The Dispatch Podcast - Failure in Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

In this episode, Steve moderates a conversation with David French and Tom Joscelyn about the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan. They cover the Biden administration’s decision not to begin evacuations before the Taliban captured Kabul, intelligence failures, the state of the Afghan military, and much, much more. Show Notes: -Read Vital Interest for Tom’s latest analysis on Afghanistan -Read The French Press for David’s latest analysis on Afghanistan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, and this week we are going to have a special podcast for you. This week on Dispatch Live, Steve Hayes, David French, and Tom Jocelyn, who writes the newsletter of vital interest for us, had a full, wide-ranging conversation about Afghanistan. What's happening on the ground, what we know, what we don't, where U.S. foreign policy goes from here. I think you'll find it to be a very interesting conversation. Tom, I want to start with you, and we're not going to waste any time. President Biden gave an interview tonight with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, in which he said, in effect, what we've seen transpire over the past week was inevitable. nothing could have been done to avoid it. And contradicting the speech that he gave in April, when he said this would be an orderly phased withdrawal, said that they understood that there was going to be chaos, that there was going to be a mess when we left. What do you make of those comments? Well, I mean, the first thing is that President Biden's given three speeches now since April on his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. And of course, the comments that he made to Stefan

monopolists contradict what he said in those speeches, including the speech he gave just last month in which he was claiming that the Afghans were the, as well equipped as any army in the world, and that they had 300,000 men going up against 75,000 men for the Taliban, and so therefore they had the capacity to hold their country. That was the argument he made just last month. And, of course, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, backed him up with that a couple weeks later, saying that the Afghans had the capacity to defend their country. The problem with all this is that all those metrics, as I've written and argued for a long time, that they were citing, this was, these were done by spreadsheet jockeys. These weren't real numbers. These weren't real metrics. This didn't reflect the reality of the war on the ground. This was the paper view of the war that was going through Pentagon circles. It was not the reality on the ground. So the bottom line is, as I said the time, what President Biden was arguing then was wrong. Now he's basically reversing himself and saying, I saw this coming all. along. But now if that's true, let's say if that's true and he saw this coming all along,

then the evacuation should have been much better planned, right? I mean, basically, if you really did see this coming all along, you would have done a few things. One, as my colleague Bill Rocio was saying right from the beginning, you would have held on to Bogram until the very last man was out. You would have turned the lights out in Bogram, not Kabul. Now, you saw chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Millie today, or in recent hours, explain why they were evacuating from Kabul, which is what makes the scene so much more chaotic and so much more problematic for the American side. And he claims, well, we had to keep six to seven hundred troops in and basically this is why we chose Kabul. What he's talking about is that this was one of the

many miscalculations here. The State Department tried to keep its embassy open right to the very last for I don't know what reason. Okay, we can debate that later or talk about that later. We can talk about the servile diplomacy that I've documented for a while here with the Taliban. But the six to 700 number he cited was basically security for the embassy, even though the Taliban had said you're all out. All Americans are out. So they had this idea, which was totally inconsistent with what the Taliban's expectations were, that the U.S. was going to keep this small force to defend the embassy and other Americans between the embassy and Kabul Airport. This is all, this is what one of the main things I criticize about this war. It shows the lack of clarity in their decision making and their understanding of what's going on. That was not acceptable to the Taliban. If you saw that the chaos was coming as President Biden now claims, you would not have made that decision. You would have, in fact, had the evacuation through Bogram, you would have had American personnel streaming out of the country prior to the final days of all this. You would not have led yourself to the worst possible chaos you could have in trying to get out here. Now, just to put some scenery to this, Cobble's a city of

about four and a half million people. You've had a massive refugee crisis, so it's not really clear how many people are there. You had Americans living throughout the city. You had Americans living throughout Afghanistan. The U.S. government doesn't actually know how many Americans are in Afghanistan. You can see that in the different assessments of the Biden administration has put out. And this again speaks to the haphazard nature of this withdrawal. And I'm afraid my big fear here, really, in the coming days is that the Taliban is going to capitalize on the lack of American leadership and try and humiliate us in some fashion. David, we're talking at a time when, as Tom says, you're getting vastly different estimates of how many Americans are in country right now.

You have the White House saying 11,000 more, at least 11,000. You have the Pentagon yesterday giving estimates of somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. Two-part question to you, what does it say that we have absolutely no idea how many people are in country? Number one, and number two, when you look at the way that this has unfolded and different comments you're getting from different parts of the U.S. government, the CIA saying, We basically said this was coming in leaks to the New York Times. The Pentagon saying nobody could have seen this coming. Joe Biden saying, months ago, this will be planned in orderly, saying today, this kind of chaos was inevitable. What are we to make of this?

You've spent time in the military. You've spent time overseas. I think until the average person sitting at home watching this, it just screams total incompetence. Are we right to conclude that? Well, first let's deal with the confusion right now. So the confusion right now, there's two components to it in my mind. One is the confusion that Tom was talking about when you're talking about sort of the incompetence of the planning, the shock and the surprise that a lot of people are feeling when the collapse was measured not in months, not in years, not even in weeks, but in days, in days. I was a pessimist when I was thinking about the way all of this was unfold if we pulled out. And I was thinking weeks. I was thinking a collapse would be weeks once we really pulled the rug out instead of the days that we've seen.

So what we're seeing is a situation where the situation is spiraled. And whatever Biden says, the idea that he was moved, as the commander of chief, he was preparing America for this. and the American military for this, I think, is just fiction. Then there's another thing in play here. One is the fog of war. There's a lot going on that we don't fully understand. We're going to have to understand that a lot of the reports that we're getting right now are wrong to greater or lesser degrees.

We might not know the full story of everything that's just transpired over the last two to three weeks for another two to three years before we really fully understand everything. that transpired. And so we're operating in the fog of war. We're operating in a situation of where some people might have predicted this kind of chaos, but the planners did not obviously plan for this level of chaos. And so what are we to make of it? I mean, this is, this is what, you know, this, what I served in Iraq. I didn't serve in Afghanistan. When we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, one of the big differences is al-Qaeda, our primary foe, you know, our primary foe, in Iraq was a tiny fraction, a tiny fraction of what it was at the height of the surge, for

example, what it was even in the immediate aftermath of the surge. And so it took time for the decline and the fall to occur. Here we pull out when the Taliban are still relatively strong and by some measure stronger than they had been in recent years. And so they were prepared to capitalize on this pullout in a way that the tiny fraction of al-Qaeda that was left over after the surge was not in Iraq. And so this is one of the consequences that we're seeing. And I saw Tom raise his fingers when I started talking. I was wondering, you know, what your thought was.

There was obviously something I said that triggered a thought. Yeah, well, the collapse wasn't in days. So this is what the military got wrong throughout the whole thing. My colleague, Bill Rojo and I have been tracking this very carefully for a very long time. And he was producing maps that showed exactly what the Taliban and al-Qaeda were doing in terms of encircling provincial capitals and making steady gains. And the blitzkrieg that they launched was launched for May 1st, which was the withdrawal date that was enshrined in the Trump administration's withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. So they had this all planned and offensive to start on May 1st. What they did between May 1st and some point in late June was take more than half the country.

So it's not talking about days here. You're talking about they had this Blitzkrieg plan to take most of the country. What they were doing then was they had it all pre-set up to then, they had already encircled the number of provincial capitals. They encircled the remainder of them and then tightened the news. And we were very clear that this is exactly what was coming. This is exactly what they were going to do. And that this was exactly how they were going to carry out their war fighting. The military made massive miscalculations here. They said that basically they dismissed Bill and me when we would warn them about the rural uncertainty strategy and circling the provincial capitals. They said, no, no, they can't take any provincial capitals or they can't hold them. We said, look out. You know, Bill was reporting. Bill actually, I actually encouraged Bill to write something in April and May called the coming Taliban offensive, which explained this. So the collapse wasn't days, really. What you saw the end gain here that Millie referred to of 11 days here was just the end of this offensive. And the offensive was over a couple months, several months. And that had been, they had primed the pump for that over the previous year or two. And so we've been tracking this all along.

This was an offensive that they had well designed, well planned out, and this is where the real failure here is by the U.S. military. They had the Afghan forces in the Afghan side fighting for an imaginable, a totally delusional draw, this idea that they were going to have a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, whereas the Taliban and al-Qaeda was fighting to win. And so they had set all this up, even with the U.S. military and country, and yet the U.S. didn't see it coming. That's the real problem.

So all these estimates about the potential fall of Kabul, and everything. They were too abstract, from my view, when you see the reporting on them. They, you could see the U.S. military itself. I mean, the intelligence community had some idea of this, of course. But the U.S. military itself, when they were describing this, they didn't really get the degree of the severity. In fact, you can find DIA reporting where they were talking about several provincial capitals being surrounded. We were saying there were 17 at the time surrounded. This is earlier this year. So they, I think they really messed up in figuring out the timing of all this. The military did. So I'll let David answer for himself, but I suspect what he meant was the final

collapse. The final collapse was a matter of days when we had estimates that suggested it would be months. But I think, David, let me ask you about Tom's broader point, which I think is a very, very good one. This was happening. We saw this in May. I mean, Tom wrote about this for us and said the Taliban are surrounding these provincial capitals. The offensive has begun. I remember we talked about this a month, six weeks ago on a dispatch podcast and said, what's so striking about what's happening in Afghanistan today is the Taliban are not waiting to we're gone. They are doing this now. I think there was a psychological play where they wanted to be doing this while we were still in country to humiliate us further. But what do you say to Tom's broader point that

it's not just that they failed to plan. It's that they failed to recognize what was happening under their own noses. Oh, I mean, yeah, from that standpoint, and, you know, when Tom's talking about the Taliban tighten its grip and tightening its grip, you know, from that standpoint, absolutely there was a massive failure here. There was a massive failure here. And anyone who has looked at armies over the course of history knows that every fighting force, every military force that suffers an abject defeat reaches a tipping point. And when it reaches that tipping point, things can change and transform suddenly, shockingly, you know, and this is not something that's completely alien to the American experience.

I mean, we had, if some listeners and some viewers may remember the great bugout from the, you know, from North Korea as one of the strongest fighting forces in the world dissolved in the face of Chinese offensives. And so you can have, a military can reach a tipping point where it essentially dissolves. And that tipping before, the process to reach that tipping point can take years. It can take months. There can be an offensive that squeezes and squeezes and squeezes. And then when the collapse comes, the collapse can happen with astonishing speed. It's something that we saw in Iraq. I mean, in 2014, when ISIS took Mosul, it is still.

one of the more stunning routes that you can imagine between two on-paper mismatched forces, a couple of thousand ISIS fighters, roughly, confronting a couple of divisions of the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi army just dissolved and dissolves very quickly. But there was a process, of course, before that time. There was a process before that moment. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, if you've been reading Tom for a while, you know that this process was absolutely, this process had been ongoing. And, you know, one of the things that when we look back at this, that time when we go down to 2,500 troops

from, you know, over 10,000, that was the time our enemy used quite well. The enemy was not asleep. This was not a, everything did not just sort of freeze in place while everyone conducted all of these good faith to negotiations, we were weaker. We had a much smaller, lighter footprint. And this is where I sometimes disagree with folks who I see online, who say, all we had to do was keep 2,500 more troops there and everything would be fine. I disagree with that. We would have required a larger force. Right, right. That's right. Look, I just add one point to that, the process that we're talking about here, how it's hauled out. It's very, I think what's striking to me is because one of my main criticisms of the war in Afghanistan is so few people,

so few people have really been paying attention over time that they didn't really know what was happening here in the war and how it's unfolding. And you've seen in recent days that former President Trump and former Vice President Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are trying to employ this revisionist history in which their agreement in Doha on February 29, 2020 with the Taliban was somehow a deterrent and was somehow in force and had led to a stable and more peaceful Afghanistan. This is one of the claims that Pence makes in his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. This is pure fantasy, folks. So what actually happened was that when the Trump administration signs a steeled the Taliban

and Steve, you know, I said this that day, right? And I said it beforehand and I said it after. What that was, that was really one of the final death blows for the Afghan government. Because remember, the Afghan government is cut out of the negotiations. The Trump administration makes concessions to the Taliban, uneven concessions to the Taliban, doesn't extract any concessions for the Afghan government. And the Taliban looks at this and says, this is it. They've agreed to get out by May 1st of next year.

That's a very important date because that's when this offensive began. The current blitzkrieg that we saw, that's when it began, was the date that was enshrined by the Trump team for America to withdraw. So they had this all, they had primed the pump for that date. And what they said was, the Taliban said to everybody was, look, they just capitulated. They surrendered. America surrendered. They're not going to fight any longer. So what they did in the preceding months, we're talking about the process of hollowing out. What actually happened here is the ANDSF, the Afghan security forces that have been set up by the Americans, suffered thousands of casualties from February 29th, 2020 on. Everybody's talking about how the Americans didn't suffer any. Yes, we were glad for that. But guess what? The Afghans suffered thousands of casualties. And then you can go to the UN reporting, and you can see what happens in September of last year. The Taliban then really goes on the march. And you can see the civilian casualties, which in the first half of 2020,

had dipped, all of a sudden spike. They go through the roof. Why? The Taliban now is unleashed in the hounds in a bigger way than they ever have because they're getting ready to take over the country. And that was not, Tom, let me just interrupt you for a second. And that was not a violation of the agreement. No.

Which is really important. Excellent point. I've watched this on the discussion on the news and people think that this was some kind of a violation of agreement. One of the reasons the agreement was weak was that it didn't contain provisions that prevented. I mean, in addition, I think it's worth pausing for a second. I try to emphasize this every time we talk about Afghanistan. I think it's worth pausing for a moment and recognizing that the Afghan government wanted to be a part of these talks and was excluded by the Trump

administration. They were told because the Taliban requested, you cannot be a part of these conversations. Tom, the question I have. Can I just finish my thought there on that? Please. Yes, please. Let me just say one thing, sorry. So when this process, so not only do they killing thousands of Afghan security forces Taliban al-Qaeda. And not only do they then, there's a spike in civilian casualties that you can see in September, starting in September 2020, what happens is the Taliban goes to other A&SF commanders and says, hey, the Americans are leaving you, right? They're not going to fight. They're not going to save you. So why are you going to fight? Why don't you turn, why don't you cut a deal with us so that when the time is right,

you just turn over their territory so we don't have to slaughter you and your men? So part of what is baked in here, people are talking about how the Afghans didn't fight. That's not true. that's a smear of the Afghans, you know, over 60,000 Afghans have died since 2014 when they've led the ground forces in the fight against this insurgency. But beyond that, the reason why more Afghans didn't fight in the final end game was that this deal meant the death blow for the Afghan government. A&DSF forces, thousands of them fought to the death. Others decided to cut a deal and turn over their territory to the Taliban immediately. So this was all a very well-designed military strategy by the Taliban and, in fact, Al-Qaeda. I have to keep inserting al-Qaeda because this is the force

here that nobody understands, right? This was a very well-designed military strategy by the Taliban al-Qaeda, and I've got to say it was much better designed than anything the Americans were coming up with. And one final point, I have to stress this again. The American strategy since 2018 was to force the Afghan government to fight for a draw while the Taliban and al-Qaeda were fighting for a victory. You know David and Steve, you know, the old maximum, you know, war is politics by other means. What the U.S. was doing was forcing the Afghan government to fight for a political outcome that was an impossibility. The only political outcome from the Taliban's perspective was the resurrection of its Islamic Emirate Afghanistan, and you'll see that

announcement in the coming days. So, David, let me pick up on Tom's point there, because I think it's a fair point, and it's really important that he adds the context about the Afghan National Defense Forces. But they melted away. We have spent billions and billions and billions of dollars training them there were depending on how you count them 300,000 give or take they were trained to meet this moment and they didn't fight weren't they though even if you say even if you even if you concede I mean I think it's fair to put this in context as Tom does 50 60,000 66,000 I think is the accurate count Afghan security forces that have been killed in this in this fighting they didn't fight. Cabo was gone in in a couple of days. Shouldn't Americans look at this? And I mean,

doesn't Joe Biden have a point when he says, they weren't going to fight. He shouldn't smear them. Let's just stipulate. He shouldn't smear them. And he shouldn't pretend like they haven't taken casualties. But at a certain point, doesn't he have a point when he says, they didn't fight? They didn't fight. Yes and no. Yes and no. Okay. So and look, again, I'm, I'm, I'm going to refer back to Iraq experience with full knowledge, Iraq is not Afghanistan. Okay? There are differences between the two countries, but there are also some similarities, I think, that are interesting and instructive. In 2014, Iraqi Army divisions melted in the face of ISIS, even though they outgunned ISIS, they had American equipment.

In many ways, they were better trained and equipped than the Iraqi army units that we saw melt away in the last few days. just gone, just left, just vanished. Okay, you fast forward. So that was June 2014, the quote-unquote battle of Mosul, really more the fall of Mosul takes place. You just fast forward to late 2015. And all of a sudden, the effort to retake Mosul takes place. Well, who's fighting that?

It's not the 82nd Airborne. It's not the 1001st Airborne. it's a bunch of Iraqi army troops with Kurdish troops as well and some Shia militia but it's a lot of the same sort of it's the same military that just left just left

not long before and what do they do? They fight one of the largest urban battles that we've seen since World War II ultimately victoriously and one of the things that I write about and I wrote about this week is what is it that fuels an army what is it that fuels what is it that

causes a person to want to stand and fight and risk their lives. What is it? It's not just their equipment. You know, it's not just they have an up armored Humvee or they're in an MRAP and they've got an M4 and, you know, maybe a few more, a few helicopters out there. There's something about this idea that a hope, this idea that we can win, we can win. We maybe not just we can win, we will win. We will win. And one of the interesting things about when you add even a small amount of American forces to a much larger force of allies, whether it's in Iraq or somewhere else, it completely alters the balance of power in a given fight. And that's what people have to realize. And then combine

it with this. If you are losing to the Taliban, if you are losing to al-Qaeda, and I agree with Tom. Let's use these terms interchangeably. It's not like you are, you know, that you're the British army losing to the American revolutionaries at Yorktown where you're going to get to fold your flag and march respectfully out or that you're lee surrendering at Appomatics and you're going to get to march respectfully out. You are losing to vicious people who in all likelihood may murder you, murder your family, and what are your options? You're losing, you're losing to some of the most vicious people on the planet. Well, one of the things you do is you cut a deal. You switch sides. This is something that happens in the world. People cut deals and they switch sides, or they melt away

and they try to blend into a civilian population. And look, I get it. This is not what we would want and hope and expect for an army of that size. That is not. That is not what we want. But we also know you have to look at, you have to pull back the lens and look, they've lost 50, 60,000 people. That's 20 times, 22, 23 times our own loss rate. And then they reached a breaking point. They reached a breaking point. And that's what happened. And we've seen it happen before. We've seen it happen before with other allies that we've had in our history when we've pulled away and we have taken away their hope. We have taken away their hope. Yeah, I mean, I think Tom, Tom, let me just jump in with a question before you answer that. Just put it in broader context. And we talked about this

a little bit on the dispatch podcast today. I mean, I think one of the main differences here, if you think, and I think it is worth stipulating that there are major differences between what we did in Iraq and what we're doing in Afghanistan. But one of the things that that happened in the context of the surge was George W. Bush said, we are going to win. We're going to stay there forever if we need to stay there forever because we're going to win and we're going to crush you. We're going to defeat you. And there's no question about it. And I think that plays in the psychology both of the enemies and of the Americans fighting and our allies on the ground. And the difference in Afghanistan is that beginning in 2009 when Barack Obama gave his speech at West Point,

announcing that he was going to search troops into Afghanistan, but at the same time announcing a date, not just that we were going to withdraw, but a date for withdrawal. And then you had successive presidents, three in a row, make very clear and I think unambiguous ways that our top priority was getting out. And you have had, as we discussed on the dispatch podcast today, Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden in a letter to Mullah Omar, Tom, that you've written about talk about the need to just outweighed americans we are impatient we operate on a political calendar al qaeda and the taliban operate on generations they can afford to wait us wait us out and they understood because we had told them that our top priority was getting out they understood

that if they waited they would win how much time does that play in to what we're watching unfold here? Well, I mean, the damage done by the failure in America's erratic political leadership, and I would say incompetent military leadership, and I will save that for another time or maybe later, is incalculable. I mean, you've had three presidents in a row, as you say, say they don't want to fight in Afghanistan, right? I mean, if that's the American position, and this is why I have a hard time supporting, for example, military action anywhere. If you don't have the, if the Oval Office is saying we don't want to fight there, then, you know, then I mean, I'm sorry. It's hard to rationalize sending troops there, right? I mean, I mean, you've had, but what happened is so just to back up for a second, for one, one quick point. Just so you know, my, my history of this is not of the last year from February 29th, 2020 onward was not to totally absolve Afghan forces whatsoever. What I was saying, what I was just simply saying is that the American side likes to put all the blame on the Afghan side. And I'm saying that's not true. That incompetence on the American side.

shaped the outcome of the war. Absolutely. And there were multiple breaking points for Afghan forces before they got to the May 1st Blitz Creek and before the endgame we witnessed this month. And of course, you still have some forces fighting north of Kabul right now. But all that said, what I think people don't get is that since the Obama administration, this idea that the Taliban isn't really America's enemy really seeped into the U.S. government's thinking. And so you had President, Vice President Biden, for example, say the Taliban is not our, our per se, our enemy, not our enemy per se. He said that when?

I think, I think 2011, you know. 2011 is right when he was vice president. Right, right. And the thinking, the thinking, that thinking, however, you remember, Steve, I was working with you at the time, and I was writing about this back then. I wrote about the Fantasyland Peach Talks was a piece I wrote in 2010. And I started understanding what had happened here. And this is something that America's, I think, really need to deal with.

what what had happened here is the taliban apologia and afghan war revisionism had sunk into american channels and so that the the entire vision of the afghan war was shaped by i think absolutely uh morally and intellectually corrupt ideas so for example you'll still see people to this day say well the taliban they didn't really harbor bin lad and they were willing to turn them over and it was it was the bush administration that insisted on going to war i've seen that claim now the new york times daily beast washington posts and multiple other outlets even a recent week right? That's a claim that I've seen in U.S. government channels, right? This is the thing. If the U.S. government doesn't think that an entity is its enemy, right? Then you get this

deep ambivalence in the war fighting, deep ambivalence. And that deep ambivalence has absolutely, for the last decade, shaped the conflict across administrations. You saw it. It has to. You saw it shape it during the Obama administration. You talked about the time stamped on the surge that he announced. Remember, before the surge even came to an end in 2000, 11, America was chasing these fantasy land peace talks for the Taliban. It was America chasing the Taliban for a peace deal, not them coming to us. In fact, it was so servile, okay, and so humiliating that America paid $150,000 to a fake Taliban commander because they thought he was a real Taliban commander would finally give them some talks. It wasn't until they actually

found a guy to talk to after this iterative process of going through phony Taliban commanders that they finally found somebody to negotiate with. Those talks ended in a fiasco in 2013. But the point is that if you're the enemy, right, the Taliban and al-Qaeda is watching this, of course, and the Taliban is experiencing this together, by the way, and they see this, they say, America doesn't have any will for this fight. they don't want to be here. They want to get out. They're looking for a desperate way out. And then, of course, amazingly, one of the most amazing parts of the story is that the Trump administration then picks up this track that was left off by the Obama administration and talking with the Taliban and then goes full steam down, down the track with it. And that talk, those talks and the deal that was consummated in Doha last year really were the death knell for the whole thing.

I'm not excusing President Biden's incompetence this year. I think that that speaks for itself. I think there's plenty to criticize there and their decisions he could have made that would have been clear. But the point is, this ambivalence in the war is more than a decade old. And this is part of the reason why it's very tough for me to justify even a small number of American service members dying in Afghanistan, right? I people don't know this, but I talk to a lot of service members because they hear me criticize their leaders. And I have to explain to them during this last time here, this isn't your fault, okay? A lot of you served honorably and admirably in Afghanistan. You were fighting the right enemy. You were fighting my enemy as an American. You were protecting my family.

We're protecting families of Americans. Your leadership failed you across the board, right? I'm not you know, I'm going to take it to them, and I'm going to make sure that there's some measure of accountability for that. But the last decade, America has signaled over and over again, it doesn't really want to be in this fight. One thing I will note, and look, you know, I don't claim to have conducted a scientific survey of the distinction between Iraq vets and Afghanistan vets. But I will say this, in my experience, the folks that I served with who served in Afghanistan were considerably more disillusioned by their experience than the people I served with in Iraq, that was almost without exception, almost without exception.

I want to get to member questions. We've got some terrific questions lined up here in the queue. I want to go through those sort of on a rapid fire basis. But before we do that, Tom, you've been talking to people on the ground in Afghanistan now. And I want to ask a question about what happens. Let's say that let's take the White House's estimate of how many Americans are on the ground in Afghanistan, 11,000 plus. You've seen, I think people have probably seen the State Department emails. They're trying to evacuate people in shifts, sort of in waves. And they're asking people to sign up on a State Department website, wait for an email. When they're emailed, they're told, come to the airport, the Hamid Karzai Airport in the middle of Kabul, not Bagu, Air Base.

outside of Kabul, come to Hamid Karzai Airport, and we will get you on a flight. The problem, of course, is there are many, many Taliban checkpoints designed to keep those very people from getting to Hamid Karzai Airport. And you have the U.S. government saying literally in the emails they're sending these Americans in country, we can't guarantee your safe passage to the airport. I don't want to get into to rumors. I only want to talk about things that we can verify here. But Tom, how seriously, how worried should we be about massive hostage problems?

And if things look bad right now, given the vulnerabilities there, given our lack of security outside of the airport itself and the apparent lack of will to protect Americans outside at the airport, should we be expecting this to get worse? Look, my main concern here in this final act is that they are going to seek a way to humiliate us in some fashion. And I am concerned about that because there are a number of different ways that could play out I'm not going to get into everything I'm hearing because, you know, some of it may be true. Some of it may be false.

We don't really know at this point. But there are a number of different angles of the story. But I think the bottom line from my perspective, why this is so incriminating for President Biden, is that, you know, he's now saying that the chaos was foreseeable. Well, this would not have played out that way if the chaos was foreseeable. You would have had plans in place to get out without dealing with all this. To make it clear, the Taliban is dictating the terms of America's, withdrawal at this point. And we are seeing some very loud discontent in military channels from

people who want to go protect Americans and find Americans and get them out of there. And you're seeing that there right now that are being told to stay within Hamid Karzai airport and around there. Now, by the way, that airport's going to change its name very soon, isn't it? The Taliban is going to keep it under that name for much longer. But the point is that the point is that the Taliban is in the driver seat here. And if you really were a competent president who had planned for a competent withdrawal, that would not be the case. Thousands of Americans wouldn't be in jeopardy if you really had this under control. So, David, let me ask you a question from Josh.

Very good question, directly related to what we're talking about here. How will our future military choices be limited by our decision to give up Bagram Air Base? And should we have given the stories that we heard at the time that the U.S. bugged out of Bogram in the middle of the night, leaving, you know, tens of millions of dollars of advanced military equipment, there should, Should that in retrospect have been a sign that this was going to go very badly? There were so many signs for so, I mean, you know, going back, going back to the peace deal with the Taliban, I mean, there had been sign after sign after sign after sign. And ultimately, Bogram was going to be untenable if we didn't have a large enough footprint in Afghanistan to maintain a degree of stability.

I mean, it's not like you could have maintained Bagram as this tiny little island of stability in a sea of Taliban control. I think that the abandonment of Bogram was an early, was just, I'm not even going to say an early

indicator. It was yet another indicator of the cascade of incompetence. I mean, remember, we were fed aligned by Pompeo that the Taliban would fight al-Qaeda. I mean, are you kidding? literally we we had literally what he said we had the trump administration releasing 5,000 Taliban

you know agreeing to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners including al Qaeda commanders by the way we're in that 5,000 and including the the widows of al Qaeda commanders of the Taliban lobbied to get out and yet they did and yet they were pretending like you said Pompeo was saying that they were going to hunt down and destroy al Qaeda for us and Trump said they're going to be killing terrorist force as they're getting their blood brothers from al Qaeda out of prisons so it's one thing after another, after another. And, you know, we've heard for, you know, I grew up in the shadow of what was called the Vietnam syndrome. I think we're all old enough here on this Zoom. I'm probably the oldest. I mean, David, you are, but you're clearly the oldest. Well, I just want to make that

clear. But yes, we're probably old. We all grew up under the shadow of the, the Vietnam syndrome, right? That this notion that there was this cloud that hung over, not just the military, it hung over American culture, it hung over American foreign policy, it hung over perceptions of American will. And it was a very real thing. Now, fortunately, we were at relatively short order after 1975. We had much better American leadership when the Reagan administration came into power, and we had much better leadership relatively soon. So that Vietnam syndrome didn't hang over us as long as it could have. But it did hang over America for a while, even to the point where even after desert storm, even after successful interventions in the Balkans, there was still

a lot of questions about going into Afghanistan. Would this be another Vietnam? Well, now we have the next question. Is this going to be another Afghanistan? And, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, Tom was talking about his reluctance to agree or to believe, you know, sort of any kind of military intervention is going to be wise. That's already a manifestation of what you might call the Afghanistan syndrome. What does it say about us and our national will? What does it say? And, you know, I would be very interested to hear Tom's perspective on what it says about the quality of leadership at the upper echelons of the military. So let me work in a question here because we've got a very good question from Peter that speaks directly to this point.

Peter asks, can Biden be right about leaving and wrong about how to do it? And Tom, you mentioned earlier, given the evident lack of will in three successive administrations to fight and win in Afghanistan, is Joe Biden, and you look at the popular polling, there are plenty of reasons to believe the polling doesn't necessarily reflect broad popular sentiment. I think it's fair to say there's deep skepticism about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Maybe Joe Biden was right. Maybe we shouldn't be there anymore. I mean, is there a national security case for the United States to be there anymore? And is Peter right that Biden could be right about leaving, but just wrong about how to do it? I mean, of course he could be right on those. You know, I mean, the thing is that you talk about different things. The national security case, I think people don't understand, which is even during the splits creed by the Taliban this

year, for example, I now have to track hundreds of al-Qaeda operas who have been freed from prisons. We're informed that multiple external operations teams have now gotten out of the detention facilities in Afghanistan. Some al-Qaeda bigwigs who were in prison in Afghanistan are now roaming. This is, this is compounded the terror threat, you know, for months and years to come. We're going to be living this with the national security fall out of this for a long time. And there are a lot of people in the counterterrorism world that I deal with that are, you know, understandably freaked out. But when you talk about from the other perspective, when David talked about Afghan veterans who are disillusioned, right? Why is it that they're

disillusioned? It's because their leaders have failed them. The leaders have failed them time and time again. They've said things like, you know, we've heard how many times Afghanistan turned the corner, right? It didn't turn the corner. It turned the corner so many times it turned right back into the Islamic Emirate Afghanistan. You know, they were talking about like this paper calculation that Millie had of 300, and the Biden administration used of 300,000 Afghans versus 75,000 Taliban. Each side of that equation was wrong, each side, right? They didn't have 300,000 on the Afghan side.

They didn't have 75,000 on the Taliban side. The incompetence goes across administrations. It's very, I think it's actually almost unfathomable. Now, let me put this in perspective. Steve, you know some of this history here. I kind of joke about this. For five years of my life, Five years of my life, I had to argue with the U.S. government that their estimates of al-Qaeda

in Afghanistan were wrong. Because from 2010 to 2015, they would say over and over again, it was a sticky estimate. There's 50 to 100 al-Qaeda, 50 to 100 al-Qaeda. And I would say, in all, wait. Sorry, Tom, Tom. Let me just clarify this. And this is an important description. I mean, this is really in the weeds for me and Tom, and we were sort of obsessed with this for years. But the U.S. government's estimate, and it was a talking point, was used in every discussion. of Afghanistan was there were 5,200 al-Qaeda operatives in all of Afghanistan, in all of Afghanistan, basically supporting the Obama argument that with bin Laden's death, Al-Qaeda died. Right. But let me just, but here's the thing, right? They even started this before bin Laden died.

And I won't get in all the nerdy details, but you know, you know the history here that, you know, my colleague, Bill Rojo and I would say, you know, what are you guys talking about? You just kill 20 al-Qaeda guys in Kunar. You know, does that mean? it's 30 to 80 now, you know? Oh, you just killed 30 more. You know, I mean, we actually did an estimate at one point time. It was actually a negative range. If you just took out all the killed or captured al-Qaeda guys, it was like a negative 1,000, a negative 500 or something like that in terms of what I actually would have been. It didn't make any sense. But they kept sticking with this. And this showed, this what this really demonstrated was that they had

checked out, right? They weren't really thinking about this. They weren't devoting the human capital that the U.S. war machine should devote to something. If you're really going to commit to a fight, then you shouldn't be this stupid, right? But let me give you the end point there, though, right? The only time the estimate was revised was when, October 2015, what happened? The U.S. stumbled upon the largest al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan's history of the war. 30-square-mile town in Shorbaq district in southern Afghanistan. It was a virtual town.

These training facilities were putting out more al-Qaeda terrorists than the longstanding estimate of al-Qaeda's entire presence in the entire country, this one town of al-Qaeda mill was putting out more. And did they go back to the drawing board and say, hey, maybe we didn't know what we were talking about. We have to revise everything. No, they just revised the estimate, what? Up to include the capacity of that facility. I mean, this is not competent leadership, right? I mean, this is not, this is incredibly incompetent. So the point is that, and I, we won't belabor the point here, but you know me, Steve, you've been dealing me for a long time. I can go on and on and on about what al-Qaeda actually looks like in Afghanistan, they had no clue who

they were even fighting. And this wasn't just a loss of the Taliban. It was a loss to al-Qaeda. So, David, I'm putting Tom in the penalty box since he just blew right over me, just kept trampling over me as I was trying to insert a question. And I'm going to you with this question. Tom says this suggests just incompetence that they had checked out that they weren't paying close attention. I would suggest maybe it points to something else. We had set as a political goal getting out of Afghanistan. The best way to make the case to get out of Afghanistan is to say that there's not really much to fight for there. Declare victory.

And if you have 50 to 100 al-Qaeda in the entire country, the strong implication is we did it. We won. Is that what was happening? I mean, is this sort of classic manipulation of intelligence? You know, look, I don't have granular enough knowledge of what was happening in the intelligence shops to suggest that there was specific and intentional tinkering with the numbers. But we all know the concept of motivated reasoning and motivated analysis, right? That we as human beings see and hear what we want to see in here.

It's a constant battle to do otherwise. And so, you know, look, I mean, we can go all the way back. to Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive, to sort of say, from that point forward, the idea that we should still be there required leadership, and it required making a case. It required making a powerful and persuasive case. And look, the case could be made. This is not an argument that couldn't be won in the court of public opinion. But this is something we've been acknowledging since the beginning of our dispatch live. That case has not been made on a bipartisan basis for a very long time.

And even on the conservative side of the house, even on the right wing side of the house, it became to the point where if you started to make the case to stay in Afghanistan and you started to make a case that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were still a threat, you're just going to be gang tackled constantly as some sort of warmonger, It's some sort of neocon, like that's a bad word. And so this was something that was consistently happening, relentlessly happening, but as a symbol of that leadership could still matter, even now, after bipartisan arguments for a decade to get out Afghanistan, even now,

if you just phrase the question slightly differently in a polling question, all of a sudden the numbers start to flip around. the American people don't want to be vulnerable to jihadists. The American people do not want to see America vulnerable. But if you tell them for year after year after year after year, there's only 50 al-Qaeda, there's only 80 al-Qaeda, there's whatever, then you lull people, you give them a false sense of security. So here was a tremendous leadership failure. But I do want to say one thing. I do want to say one thing about there's, there is a lot of incompetence, but we also cannot minimize the difficulty of the fight.

This is a tough fight. I mean, you're talking about an insurgency, in tough terrain, in a culture very different from our own, with free access to safe havens, okay, in Pakistan. The history of wiping out insurgencies in that circumstance, of just wiping out insurgencies, where they have safe havens, where they have the ability to rest, to recruit, to refit, there's not a lot of examples of that. That is a difficult fight. So again, what leadership should say is it's a difficult fight and it's a necessary fight.

Here's why. And what we got from the moment Osama bin Laden was killed was, we're just marking time until we get out. Why are we even here? I'm the one who's going to get us out. I'm the one who's going to get us out. And that is not leadership. That was not the necessary leadership. David, I'm keeping Tom in the penalty box.

I have a question here from Matthew. After pulling out, what's our level of visibility mitigation in regards to terrorist threats emanating from the region? And I just want to add something to the back of that. If you look at President Biden's speech on Monday, I was struck by the fact that he minimized the terrorist threat in Afghanistan. He sort of shrugged off the Taliban al-Qaeda. relationship said, you know, well, if the Taliban provide al-Qaeda with safe haven't,

they will suffer our consequences, as if the Taliban haven't been providing al-Qaeda with that kind of safe haven support and resources throughout this process. But the other thing Joe Biden said was the al-Qaeda threat is real. And he pointed to the threat from a number of places in the region and well beyond the region. So what do you think of Matthew's question? question, we haven't thought that much about the terrorist threat. We haven't thought that much about being hit again here at the homeland. And I want to pick a fight between you and Tom, because David, you've written, I think compellingly in your newsletter, that in effect, we won the first part of this war, that we actually did what we meant to do. That if you would have told any of us 20 years ago that we would not have had a significant al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. homeland, that would be successful. process. Tom doesn't see it that way, but I'm going to give you the first shot to answer Matthew's question and also address that. Yeah, I mean, look, it's pretty simple. If you told me on 9-12-1 that 20 years later, we were going to have more casualties on American soil due to domestic right-wing

terrorists than international jihadist terror networks and the total number of domestic, of jihadist terror victims in the U.S. for the next 20 years was going to be less than 200. I would have said that is a successful anti-terror strategy. That is what we did, and not to say that we did all of it well and we did all of it perfectly, but on a bottom line results oriented, if you're looking at the results on defending the United States of America, we have defended the United States of America. And I know Afghanistan is not all of that, but it's a part of that. So let me give you the optimistic case, and then I'll give you the pessimistic case.

going forward. So very smart people I know have said don't press the panic button about the loss of Afghanistan from a counterterror perspective. Again, just a counterterror protecting the United States and its interests abroad because our counterterror operations are far more sophisticated than they were in 9-10.01. They are still global in scope. We have the ability to reach out and we have the intelligence ability to sniff out terror plots and the ability to strike terror threats on a global scale to an extent that we didn't have before 9-11, don't go pressing that panic button.

Our counter-terror operations are far more robust than people comprehend, than people realize this is not a situation like we're going back to a pre-9-11 world. That's just not on the cards. That's not in the, that's something that's just not going to happen. That's the optimistic case. Now, the pessimistic case is we were on the ground in Afghanistan

and did know about a big al-Qaeda training camp. And that's when we're there. That's when we're there with thousands of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. And one of the things that I think that it's often overlooked as we love all of our technology. You know, we love our ability to, you know, the high-resolution, the high-resolution video from a predator drone. Our ability to do signals intelligence. Our ability, we have it. We love our technology. But at the bottom line, sometimes there's not much of a substitute for personal presence,

for people on the ground to be able to understand what is happening. And even with people on the ground, as Tom just said, there were things that we missed, that were big. So my view of it is, yeah, we have a, a. much more robust counter-terror operation in existence than we had on 9-10-01, much more. But the more you retreat, the more you pull back, the more you're relying on all our G-Wiz technology, over time you're going to degrade that counter-terror capability. Over time, you're going to degrade it.

And if there's one thing that we know, one of the things about a counterterror operation, one of the things we know about countering terror is that look you don't know when the attacks are coming you have to be you know you can be lucky and you are good 99 out of 100 times but if they get through that one out of 100 it's traumatic but one thing you kind of do know is the larger and more secure a safe haven that terrorists have the increasingly increasing likelihood that you will face actual attacks. Safe havens, over times equals attacks. That's a truism. And what we've done is we've given al-Qaeda a nation-state-sized playground here. And over time, our ability to degrade their operations in that nation-state-sized playground will diminish. Yeah, again, Tom,

speak to that first point there. I think it's people don't quite appreciate when we leave and when we shut down an embassy, we have dozens and dozens of intelligence operatives working out of that embassy. We have people under diplomatic cover. That is the main intelligence node for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. We no longer have it. We launched the raid to get Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan. The amount of intelligence that we've gotten from Afghanistan over the

years has been extraordinary and should have, I would say, shaped the outcome. So first, speak to that. What do we lose? And second, where do you think David is wrong when he says, look, we did do what we set out to do? We didn't have a major attack over the past 20 years. Well, I'd like to take a second part first, because the problem with this argument is, yes, I mean, we should credit the U.S. service members and the counterterrorism community for stopping another big attack. The plots that we've seen since 9-11 have been far bigger than anything from the far right or anything else. I mean, it easily could have had thousands and thousands of more Americans dead in any one of these plots. So I don't trust these estimates you see of far-right, you know, deaths versus jihadi

terror debts, that there's all sorts of problems with those calculations. But here's the the biggest problem for me is one, it's not that we don't grant the success of stopping on 9-11. is it worth the amount of resources that have been spent to stop another 9-11? We've spent a lot of resources to stop another big attack. They got lucky on 9-11 in some ways. There's numerous ways that could have unfolded. I would say that that should be something we should be capable of stopping in general. The problem I have is twofold beyond that.

One, they were busy winning a war, right? So for them, winning the war in Afghanistan was, if you follow any of their literature, way more important than another 9-11 because they just defeated America and Afghanistan. So what that does now is it creates a whole other generation of terrorist threats. They've been raising a whole other generation of jihadists during the war. And now they have a victory message to go out across the world. And nobody even understands al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda has, they're fighting for Islamic Emirates in several places.

All those places right now. I'm tracking it. I'm watching them, I'm translating their messages. All of them are saluting and saying, we did it. We got victory over the Americans. That is going to create another generation of problems. The other thing is that people don't understand is that al-Qaeda was never only myopically obsessed with attacking us. In fact, we've detected multiple times since 2014, 2013, that al-Qaeda's

actually had a stand-down order where they said, don't go for a big attack in America or go after America because we're going to win these wars. We're going to win different places. We're building Emirates. Let's focus on that while preparing the ground for possibly launching another big attack in the future. And what a lot of people I talk to are freaking out about now is that the thing that they were really concentrated on Afghanistan. Yes, they had plots against us over the years from Afghanistan, But 99.9% of the resources were put into fighting that war and winning that war in Afghanistan. That's what they were most focused on. They've now done that.

So now do they have resource capacity to shift back to putting more effort into attacks in the West? That's the problem. Now, beyond that, too, I think people have underestimated the value to them of winning in Afghanistan for these other theaters. You talked about President Biden saying the threat is in these other places. This is my fundamental critique of all this. people don't know anything about al-Qaeda. The President of the United States doesn't know anything about al-Qaeda. Do I think his advisors know anything about it?

No. Because if they did, right, they would understand he pointed to the threat in Somalia. Well, guess what? Much of the leader of al-Qaeda in Somalia are veterans of Afghanistan. He pointed to the threat in West Africa and Yemen. You know that most of the leadership of West Africa and Yemen are from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda guys who were trained in camps in Afghanistan prior to 2001. The leaders of al-Qaeda in Syria are mainly what?

veterans of the war in Afghanistan in the 1990s prior to 9-11. All these groups, all these groups are looking to this now and are saying, we did it, we won, we won in Afghanistan over the Americans. This has just given a huge shot in the arm and generated a whole other generation of counterterrorism challenges for us. So the point is like, yes, there are plenty of people we should credit for stopping another 9-11. There were, especially in the early years.

But I think it's a much more complicated story when you get into the war fighting and understand what they were really all about and what they were actually trying to achieve. and the fact that they've achieved one of their major strategic goals here, this is going to create problems for us. And we've lost a great amount of intelligence assets. I'm not as confident as some of the people David's talked to about our counterterrorism resources. I'm deeply enmeshed in the counterterrorism world. And a lot of people think that we've lost capacity over time already. Remember, during the Obama administration, the push was to get out of this,

was to end all this. And, you know, there was a, you know, the Trump team didn't exactly staff the human, the U.S. government with a lot of human capital now, did it, you know? So, you know, I think you still have a lot of people in U.S. government who want to focus on other priorities other than this stuff. And I think that there are still, I think there are windows of opportunity for them, I'll say. So we're going over time just a couple of minutes. I don't believe in lightning rounds, but I'm going to ask you both to address these three questions. I want to ask a narrow question, a somewhat broader question than a global question, narrow question. And And this is the number one question that's been sort of voted up from our members watching this.

Is there anything we could have done to fix the myriad problems within the ANSDF? Tom, first. I don't know. Like, the reason for this is because everybody wants to do counterfactuals in Afghanistan, and what I say about that is after doing this for all these years and criticizing so many different decisions that are made, my counterfactual is if I were a horse with a horn and wings, I'd be a unicorn, you know? I mean, it's, you know, at this point, I kind of given up on counterfactuals, you know? So, so I don't know, this is my short answer.

My answer is not, my answer is not to fix the problems with the Afghan army. No, to keep the Afghan army in the field, not leave them alone. That's the counterfactual, is not leave them, not do this drawdown for this fictional peace deal for the Taliban. in. Look, our allies do not fight as well as we fight, not by a long shot. But when American troops are present, when they have access to American air power, it is a different ballgame than what we've just seen over the last few weeks. It's just a different ballgame. And so, yeah, one of the things you do differently when you're talking about your allies is you don't rip the rug out from underneath them. And you're not going to like the results. We've never

liked the results when we do that. Never. David, back to you first. The Taliban is in effective control in Afghanistan now. They're holding press conferences. They're swapping out anchors on the local news stations. They're setting aside Afghan government officials. You've seen some, I would say, credulous reporting in some of our country's biggest newspapers and media outlets, that this might be a new Taliban. There's a New York Times reporter who tweeted yesterday that the fact that the Taliban would sit down with a female reporter

suggests that the Taliban have really changed in the past 20 years. Yeah, I've seen this Taliban 2.0 thing. What do you make of it? You know, look. We have this tendency to not want to believe that some, not to want to really believe that our enemies are who they are, are motivated by what they say they're motivated by, and believe what they believe and say what they mean.

There has been zero indication in 20 years of war of the moderation of the Taliban. They have been savage in their treatment of civilians. They have been murderous in their treatment of civilians and enemy combatants. They have been terrorists the whole time. There is zero evidence of quote unquote moderation. Now, maybe they're shrewd enough tactically over a period of time to hopefully, hopefully in their good graces. I can't even imagine I'm saying that.

allow safe passage of Americans out of the country. But the idea that the Taliban is anything other than the Taliban, there's just no evidence of that, as opposed to an overwhelming amount of evidence that we're facing the same character of enemy now that we faced in October of 2001 when we first had our boots on the ground in that country. So don't believe anybody who has a Taliban 2.0 story to tell. The only way to tell a Taliban 2.0 story is if they have a record of changed actions, not whether they can sit down for an interview and it's tactically advantageous. Tom, the Biden administration seems to be putting some stock in this. I mean, you had Jake Sullivan, the president's national security advisor, asked directly whether

he could see the United States supporting the Taliban financially. And he said in effect, well, look, the Taliban behaves the way that we would want them to, of course we could do that. He wouldn't rule out future financial support to the Taliban from the United States. How do you view Taliban 2.0? Well, my blood pressure just rose when you were talking about that. We've talked about that before, but, you know, I mean, I'm about ready to throw something here. Look, here's the bottom line. Do I think Jake Sullivan knows anything about the Taliban? No. Do I think he knows anything about the Taliban al-Qaeda? No. Do I think he knows anything about al-Qaeda? No. So, So I don't think, I think this is part of the failure here in all this, right?

And this is why I'm so critical of all this. When you talk about reporters and you talk about other people commenting on this stuff, how many of these people can tell you who the emir of the Taliban is, the real emir, and who his deputies are, or how this actually works or how their infrastructure, how they're set up, or how they had set up a shadow government all these years coming? How many people can actually tell you anything basic about the organization whatsoever, right? I mean, one of the things I talk to when I get into, when I hear this from somebody, I'll say, excuse me, who's the emir of the Taliban again?

If they can't give me the right answer, I go, well, then how do you know Taliban 2.0? Because I'll tell you this much. His name is Habitu Aksandata, and he sacrificed his son in a suicide bombing in 2017. He's been an ideologue since the 1990s. He was the chief judge in the Taliban's ruling hierarchy in the 1990s. He is a hardcore ideologue who's spent much of his time, as far as we can tell, writing theological tracks about deobondism and solofi jahism for the last decade. This is a hardened ideologue who was willing to have his son blow himself up for the cause, right?

This is the idiocy of all this, right, is that, first of all, people in America thought and the American government thought that they could come to terms with such an individual, such that he was actually going to share power with anybody, right? His title, just in case people don't know, is Amir of the faithful, okay? Amir of the faithful is not a title that lends itself to being the minister of interior, for example, in a new Afghan government, right? Amir of the faithful is the title given to a caliph. It is a sacred religious title, it's the same one Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took for as the head of the caliphate. And he has been, Akunzada now for several years, has been the proto-Kalif for them, right? And just to give you one more example, without filibustering, I saw the Washington Post, for example, a report earlier that Mullah Barater, who was led out of a Pakistani prison to negotiate this servile deal with the Americans, servility on the American part, that he was the likely new ruler of Afghanistan. And I looked at that and I thought, you guys have no idea, even to this day, what the Taliban is or how it's organized, because they've been very clear that Akunzada is the Emir of the faithful.

he's the head of the whole thing. And this is a religious state. But this just, I just want people to think about this, right? We're sitting here in 2021. And what I'm saying is nobody knows anything about the Taliban, right? That's what I'm saying. Two decades. Two decades later. Also, it's also worth noting, just as an aside, Akronzada is the person to whom I'm in Al-Zawahari, the leader of Al-Qaeda has sworn a blood oath, sworn by which, which by the way, nobody, which, by the way, nobody would know if it wasn't for me capturing that off the Taliban website in Arabic and translating it. But yes, you're right. So last question, last question.

And this is really sort of pulling the camera back and take it a big picture of you. We've spent a lot of time tonight talking about the immediate effects of the embarrassment in Afghanistan, what it means to Afghanistan, what it means to the region, what it means to the United States. In that area, in counterterrorism, Jason asks a bigger picture question. How does the embarrassment, the U.S. embarrassment in Afghanistan, playing to Jesus, geopolitics in East Asia, particularly with regards to Taiwan, we've already seen Chinese state media say in effect to Taiwan Democrats, you're relying on the Americans? Have you seen what's happened in Afghanistan? David, I'll go to you first. What are the broader implications of this?

I would say both answer Jason's question specifically on Taiwan, but then broader. What do our allies think of what's happened? What do our enemies think of what's happened, including Iran and Russia and North Korea? So here's, let's just get really brass tax. We are in a situation where while we are still absolutely the most powerful military in the world, our near-peer competitors, technologically, China, Russia have improved their military capacity to such a that their supreme, arguably, almost certainly close to their borders. So if Russia wants to grab Estonia, it's going to, it can grab Estonia. If Russia wants to, if, you know, instead of building up 100,000 troops in southeastern Ukraine this spring and then pulling them back,

if Vladimir Putin had gone into southeastern Ukraine, he could have, for time, gotten what he wanted. A lot of war games indicate that if we tried to fight right now, if China attacked right now, to take Taiwan, that it would have a very good chance of winning that conflict. That they, in their own spheres of maximum influence and power, they have an ability. Now, they can't take us on once we fully mobilize. So in theory, we could take back Estonia. In theory, we could maybe hold off China and then take back Taiwan. But all of that requires an investment of blood and treasure that would,

dwarf what we have seen in Afghanistan. Dwarf it. And so the question that what we have right now is a deterrence that is maintained in many ways by a sense they are not quite sure that we don't have the will to bear that cost. The more that they believe that we don't have the will to bear that cost, the more dangerous the world becomes. And every time the United States of America demonstrates that it doesn't have the will to bear the cost. Now, what cost here? What cost here? To stay in the fight against an entity that struck us at home in our capital city and the financial capital of the world, our financial capital. To strike us at home and to kill almost 3,000 Americans, we didn't have the will to stay in that fight. When staying in that fight,

meant exerting a very small fraction of our military force, a very small fraction of our military force. So what does that say? If deterrence depends on will and will appears to fail, you have raised the possibility the deterrence will ultimately fail, especially when you combine it with large scale increases in Chinese military might and large scale improvements in Russian military capability and competence. Tom, if you're Xi Jinping and you're looking at Taiwan, David is exactly right, isn't he? I mean, this is the moment. And if you're Vladimir Putin and you look at Ukraine, you look beyond Ukraine, wouldn't you be

sort of crazy? If you had designs, if you had expansionist designs, wouldn't you be sort of crazy not to do it right now? Oh, I don't, now? I mean, soon. What? Yeah. I mean, we're otherwise occupied. We look as weak as we've looked in the past two decades. No, David, you don't think so? Well, I'd be here. I'll, I'd love Tom's answer, but I don't think so. Well, all I would say is in terms of American willpower. American willpower is now at an all time low. And you can see our fractured leadership is incompetent. So fire or Chinese general, you know, I'd like to take my chances. But, but the problem is that, you know, I asked a friend about this who knows, you know, because I've been, I, I launched Vital Interest newsletter to try and do more than counterterrorism. And, of course, I keep getting sucked back in, right?

Because, you know, because this is the end. And we're glad you do as depressing as it is. Right. But I've done, you know, quite a bit of, I've done, I have done six or seven. I try, my rule is I try not to comment or write about anything I haven't researched pretty intently, right? And I've been asking around about Taiwan for a long time. And my friends about that say a couple things.

One, you know, the Delta variant is that the Chinese pretty hard, you know, and they they have definitely are dealing with that probably in a way. that people don't even know, much worse than people know. There are all sorts of complicating factors around Taiwan, you know, that the U.S. has built it into a porcupine, which makes just drives off the costs there. The Chinese are, you know, trying to tilt the playing field further in their direction before, you know, potentially, you know, considering that. There are a lot of other calculations involved. But to the broader point, the original point you were asking, so in other words, I don't know what the full calculation would be for Xi Jinping or others. I don't think anybody

in American policy circles do. I think there are there are reasons. to suspect they wouldn't go for it now for various reasons, but that reason is not American willpower, right? The reason, the thing that's not holding them back is the American willpower. And they, they obviously, as you saw, were cutting deals and welcoming the Taliban delegation in Beijing as America is being humiliated during this withdrawal process. You know, they were very well, they were very happy to welcome. Wait a lie. Yeah. Which, by the way, by the way, there's a group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is part of Al-Qaeda. Again, nobody understands this. But it's part of al-Qaeda.

It's been fighting for the Taliban for many years. And they have really no prisons in Xinjiang. I mean, they don't do anything there. And their existence in Afghanistan, Syria, does not in any way justify the Chinese parties absolutely horrific oppression in Xinjiang, okay? Does not at all, right? But what's interesting is that the Chinese were willing to come to terms and play real politics with the Taliban, even as you had this al-Qaeda force in Afghanistan,

seizing Badakshan right on the border there and seizing territory for the Taliban. So they're willing to cut a deal and figure out how this modus, you know, of existence, really, for modus vivendi, as Biden would say that he thought was coming between the Kabul government and Taliban, which was a fiction, modus vivendi between the Taliban and China, they're willing to come to terms in a way that basically says, hey, as long as you don't bother us, we won't bother you, and we can invest in Afghanistan in different ways in the future and just sort of, you know, get along. And what's interesting is that Beijing is willing to do that and was doing that as the U.S. was being humiliated in Afghanistan during this withdrawal process.

And I think that speaks to how they view things. And I've heard from people in recent, days that both the Chinese and the Russians are going around saying, look, look, see what they did with Kabul? The Americans threw it under the bus. You don't want to lie with them. Look what they did with Kabul. And by the way, there's a friend, one more point, sorry, David, I'll shut up. The, you know, a friend pointed out that Russia saved Bashar al-Assad, a complete butcher and mass murderer, right? And as bad as Ashrafgani was in terms of corruption and incompetence, he was in Bashar al-Assad. But we did nothing, did not lift a finger to save the Kabul government, which was stood up by the U.S. and its international partners after 2001,

while Russia and China are willing to come to their aid in certain ways, including the Maduro regime, Bashar al-Assad, and others. And in Saad's case, actually save him from annihilation. So this speaks to, you know, the lack of will on the American side. Do you think of crazy now now? They wouldn't probe us or trust us now? I will say this. I see a difference between Russia and China in this sense.

Pardon me, and I actually asked this to somebody to a friend of mine who has, has been working on these issues. And knowing what you know now about American will, does Putin not, does Putin regret not taking a bite out of Ukraine this spring, not just going ahead and taking a bite out of Ukraine? Because at this point, the idea I think that there would be a national will

to lose American lives to defend Ukraine, I think that's almost pure fantasy. I think that's China and Taiwan, I think, is a different deal. I think that is a, Russia in Ukraine and China and Taiwan, I think, is a different deal. I think that the consensus, my, I think that the consensus point of view is if China goes for Taiwan, it will get in a slug fest with the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and it will get in one immediately, and they're not ready for that.

Why could, David, let me, I'm sorry, we don't want you to keep this going for hours, although I would like to. Why? Why is that? Why would there be a slug fest? So if you're a Chinese military planner and you're wanting to take an island, okay, and you have strategic ambiguity that's not really ambiguity that is a longstanding belief and a longstanding idea that the U.S. would come to the aid of Taiwan, and if you attack Taiwan without dealing with your primary military foe, and you allow it to respond to your attack at the time,

in place of its choosing, to intervene in your invasion, you've essentially guaranteed a loss. You've essentially guaranteed a route. You've guaranteed a nation defining defeat. So if you're a military planner and you're wanting to take that island, the way you guarantee that you're going to take that island is by removing from the field the number one, the most potent force that can prevent you from taking that island. And that would be the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And that would be dealing with specifically the elements of the fleet that are close enough to interfere. So my view has long been that the biggest Chinese gamble on taking Taiwan is to try to take it while leaving all American forces in the Pacific intact, which would be an extraordinarily

potent force to defeat the invasion. If you want to take Taiwan, you try to defeat the U.S. Pacific Fleet, which is what the war games indicate that it could potentially do, take the island and then say, this island is now under our nuclear umbrella. This is part of the nation of China. Any attack on the, any attempt to invade the territorial integrity of the nation of China will be met with every bit of force that we have at our disposal up to and including our nuclear deterrent. And you make it a fait accompli and you leave America with a question, do you take your defeat

and leave Taiwan alone, or do you counterattack and risk nuclear confrontation? And again, this is when you're talking about. talking about oppose, the, what was the chief of the Indian general staff after Desert Storm said the lesson you take from Desert Storm is you do not fight the United States of America unless you have nuclear weapons. And so our allies, I mean, our enemies, they have a military doctrine that says, once you bite off a chunk of territory, you put that behind your strategic nuclear deterrent and you make the Americans call your bluff. And And that is what I would be. And that's why I don't think that it would happen. That is a, that is

brinksmanship at a level that is extraordinary without any guarantee that they could even take Taiwan right now. That's why I'm, I'm less worried about an attack on Taiwan. And hopefully I'm right than I am about, say, Putin trying to chew off another chunk of Ukraine, of Ukraine. Well, on that optimistic note, I'll say on that is, I like David's, uh, I like David's explanation error of his thinking. All I'll say is use the word consensus, however. And after all these years, I'm so jaded that I don't trust anybody, any consensus coming out of Washington or anywhere else.

Because the consensus that in my world has been wrong so often that I almost want to just bet against the consensus every time. And if there were a functioning marketplace, would be able to profit from that. But, you know, there is. Well, I would say the consensus among our members is that this has been a worthwhile hour. and 20 minutes. And that I will say at the end of this discussion, the same thing I said at the beginning of this discussion, which is, I can't think of two people I'd rather have to talk

through these issues. At this moment, it's a difficult time. These are challenging issues to work through. I will say I worry that the worst is in front of us, which sort of tears me away from my optimistic nature. It makes me, I guess, a bit of a pessimist, but I'm worried about it. We will keep following these issues, as you've seen. David has written about them, I think, in three or four consecutive newsletters. Tom has been covering Afghanistan on a regular basis long before we even started the dispatch, but particularly since we've been doing vital interests, regularly updating us with insider information and sort of a detailed understanding of what's happening on the ground there. So thank you all for joining us.

Thank you.