Morning Wire - The Afghan Allies Left Behind | 9.11.22

Episode Date: September 11, 2022

Just over a year after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, thousands of American allies remain there – hunted daily by the Taliban, with little hope of escaping the war torn country. We speak with retired Green Beret Scott Mann who founded task force pineapple, a volunteer group that collaborates with the U.S. military in keeping U.S. allies out of harm's way. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just over a year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American allies remain in the country, hunted by the Taliban with little hope of getting out. But groups of American veterans, many of whom fought side by side with these allies, have been working tirelessly to provide some aid and protection. One volunteer group called Task Force Pineapple, founded by retired Green Beret Scott Mann, collaborated with the U.S. military to get allies out of harm's way. And many of these volunteers have continued,

their work to this day. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. On this Sunday episode of Morning Wire, on the anniversary of 9-11, we talk with Lieutenant Colonel Mann about the Allies still left behind in Afghanistan, what veterans are doing about it, and what the U.S. needs to do to make sure another 9-11 doesn't happen again. If you like this podcast, subscribe to our Morning Wire newsletter available exclusively to Daily Wire members. Get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at Dailywire.com slash subscribe.

Use code MorningWire to try Reader's Pass membership and get your first month for only 99 cents. Joining us today is retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, who founded Task Force Pineapple and wrote about the project in the book Operation Pineapple Express. Lieutenant Colonel First, thanks for joining us. We have just passed the one-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And while some would like to believe that that period is over, it's clearly not. and we continue to hear troubling reports out of Afghanistan, including about American allies that are still left on the ground there.

How many allies do we think are left in Afghanistan now under Taliban control? So a lot of it has to do with how you quantify allies. If you look at SIV, special immigration visa eligible individuals, I've seen numbers ranging between 75,000 and 100,000. And that's where an explicit promise was made that if you risk your life in defense of the United States of America in this war in Afghanistan, you are eligible for an SIV. And so that's the number that we keep hearing on that. But then you've got another, easily, another 20 to 30,000 Afghan special operators, special mission wing pilots who really took

on 98% of the combat in the last five years of the war. They don't even have a path, a pathway to a third country or the United States. They're not eligible because they technically didn't work for the U.S. government. They worked for the Afghan government. And they're being hunted, killed, and exterminated right now in droves. Do you have people in contact with some of those folks? We do. Actually, you know, the brotherhood in the special operations community

between U.S. special operators and the Afghan special operators is very tight. I mean, we fought alongside each other for years. And so even though a lot of us are retired who are doing this volunteer work, we've known these guys like Nizam, who's in my book, I've known him since 2010. I mean, I knew him when he was 18 years old as a young commando. You know what I mean? And so we stay in touch and they stay in touch with their networks.

So the amount of information, I mean, really granular, specific information about what the Taliban are doing, Al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, coming out of there is immense. And the other thing is I'm in touch with another guy, his name is his call sign is legend. He's the leader of the legend group, a nonprofit. but this guy is an Afghan-American, former U.S. Army Intelligence NCO, and he is on the ground right now in Afghanistan working with the resistance and reporting out to several of us and the volunteer groups giving us really, really good intel. Now, are they fighting back or are they trying to find ways to get out? Both. Think about it this way. Imagine these special operators that we built in our own image, right? So there's this false narrative that the Afghans didn't fight. It's just not true. I mean,

but understand that the Afghan special ops that we built in our image. So if you were to see these guys, you would think they were Delta or Rangers or Seals. They have the same kit. They have the same special optics on their weapons, the same tactics, techniques, procedures. They use precision operational fires to saturate a target before they go in, high-tech radios, and even their infiltration-exfiltration platforms mirror ours. So for years, we built these units in our own image so that they could keep. keep the Taliban off guard. They could strike without warning, and they hunted the Taliban very

effectively for years. Then in June of 2021, all of the contractor support is pulled without warning. So all of these platforms that I just described are gone. So their ability to fight the way they know how to fight was pretty much removed overnight. But even with that, the people that I was in contact with fought until the last bullet. Many of them ran out of ammunition. Many of them, it just got to the point where there were so many Taliban in the city that they had to go get their families. You know, their generals, their officers were gone, but they were still fighting. And many of them have joined the resistance and are fighting. But some of them are so hunted and so isolated. They had to leave their homes in the middle of the night because the Ministry of

Defense was compromised and all the records were left there. So their associations with their home of record. So all they could do was running their house real quick, grab what they could and put it on their back, and they've been on the run ever since, and we've been paying for their safe houses. Unbelievable. So you guys have ways of giving them resources to at least stay hidden and somewhat safe. Yeah. So what's next?

What's the next line of action to provide more help? Well, you know, one of the things that's been so remarkable about this, to me, is the way that our veteran population stepped up, particularly the special operations community. We worked in that country for 20 years, and we built these networks. You know, for example, Green Berets, which is what I was, we should. we specialize in unconventional warfare. So we build networks. We build networks that include auxiliaries, that include medical care.

And the whole idea is that you can leverage those networks to overthrow bad actors or create effects from a distance indirectly. And it's guerrilla warfare 101. So what we did was when this happened, these veterans that had built these networks for years simply reverse-engineered their guerrilla networks into humanitarian networks. and we focused inward. And so we used, you know, safe houses, food drops, indigenous connections to provide medical care. One group delivered 20 babies between the ISIS explosion and the new year. And so that's the idea is we wanted to keep them alive through the winter. That was the big thing because then they would have a fighting chance this summer.

And we hoped we could get more out. But we're rapidly approaching the point now where we're going into another severe winter. The government has still not stepped up. Most of these veteran groups, they're trying to solve an Uncle Sam-sized problem with their pension. A lot of these guys have lost their jobs. They've cashed in their kids' savings account, you know, for their college funds. And the reason they're doing it is because we're trained and conditioned. You don't leave a partner on the battlefield, you know, and so they're not going to do that. It's too much of a moral injury. But we're approaching a culmination point where if the government

doesn't step in and take the burden off of these volunteers, I'm afraid there's going to be a catastrophic collapse of the sustainment of this network. What about the U.S. government? Have you seen any progress in Washington? You've done a lot of advocacy work for these guys that have been left behind. Any progress in D.C.? Not really. I mean, if I'm being honest, I really don't think so.

And I think most of the volunteer groups like Moral Compass and Project Exodus Relief, they would agree that there just has been no real relief from the government or support from the group. There's been a lot of words. You know, a handful of us were summoned by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs about this time last year to go to D.C. and meet in the Pentagon. There was a lot of talk about what we were going to do. Nothing happened, really substantive. And the metric that we used to measure this is the number of our partners

who have been killed and tortured over the winter. You know, and that's one of the hardest things about this. And it's what I worry so much about our veterans is, you know, these guys have been on the world's longest 911 call. I mean, imagine being on a phone call with a commando that you serve, with in his family and you have no relief, you have nobody, and you have to keep this guy on the phone, you have to keep him hopeful, and all of a sudden one day, he just doesn't pick up the phone, you know, or you get a video from his wife of him being tortured. And that's what these veterans,

who gave us so much for 20 years, are enduring right now. And they don't know how to hang up the phone. You know, they don't, how do you do that? Like, how do you hang up the phone on someone that fought for you and that counted on you and you counted on them. And that's what I'm really worried about is what we're seeing with the moral injury. And D.C., as far as political, diplomatic and military, I've seen no substantive relief or concern on either the Afghan plight or the mental health of our veterans. What's needed to make a significant change here to address this really untenable situation? Well, you know, as we're talking right now, we're hovering around 9-11, right? And this is the first year of 9-11 after we abandoned. And a lot of us in the

special ops community, we're very concerned about what's reconstituting in Afghanistan. I mean, let's play it back. Let's play it back what happened 21 years ago and how it went down, you know, and it was because we did not have good ground intelligence, and we had no partner network to serve as an antibody to an emerging al-Qaeda flush with cash. and operational capability in an unfettered safe haven that was Afghanistan. Well, it is exactly that way right now, except now you have ISIS K in the mix.

You have Iran cooperating from what we're seeing with al-Qaeda to foment instability. And right now, we've seen a return of foreign fighters from Syria, Iraq, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, openly training in former Afghan army camps in both Helmand and Kandahar, where we had bases. they're openly training.

So to me, that's one thing, is we've got to think about this from a national security perspective. Like, what are we actually doing about the reemergence of these global terror groups in an unfettered safe haven? Over the horizon, it's not going to cut it. And then the other piece of it is, from a national security perspective, what country in the world is going to want to work with us? We have such a systemic history of abandonment of our partners going all the way back to the mountain yards in Vietnam. So those two things right there, I believe, have got to be addressed. We've got to address the reemergence of al-Qaeda, and we've got to address our reputation in the world to work by with and through partners. Because even countering near-peer threats like Russia and China, we're not going to do that unilaterally.

We're going to do that with partners. And I don't think there's a lot of countries out there right now that look at Afghanistan and feel very comfortable working with us as a partner. Right. So that's what the government needs to do. What can the average American do to help with the situation? I think the big thing is don't take your eye off Afghanistan. You know, just because we're done with al-Qaeda and ISIS, they're not done with us. They have a long-term narrative that is apocalyptic in nature.

It is a level of violence that most of us can't fathom. And they don't let go of that narrative just because things change internally. They cling to their narrative for decades. Their narrative is measured in centuries. And so we can't take our eye off Afghanistan. We have to stay focused on Afghanistan. I would tell people, you know, learn as much as you can about what happened in Afghanistan and what's happening now.

I believe that people should contact their congressmen, particularly as we go into an election year and demand open public hearings on what happened with Afghanistan. First of all, the abandonment, the level of abandonment that happened, the lack of leadership, the lack of accountability, and the impact of moral injury. on our veteran population has gone unanswered. And if we don't start to answer this, I believe this one follows us home. And I think it culminates in a catastrophic attack.

And an uninformed, distracted citizenry is exactly what they're counting on. Well, a particularly relevant message on this day. Scott, thank you so much for talking with us. That was retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. If you want to learn more about his mission, go to Scottman.com and Operation Pineapple Express.com.

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