you know, everybody knew the minute timeline of the Secretary Clinton called, you know, this and the stand down. Yeah, and you'd be like, oh, and what's happening in Libya now? Yeah, I was. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I was like, you know, ISIS just took over Benghazi.

That seems like way worse to me. Right. And they were like, what? Look, they didn't even know. Focusing on these things, turning them into flashpoints, trying to gaslight the base, then it becomes an entire partisan thing where we're all just fighting about the withdrawal. And instead, or trying to compare people to American citizens instead of saying, what the hell went wrong in this country over the last 20 years? I would love to see some sort of real introspection on that. What do we need to do to make sure that we never end up back here again? And all of these people

on our list of infamy here are doing their best to gaslight you that will ultimately lead us back to exactly the same place rather than being clear-eyed about what actually happened and who is actually to blame. Because it's not the far left or the far right in terms of regular people who are to blame for this. It's the leadership class. It's the elites. It's the military-industrial complex. That's where your ire needs to ultimately be aimed. That's where your cutting, biting jokes need to focus on, where the blame actually you know, there's a chance for this to be a bipartisan moment because there has been, over the years, bipartisan support for getting out of these wars. And sometimes the reasoning is a little bit different or the ideology or

philosophy behind it, but there's been a real consistent disgust among bipartisan swaths of the American people at the way these elites lied to them about the way that, you know, working class people of all races, creeds and colors have been dragged into these wars and used as pawns, used as cannon fodder. And so that unifying conversation could be happening, but instead in a lot of. I have one more entry for a worse take. It just happened this morning. Jonah Goldberg, quote, I am really struggling to think of a time when I despa more entry for Worst Take. It just happened this morning. Jonah Goldberg, quote,

I am really struggling to think of a time when I despaired more for the country and had so much contempt, not just for both parties, but the bases of both parties. As in contempt for the people who vote, contempt for the people who want to get out of Afghanistan. This is an all-time good because what it really is is calling out the voters themselves for being misguided, not listening to Mr. Goldberg. The all-knowing saint and God, apparently. What was that? There was that Atlantic, Tom Nichols Atlantic article. Yeah, same thing. You're to blame. Afghanistan is your fault. Right, because you didn't care. Actually, we cared, and we cared enough to vote in order to make sure that people like you weren't in charge anymore. Yep, exactly right. Wow, you guys must really like listening to our voices.

While 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. Sagar, what are you looking at? There's a lot of partisan hay being made on Afghanistan today. Everybody, it seems, has turned into an amateur

logistics expert saying how they exactly would have conducted a proper withdrawal. Many find themselves in the camp of, I wanted to leave, but not like this. I would say to that group, I sympathize with you. I'm one of you in spirit. But after long and careful consideration, I have resigned myself to the fact that the situation today as it stands may well be the best worst option that we had to conclude this hellish war. So I'll tell you how I got here. Let's start from the very beginning. It may seem like a lifetime ago, right around the time we were dealing with the first cases of COVID, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement on February 29, 2020, to end the war in Afghanistan. The terms of the deal were as follows.

Within 14 months of signing the agreement, May 1, 2020, the United Statesged to prevent any group of individuals from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States, to sever its ties with al-Qaeda, and included a prisoner swap. It set the stage for negotiations between the Afghan government, which we backed, and the Taliban to come to some sort of negotiated solution. Now, I can't go into a lot of detail. Around the signing of that date, I was invited to a meeting at the State Department with some of the people who signed this deal. Now, with me so far, here is where things get very messy. COVID happens. A month later, the whole world is on lockdown. But in Kabul, there is major trouble brewing. The trouble being that the Afghan government that we back doesn't want to negotiate with the Taliban. I posed this question to the negotiators.

They didn't have an answer. They wanted to keep all the spoils for themselves in terms of the Afghan government because they know that if we leave, their gravy train is over. Obviously, then we had an election. Joe Biden won the presidency. But critically, while Trump was in office, he desperately wanted to get out of Afghanistan, too. So he reduced the number of American forces down to 2,500 troops. Now, remember that number because it's actually very important. That is the floor on which the Biden administration is going to inherit. Biden comes into office. He announces a review in his first few months. On April 13th, 2020,

Biden announces all U.S. forces will withdraw from Afghanistan on 9-11-2021. As part of that drawdown, Biden says he will continue to pressure a peace process between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The interim months there are critical to understand how we got here. Because Ashraf Ghani, the guy we backed who fled a few days ago with a big cash in that process, he basically refused to have any real peace process with the Taliban. He wanted to hang on to the presidency in any sort of deal with them. They said no. The Taliban then had the upper military hand. They refused this deal. This is critical too. It shows our political partner in the country was himself rejecting a core tenant of the peace process which we initiated.

Furthermore, during the time that we only have 2,500 troops in country, which was the level set by the Trump administration, that we have a plan for withdrawal, it is hinged on two things. Number one, no withdrawal of our citizens and translators is possible at that troop level without the cooperation of the Afghan National Security Forces. Two, we were relying on a political partner in Afghanistan to set the conditions for peace by themselves, recognizing reality and negotiating with the Taliban. Those two critical assumptions and reliances are where things fell apart, so it's important to understand that. From here, this is where things become a mess.

While Ghani dithered, the U.S. continued a pretty slow withdrawal, predicated on the belief that the Afghan forces would actually, you know, fight the Taliban and would stuck to the letter of their deal. Now, on May 1st, 2020, the Taliban controlled about 19% of the country. Now, beginning on May 1st, which is when our peace deal officially expired, they launched an offensive that swept across the rural parts of that country. Nearly one-third of, 30% of the control of the country was under theirs by mid-June. A month later, they controlled half the country. Then in early August, the world woke up. Taliban took their first provincial capital. From there, Kandahar, Herat in the west,

finally capturing Mazar-e-Sharif. A few days later, they're in Kabul. That's where we are today. I took you through this timeline because I think it's important to see how things, where we are right now, which is this horrible situation. We have 5,000 to 10,000 citizens in Afghanistan that we need to evacuate. Obviously, a lot of supplies. The government collapsed. Many are saying, how did we not plan better? I agree with every single one of those criticisms. And I think the situation is dire. But consider here,

given the fact that we had a negotiating partner in the Afghan government, which refused to act in good faith and was just trying to grab the spoils on the way out. Given the fact that the Afghan army melted away within three weeks, who are the ones themselves that left behind or sold equipment to the Taliban? Given that we only had 2,500 troops in country, was a better withdrawal possible? I will say maybe yes, but maybe only on the margins. To accomplish the perfect exit, we would have had to do a number of the following. Number one, dramatically increase the number of U.S. troops in country and send them to the front line in Kabul to protect the city. Number two, as the Afghan army melted away, it would have required direct assistance

by the United States via air power to keep the Taliban back from Kabul. That would have meant we violated the peace term and it would have meant we are back at war with the Taliban. Once again, this would have required thousands more troops to assist in combat operations. It would have put hundreds of American lives at risk. Worse, it would have meant we are directly inserting ourselves into the middle of the Afghan civil war. Can anyone confidently tell me that after resurging troops, after inserting ourselves in that battle, getting engaged, that we really only would have stayed to get our people out and then left? By that time, U.S. troops are dead. We're involved.

Now the Afghan army is going to say, really, we just fought so you could get your people out? No. You have to stand and fight. The generals, the media, they would have brought all the pressure to bear about abandoning the fight. And then, voila, you just bought yourself another year in Afghanistan. I, along with you, am disgusted by the images of the Kabul airport, of the men who spilled American blood holding the arms that we gave to the Afghan army. And I pray for the safe return of every U.S. citizen there, every Afghan who stood with us on the front line. But given the facts of the situation that I best know and have laid out for you, I think this is as good as it probably was

ever going to get. The alternative is far worse. More war, more dead boys, more dead Afghans, and worse, forever war. So there you have it. That's why I think what I think. You're welcome to disagree. But I urge you to stay away from hyperbole and to do what so many in the media and in the Pentagon failed to consider for 20 years. What are the downsides to my actions? In war, the United States has forgotten for far too long. The enemy gets a vote too. So that's the thing, Crystal.

I wanted to take people through the timeline. 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. Crystal, what are you taking a look at today? Well, one thing has become abundantly clear this week. The deep state has declared all-out war on President Joe Biden. The leaks are coming fast and furious. The media spin and propaganda is loud. It is unified and full-throated. And by the way, the stakes are really quite high here. So just take a look at this article as one example of the type of propaganda and leaks and spin that we're getting. From the New York Times, intelligence warned of Afghan military collapse despite Biden's assurances.

In it, the stenographers in the New York Times write that, according to current and former government officials, our sage intelligence community warned Biden that Kabul could fall quickly to the Taliban, but he just wouldn't listen, pushing ahead with his plan in spite of their wise guidance that he should delay our troop withdrawal yet again, ignoring their assessments to intentionally mislead the American people that the Afghan army was in fact strong. Now look, there are a couple possibilities for what actually happened here. One is that the intelligence agencies completely failed, that they gave Biden really bad information from extremely flawed assessments, and that they are now just flat out lying to the press. It's obvious to see how they would

benefit from such a self-serving lie. We tried to warn him. They're trying to convince them. In fact, apparently, the CIA director was on a big six-day Middle East swing when Kabul fell, which would seem to suggest they did not, in fact, think that Afghanistan was hours away from collapse. Another possibility not contemplated by the New York Times or the many other outlets running their own version of this PSYOP is that the intelligence community did, in fact, give Biden increasingly dire assessments, but he didn't believe them because they've literally been lying nonstop about Afghanistan for the entire duration of the war. They lied to Barack Obama to get him to do the surge. Then they lied that the surge was working. Then they lied to Trump to get him to do another surge. Biden has been around not just to watch the lies

on Afghanistan, but also the lies on Iraq and the lies on a million Cold War adventures. And at the start of his career, of course, the lies on Vietnam. So if they came to him this time and said, hey, you got to push off this withdrawal again, and we probably need another troop surge to hold back the Taliban, he was 100% correct to say, screw you. And it was completely understandable that he would assume they were overstating their dire estimates in an attempt to manipulate him the way that they always manipulate the commander in chief. Now, here is another example of this genre of propaganda, but with this one with a little more bite to it. It suggests that Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal was a failure because his staff is too heavy on think tankers and too light on field experience. As if the generals with the field

experience weren't exactly the same people who lied to us and helped keep us there for years and years, or who told soldiers to look the other way when our Afghan allies kept child sex slaves. Thank God Biden used his own brain and his own moral compass rather than relying on these people. Here's another direction that the media is trying out, rekindling that old fear of Al-Qaeda and Islamic terror. Quote, America's top general said Sunday that the United States could now face a rise in terrorist threats from a Taliban-run Afghanistan. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators on a briefing call Sunday that U.S. officials are expected to alter their earlier assessments about the pace of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan, a person with the matter, told the AP.

This, of course, has been the tried-and-true method for getting Americans to accept mass surveillance and disastrous imperial adventures for more than two decades now. The media is only too happy to reprint lies and propaganda or to apply their selective outrage in ways that benefit the pro-war establishment. As Glenn Greenwald points out regarding that carefully selected outrage, of course the images from Kabul in the wake of U.S. withdrawal are harrowing to any decent person. The 20-year U.S. war itself created massive amounts of suffering and death as well, but the images of that remain mostly hidden, and thus they never produce the same reaction. They also don't even try to hide their pro-war bias with the parade of criminals and war profiteers that they trot on as experts, when in any sane world, these people should be

banished from polite society, never to be heard from again, at the very, very least. Why would anyone listen to a word on foreign policy and especially on the war on terror from John Bolton or Judith Miller or Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleezza Rice? They've been elevating these people. It is sheer madness that the revelation that Afghanistan was even more of a catastrophe than anyone could have imagined would lead to our top news outlets saying, hey, let's bring in the old crew who lied us into all of this and then unironically ask them for their advice. For more on how to deal with rising inequality, let's bring in Jeff Bezos and the Monopoly guy with the top hat. That's like what they're doing here. It's all unbelievably shameless, but there's a very simple reason that

they are spinning so hard on this. The stakes, as I said earlier, are quite high. As Shant Misrobian points out, there is no one who is more vindicated by the events unfolding in Afghanistan than the anti-war faction of American politics on the left and the right. There will be a lot of PSYOP bullshit in the media aimed at obscuring this very obvious fact. Well said. The very clear and very obvious lesson to learn from all of this is don't get into these damn conflicts to start with, and the moment anyone says nation-building, laugh them out of the room and straight into the hag. But if the American people clearly learned that lesson, which should be very obvious,

then that dries up trillions in contracts and untold prestige and power for blob warmongers. So instead, they want people to think, oh, this all would have been perfectly fine if Biden had just planned better, given another month or process more visas. They need you to think that the real horror is a messy exit rather than the hundreds of thousands of lives and $2 trillion spent just to leave Afghanistan poorer and the Taliban stronger. I am begging you, please do not fall for their lies or you will not believe how fast we find ourselves deceived into the next endless war. And actually on that first piece about the intelligence assessment, we have even more. So we have a fantastic guest here. Michael Tracy is an independent journalist. He's over on Substack and has a phenomenal piece that Sagar and I have both been taking a look at and already referenced here once this morning. So

Michael, great to see you. Good to see you, Michael. Great to be with you guys. Yeah. Just lay out for us sort of your view on the withdrawal and particularly some of the most, I guess, potent criticism of Biden is like, well, we wanted to get out, but not this way. We should have done manage the execution of the withdrawal much more effectively. What do you make of that critique? Well, I just think it's extremely ironic that you have a fairly widespread bipartisan acknowledgement that the public is war weary, right, or wanting to end endless war. That was the repeated, almost cliched refrain for years now. And then when a president actually takes the decision and implements that decision to end one of these supposedly lamentable endless wars, it becomes the biggest scandal of his entire presidency, according to the corporate

media and the political class. Look, if you're upset about the execution of policy as pertains to Afghanistan, I think those complaints would be best directed at the architects of a 20-year failed policy, at the heart of which was chronic and systematic graft, corruption, waste, misery, and death. I don't know when it became this outlandishly contrarian position to say that the Afghanistan war ought to be over and whatever actions are necessary to implement to see to it that the war is over should be done. But you have these figures like David Petraeus trotted out on television to give his expert opinion, when David Petraeus presided over the deadliest portion of the entire Afghanistan war, which let's remember was in 2010 and 2011, which itself is insane because that's about a decade after the 9-11 attacks. And yet that was when the U.S.

was incurring the most casualties because of this counterinsurgency strategy that Obama implemented and Petraeus executed. So why isn't that execution of policy being declared catastrophic? Why is it only when the rare event occurs, which is that the U.S. actually extricates itself from a foreign war, that's when everybody's up in arms and declaring some kind of abomination on display? It really gets to the heart of a pathological sickness in U.S. political and media culture and shows that I think a lot of these pretenses to be opposed to endless war are really just that. They're hollow and they're sloganeering and they're talking points. I want you to stick with that. One second,

Michael. I want you to stick with that. And this is a quote from your piece. Let's put a tear sheet of that up on the screen. You say, Republicans now insist that the Trump withdrawal plan was in fact fundamentally different than Biden's because it would have been conditions-based, which is just code for the withdrawal would have never actually happened. Can you break that down for the audience? I think it is so critical. Yeah. So this is the claim being trotted out now by Republicans who have to maneuver themselves into a position where they're condemning Biden for supposedly overseeing a botched or faulty withdrawal, yet also justify why it is that Trump undertook what at the time were fairly groundbreaking negotiations, direct negotiations with the Taliban. Remember, that was unthinkable. Under George Bush, we will never negotiate with terrorists. If you teleported back to 2004 or something and asked the average citizen whether the United States could ever be in direct negotiations with the Taliban, they would

have looked at you like you grew two heads. So this was a major advance on a diplomatic front. And it was Trump who, to his credit, I would say, undertook it because super majorities of the American public wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. Now, there's been some partisan differentiation there over the years. I just pulled up a poll from 2019, which actually showed that a plurality of Democrats were against withdrawing from Afghanistan because Trump would be the one overseeing that, right? And we see sort of the inverse happening now with Republicans no longer favoring withdrawal because Biden is presiding over it. But that notwithstanding, Republicans

are in this bind now where they have to kind of manage these seemingly contradictory impulses. And so they're saying that Trump's withdrawal would have been fundamentally different because it was conditions based. Trump himself emerged from his cavern in Mar-a-Lago and went on Sean Hannity this week and repeated this talking point. Pompeo's been all over Fox and such, repeating the talking point. Pompeo's been all over Fox and such, repeating the talking point. Well, when they say it's conditions-based, that means they could have just reneged on their commitment to actually withdraw by a stated date because of some vague concern over conditions, which are just defined according to the whims of whosoever in charge, right? And it deflects from what the fundamental condition, quote-un unquote, of the Afghanistan intervention really was, which is that the government that the U.S. taxpayer was propping up funding,

arming and so forth for 20 years was fundamentally a fictitious entity. And there's no amount of delay or minor policy adjustment around the margins that could have rectified that fundamental condition. Yes. And so. Yeah. There's another piece here, Michael, I want you to speak to, again, grabbing a quote from your excellent Substack post, which says, why didn't these same pundits, and you mentioned Petraeus, McMaster, and other like-minded pundits, which is all that's been on the airwaves, by the way. Why do these same pundits and operatives now opportunistically posturing as pure-hearted humanitarians seem to mind or even notice when those U.S. subsidized deaths were piling up in the very recent past over the past couple years with no strategic gain to speak of? Do you actually care about dead Afghans or do you only incidentally care when those dead bodies help you make a cheap

political point? I think that is so important and so well said. Yeah, so in 2018, there was a peak of Afghan civilian casualties. And again, we're talking 17 years after the war, which is itself an absurdity, that a U.S. subsidized force is engaging in military conduct that leads to this astronomical increase in deaths that far after 9-11, which was the supposed impetus for the intervention, right? And was it perceived as some gigantic humanitarian scandal that every politician had to go out and fulminate against or that every corporate news network had to devote wall-to-wall coverage to when record numbers of Afghanistan, Afghan civilians in 2018 were being killed? I don't remember hearing a whole lot about it at all. You had to kind of actually delve into the niche press to have even any awareness that this was going on because Afghanistan had sort of faded into the background. So for these people now to go on TV or to go on

social media and kind of peacock as though they are these principled humanitarians and that's why they're so aggrieved at the manner of Biden's withdrawal. It's nonsense because in 2018, they were probably all freaking out about some obscure Trump controversy that nobody could even recollect the details of anymore. So it just doesn't make any sense. It's all circumstantial. It's all incidental. And it gets to why it's so obnoxious to kind of funnel this Afghanistan issue now into a cheap partisan issue, because that's actually very convenient for the political class in both parties, because the failure in Afghanistan is a profound indictment of the entire political system, the entire military leadership, the entire kind of think tank and consultant class. And so now if they're just

bickering as though it can be distilled into a kind of cheap partisan food fight, that actually absolves them from the scrutiny that they really deserve. And that goes, we were talking about Republicans, but that goes for Democrats too. I got into Eric Swalwell, who I think is probably among the most dim-witted members of Congress. He attacked me on Twitter out of nowhere a few days ago because I mocked his criticism, believe it or not, of Trump and Pompeo. He was saying how horrible it was that Pompeo negotiated with terrorists who are now overseeing this supposed humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. And I just said, okay, so if that's your criticism

of Trump and Pompeo that they, quote, negotiated with terrorists, what do you think the Biden administration is doing right this very moment? As we speak. To ensure that there's some semblance of a means for the Kabul airport to be able to have flights taking off from it. And American citizens, in fact, unthinkable taxpayer expense. That is really well said, Michael. Thank you so much for joining us, man. We really appreciate it. Everybody out there, we'll have a link down there to Michael's Substack. I encourage you all to go and subscribe.

Excellent post there, and we should support Michael's work. So thanks, man. Thanks, Michael. Good to see you. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching.

This week has been, I just think, really such an important one for us to be able to offer a counter to what we both see as just the unconscionable way the media has behaved to elevate people who are not like Michael or to people like Craig Whitlock or Richard Hanania who are giving real counter voices to the establishment. And then having John Bolton and Condoleezza Rice and more. That's why this show exists. I wake up every day for days like this. So, you know, if you guys can support us, it means the world. Link is down there in the description. It's what enables us to do this every day in return. You know, you get the show an hour early and all of that. But really what it is is that we need this show to survive so that we can continue to give the takes like this.

Because I've heard from so many people, Crystal, who are service members and more, who are like, thank you. I don't hear this anywhere else. And that's what we try to do here. New poll out this morning. Two-thirds, think about this, two-thirds of American people, even with all of this happening, say the Afghanistan war was not worth fighting. Okay.

Do you see that view, which is an over, even if the polling can get a 10 point margin there. It's still 50%. It's still overwhelming. Majority of Americans who say we should never have been there in the first place. And do you see that view represented in media? I mean, that's what this week, you talked about this week and how important it has been for us. I think part of why we've both felt it that way to be that way is because all of the worst biases and excesses and blind spots and partisan hackery and just being partisan, you know, stenographers for the national security establishment. All of that has been on full display this week.

So we just feel really proud to be able to provide you with some different voices who are just trying to be honest about what's going on there. We feel really grateful to you guys for helping us make that possible. That's right. Thank you for sticking with us this week. Enjoy your weekend. Of course, we're going to post some great content for you over the weekend as well. But we will see you back here for a full show on week. Enjoy your weekend. Of course, we're going to post some great content for you over the weekend as well.

But we will see you back here for a full show on Monday. See you Monday. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it. To help other people find the show, go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people find the show.

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