Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 472 | Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster & How We Can Help | Guest: Morgan Ortagus

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Today we're covering the disastrous withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan organized by the Biden administration. Why has it been such a catastrophe? What went wrong? To help answer these questions, we talk to former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus. She worked in the Trump administration with Christopher Wray and has unique insight as to how things have changed under the new president. --- Today's Sponsors: Annie's Kit Clubs help your kids master new, hands-on skills while expressing their creativity. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 75% off your first shipment! Raycon's E85 work earbuds are a game-changer. They boast a 32-hr battery life, they're super comfortable with active noise cancelling for maximum focus. Go to BuyRaycon.com/ALLIEWORK to get 15% off your Raycon order! Good Ranchers's product is 100% American. Did you know that more than 80% of the grass-fed beef sold in the U.S. is imported from overseas? Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE to get an additional $20 off & free express shipping, plus use code 'ALLIE' at checkout! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. I hope everyone is having a good week so far. Yesterday, we kind of took a break from the new cycle and I gave you some encouragement.

And a lot of you guys said that that was really helpful. So if you are feeling like you are in a pit of day. despair or you're feeling really hopeless, especially about what's going on in the world. I really encourage you to listen to her watch yesterday's episode if you haven't done that. And as promised today, we are talking about Afghanistan. We are talking to Morgan Ortegis. She was spokesperson for the State Department working with Mike Pompeo in the Trump administration. And she has been in Afghanistan several times over the past 20 years or in the Middle East,

at least several times since 9-11. So in a few minutes, she's going to give us some context. She's going to set this all up for us and back us up and remind us, okay, why we're here, what's going on? How did this unfold? Because a lot of us, you know, of course, there have been wars in the Middle East, and we know about 9-11. Some of you, as I will say with Morgan, were not even alive when 9-11 happened, but you kind of understand. Okay, we've been there for a long time. It's been very popular among the American people to get out of Afghanistan, but it's a lot more complicated than just, okay, let's leave. And that's what we are watching unfold. So Morgan's going to talk about that and talk about some of the implications and the consequences and how we need to

look at how, you know, China and Russia play into all of this and what we need to be concerned about and also what we need to be praying for. Then after that conversation, I'm going to give us, once again a little bit more perspective and encouragement. I'm just going to continue to do that a lot because I feel that many of us are carrying this heavy burden of wanting to know so much and do so much and feeling incapable and just kind of powerless. On top of all the things that are going on in this country and in your own personal life, it can be a very stressful and just a very exhausting time for a lot of people right now. So I want to try to refresh us with that eternal. perspective as much as I possibly can. But first, before we get into the conversation with Morgan

Ortegis, I want to talk about what's been going on for the past few days. So if you just haven't been paying attention quite yet, I don't blame you. There's a lot of news out there and it could be very overwhelming. I really didn't look into all of this over the weekend because I just said, you know what? I'm going to start looking at this on Monday because it's just too much. People who know a lot more than I do can kind of give me a rundown of what's been going on. And so that's kind of how I spent a lot of my day yesterday, really trying to, really trying to understand. So this is from the AP. The Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was set to complete its troop withdrawal after a costly two-decade war. So this is something that President Trump promised to

do. And this is something that Biden said that he was going to follow through on. And he promised that troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9-11 by the 20th year anniversary of 9-11. The AP goes on to say the insurgent stormed across the country, capturing all major cities in a matter of days, as Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. and its allies melted away. So we've spent the past 20 years trying to train these Afghan forces, arming them, and so that when we did actually withdraw that the Taliban wouldn't take over because these 300,000 troops that we have spent so much money and so much time and so much energy and so many lives training and fighting with and fighting for, they would be able to fight off the Taliban. And obviously, that has, that has not happened. And it's, you know, it's very strange. I saw some videos across social media that made me feel, I don't know,

it was like a cringy feeling, a sad feeling, like a pitiful feeling. But there were videos of American troops trying to train the Afghan forces over there. And it's just a completely different world. It's a completely different setting and a completely different visual of how you see American troops being trained. Like, I think that one of the faulty premises that we have had, America has had a nation building is thinking that all people. are basically the same, which of course, as Christians, we know that everyone is made in the

image of God and has the same value, but not everyone has the same values. Like, not everyone has the same worldview, the same desires, the same commitment to fighting for individual liberty and all of that, that people in the Western world, and particularly people in America do. And so it just didn't. Our vision for Afghanistan and the Western world's vision for Afghanistan, that has really been driving foreign policy in the Western world for the past, not 20 years, but 200 years.

It just failed to manifest in the way that I think a lot of idealists in the United States thought that it would. So that's part of the disappointment and part of the disarray that we are seeing right now is that the vision that a lot of Americans had of how things would kind of settle themselves after 20 years of what's typically called nation building. It just has been a shock, I think, to a lot of people. And maybe it shouldn't have been. But Morgan will answer that question for us.

So here's a little bit more about what's going on right now. So people are fleeing the country. The Taliban took over. And so basically what's happening right now is that if you are a man left in Afghanistan, you will be forced to join the Taliban. if you are a woman or a girl that's left in the Taliban, you will be, and this is explicit, I'm just warning you, you will likely be raped, you will likely be taken in as a sex slave, you will not be allowed to be educated, so you won't go to school, you will not be allowed

to have a job unless it's in health care, which is just an interesting caveat that they have. They will be forced to wear full burqa, so really only their eyes through like a very thin window will be able to barely be seen. And so these are the most extreme of extreme Islamists. They have a sincere hatred for women and girls. They don't have the same perspective on human life, certainly not the same perspective of equality. And it's just silly for anyone to imagine that they do. But they truly don't have the same idea of human value. People really are, especially women and girls, are just treated as objects. And there are Afghans who are left there right now who have absolutely no hope of anything else except to be subjugated by this terrorist regime.

There were thousands of people who have been trying to get out of Afghanistan, the scenes that we've seen on Twitter of people literally trying to. to cling to American airplanes that are leaving or just devastating. I'm going to play a few of those clips. I encourage you to watch on YouTube so you can see this for yourself. It really is heartbreaking. Here that is. A video that I did not play, which was just, I mean, it reminded me so much of 9-11. So that plane that you watched that Afghan men were clinging to, I don't know what they assumed would happen. I mean, of course, you're just desperate in that case, and so you're not necessarily thinking rationally, and I can't blame them for that. But there were people who,

there were men who managed to hold on to the plane as it was taking off in their videos, as the plane is going into the sky of these people falling to the ground, at least seven people fell to their deaths as they were trying to cling to the side of the plane. So desperate were were they to get out of Afghanistan and out from under the Taliban rule? And one thing that you'll notice in these videos and in some of the pictures that you see of these planes that are full of Afghans trying to escape is that the vast majority of these people are men. And the question that a lot of people ask is like, where are the women and children? Like, why are the women and children out first. And we don't know completely the answer to that question. But again, I would

remind us that not every worldview is the same. Not every culture is the same. I think we think here in the West that everyone has the same kind of chivalrous mentality that, of course, you allow the most vulnerable to go first. And of course, the men stay back and they fight and they allow the women to escape. That's not how it is everywhere. And I'm certainly American. is not like the exemplar of chivalry these days. But that mentality that we have of trying to protect the most vulnerable, which in this case, of course, is women and girls, almost in every case is women and girls, but especially in this scenario, they just, that's not their priority.

That's not necessarily their value. Now, I don't blame these men for wanting to get out at all. Of course, they would be forced to join the Taliban. like they would have a very hard life. Like they would also be subject to abuse. So I don't blame them at all for wanting to get out, but I would be lying if I said it didn't break my heart that the women and girls apparently, obviously, were left behind in many of these cases.

America has, and we'll talk about this with Morgan, they have agreed to accept 30,000 of these Afghan refugees. I'm sure that it will be a lot more. Now, as a Christian, we have hearts of compassion for people that are fleeing torture, that are fleeing the threat of murder. We especially have compassion for our brothers and our sisters in Christ who are facing persecution. Some of the pictures and the videos and the testimonies that we've seen from Christians there, literally being tied to what look like crosses and blinded and beaten.

I'm sure they will be slaughtered as is. so prevalent among Christians in the Islamic world. We want those people to be able to escape. Like, we want them to come here. Like, that is our instinct. I think that's a good instinct. And I, by the way, I think it's good policy to accept, especially the people that are facing religious persecution, especially our allies, especially the people that worked with us there. It's good policy to accept those people into the United States. It's not good policy. It's not good policy. And this is just true. Like it's not lacking empathy or compassion to say this. It's not good policy to just make a blanket number and say we're accepting this many refugees no matter,

no matter what, because what I worry about, and I think what a lot of people worry about is that these people are going to be vetted. How do we know there aren't Taliban sympathizers that are coming in with this group of refugees? Like, do we have any confidence at this point in this administration that they will be vetted and that this will be a process that is characterized by integrity and safety and security, I don't have any confidence in that. And it is absolutely the job of this administration to think about that. Like, it's not, we can't just have such narrow compassion that we only have compassion for the people that are fleeing Afghanistan. You have to also have compassion for people here that are impacted, especially the most vulnerable people here,

that are impacted by these kinds of public policy decisions. You've already seen Emmanuel Macron, the leader of France, say that he said, you know, it's not France's responsibility to accept a bunch of these refugees. The reason why he's saying that is number one. I mean, this is kind of America's mess at this point, at least mostly, primarily. But he's also saying this because of this very inconvenient fact that after Afghan refugees, unfortunately around the world, have a much higher or a disproportionate crime rate than refugees from other countries. So Emmanuel Macron said that. I mean, this is a guy who

is certainly seen as a progressive. France is battling, though, Islamist extremism and has been for quite a while because of much more liberal immigration and refugee policies that they've had in the past. They've really tightened that up. A bunch of these Scandinavian countries have extremely tight controls on immigration. It's really, America is very unique in its willingness to simply, basically open the borders and open the doors for people without a whole lot of conditions. On the one hand, that can be seen as compassion. And I think it is in a lot of cases. On the other hand, it can be seen as a lack of prudence. And even you could see it as just a bad, irresponsible, even wicked leadership to put the interest in the safety and the security.

of your own people last. And that, of course, is what we have seen from this administration and other administrations in the past. So there has to be a balance. Like there has to be a balance of looking at and prioritizing first and foremost our own national security. And then looking at ways, okay, how can we help the refugees that are fleeing this violence and fleeing this danger while still keeping our country safe? Hopefully there's a way to do that. And that. Like I would, I would like to prioritize the women and the girls and the babies and the children, the Christian refugees, the religious refugees that are fleeing, that kind of violence. We have to prioritize our allies, people that helped us there. Of course, we have to prioritize

the American citizens. They're American citizens still left there right now. So we have to prioritize that. And maybe this administration will do that. I'm not really sure. This is Joe Biden and his administration's fault. It's not entirely his fault. This has been going on for a long time. But the fact that not that we left, most people wanted to leave Afghanistan at some point. The so-called forever wars, people were over that. There are different perspectives on that, of course, within conservatism, within progressivism. But I would say most people, this is kind of a bipartisan issue and didn't want to have such a large presence in Afghanistan anymore. People understood that people did not think that we would leave in this way. And Morgan's going to talk to us more

about that, completely haphazard, going to talk about, and you've probably heard about this being Joe Biden in Saigon, that the same thing happened when America left or ended the Vietnam War and left in such a haphazard and chaotic way. That's what we're seeing now, except worse. I mean, left billions of dollars of weaponry for the Taliban to take over. It is an absolute mess. It's an absolute mess. And Joe Biden responded to this. Another big thing about this is that Joe Biden was, he wasn't talking about it. Like all of this was unfolding over the weekend due to Biden's decision making, or at least whoever makes the decisions in the Biden administration. I have my doubts that it's Joe Biden himself. He was absent. Like he wasn't making his statement. The

the press secretary was on vacation. So Joe Biden was at Camp David. And we finally heard yesterday that he was going to make a statement at 345 Eastern Time. It was a little late. And he made his speech. And it was, in my opinion, disappointing to say the least. Let me play just a few clips of that. And then I'll explain what I'm talking about. When I came into office, I inherited a deal to President Trump negotiate it with the Taliban. The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed sometime without trying to fight.

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 gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. So here's where I agree and disagree with Joe Biden. If you listen to the whole speech, you watch the whole speech. It's not very long, so I encourage you to do that. it doesn't sound all bad and it's it's not all bad and what I mean by that is that the thing that I found that was bad is that he created straw man arguments so basically he spent however many minutes the speech was defending um defending his decision his administration's decision to

withdraw from uh Afghanistan and talked about how this has been going on forever he blames Trump basically said, look, this was Trump's plan and we just executed on it. Morgan is going to bust that myth, though, once we talk to her. And this is, he even went on to blame. We didn't play in this clip Obama and past administrations. And then, of course, you heard him blame the Afghan, the Afghan army. And the problem is that no one is arguing, like I said, that's a straw man. No one is arguing that we should not have withdrawn. Like, no one is saying that we needed to stay there forever. We're saying that maybe we could have done it in a more responsible way. Like maybe we could have planned for contingencies. Maybe we shouldn't have left our millions of

dollars of weapons there. Maybe we should have gotten our American diplomats and the allies out first. Like maybe we should have had a better plan in place. Of course, he knows that though. He's setting up a false dichotomy and he is trying to defend something that no one is arguing against. Like no one is saying that we should have stayed there forever. And yet that's what he spends his speech saying, defending that we shouldn't have stayed there forever. No one's saying that. He knows that though. He doesn't even want to address the fact that this was an absolute failure of his administration. It wasn't the Trump administration that executed this. It wasn't Obama. It wasn't Bush. And maybe all of them, I would say definitely all of them have blamed to take 100%. But this is very different than the foreign policy. The success. full foreign policy that we saw under Donald Trump. That is an objective fact. That's not partisan politics. That is just true. Even if you like Joe Biden, you can see that how this was handled was a failure. And he does not own this. Brian Williams on MSNBC tried to say, oh yeah, he owned this. He didn't run away from it. It was awesome. His guest, who is a veteran, immediately pushed back and

said, I feel like I was watching a different speech than you because he did not own anything. And that is absolutely true. Now, where I agree with Joe Biden in this speech and in just, just the couple clips that we just played is that Americans should not be dying in a war, that the Afghans are not willing to fight for themselves. And that is true. They, at the end of the day, I don't think the Afghan army was prepared. Like I said, there were videos of training the Afghan army that didn't look prepared. And also, like, the American troops ran into a lot of problems in trying to train the Afghan

Army, this is a completely different place. Many of the Afghans that they were working with could not read. They could not count. They did not know their numbers. They were illiterate. They didn't know their colors. In a lot of cases, it's being reported. And so think about the challenge that the American troops are faced in trying to train these people, that they really kind of have to go back to the basics of just elementary education. And then on top of that, teach them military strategy, teach them how to use weapons. And it was just our idealistic view of what was going to happen, like I said, a few minutes ago, just was never, was probably never going to pan out how we thought that it would 20 years ago. And also,

like there was a lot of corruption. According to the AP, the U.S. and its NATO allies spent billions of dollars over two decades to train and equip Afghan security forces. But the Western-backed government was rife with corruption. So the Afghan government was rife with corruption. And this is the government that, again, the West helped to install. Commanders exaggerated the number of soldiers to siphon off resources and troops in the field often lack ammunition supplies or even food. There is also reported by several outlets. There was rampant sexual abuse of young bullies by the Afghan troops that the United States was told not to report and just to ignore. And so certainly I think that the United States could have had at least enabled some of

this corruption. So so much of this was ill-advised. And then there, of course, is the concern that our enemies are going to seize on this, as Morgan will talk about, and it's going to spell trouble for us. And for anyone who thinks that, okay, you know, this is, they just want to be, they just want to, you know, deal with their own problems. They just want to live by their own values and be left alone. CNN did an interview. And Michael Knowles pointed out that the Taliban has actually done more interviews with, with the press than the president of the United States has about the Taliban takeover. After Joe Biden did his speech, he didn't say anything to the press. Like he ignored the press and he went back to Camp David. So we've got an absentee, I mean, a complete

failure, a complete failure of leadership. But one of the people in the Taliban talked to CNN and he said this, it's our belief that one day Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. Jihad will not end until the last day. And so you've probably heard this phrase before, like, you have all the watches. We have all the time. Like this is a, this is a goal, this worldwide jihad, this worldwide takeover by Islamic law, Sharia law, is generational. It has been around for a long time. And the people in the Taliban don't see themselves as necessarily wanting to see themselves the takeover of the world. They see themselves as one part of a grand collective and a grand narrative that they are just helping move along and they're absolutely willing

to give their life for that. And so this is not just about them wanting to be independent of American rule. This is they want worldwide, worldwide domination. And so that's where we are. this is a very scary time for a lot of people over there. It's a scary time for people here. I hope that it's a wake-up call for people to see, not just the failures of this administration, but the failure of a particular worldview that clings to cultural and moral relativism

that says, you know, everyone has a basically good value system. Every set of beliefs is basically morally equivalent. there's no culture that's better than another culture. There's no worldview that's better than another culture. There's no set of politics or set of beliefs that's better than another. And that is simply not true. That kind of cultural and moral relativism, that kind of postmodernism, that there is no objective morality. There is no objective higher good. There's no objectively good or bad worldview. It's part of what has gotten us into this mess and has led to bad foreign policy a naive foreign policy decision. So I hope that this just shakes us of that. And I hope it also

reminds us that so many of the things that we complain about here, so many of the things that we call injustice here, which are really just things that we don't like, so many of the things that we are offended by and riled up by here are such small potatoes compared to what most of the people in the world suffer through. And so allow that to give us a little bit of perspective as well. We're going to get into this conversation with Morgan Ortegis, and she's going to give us some more information about all of this. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity,

and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narrative. and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed,

you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Morgan, thank you so much for joining us. For everyone who may not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do? Sure. Well, I was just recently, Mike Pompeo and President Trump's spokesperson at the Department of State, but I've been in the intelligence community defense porn policy for like the past 15 years or so, lived a lot

in the Middle East, been in and out of Afghanistan a lot. And now I'm in Nashville, hence the sign, and working in investment private equity. Okay, I gotcha. And you are the perfect person to give us all the context of what's going on because a lot of people listening, they feel like they have a vague idea of why we're there and what's happening. But some people may not know. Some people listening to this podcast may not have even been alive at 9-11. So can we back up a little bit? And can you just start from the beginning? Tell us why we're here and why is all of this happening right now? You know, it is amazing to think that there's plenty of people listening to this podcast that we're born after or watching this who were born after 9-11. It is kind of amazing. So I think we all,

who are old enough, remember that dark day. I was in college. I was a sophomore in college, actually, when 9-11 happened and quickly switched my major to start studying these sorts of things. But back then, Afghanistan was mostly controlled by the Taliban, but not entirely. I think, sadly, actually, they have probably in many ways more control today than they did have in 2001. And we have the Northern Alliance and various factions within Afghanistan that would fight with the Taliban. Of course, why would any of this be our problem? The reason why it was our problem is because, of course, the Taliban offered safe harbor to al-Qaeda.

They let them plan, execute plots against the United States from Afghanistan. So when we went in in 2001, President Bush said, you know, we are going to make sure that we root out this terrorist group, that they are never a threat to the homeland again. And fast forward, here we are 20 years later. I think we had, we obviously, there's no doubt, we had a lot of mission. creep. We got into nation building and into counterinsurgency and a lot of things that went beyond the scope that I think President Bush and his team imagined. And so that's why in the Trump administration, President Trump asked Mike Pompeo how we start to responsibly draw down from Afghanistan. And that

is the effort that I worked on, or that Mike Pompeo worked on very closely with President Trump. Of course, the way that we were planning on exiting was very, very different than the chaos that you've seen over the past few days. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because in President Biden's speech, which we'll play a couple clips from it in a couple minutes, he talked about, you know, defending his position that we needed to leave Afghanistan. Of course, that's besides the point. President Trump wanted to do that. I think that's backed by the majority of Americans. What we saw, though, was a lot of recklessness. and a lot of chaos. What would the Trump administration have done differently to try to avoid some of the just

anarchy that we're seeing right now? So first of all, it starts with who are the negotiating partners at both sides of the table. So you have to remember that President Trump, I think this is quite obvious, is very different than President Biden. And President Trump's, I think it was the first year in office. He released what we have nicknamed the Moab, the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan. And whenever General Miller, who was the last commander in charge in Afghanistan, when he took charge, he really took the fight to the Taliban. So whenever we came to the negotiating table, the Taliban knew a few things.

They knew it was a president who was willing to use moabs if necessary. And they knew it was a president that had empowered a general to go after them. and they were seeing casualties under General Miller that they had not seen in a very, very long time. So why does that matter? It matters because who is at the negotiating table determines the outcomes. So we were there with a credible threat of force. During this whole process, they saw that we took out Qasem Soleimani, who was the head of the IRGC Quds Force in Iran, the world's leading terrorists. And they knew that we were serious and that we meant business. So when president, Trump gave Mike Pompeo this directive, Pompeo said, you know, we have to withdraw responsibly,

but we have to do it in a way that Afghanistan cannot be a place where Al-Qaeda is given safe harbor to plan terrorist attacks against the United States. That was our number one guiding principle, is how do we ensure that America is safe? So we put provisions in the deal that we negotiated with the Taliban that Mike Pompeo and the team did that said, you know, that that that, the Taliban had to break with al-Qaeda. Now, everybody was really skeptical. If the Taliban was actually going to do it, that's fine. We were very skeptical as well.

It's not like we trusted these guys. But we knew that they had to abide by all of the conditions of the deal for our drawdown. Now, the thing that we were really, you know, very, very focused on, obviously, is do we need to keep a residual force, a small counterterrorism presence? So it's good to think about Iraq, right? So right now in Iraq, we have a small number of troops. We are not at a war in Iraq. We are not facing American casualties, but they are there in an advised, train, and equip mission.

And I think that that's something that we probably could have responsibly done in Afghanistan. President Biden had a very, you know, he wanted to review the deal. He wanted to come up with his own plan. Fine, totally understand. You're the new president. You've got a new team. You want to do it your way. And I have no problem with that.

But if you were going to review and make a decision about withdrawing from Afghanistan or not, why did you not keep your foot on the neck of the Taliban during the process? Why did you disengage during the height in the middle of the summer during fighting season? Why was there no plan? I mean, there's a lot of unanswered questions, but probably would have made a little bit more sense. As for President Biden and his team to say to the Taliban, listen, you guys have not totally abided by the terms of this deal.

And we're going to keep a small presence here. we're going to continue to negotiate with you. And if you start following the terms of the deal, if you start negotiating with the government of Afghanistan, then we will consider drawing down. But President Biden wanted out no matter what. And so when you set a dime line, when you say you want out no matter what,

when you say, you know, we're not living any troops at all, like, well, what, you know, what incentive does the other side have to abide by anything? They don't. Yeah, right. There were media reports. I think there was something in the Wall Street Journal. I believe it was Friday.

So as this was kind of starting to unfold, saying, look, if we pull completely out of Afghanistan, it looks like the Taliban could take over. And so we knew that. I mean, there were people in the media who knew that. Surely there were people in the Biden administration that knew that was a possibility. I think Blinken said that, you know, it could happen within maybe 30 to 90 days. Joe Biden said that this is not a foregone conclusion. We've equipped the Afghan army, 300,000 of them.

you know, they're going to be able to push back on this if it happens. Obviously, it actually happened really in a matter of just a few days and maybe 30 to 90 hours. Where do you think that where do you think that maybe naivete came from in the Biden administration that didn't allow them to see what even some people in the media seemed to see? I mean, surely they've got the intelligence to know that this kind of thing was a possibility and just trying to be as charitable and giving the benefit of the doubt is as much as possible. Like surely, I mean, surely they thought that something else was going to happen and they thought that they had planned for every contingency, but obviously that wasn't the case. So like, where did they fumble the ball in this is what I guess

I'm trying to ask? Sure. So it's funny that you mentioned what Secretary Tony Blinken, the Secretary of state said about how he thought it would take longer. I think he said 60 to 90 days. One of the things that he quoted in, he was quoted as saying in congressional testimony, it could have been congressional testimony or an interview. Anyway, he said it's not going to happen from a Friday to a Monday. And it literally happened from Friday to a Monday. So we've got a little thing that, you know, we're going to need to get through this crisis, but we have a few things I think that Congress is going to need to investigate and take a look at because you have people in the administration. trying to blame the intelligence community saying, oh, they gave us, you know, they gave us

wrong estimates or we weren't alerted. But you have people in Congress, like Congressman Mike McCall from Texas and others who are also breached by the intelligence community. And they're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The intelligence community painted a very, very stark picture for us. So if the intelligence community briefed one thing to Congress and then one thing to the president, that would be really, really bad. And we need to know if. that happens. I'm a little skeptical, but that's what happened. I would think what makes more sense is that they were briefed the same things by the intelligence community, and this administration did not listen to the intelligence. That's my gut. We'll see what happens. I'm sure all of this

will be investigated. But you have to understand if you step back and you look at the worldview of this administration, remember, these are the same people that were in the Obama administration. Same exact people. Tom Lincoln was Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, the current Deputy Secretary of State is the person who is the lead negotiator on the JCPOA, the deal, the Iran deal, as it is popularly known. So if you remember, these are the same people that thought that Iran was actually going to abide by their deal and become a responsible international actor. Right. So they negotiated the JCPOA. They gave away billions of dollars in sanctions relief to Iran. They put no limits on their terrorist activity in the region. They put no limits in this deal

on ballistic missile expansion, for example, it was only focused on the nuclear deal. And so because it wasn't a broad deal, they get billions of dollars of sanctions relief, pallets of cash, as we all famously know about. And what do they do with it? Well, they do what the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism would do, which is they foment more terrorism.

They fund their groups. They build more ballistic missiles. So why do I bring that up? Why is that relevant to Afghanistan? Because it's the same group of people that really believe that the Taliban and Iran and other actors, they just want to be liked. Yeah. They want to be recognized by the international. So they say a lot of things like in diplo speak, the way we talk saying, you know, that they want to be recognized by the international community, that they want to be in good standing.

No, they don't. Yeah. They want power. They want hegemony. They want control. They're terrorists. Yeah. I mean, you've seen.

the UN, I think it was also the leader of New Zealand who came out and said, you know, we are really urging the Taliban to have an inclusive representative government and to recognize the rights of women and girls. And I shouldn't be laughing at that, but it is laughable. It's funny in a very sad kind of way that anyone has that kind of mentality when it comes to a group of people that is only bent on destruction. And is that what's going to happen to Afghanistan? I mean, will it completely be dominated by the Taliban forevermore until, I don't know, another group tries to come on? Until the next invasion. Yeah, tries to dominate. I mean, what's going to happen? And also within that question, where do China and Russia play a part in all of this? Well, let me answer that part first,

because that's easy. They have kept their embassies open in Africa. Afghanistan. They have decent relationships, you know, good relationships. Some of the Taliban have already met with the Chinese publicly. They've talked about this with the Russians. So a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is a win. There's no two ways about it. A win for China and Russia. We no longer control Afghanistan, which does actually share a tiny border with China. So that opens up part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is their Chinese trade initiative to But that's a whole other thing that I could go into what the Chinese are doing there. Right.

So, yeah, so the Chinese Russians, even the Iranians, they're keeping their embassies open. They're talking to the Taliban, big win for our enemies. I think the question that you're getting into is, you know, why would this administration, you know, think, or the UN think that the Taliban could have a representative government? I do think that one's a little bit more complicated because I will say in our administration and the Trump administration, what we were trying to, do was to end America's wrongest war. And we knew that there was no military end to the war. So what we were attempting to do, but again, this is the crucial point that this administration is missing.

You have to do this from a position of strength. And that's what they miss in all of their negotiations. But we were trying to get the government of Afghanistan. So that was until he fled a few days ago led by President Ghani. We were trying to get the government of Afghanistan, the Taliban, women, human rights. We were trying to get everyone at the table to negotiate what the future of Afghanistan looks like for their people. So that was a goal we had.

Some people may have said that was a naive goal. But the bottom line is that the Afghan forces, with our support, were never able to fully defeat the Taliban. So we were trying to bring everyone to the table. But again, it's hard to compare apples and apples, in my opinion, to the effort that Mike They led at the State Department versus the Biden effort because, again, we felt like we were very much negotiating from a position of strength. I think that the world sees this, obviously.

I think Americans on both side of the aisle sees that this was fumbled. Now, I think we probably disagree on the why behind it. And it's that worldview piece that you very well brought up a few minutes ago that I think really kind of divides us of really what should have been the tactics leading up to this. that would have at least mitigated some of the chaos and the loss of life that we're seeing right now. And this doesn't all lay at President Biden's feet, of course, as you started out saying, you know, this has been a longstanding failure of policy in some ways for the past 20 or so years. Do you think that there's a way for the Biden administration to fix this in any way?

Like, are we going to be able to regain any kind of, good reputation on the world stage, are we going to be able to regain the trust of our allies and the respect of our enemies? Or are we done for, at least for the next couple decades? So that's a big, very big question. I would say in Afghanistan, it is going to be very, very dicey over the next few days. And the coming weeks and months, right? It's going to be dicey for a long time. One thing that I think that we should pay close attention to is what happens to all of our equipment that was left behind. Right. We're seeing multiple planning failures by this administration.

We're seeing a lack of a plan to get the people who were interpreters with us. We call them SIVs, SIVs, SIV, people who actually worked with us. We have, they didn't get visas in time. Whenever Ghani left, there was a scramble to get to the airport. So you've got a humanitarian situation on top of everything else. And by the way, everything does need to be carefully vetted. I want all of our SIVs and interpreters and people who were crucial to the fight to come over, but we have no clue how this administration is vetting extended family members.

Are they letting extended families? Is it just immediate family? There's a lot of just process questions and things that should have been planned out and explained to the American public and to the Afghans ahead of time. I think one of the reasons it wasn't planned out is because they just didn't think Afghanistan would fall right away and they didn't think it was going to be an issue right away. But that's why you have contingency plans in place just in case things happen that you don't expect. I'm very concerned about our equipment. Not that I think that the Taliban necessarily has the capability to use the equipment over the long run, but we have some of America's most expensive and precious machinery.

and why wouldn't they turn it over to the Iranians or the Russians or the Chinese, right? Right. Or to the highest bidder, whoever, whoever wants it. So all of that is very concerning. Then as it relates to getting our reputation back, I think it was funny. Just a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I think it was in June. Biden was at the NATO summit and he was at G7. And there was all of this talk about how America was back. Diplomacy is back. Adults are in the room. I think it will be a long time before the year. Europeans say that again. This is not, you know, what they expected. I think that it's funny, the behavior that Biden is doing right now is what they expected from Trump, but he didn't do.

And so it is going to be, you know, it's going to be tough, not just for Afghanistan, but if you think about the countries, here's what I think is like key, and this is what I get, you know, in my nerd world, the things that I focus on, the countries in Central Asia, like Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, all of these countries. are in between Afghanistan and China, right? And these countries are crucial, crucial to, in my opinion, to being a part of the alliance that we build of democratic countries, of pro-Western countries that are going to be a part of the alliance

that we should be building to counter China. I think that the argument for all of those countries in Central Asia, that we have been, you know, courting and trying to get them not to take all the money, from the Belt and Road Chinese program, not to let the Chinese, you know, in and own ports and own their critical infrastructure. You know, we've been trying to get them out to have Huawei, right? The Chinese authoritarian 5G company.

We've been trying to convince them not to have that in their systems. So if you look at these countries in Central Asia and in Southeast Asia, in my opinion, are the most crucial countries in the long-term fight that we are up against with the Chinese Communist Party. and all of those countries are a lot closer to Afghanistan than we are in terms of proximity. And how are those countries going to now ally with us in the fight against China? That's my big concern. Yeah.

Well, hopefully that's a concern of the Biden administration as well. I think best case scenario, this is some kind of wake up call for the Biden administration and maybe the American people in general. Not everyone knows the ins and outs of foreign policy. I certainly don't. But we do know what it looks like to be human. humiliated on the world stage and we don't like it. We do know what weakness looks like and we do, no matter how much you know, no matter how much you know about foreign policy, people don't like to

feel that their leaders are not doing what is in the best interest and in the safety interests of their constituents. And I think that's one concern right now. Like, does this possibly pose a threat to America in our homeland? That's really. important question. And here's part of the problem that we're going to have in answering that question going forward. How do you have intelligence collection capabilities, right? You have that whenever you have, wherever you are in the world, not just Afghanistan, you have assets in the region, right? You have, you know, wherever you are, you've got embassies, you've got, you know, maybe bases, you have friendly countries. We have a variety of different methods, which I'm not

going to go into to collect intelligence. But when we have pulled everything out, including our embassy and our entire presence in Afghanistan, for me, I see a massive intelligence gap. Now, the U.S. military is saying we have these over the horizon capabilities. I remain highly skeptical of that. Like if you think, for example, we have a base in Doha, Qatar. That's, I think, a four and a half hour flight from Afghanistan. So it's not like a rock. So if you go back and you think about, like 2009 in Iraq whenever Obama started pulling everyone out. And then we started seeing the rise of ISIS. And it took a couple years for Obama to go back in. But eventually Obama had to go back into Iraq because there was, you know, because ISIS constituted in forms taking over the country

and was chopping off heads, right? And the American people woke up, right? Especially in that 2012 and other elections was like, wait a minute, we don't want them coming over here and chopping off heads. So we need to take care of this over there. Well, in Iraq, if, you think about the map of the Middle East, we have bases, right, all, you know, all over the place. We have people in Bahrain. We have people in Qatar. We have so many, you know, things that we can use in what we call the Cintcom, what the military calls CINCOM. We are not nearly as prolific in Southeast Asia. So it's going to be, I know this is a long-winded explanation, but it's important to think about the geography. When we say, well, what is the intelligence community going to watch, you know,

what happens to al-Qaeda. Okay, well, they'll try, but they have just had, you know, an arm and a lead chopped off in terms of their collection abilities. Right. So we're going to have to rely on a lot of partners and we're going to have to watch it very closely. If the Taliban, once again, allows al-Qaeda to reconstitute and to green ground and to start planning attacks in Afghanistan, we're going to have a very, very, very big problem. We're going to need to go back in. And it's going to be a lot harder and a lot more expensive. and not as easy to do as everyone thinks. Right.

I think people probably have good reason to wonder if the Biden administration is going to be as cautious and careful as we think they should be in trying to prevent America from having those vulnerabilities. We already know we're accepting, you know, I think it's 30,000 refugees, which I think most Americans understand. Okay, America kind of helped cause this mess. It seems like our responsibility to accept a lot of these people. and especially the women and children that are there. I think most people have a heart to do that. At the same time, there's a lot of fighting age men that are also coming to the United States. And we want to make sure that they're carefully vetted.

How do you do that? Is this administration committed to doing that? Very hard to believe when the southern border is basically wide open, where there's been hundreds of thousands of migrants who I guarantee you're not vetted, who are coming in. And so it feels very much like an America last. situation in a lot of in a lot of ways and just swinging from president trump who was so adamant about putting america first and you know progressives complaining about that well i would say that's

probably a better alternative to america last which is what we're seeing right now unfortunately um last question for you you said that you've got friends that you are trying to get out right now tell us like what what the state is what people can be thinking about what people can be doing here and what people can be even praying about as we're thinking about the situation right now? Yeah, thank you so much. That's a great question. First of all, if anybody wants to donate, I know there's several organizations out there. The one that I've been promoting is no one left behind. You can just Google it. The website will come up and they're working very studiously to try and get the right people out. They're really focused on people who were interpreters,

There's people who have letters proving that they worked with, the military, the U.S. Embassy. And so that's a fantastic organization. Obviously, I'll keep the, you know, names quiet because we're still trying to get them out. But, you know, I have a friend who we actually brought over to the U.S. He did an LLM at Harvard, went back to Afghanistan, was a lawyer there, has a family, and he employed other lawyers. I mean, he did so much to advance the cause over the past, you know, decade or so that I've known him.

And so he is, we're trying to, we're trying to get him out. I guess I'm a little hesitant to say too many details because I'm very, I'm holding my breath, of course, hoping that we can get him out. But, you know, there's also other people, a friend of mine sent me a picture just last night of a guy who was interpreter with the military. young guy has a young life and they have three-month-old babies twins. Wow. And they were just sitting there at the airport, no food, no water, holding the babies and the mom is nursing.

But, you know, as you and I know, with little babies, that doesn't, you know, you got to drink some water to be able to nurse those twins, right? Where are the diapers? Where are the things? So getting his information to the State Department. And there's, you know, a million more tragic cases like that for sure. obviously some people there, listen, we know this. There's some people there who are just desperate to get out.

They may not have worked with us and they're just, you know, trying to get out. And this administration does really needs to do a very thorough job of vetting that. But I can tell you the people that have been brought to my attention that I've worked with, you know, are old people, you know, with babies, you know, small children. And they're fearful for their lives. You know, one of my friends with small children yesterday that had worked for years texted me. I think it was in the morning our time and just said, I've given up. It's hopeless. You know, it's, I'm done for it. I said, do not give up. Do not give up. I said, I know you're frustrated, but you have three children, you have a wife, you have a family.

You cannot give up. And hopefully, hopefully we can get them out of there. Yeah. Gosh, well, we will be thinking about that and praying, praying about that adamantly. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of this to us. Your insight is really, really valuable. And thank you for just kind of setting the scene for what's going on. so people can kind of get a better sense of what to focus on. I really appreciate it. I encourage everyone to follow you, to keep getting your insight. Thank you so much. Thanks.

Appreciate it. All right. So I know there's so much going on in the world. And as we've talked about so much, like sometimes we're just at a capacity to, we can't care about. We are just filled to the limit of things that we have to care about, not just when it comes to ourselves, but maybe your family is going through a really hard time right now. Maybe you are dealing with sick relatives.

Maybe you're going through a hard time financially. Like you already feel the weight of your own world on your shoulders and then adding everything else can just be really tough. And maybe you're taking care of your community and you're fighting for a variety of different causes. Let me just relieve you of the burden of having to carry everything yourself. You don't. God is completely in control.

We don't know why things happen the way that we do. we don't understand how things are going to come together, but we have to trust that God still works all things together for the good of those who love him. We have to pray for our brothers and our sisters and Christ who are in Afghanistan, whom we have more of a connection with, that spiritual connection that, that kinship that we have with them as members of the body of Christ is greater than the connection that we have to our fellow Americans. We have to be praying for them. We have to be thinking about them. Be careful about who you donate to. I don't have a list of organizations in front of me that are necessarily trustworthy, but I do think that we have

to use a lot of discernment and giving our financial aid and our support. I'm sure there are people that you trust that can kind of point you in the right direction, but let's be just praying that the Holy Spirit would protect them, strengthen them, especially the women and the girls in the region. I just think about the babies. I think about the mothers. I think about just, I can't. I imagine the panic that they're feeling, the desperation that they're feeling right now, and just that the Lord would comfort them and would be with them. We don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know when Jesus is coming back. We don't know when we're going to be rescued, when they're going to be rescued from all of this stuff. Right now, what we're called

to do is all Christians are called to do is to be grateful to rejoice in the Lord always, to continue to pray, to cast our cares on him because he cares for us. Let's be thankful for the freedom, for the privileges, for the luxuries and the blessings that we have right now that so many in the world will never be able to enjoy. Let us give, let that give us some perspective and let us even more than just having an American and temporal perspective. Let us also have an eternal perspective that one day God will rule in perfect peace and he will avenge all of the wrong that's been done and he will end the wrongdoer forevermore and let our joy and our hope come from that. All right, we'll be back here tomorrow. I'll see you guys then.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

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