Pod Save the World - A tragic end to 20 years in Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Today’s episode is all about Afghanistan. Tommy and Ben cover President Biden’s decision to withdraw troops, the failure to process visas and get refugees out of the country, why the Afghan security forces didn’t fight back, the history of the war effort under four US presidents, Trump’s role in what happened and the broader political implications.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we're back in studio. We are together. Yes, together again. Just in time to spend some time talking about Afghanistan. I have the grimmest podcast we've ever recorded. Yes, it has been a momentous and awful week there. And we figured let's just dedicate the entire show to what's happened over the past week,

really what's happened over the past 20 years. Yeah. It's all the context here because look, there's some big things happening like this earthquake in Haiti. is heartbreaking and it's something we should keep an eye on. But I think the whole world's eyes around Afghanistan right now. Yeah, no. I mean, and Haiti is something that will require, you know, extended attention. And I saw submit the powers very much on this. But yeah, right now I think it's impossible to focus anything about Afghanistan. It's actually one of those times where I'm glad that there's a podcast where we can actually, you know, even in an hour

you can barely scratch the surface of the context year. But yeah, you can do a little. little bit more than you can on the cable. Yeah, it's weird that Twitter's not cutting it for this today. Twitter is not the right genre for this one. Before we get to the news, I just want to make sure everybody knows that we are back with a brand new season of this land, host Rebecca Nagel. She's taking you inside her year-long investigation into a series of custody battles over Native American children and how the most powerful people on the far right wing are using them

to quietly dismantle American Indian tribes and advance a conservative agenda. This land's new trailer is out now. first two episodes premiere on August 23rd, listen, subscribe to This Land, wherever your podcast. The first season was incredible. It won journalism awards. Rebecca's done an amazing job with season two. So please check it out. So Ben, I'm going to try to do like a quick catch-up on what's happened over the last week

and then we get to Biden's speech. So in the last week, the Taliban took control over basically all of Afghanistan, including Kabul, the capital city. Much of this takeover happened without fighting between Afghan security forces and the Taliban. It was more of a ceasefire or surrender by the Afghan government forces, and we'll get into why later. Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, fled to Tajikistan on Sunday. I think a lot of his ministers came with him. Ghani released a statement on Facebook saying the Taliban have won the battle of sword and guns,

and now they are responsible for protecting the countrymen's honor, wealth, and dignity, end quote. So now we have Taliban soldiers, fighters policing the streets in Kabul. There's these surreal videos of Taliban fighters like wandering around the presidential palace. going on rides at amusement parks. There was a video of some guys using a wait room for some fucking reason. U.S. Embassy staff have been evacuated to the airport. President Biden had to send thousands of troops back into Afghanistan to secure the airport for a while that that airport was just total chaos. There were thousands of people desperately trying to get on flights out of the country as the Taliban were rolling in. President Biden gave a speech. We'll talk about that in a

minute. On Tuesday, the Taliban spokesman gave a press conference where he said the Taliban would respect the rights of women and minorities and protect foreigners. I think history should make us quite skeptical of those assurances. The Taliban spokesman also complained about Facebook, so we have got that in common with them, I guess. The Department of Defense estimated that there could be between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans left in Afghanistan. There's tens of thousands more Afghan citizens in their families who worked with the U.S. in some capacity who were trying to get out of the country. The Biden administration says they're now in control of the airport and hopefully can fly these people out. But the problem is that a lot of Afghans can't get to the airport without going through Taliban checkpoints.

So they're still in some serious danger. In some cases, you're seeing as a result basically empty evacuation flights. So that's the latest. So let's start with Biden's speech from Monday. And we'll roll some clips here. So it was a pretty defiant speech defending his decision. Biden talked about the success the U.S. had degrading al-Qaeda in the region, killing bin Laden, his long-held opposition to expanding the U.S. mission to include a broader nation-building effort.

And he also made clear that Biden believes the primary responsibility for the military defeat lies with the Afghan government and forces. Let's hear a clip. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained in equipped an Afghan military force was some 300,000 strong, incredibly well equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their Air Force, something that Taliban doesn't have. Taliban does not have an Air Force. We provide them.

provide a close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. Biden also had some harsh words for Afghanistan's political leaders. So we'll listen to that clip and then we'll talk about. When I host of President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed, to clean up the corruption in government so that the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensive about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.

They fail to do any of that. I also urge them to engage in diplomacy to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong. So Ben, some listeners were upset by Biden's blunt criticism of the Afghan military in particular, probably less so of the government. I think I understand the point he's trying to make here. I mean, you know, again, like a lot of these peace deals were cut between Afghan forces and the Taliban. We'll get into why later.

I also understand how people listening might find this insulting to the tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers, police, many, many more civilians who have been killed over the years. But what did you make of that point in criticism and the speech generally? I think the speech generally encompassed, you know, basically his best case, which was, you know, Joe Biden has not believed that the United States was capable or should carry out a nation-building exercise in Afghanistan, that 20 years into that effort, the idea that we would stay for another year or five years and make a difference in what was already a deteriorating situation, you know, he just didn't believe that that was feasible or possible. And therefore, you know, you have to end this war at some point, and he decided that this is the time.

And I think that, you know, that's a, that's a very credible argument to make. I think that this, the clips we heard, there's a couple of problems with them. One is, just as you said, there was a kind of noticeable lack of empathy. The Afghan security forces have lost over 60,000 people fighting the Taliban. But they've been fighting them for years. He almost made it sound like we've been doing the fighting. And now we left and then they just refused to fight. Actually, they've been in the lead here since 2014.

Yeah, since 2014. And they've taken a lot of casualties, right? And so a lot of people were willing to fight. And that leads to the second point, which is, you know, he kept saying, and you heard other administrations officials say that they lack the will. And there may be a political point to that that I'll get you in a second, but really they lack the capability. And that's as much an indictment of our policy over 20 years.

Because essentially what we did is we built, yes, a 300,000 strong Afghan security force that was also entirely dependent on not just the U.S. military, but contractors, U.S. military contractors, for things like intelligence, how do you manage that close air support. I mean, a picture a machine that is built to function plugged into another. machine. And then you just remove that machine and they weren't prepared to logistics, communications. Like literally like the dudes who twist the wrench to fix the helicopter, like half of them left between April and June of this year. That's exactly right. Like they have the equipment. They have guns. But like all the things that allow a military to move around to know where the enemy is, to coordinate air support

of people on the ground, like those functions disappeared, you know, over the course of this withdrawal. And so his basic point, I think, is one that resonates with Americans, which is, like, at a certain point, we can't fight in another country's civil war. And again, I think that's a credible argument to make after 20 years. I do think it was a little, just went over at skis, I think, to some extent in pinning this on some of the Afghans themselves. I think the Afghan political leadership, Look, I think, first of all, there is a question as they folded so fast that it did feel like some deals had been cut. Yeah, and I want to talk about that in detail later. Because there's a really good Washington Post report about these deals.

I feel like we're just like kind of get the tip of the iceberg with that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, basically, you know, had the Taliban either infiltrated or cut all these deals with, you know, military commanders or people out in regional governments. And to some extent, you know, that is an indictment. of Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan government, just kind of being in Kabul and having very little, you know, connection down to their own security forces and their own more localized officials. And so the, you know, the pointed criticism of Ghani, again, you could make the same argument that, you know, Ghani is kind of the type of official who was hugely dependent on the U.S.,

but it is the case that over successive Afghan governments, there have been these problems around trying to centralize authority and not being able to do that. Obviously, there's been endemic corruption. Again, I would argue, too, that while that is absolutely the case, and you saw some of these extraordinary videos, I think, that the Taliban posted of the lavish compounds that these like warlords lived in. Look, there's corruption on our side, too, right, in the sense that, you know, people ask where a lot of that money went, that the trillions of dollars, like, well, a lot of it went

to U.S. military contractors, you know, there was a whole kind of war economy that was built that didn't really reach down to people. And look, I was a part of an administration for years that, you know, was a part of a policy of trying to build these Afghan security forces and try to support this Afghan government. So, so to me, he's, you know, he's definitely correct in his indictment of Afghan political leadership. I think the reality is all of us who were a part of this policy under four administrations was also a part of a policy approach that just didn't work. The idea, like, we could go, here's my core point on me, it's like, we can go and kill terrorists. We can go and blow things up. Like, that's what our military is built to do. That part of

the Afghanistan project, you know, did generally succeed, if you look at the degradation of al-Qaeda. but our capacity, this other part of the policy of like kind of building up Afghan institutions, Afghan security forces and handing it off to them, well, clearly, you know, clearly that did not work. Yeah. And we're going to dig into the history of how that mission sort of creeped and evolved over time later in the show. So Biden also explained sort of like the more acute question I think a lot of people are having, which is why didn't the U.S. evacuate more Afghans earlier? How was there this like mad rush at the end? So here's a clip of that. I know there are concerns about why we did not began evacuating Afghans civilians sooner.

Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discourage us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence. So I found the first part of that argument that Afghans didn't want to be evacuated soon. to be kind of odd and bullshit. I mean, maybe there are some individuals who didn't want to leave. Yeah.

But there are tens of thousands who have been trying to leave for a long time. So setting that aside, I'm sure the point about the Afghan government, not wanting the U.S. to make it look like we're getting everybody out in some rushed manner is true. And it kind of speaks to the fundamental challenge Biden had with this decision generally. Yeah. Like the international community spent two decades trying to build up the Afghan military and the government with this goal of that being our exit strategy, right? we hand over responsibility to the Afghans, to their military, and we leave. But once you set a

date to get out, the Biden choice becomes rush people out and maybe look like you have no confidence in the Afghan government or withdraw troops, hand over responsibility, hope it all works. Clearly, in hindsight, they made the wrong decision. You know, they did the hope that it works play. And like, you know, even with making that decision, like the visa process could have and should have been accelerated and then maybe your break glass option is you push the withdrawal deadline out six months or something to get more people out. But what do you make of this argument, Ben, that like the evacuations didn't start earlier because of the Afghan government?

To me, this is the biggest problem with this whole withdrawal is what happened to the Afghans and the failure to evacuate them. That's the thing that I think is hard to excuse. And I'd break it into a couple of different issues. One is this SIV issue, right? This is the special visa for Afghan interpreters, people who worked with our military, which is an existing program. And they were, you know, Biden and speech was saying, well, we've gotten 2,000 of these

people out. And it's like, that is a drop in the ocean. I mean, we're talking 50, 60,000 people at least, you know, who are in that kind of danger. And to me, like, what I cannot understand is what he said about people not wanting to leave or what he said about the Afghan government not wanting mass exodus. Okay, I can see the point about the Afghan government not wanting mass exodus, but just dramatically ramping up that SIV program would not necessarily be a mass exodus where we're saying like everybody get out, everybody get on C-17s.

Right. And clearly they were still operating within the confines of the existence. bureaucracy of the program. There are caps on who can come. There are all these requirements, all these forms, all these hurdles that people have to jump over. Interviews. And I don't know why from the moment that he announced to withdraw, it wasn't like, that's all gone.

And we talked on the show, like, we don't even necessarily need to fly all those people to the U.S. They could fly them to other U.S. military installations. They can take them to Guam. They can cut a deal with a Central Asian country to have a facility there. The SIV program and the failure to just dramatically. dramatically ramp that up and get into the tens of thousands at least by this time, I just, I truly don't understand it because I don't think that ramping up that program would have been

the kind of mass exodus that is described. Now, the second point is another thing that has concerned me is that until basically the last couple of days, they were not allowing for people like USAID subcontractors, like people who got USAID grants, those types of people. The P2 visas, prior to the P2 visas, and just to give people a sense of this, like, what if the U.S. government, like, gives a grant to somebody to set up an organization to promote girls' education or to catalog human rights abuses or to do things that you know the Taliban finds offensive and has in the past killed people for doing those things? If we subsidize them doing that, how are they not just as at risk and just as worthy evacuation as someone who's a military? interpreter. Right. And these are a lot of the people, I know, you know, I've been hearing from Afghans on the ground, Afghans and other countries, desperately trying to get these people

out. These people want to leave. So I don't understand the argument that I'm sure anecdotally there were some Afghans who were like, I want to stay. I even know some Afghans who, I don't know if they wanted to stay, but like they, they were hoping for better than what happened. Sure. But I wanted to see both like that SIV program moving much faster, but then a much larger category of people can get out. They're there now. The question is how many people can they get out in the coming days, which we can talk about.

So you could sense, and I sense this in Tony Blinken's comments in recent weeks, that they did truly believe. I don't think it's spin. I think that they truly believed that there was a risk that it was a mass evacuation. It would kind of precipitate the exact collapse that did happen. But they could kind of see that that was happening anyway. You know, the writing has been on. on the wall here for a number of weeks. And that's the thing, right? I think like doing the right

thing almost required the U.S. government to preemptively say this effort has failed. The nation building part of this has failed. The government is not stable, it's not trusted. It's seen as corrupt. It's seen as illegitimate and it's over. I'm sure COVID was part of what slowed down the SIV process. And you're also seeing this fight spill out into the press where the state department staff didn't want to evacuate and the Pentagon was pissed at them because they were saying we got to get you out earlier because the logistics will get hard. Well, those things are directly tied to this visa processing issue, right? Because a lot of these State Department officials are trying to help Afghans get out of the country and they want to stick around and do their jobs because they're like brave people who

care about what they're doing for a living. But, you know, there's this push and pull. And it's really hard. We dealt with this a lot after Benghazi when we were constantly looking at like what embassies are safe, what are secure. How can we keep people safe in like dangerous places like Pakistan? Yeah, I mean, and I remember the frustration of the bureaucracy of these programs because everybody's worried about making the mistake of letting in somebody, you know, good. One terrorist. One terrorist. It's all post-9-11 hysteria. But to me, the balance of risk shifted dramatically to just get these people out as soon as, you know, the withdrawal decision is made.

And, you know, you have like this narrow window of time where you control things and you have like, you know, you. know, Kabul, not under Taliban control. And I think just clearly not much was done with that. I mean, if 2,000 Afghans have gotten out, I think, this entire year before the situation were in now, those numbers, again, we're talking about about 100,000 people, I think, who are at risk. And one way to just think about this, Tommy, is like, obviously the priority of the U.S. government is going to be American citizens, American diplomats. Like you said, that kind of Benghazi effect of really being hyper-focused on that. But the distance between the lengths that we go to to extract Americans and what's been done for Afghans who sacrificed a Shetan and whose lives are at in some ways much greater risks than those Americans.

Yeah. Because it's more likely, I think, that the Taliban goes around trying to kill and extract or put in prison or do whatever horrific thing they might do. to Afghans than that they go hunting for Americans. Like that's a very uncomfortable reality that we've all, I think, experienced the last few days. Yeah. And look, you know, this decision to not get more Americans, State Department personnel out earlier could look worse and worse over time if the situation, the security situation gets hairier. But I totally agree with you that it seems already more likely that the Taliban are going to

target Afghan citizens. And I just want to say one thing, Tommy, like I know, I don't want to even name any of these people because like, you know, I don't put many careers, but the types of people I know or I'm familiar with who are in these circumstances are people who've like built their whole lives around supporting what we said we were doing in Afghanistan. You know, people who studied in the United States

so that they could go back and join the Afghan government or set up a civil society organization or people who truly believed that Afghanistan's future is going to be determined by how they treated their women. So they were going to go out and build schools for African girls. Like you cannot overstate how much these people put themselves on the line for what we said we believed in for them, you know?

And man, like this is a shameful, shameful situation. And I don't say that to single out even just Biden on this one. We're all, everybody, every one of us who worked on this policy, you know, should think about that for as long as we're on earth. But particularly, you know, I hope that whatever comes next in our foreign policy, you know, is more grounded in, and people like that. Let's just say grounded what's possible. I think U.S., you know, often as whether it's setting a red line, whether it's telling Iraqi Kurds to rise up in the first call for, right? Like suggesting the others that we will be there for them at all times when it's not necessarily always possible.

Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, spoke at the White House briefing today. And I thought did a little better job than Biden of explaining the broader options available when it comes to Afghanistan. Let's hear that clip. President Biden had to think about the human costs of the alternative path as well, which was to stay in the middle of a civil conflict in Afghanistan. There are those who argue that with 2,500 forces, the number of forces in country when President Biden took office, we could have sustained a stable, peaceful Afghanistan. That is simply wrong. The previous administration drew down from 15,000 troops to 2,500 troops, and even at 15,000, the Afghan government forces were losing ground.

What has unfolded over the past month has proven decisively that it would have taken a significant American troop presence, multiple times greater than what President Biden was handed to stop a Taliban onslaught. And we would have taken casualties. American men and women would have been fighting and dying once again in Afghanistan, and President Biden was not prepared to send additional forces or ask any American personnel to do that over the period ahead. So this is a very important argument, I think, that is not breaking through.

And it's not breaking through because I think the media doesn't want to believe it, but also because you have some charlatans out there, like selling a lie, which is that Biden's options were not keep a few thousand troops in Afghanistan. Yeah. And automatically life is better for the end. Afghan people, human rights are protected, women and girls are protected. It was keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan or probably be forced to send more troops to Afghanistan, engage in heavy fighting, take casualties. And for the Afghan people, most of all, it means spending another

year or two or three or four living in a civil war. And that's the tradeoff, right? Like, you get killed. Again, like the visa issues, the criticism of the last few weeks, that is all absolutely real and fair. But Jake, I think, is right that these are. the imperfect options Biden had. Like, staying in Afghanistan creates risk for Afghan civilians, leaving Afghanistan creates risk for Afghan civilians. I don't know how to make this depressing context break through. That's right.

And it's the bottom line, which is that 2,500 troops, which is where it was, you know, because of what Trump had done. Right, right. And 2,500 troops in the context of a deal in which you've already cut a deal with the Taliban to leave, I've seen these people say, well, we could have just left those 2,500 troops and had this kind of, you know, status quo that was relatively stable. No. I mean, first of all, it was not relatively stable in the sense that the Taliban has been making gains steadily year after year after year. And they were doing that when there were more than 2,500 troops there. Biden said they were stronger today than they were before 9-11. Well, and clearly they are, given how they ran over the country. And so, like, in order to stay, first of all, you are going to be in a civil war. You're going to be in a middle, because it has been a civil war in a way for 20 years, like, ever since we went in, and even in some ways before that. And so either we were probably going to have to surge back up.

If we made the decision to stay, you know, 2,500 troops is not even enough to protect our own forces there. So there would have had to be a plus up of forces, I think, in order to stay. And inevitably, it's not that we would have been taking enormous casualties because we haven't been taking that many casualties for years, but you would have taken some. And not just that, you know, you would have still been in Afghanistan spending billions and billions of dollars and trying to tip the balance of a civil war that has been going in the wrong direction for many years now. And so, I I think Jake did lay out very honestly. Like, this is just a calculation that Biden made, which is that, like, we've been there 20 years. We've not found the formula that works. The formula that works is not going to be 2,500 troops there. And he made a determination that given everything else we have to do in the world, given a desire to kind of put a period on, you know, an aspect of post-9-11 foreign policy, like this is what, this is the only option that we had to do that. otherwise we're deeper in Afghanistan with all the risks that go along with that. And I think

that's, you know, people don't want to accept that logic, but that logic is clear. And you can argue that, you know what, it's worth like having a few more thousand troops in Afghanistan. It's worth billions and billions of dollars. And it's worth the occasional American casualty. And it's worth all the bandwidth of the U.S. government that goes into this. And that's another thing. It's a lot of bandwidth in the U.S. government that is not doing other things because it's been fighting a war in Afghanistan for so long. But the idea that there was this status quo option, I mean, that is not right. I mean, that is not right. And Jake is right to point that out. And then, you know, you raised this, you know, this broader question of like, why did the Afghan security forces

not fight? And it keeps getting reported on as an intelligence failure. And I'm not even sure that's the right terminology. But like trying to, trying to assess what happened. Like you mentioned this logistics problem, right? The U.S. pulls out the, the, the, the, the, Afghan army is dependent on U.S. personnel to do logistics or contractors, and suddenly they're gone, and it's hard for these army forces to operate. I think that that logistical challenge was compounded by the fact that Ashrafgani didn't want to pull back Afghan forces from remote areas that he probably should have retreated from because he didn't want to look like he was giving up parts of the country, but then they literally couldn't get those guys food from what I've read. And then the other

part of this. And they seem to not be paying salaries. Yeah, and they weren't paying them. You see the reporting, like, and that may be corruption. Like, why are these, These guys are being asked to fight and they're not getting paid. And that merits for their scrutiny. Yeah, that's a big, big problem. And then the other factor, so there's this really interesting Washington Post report that said that Afghan officials have been quietly surrendering to the Taliban since last year. And they said it started at low levels.

When the peace deal happened. Right, when the peace deal. Well, exactly, right? Peace deal. Like, right, the, you know, the Taliban deal. The withdrawal deal. The withdrawal deal. Yeah.

And so basically, you know, what it sounds like happened was these deals were getting cut at levels. And then as the Taliban advance accelerated and got momentum, these deals started getting cut by more and more senior Afghan government officials. And that's why you saw, you know, the Taliban just walk into Kabul without firing a shot. Like one important caveat to this is that the Afghan commando unit, their special forces, have been in like brutal combat for months in places like Kandahar. But the big deal that was cut was the Trump deal. And again, this isn't about politics. It's about facts. Like Trump cuts a deal with the Taliban where he says, you know, essentially we're going to leave if you don't shoot at us. And what happened was, yeah, they

stopped shooting us, but they kept shooting at the Afghan security forces. And all the Afghan, you know, warlords or regional or tribal leaders are looking and reading the writing on the wall. This is even before Biden comes in. And they start cutting deals with the Taliban because they're literally cutting the same deal that Trump cut. You know, they're cutting a deal. They're cutting a deal that says, like, don't shoot at us and, you know, you guys can do what you want. And so the momentum of this thing was well underway by the time Biden made his decision. And that's just a fact that has to be a part of our reckoning with this. Well, so I agree. Like, and again, I think it's quite clear from this conversation, and we'll get into the broader history in a second that like four

presidents are responsible for this outcome. But it's been frustrating to see Mike Pompeo and Trump and and others try to take a victory lap on this given their role. So just some context, Ben, that we should talk about. Like you just said, they cut this deal without the Afghan government, Trump and Pompeo, and invited the Taliban to Camp David. And then they attacked Biden when he took the withdrawal deadline from May 1st to August 31st. They said, oh, Biden's going to stick around forever now. Trump forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, many of whom went right back to fighting. And then in 2018, they pushed Pakistan to release Mullah Baradar, one of the founders of the Taliban, who is now basically the de facto leader, the Trump administration did everything possible

to prevent refugees from coming to the U.S., including these special immigrant visas for people who helped us to the point where there was a lawsuit against the Trump administration and a judge rule that they'd violated the law because they slowed down the process. And so we have to, you know, this context is relevant. I also think we need to watch this refugee issue really closely because Stephen Miller is already out there trying to demagogue Afghan refugees. And last night, Tucker Carlson on his show said, If history is any guide and it's always a guide, we will see many refugees from Afghanistan

resettled in our country. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade and then we are invaded. That is some chilling, chilling shit from a bowtied fascist fuck. So I don't know. I just think that context is important. No, I mean, it's so much like there. I mean, the deal cut without Ghani, too, totally undercut him in the country, right?

The U.S. government that has been the principal force in the country for 20 years cuts a deal with the Taliban that totally excludes the Afghan government. That was part of what cut the legs out from underneath Ghani because then the Taliban starts cutting deals with these other officials. The strangulation of an already bureaucratic program in terms of refugee admissions or, you know, like just, just stops the already slow moving gears here. I mean, and to fucking Tucker Carlson's point, the best thing that could happen to this country is to have 150,000 Afghan refugees come in, and you know what they're going to do?

You know what's going to happen? They're going to start businesses. They're going to run for elected office. They're going to make enormous contributions to this country. Like, we will be better for having them. It's not like charity. Like, we will be enriched by them. And the same way we're sitting here in California.

Like, look at what the Vietnamese American community is done in this state. You know, these people, I mean, the lack of any sense of internal accountability on their behalf is so astonishing me. I'm sure we'll get to Bush here second, too. But like, they literally cut the deal with these people. You have Mike Pompeo, they pressured Pakistan to release the guy who's now like basically the president of Afghanistan. You know, I'm not formally recognizing it, not that anyone cares what I think about that. But the guy that they've declared to be the president of Afghanistan. And Mike Pompeo met with the guy.

Yeah. I mean, he goes in, they took a photo, they released a photo. And, and like if, oh my God, if Barack Obama had done that, you know, I don't even know what the consequences would have been. But there's this kind of because there was such a farcical nature to Trump, people didn't take seriously like agreements that were agreements that were reached. Like, so for instance, also the withdrawal of U.S. contractors was part of the deal. Yeah. It wasn't just about the withdrawal of the U.S. military. They literally negotiated.

The Taliban knew what bargain they were driving. They're like, not, don't just get out the military. You got to get out those contractors too. Right. So like this is all was set in motion in a way. And then Biden comes in. And yeah, Biden has had a long held view that he wanted out of Afghanistan. And so he took it, right?

Yeah. And so. And in fairness, he didn't have to accept that deal. He didn't. They could have renegotiated it. But I think they decided on balance that the risk that it was the right thing to do. They could have torn it up. They could have said, we don't abide by the steel.

it's a piece of garbage. And by the way, they would have been right in saying that the Taliban hasn't really abided by the spirit of this deal either because they're supposed to be a ceasefire. And that was a point you were making at the time. At the time. Yeah. When you extended the deadline. They could have said, we are saying this because the Taliban's not. So again, this doesn't mean that Biden didn't make the decision he did. It doesn't mean that Biden hasn't mismanaged aspects of the decision he has. It does mean that Trump set in motion a withdrawal that had a lot of momentum and had created a lot of ripple effects in Afghanistan by the time Biden came in. And it does mean that the argument that Jake laid out is true that the current course was not like some sustainable

status quo. It was either ramp back up and get back into the Civil War or get out. And people can argue that ramping up a little bit and keeping Bogram that there was a limited option you could have done. But this is where things were. Yeah. And look, I don't think either of as opposed having peace talks with the Taliban. They should have included the Afghan government. That was like the original This too. I mean, throughout the Obama years, people often said, how come you guys aren't doing more to have these discussions of Taliban? And it's because our principle was always that it has to involve the Afghan government. We weren't willing to cut out the elected government. And keep in mind, they were democratically elected. You can call them corrupt. You can call them all these things. They were democratically elected by a lot of Afghans who turned out to vote in difficult circumstances. And to cut them out of a deal like that was pretty extraordinary. I will say another thing that hasn't got a lot of attention, I, I'm not sure why the Biden people kept on Zal Khal-Illad, the envoy who cut the deal with Pompeo. Like, he's not exactly covered in glory here either, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's probably just continuity is probably because knowing the writing was on the wall.

I mean, but it's a fair point. So, look, let's talk about the history of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan the last two decades in that mission creep over time because, you know, this is not just a Trump and Biden story. So the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan in early October of 2001 right after the 9-11 attacks. And by early December, the military effort had been so successful that the Taliban offered to surrender, hand over their weapons, enjoying the political process as long as Mullah Omar, who was the Taliban leader at the time, could live in Kandahar under house arrest. Bush, Don Rumsfeld, they rejected that deal. Great deal. It would have been, it was the deal that was on the table in 2019. And then that mission quickly shifted from counterterrorism to this broader.

nation-building exercise. You had Bush who ran against nation-building talking about a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. This is what he wrote about Afghanistan in his memoir, Ben. Quote, Afghanistan was the ultimate nation-building exercise. We had liberated the country from a primitive dictatorship and we had a moral obligation to lead behind something better. We also had a strategic interest in helping the Afghan people build a free society, end quote. So, of course, as we all know, Bush then invaded Iraq. And for the rest of the administration, you know, Afghanistan was on the back burner. Obama runs. on refocusing on the war in Afghanistan.

We sent tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. In hindsight, I think we both have said that was a mistake because it kind of got us back to the status quo ante. But the thinking at the time was, as we were just talking about, happened recently, like major population centers were close to getting overrun by the Taliban. They needed reinforcements. The military mantra was more troops, more time, build the capacity, right? Like when we began this big offensive in 2010 in a place,

called Marja, the military said, we're going to come in, we're going to clear out the bad guys, we're going to hold the territory, and we're going to open up government in a box. That was the proposal, the plan, and that part never delivered. We were never able to clear hold and then transfer responsibility. And, you know, like, we had a Pentagon coming in from the Iraq surge. And I think we're eager, people like Dave Petraeus, were eager to try out that counterinsurgency strategy that they think succeeded in Iraq in Afghanistan. And so, again, like, victory has a thousand fathers and, you know, loss as an orphan.

But I do think, like, all these administrations were a part of allowing this mission to balloon over time. And I guess my question is, how do you think it never got right size? Because I know Obama was asking a lot of these questions in that 2009 Afghan review, right? Like, what's our real objective? Is it to defeat the Taliban? No. Remember, we had to walk that back in the media? and it was like a big deal with the Pentagon.

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, first of all, the original sin here from which maybe we could have never recovered is George Bush goes into Afghanistan. And again, I think you and I would have thought at the time, Tommy, that's just, you know, people watching the news at that time, that we were going there to get the people who did 9-11 and then leave. Like, did anybody think that we were going there to Nationville? for even one decade. And so the mission goes so well.

I think there was such a moment of triumph and hubris. And the world was out there who are not quite as middle-aged as we are, like, member that moment of like euphoria, like America can do anything. We knocked over the Taliban in like a matter of weeks. You know, we're going to route these guys. And then we were installing Hamid Karzai as president. And he's getting built up as this kind of George Washington type. figure and and suddenly it's about it became about nation building quickly and having made that

decision right to nation build to then pivot and invade and occupy Iraq and throw far more resources at that that's the original sin here like like that like we never recovered from that if we were going to nation build in Afghanistan like you don't need to be like a grand military strategyist to know that if you're commencing a nation-building project in a place as distant and different from us as Afghanistan, which may never succeed to begin with, but the last thing you want to do is go invade another country. A place known as the graveyard of empires. Yeah.

The British Empire, the Russians, like, a lot of countries have attempted to nation-building Afghanistan and have failed catastrophically. So that to me is like, that was always, you know, that's in the grand scheme of the 20 years, the decision to nation-build and then invade a rock stands out to me. The one that is kind of irredeemable. Okay, the Obama years.

Because by the time we come in in 2009, and sometimes we should be very clear, like sometimes people act like we were like, you know, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Like, you and I were communications. I was some little shit. Yeah, let's be honest here, right? So, and I'm not saying to absolve myself responsible,

but I do just like some context matters and context is also like, I was basically the speechwriter and you were the spokesman at the time. We come in and the Taliban is making gains and al-Qaeda had really reconstituted itself, particularly in that border region, you know, on the Pakistani side of the border, but Afghanistan was kind of both a place where they could reconstitute and a platform for going after al-Qaeda. Our mistake, I believe, was a surge, right, in the sense that Obama does this review. in the review he determines, hey, I don't think we can defeat the Taliban.

Like they are here. They have indigenous support, their resilient insurgency. We do have an interest in defeating al-Qaeda. And the military's objective through its counterinsurgency strategy, the logic of a counterinsurgency strategy, was to defeat the Taliban. It was to kind of go district by district in Afghanistan, beat the Taliban, build security force, and it was an incredibly expansive project that would have been far more expensive than even what we ended up doing. Help farmers switch from poppy to wheat.

Yeah, grow crops. I mean, it was an open-ended. It would have been, you know, over 100,000 U.S. troops there for like a decade, right? And that's what they believe. And that might not have been enough. And that might not have been enough. And so then the middle ground that was found was Obama said, like, how long do I need to a surge to buy some time and space to take out al-Qaeda?

and that becomes, you know, essentially a year and a half. And actually, if you look at the timeline, what's pretty remarkable about the timeline Obama said is that's basically what happened. In that year and a half, we degraded al-Qaeda and we killed Osama bin Laden, right? And so then a second question becomes, why did we stay after killing Osama bin Laden and degrading Al-Qaeda? And by that point it was, you know, we were so invested in this project that, you know, we drew down, but we obviously kept a significant amount of forces in there. But so the Obama challenge was getting kind of caught in between going all in with a

counterinsurgency strategy that, by the way, was completely politically unsustainable. There's no way Congress and the American people would have supported like an open-ended counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for another 10 years or just pulling up stakes. And what Obama did is he gradually drew down and gradually, you know, trained Afghan security forces. We got down to, by the end of the Obama administration, there's roughly 10,000 troops there and very few American casualties because the Afghan forces are taking the casualties. They are in the lead with our support. And he had meetings where it was discussed, do we take everybody out? And I was in some of those meetings. And the analysis

he got was basically that this would happen. That this would happen. Right. And Obama said, I can't on my way out the door basically leave a collapsed country to the next president. So I'm going to stop this drawdown at 10,000 and allow the next president to make this decision, which I actually, I think that is like defensible in the sense of like imagine on the way out the door just creating this circumstance. Like I think the question on whether Obama should have gotten all troops out earlier is tied up in the surge and whether there could have been a quicker drawdown. So, yeah.

I mean, that, you know. I mean, look, and I just think. And that, by the way, is, like I said, like, that sounded like a long answer. That's, like, just skimming the surface of eight years of Obama and seven years of George Bush. Well, and just thinking back to 2009, I mean, like, it did feel at the time like the threat from al-Qaeda was growing. It was. Right?

Because we had no question. We had a plot. The very scary plot around. around Obama's inaugural, that luckily didn't turn into anything. But, you know, the Christmas Day bomber, umar frouk, Abdul Matalib, like we were, if he had done a better job of executing his mission, he would have taken down a passenger jet over Detroit. There was a Times Square bomber that emanated, I believe, that of Pakistan. There were, you know, there were AQAP. There were threats out of Yemen, right? And I'm not, obviously, you don't send more troops to Afghanistan to

solve a problem in Yemen. I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm just talking about, like, the broader context that like the war on terror, fear and mentality and risk that we were all hearing about in intelligence from terrorism was pretty high. But here's the central tension in the whole deal, right, that came to the forefront 20 years later this week. There were always kind of two wars. There was the war against terrorists. And then there was like the war against the Taliban.

Right. And the war to kind of build a nation building, you know. And actually, the war. the United States, and Biden said this is remarks, executed the war against Al Qaeda very well and achieved big successes there. And I believe, even as someone who, if you listen, you know, pretty progressive guy here thinks that the excesses of the war on terror have been a total and other, I think catastrophe, it was the case that, you know, at least from what I saw when I came in 2009, that was a very real terrorist threat. Like there was a reconstituted al-Qaeda

Corps, there was plotting attacks. And so that counterterrorism piece, you know, went forward. At the same time, like, there was this disconnect between is the other war something that we have to defeat and eradicate the Taliban or try to stay forever? Like, this is, you know, going to become like a South Korea kind of situation where we have tens of thousands of troops there indefinitely? or is this a situation where we're just trying to get out as responsibly as we can by? And so what was decided is, no, this is the lottery. We have to get out as responses as we can. And that becomes an effort to train the Afghan security forces.

And, you know, obviously that effort did not succeed. So a couple more things. So I think everyone's trying to figure out now what will a Taliban government look like. I think recent history doesn't paint a hopeful picture. So when the Taliban was in charge of Afghanistan, back in the late 90s, you know, and the judicial system was based on a pretty strict interpretation of Sharia law. Women's rights were severely curtailed. They were forced to wear burqas.

They weren't allowed to go out uncompinated. Women couldn't go to school. They were rampant human rights abuses. Religious minorities, particularly Shia Muslims, were targeted, attacked, assassinated. There's been some reporting speculation about the current Taliban leadership. structure Ben, it was not heartening to see Sarajdin Hakani as the deputy leader of one of the heads of the Hakani group, one of the more vicious, brutal terrorist factions in the country. So, you know, it's probably too early to speculate about what the Taliban government might look

like. But, I mean, how do you expect the international community will or will not interact with them? Because you're already hearing about meetings with Russians, maybe meetings with the Chinese, what the U.S. might do, what presence will keep, whether they'll have a rep at the UN, right? I mean, all these questions are getting asked because you kind of have to. So, I mean, first of all, the Taliban has clearly gotten better at its media strategy, but, like, I don't have any confidence. They did a press conference today. Yeah, and they did an interview with, like, a woman journals from Tolo News, the main Afghan news outlet there. I still think that the true colors of the Taliban are brutal and that they will repress women.

and it may not be as performative as it was at its pre-9-11 height when they've got bin Laden there and they're executing people in soccer stadiums, but it's going to be brutal. It's going to be a very grim circumstance. So here's the dilemma. They're going to get some recognition, right? You've already seen that the Russians didn't evacuate anybody from their embassy. Like, you know, the Chinese hosted a Taliban delegation recently. recently, like, you know, Iran, which has tensions with the Taliban for a lot of reasons, you know,

but Iran's going to engage them as a neighbor. Pakistan, you know, hasn't said they're going to wait on recognizing, but Pakistan hosted these guys for a long time. So they're going to get, that's going to happen. I think the real challenge for the U.S. and other countries is on the one hand, you don't necessarily want to recognize and legitimize what could be a truly brutal and repressive government. On the other hand, what you're seeing now is just having a lot of attention on this does have some moderating influence. So I think the policy dilemma is, is life marginally better for Afghans if we recognize

the Taliban and have an embassy there and just trying to have more countries. pressing them to be less horrible, or is it better served to not recognize them because of the nature of who they are? I don't know the answer to that question. Here's what I do know. One of the consistent policy failures in Afghanistan is our failure to listen to Afghans. You know, like, like, I, and this is a critique I apply across American foreign policy. Like, we've been in Afghanistan for 40 years, basically, if you count the fact that we basically created the Mujahideen, who evolved into the Taliban in the Reagan years when we're using them to fight the Soviets. And at no time, like, we always look at this place just through the prism of whatever the

present-day political context is in the United States. Like, we need to be, and there's another reason why you want a big Afghan diaspora, another reason why you want a lot of these people to get out. Like, let's listen to them. Like, let's listen to them about how to think about the Taliban and how to think about these questions. because, again, I think too often we've been trying to impose solutions on Afghanistan, a place that we clearly don't understand, no matter how long you work on this issue from Washington.

And so I think we're going to have to be informed by that viewpoint as well. Yeah. So the last thing I want to talk about is the politics because, you know, the situation, what's happening over there is far more important. But it's also been, it's very annoying. over the last few days hearing cable news pundits say, oh, Americans don't care about foreign policy. It's not clear if this will impact them.

Total self-fulfilling prophecy there. Yeah, and it's also, it's true until it isn't, right? Americas didn't care about foreign policy until 9-11 happened, and then it drove every election for several cycles. Yeah. So, you know, over the years, polling has found a pretty big majority of Americans wanted to get out of Afghanistan. Politico and Morning Consult did a poll that came out on a Monday

that said that might be changing quickly. They polled from Friday to Monday and found that support for withdrawal had gone from 69% in April to 49% now. So if that's accurate, and there's reasons to doubt all these polls, but that'd be a big shift. But I also wonder if, you know,

supporter opposed being in Afghanistan or supporter opposed withdrawing from Afghanistan is the right question because sometimes the feeling, the sentiment is just more basic. Like, it can be Americans don't like losing. They don't like hearing that the U.S. has been humiliated,

which is literally the language you're hearing from like New York Times straight news copy, right? Like America's humiliated, Biden humiliated. Like that is the language. It's about pride. And, you know, like, you also, you don't know what'll happen if there are these horrifying images out of Afghanistan like we saw in the late 90s or if there's reports that, you know, Al-Qaeda is gaining strength.

There's all these ways this could cut. So it's obviously too early to know what the politics will be. But I do things we're talking about it because this fear of terrorism and the insanity with which we have put resources behind preventing terrorism while like 600,000 people die from COVID, right? It's it's obvious. Like it's obviously a mismatch. It's imbalance. But those terrible policy choices are driven by these perverse post-911 political incentives. And like we need to fix it.

and I don't really know how, and this week is not giving me a lot of hope. Yeah, I'd say two things about this. I think the first thing is there's a kind of dumbness to how, you know, this gets stuffed into some narrative that can be digested by like a certain vein of DC political commentary. So like this whole Saigon thing, right? This is a lot like Vietnam in the sense that like we should have learned after Vietnam that we shouldn't fight wars like this

in countries that we don't understand where our hubris leads us to make huge mistakes. Like that's the commonality. Like I don't think Gerald Ford, like something has changed in the Washington, D.C., kind of political class. Like, it's not my understanding that like when the helicopters took off

and you had those images, it was like, what does this mean for Gerald Ford? It was like, what does this mean for the decades we spend in Vietnam? You know? And so there's this kind of oversimplification of things that misses the bigger point, which is that we shouldn't fight wars like this. And how many times do we have to learn that? There's even saying, you know, Vietnam syndrome, which became this kind of DC foreign policy and media framework that suggested that it was bad that we had learned from Vietnam that we shouldn't fight wars. And we had to get over Vietnam syndrome. Like, no, I hope we get back to having Vietnam syndrome or whatever you want it was syndrome you know, call it. So that's about the lesson taken from this. There's such short-termism about, like, is the lesson that Biden had a bad week, you know? Or the optics debate?

Or the optics debate. Why is he alone at Camp David? Why didn't he speak on Sunday versus Monday? What are we talking? No, why does the United States of America have a foreign policy that has repeatedly led it to engage in wars and countries that we don't understand that morph in a nation-building exercises that fail? Like that's like the real lesson here. But then on the politics, look, I think part of the challenge is that the Biden team thus far has been very good at implementing their agenda.

But you're never going to have to manage crises. Those crises, you know, sometimes they're beyond your control. This one, they obviously had some say in because they chose to withdraw. But what the Republicans do is they package together very effectively. any bad thing that happens overseas with these kind of this new brand of identity politics where it's like immigration, the border, for us, like it was 2014 and it was like, if you asked Americans, do you care about like the annexation of Crimea and the Civil War in Syria? They would say that they didn't. But the Republicans packaged together, well, there's kind of chaos in Syria and it looks

like we're feckless in dealing with that. And Putin is, you know, done something in Crimea, a place that most Americans haven't heard of, but that it's an embarrassment for us, that they're unaccompanied children coming to the border. There's a bull and that comes from Africa. So that kind of became a part of this big other. The Republicans roll all this stuff up into a ball of fear and a sense of American decline and just ram it down Democrats' throats. And so to me, it's not a question of whether Afghanistan will be on the brain of every midterm election voter. The question is whether, you know, it becomes, you know, a part of a broader narrative they build of a Biden team that is lacking incompetence and there's chaos and there's scary stuff happening and we can't control it.

And, you know, and look, there's some foreign policy storm clouds on the horizon. Like these Iran talks are collapsing. Like, what happens if Iran starts advancing its nuclear program? There'll surely be another international crisis. And the irony is when international crises happened under Trump, like nobody expected him to solve them. So he, like, weirdly didn't get blamed when he didn't. Like, for example, right, like this evacuation or special immigrant visa issue wouldn't have been an issue under Trump because he just doesn't care. Yeah, nobody expects him to care.

Nobody expects him to care. You know, Biden gets extra scrutiny for trying, as he should. Democrats always, I mean, this used to bother me in Obama, like the people knew Obama cared about, like drone strikes, right? Which, again, we talked a lot about on this show, but did anybody ever ask Donald Trump what he was doing to prevent civilian casualties and drone strikes? No, they just knew that Obama was probably plagued by it because he was. And again, that's fair. I'm glad. I'm not complaining about the scrutiny.

Obama. I'm complaining about the lack of scrutiny of bad faith critics, you know. But so to me, I don't know what you think. Like to me, the political fallout seems like it's more about how does this connect to other things that are happening around the world or other impressions that the Republicans trying to make of Biden. Yeah. I mean, I think the brass taxes, who knows what people will be thinking about, caring about in six months. I do think my concern for the Biden team was, you know, the last few days have looked, looked bad. But depending on how things. go in the next week or two or three, it could end up looking even worse. And so they just got to get a handle on it really vast and get people out really fast. To me, this is the number one thing,

is like if they can get tens of thousands of Afghans out and salvage something there and look like they did something that was morally correct and effectively managed, that can change a lot of this impression. So the next few weeks, they should stay, they should do, they should get it done. Because if they can't, if they don't get those people out, and if they're still talking about a few thousand people out and then Afghans start to get killed. And we will learn about that, right? That's a different order of magnitude. And you're going to hear the veterans community,

they're already unbelievably upset about seeing people that worked with them, interpreters, et cetera. But if things get even worse for those interpreters, you're going to see them speaking up to be incredibly vocal. I mean, and there's something because, like, look, I appreciate that Biden was very clear of like, I don't regret this decision because I think it's right for America and here's why.

I think the two things missing, again, to end where we started, was the lack of empathy for the Afghans and the lack of kind of acknowledgement that there are things that we're watching that should be done better. From a guy who was known for his empathy. I mean, we watched human beings fall from the wheelwell of a fucking C-17. I will never forget that image for as long as I live. Obviously, like, I'm not saying that was Joe Biden's fault, but like part of your job as president is to speak. to how people felt seeing that or the humanity of the individual who fell off that plane.

And to have empathy for other people around the world, I mean, and this thing I've been thinking about Tommy a little bit too, because I remember, you know, like we, you can be guilty in the White House sometimes, sometimes when you're so bombarded with criticism, you, you weirdly take that as like validation that you've done something brave and right, you know. sometimes you have to listen to the criticism, you know. And it doesn't mean you have to question your core decision, right? And this is kind of part of what we went through, say, and you were gone by the time with a red line thing. But like, they need to show that they've learned something from this, I think.

And I say that with humility and sympathy, I say that as someone who made that mistake myself. So I'm just trying to learn from my own experience that, you know, that, that, that I think people will respect and appreciate it if, number one, they really, you know, move heaven and earth and take on some risks to get Afghans out next few weeks. And number two, that there's kind of a bit of a demonstration that like, okay, we, we, we 100% stand by this withdrawal decision, but we've, we understood and we did some things wrong and we're going to, you know, evolve to do better. Yeah, and they're going to keep making that point that Jake made that the U.S.

staying in Afghanistan or sending more troops and continuing to fight in the middle of a civil war has a cost for the United States, but has an even greater cost for the Afghan people, especially civilians who are caught up in that fighting and killed. So they're going to have to make that case, but also just have to recognize the recency bias of the images we're seeing, one, and the fact that a lot of members of the media worked with Afghans, interpreters, drivers, fixers, whatever, who they know personally and are trying to help get out. And like that, that humanity, that personal connection is going to drive some of the coverage and drive some of the moral outrage that you're hearing on TV, like fair or not, right? And like, they're going to have to speak to both of these challenges. And like, there's no good option. There was no good option here for Joe Biden in Afghanistan. The table was set for him. Yeah. He could have executed a withdrawal better. And that's just a fact.

And one thing we can talk about in future episodes, like, you know, this, I think around the world, people, like, from what I hear in Europe, it's like uniformly like Biden is no different. than Trump. He doesn't care about people outside of America. It's America first. There's a way to talk about that. I'll be specific about what I mean about evolving and it's a messaging point, but that's like a lot of what I focused on. He also said something towards the end of his speech about like how human rights is the cornerstone of our foreign policy. And I think that clanged with a lot of people because it's like you just kind of didn't empathize with these Afghans. You can't just assert then. But if he'd said, like, I want human rights to be the center of our policy. And I understand that people might be questioning that now, watching what happened in Afghanistan.

But I believe that ultimately, the way to put human rights back at the center of our foreign policy is not by continuing to fight wars. But we want to part of our commitment to human rights is getting as many of these people out and learning from this experience to get better. You know, like, there's a way to talk about these things so that you don't sound like you haven't absorbed that we've taken a hit here, you know? And, you know, what you want to suggest is, no, we understand that and we're going to try to get better. Yeah.

And then just we need to end forever the suggestion, argument, op-ed that says that the U.S. can advance a human rights agenda with the military. By fighting a war. I mean, like, Biden can get the high ground on this in some ways, you know, like, you know, yeah, 100%. That's just, I just, I can't believe that lesson needs to be relearned. I can't believe. I mean, it is astonishing to me. that some of the, there's people I even even heard from it. Like Paul Wolfwitz is coming out of the fucking woodwork, right?

These people, because again, honestly, like, even to be fair to the Trump people, right, this was basically all set in motion. Afghanistan, Iraq, post-9-11, torture, Guantanamo, all this stuff in like a few months. I mean, ICE was created in the post-9-11 reforms. Like, all of these excesses that we've lived through were shaped by a pretty small number of people in the George W. Bush administration. And they're still like held up as these authorities on foreign policy. I mean, what the fuck?

You know, like, like I like, I probably would have rejected the Paul Wolfel. I get more shit from these people. But this is insane that these people are still like just walking around as if they're, their authorities and anything. Wolfowitz, Bremer. Get the band back together. But even like Condi Rice, you know, like, well, she's a national security advisor. Anyway, I, I, I agree.

Now you're just talking your mentions. Sorry. It's okay. We're all there. Anything else we should talk about? No, I mean, unfortunately, I think we'll be talking about this Afghanistan situation going forward. Yeah, and just so folks know, I mean, you know, what I think going forward we'd like to do is obviously get some Afghan voices on the show. We try to get someone in Kabul today who understandably had a lot going on and couldn't make it.

We also wanted to reach out to the administration to see if they wanted to talk more about this. Those are some of the things we're thinking about for this topic going forward. But yeah. And the Europe, I think it'd be important, you know, keep in mind, NATO was with us. A lot of allies were with us. So it'd be good. We'll be looking at, I think, you know, how is this being digested in NATO and European countries? And not the lazy like America has no credibility and more take, but they're more like, you know, okay, what's next for us?

Yeah, the like, the other take. Taiwan is going to surrender, right? The take I have no time for is like the rest of the world now believes the U.S. won't follow through on a. commitments or doesn't understand foreign policies. Like they've seen Vietnam. They've seen Iraq. They know the, they watch the Trump administration. I think the rest of the world is pretty well conditioned to realize that sometimes the United

States makes horrifying mistakes or goes insane and elects reality show demagogues. Like I refuse to believe the rest of the world is like all that surprise right now when we make a mistake broadly. It's like not about our reputation and our standing. It's about Afghanistan and in a poor execution of a withdrawal. all, that all accept. And look, you know, like not succeeding in multi-decade nation-building efforts is not the same as whether or not we'd come to the defense of a NATO ally. Like, this is a different question. And then, and also, like, to these people like, this is America's

lost its credibility. Like, I think that was pretty much that horse was out of the barn with the fucking election of Donald Trump. So, so like, I, you know, like, the insurrection probably didn't help either. The thoughtful, like, you know, chin scratching takes about America losing its credibility in Afghanistan. I don't know. I guess I could argue that maybe the invasion of Iraq played a role in that. Maybe the financial crisis did. And whatever credibility was left, I'd like to think was pretty much gone by the time that Donald Trump is president of the United States. But yeah, no, but by all means get three people at a European think tank to say that America won't fall through. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's it. All right. Well, I think that's it for us

for this week. Yes. Yes. This was helpful for me. Good deep time. Yeah, sorry to go on. But I just, I think, I think, yes, hard to do in 240 characters here. Yeah, man. Well, we'll talk to you guys next week. And I don't know. Share the episode if you like it. Rate, review. We're trying to talk about this anonymous way

that includes a lot of self-criticism. But let us know if we didn't do well. Something like that. Something like that. Self-criticism is always something when people want until you do it. And then it's like, oh, great. Let's criticize some more.

Yep. Well, that's the job. Yeah. All right, guys. Talk to you next week. Yeah. Potsave the world is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.