The Dispatch Podcast - Infrastructure Passes and Collapse in Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

In his first interview after voting yes on the historic bipartisan infrastructure bill, Sen. Bill Cassidy joins Sarah and Steve to talk about how it feels to see that bill pass the Senate. Plus, Cassidy puts on his doctor hat to talk about COVID-19. Then Steve is joined by Tom Joscelyn to discuss the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. How much longer until the Taliban seizes full control of the country? Show Notes: -Closer look at passing of the infrastructure bill from Uphill -David French’s view on Afghanistan -Read Vital Interest for the latest analysis on Afghanistan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. Special episode today. First, we are going to talk to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. He is the architect of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that just passed the Senate. We're going to talk about that, COVID, and a little bit of what the Republican Party is doing these days. But then Steve is also going to talk to Tom Jocelyn. He has been a guest on this podcast before. writes an incredible newsletter for the dispatch on foreign policy as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates by the hour. They are going to talk updates and what's next for Afghanistan.

Senator Cassidy, thank you so much for joining us. as we talk, the vote is actually going on. You just registered your vote. Let's start with the easy one. How'd you vote and why? I voted yes because it's good for the American people. It's going to create hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of jobs and better paying jobs for those who already have it. It's going to increase their safety from flood and from traffic accident, et cetera. It's going to improve their quality of life. I mean, like one of my colleagues said, what's not the light? I think it's telling the people who are objecting, are having to make things up. At best, stretching, but at worst, totally making things up out

a whole cloth with just like a spiny little nexus to what's actually in the bill. So when folks have to put out mistruths in order to show that something is not true, it kind of further establishes that what you're doing is good. But let's dive into the politics a little of this. Donald Trump did not want Republican senators voting for this bill. And some of the criticism is that, in fact, after you'll finally get over this hurdle in the Senate, the filibuster that has, you know, been looming over this, it's going to go to Speaker Pelosi and she's not going to bring it to the floor over there because they want this $3.5 trillion spending bill. And so this bipartisan bill is actually not going to really achieve

anything bipartisan. It's just going to pave the way for a wildly huge left-wing bill. You got a lot in there, Sarah. Let's unpack it. Let's do it. First regarding President Trump, President Trump put up a $1.5 trillion bill for infrastructure, of which only 5% was paid for. We put up a $550 billion bill, and we would argue that it's paid for. You could argue that, but we think reasonably you can say that it's paid for. That's number one.

number two would Pelosi hold the self number one if so first about that if we live your life in existential anxiety oh my gosh there's variables out there which i cannot control but because i can't control them by golly i'm not going to do anything everybody would sit in their basement and stare at the wall um so number which some people would say that has been what congress has been doing well you can argue that for a lot of things but if you're done if you're sent here to do a job you're supposed to do more than stare at a wall. Secondly, if good politics is good policy, and Pelosi stands in the way of a five-year bill that's going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, that's going to improve people's quality of life, that's going to make our economy stronger and lower inflation according to

a Wharton School of Business Analysis. If she's going to stand away of that policy, that's bad politics. Lastly, I will say in terms of some people say, well, this makes it more likely that you passed a $3.5 trillion bill. One of my Democratic colleagues said, you know, infrastructure is the dessert. And that $3.5 trillion tax and spin bill, that's the spinach. So I get my dessert and now you want me to eat spinach? You know, like, I don't think so. Somebody who agrees with that analysis is Mitch McConnell. Mitch is voting for our bill. I would argue there is not a single better person who's done you who in terms of his instincts as regards what's going to help or hurt a Republican priority than Mitch McConnell he agrees with the analysis this makes it harder to pass their

$3.5 trillion. Senator, you said just a moment ago that some of your colleagues in opposing the bill have resorted to mistruths to block it. What are those mistruths and who's telling them? Well, you can figure out who's telling them by what they're saying on YouTube. So I'll leave that to you. But for example, that somehow we have an intersection with critical race theory. You know, that's a crazy one.

There's a word in there. The little tiny nexus that they're really stretching is that if you are a grantee from the federal government to provide Internet service as an example to those who currently don't have it. Well, normally if you're a private business, you're going to roll out. internet broadband to the people that are well to do because they can pay the highest rates. But if you get a grant from the federal government to provide it for everybody, you better show equity in terms of how you distribute it. The use of that word equity, telling the grantee that they can't discriminate, is being used to justify this myth that we somehow expand critical race theory. Now, I'm disappointed on several reasons. One, I think the obligation of the public

official is to speak truth to the American people. Secondly, it is to do something good for the American people. So here you have a bill which is going to create hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs directly and indirectly. It's going to protect people from flooding. My state's been so hit by flooding. Improve ports and waterways. It's going to improve quality of life, taking broadband internet the folks who don't have it now, and you're trying to defeat a bill as good as that with a, what's a polite way to say a lie? So, as you might guess, that's disappointing on several levels. Do you, do you, you are, you were part of the group that negotiated this on a bipartisan basis you've made very clear in your comments just now that you

favor the legislation for the legislation's sake because you think it does important things that have been neglected by our politicians for too long are you sympathetic to the people who say look we have $28 trillion in debt this is spending that we can't afford and if you look at the possibility or the likelihood that the $3.5 trillion gets added on top of this we're just digging ourselves deeper into a hole and it's just not worth it even if the legislation parts of the legislation are worth doing so stephen if you're one of my medical students and i was on rounds i would say young man and by the way your beer gives you away i would say young man young lady didn't you listen to what i just said you use the term

that it increases the likelihood of passing the 3.5 trillion Mitch McConnell thinks it decreases the likelihood of passing $3.5 trillion. My Democratic colleague thinks it decreases the likelihood of passing the $3.5 trillion. That's number one. Number two, in terms of the pay-for us, we always said that half of it CBO would give us credit for. Yep, you got that, boom, we believe you. But half of it, the CBO wouldn't because of their rules. Example, Congress has already allocated in previous packages money for,

states to distribute through federal unemployment supplemental payments. About $53 billion of that money is not being used. We're taking that money not being used and repurposing it. CBO doesn't give us credit, but it's $53 billion that Congress has already allocated. And we are repurposing it. And because we can repurpose, but CBO won't give a score, we think that we're actually that's a credible pay for. Oh, yeah. I know CBO is not giving you credit, but you really should, and that's how we're saying we do have it paid for. But let's just look at what the Wharton School of Business said. They did a multi-decade analysis because it takes sometimes a decade to build a bridge, but the payoff is over multi-decade. They say by 2050 that because of addressing

choke points in our nation's economy, that we actually increase the size of the economy and we decrease the deficit. Now, those are facts. Those are facts. There's people speaking out of a kind of general gestalt. This cannot be true. But if you look at the facts as best as we can understand the facts,

what I just described is the better way to analyze. Again, some people have such anxiety about the future that they can't look beyond the immediate. When you do wise public policy, you just got to think a little bit further ahead. Well, as you mentioned, you're not just Senator Cassidy, you're also Dr. Cassidy. I am from your neighboring state of Texas,

and I'm sure you're familiar with Texas Children's Hospital, the largest children's hospital in the country. I'm sure many Louisianaans come over there to that hospital as well. It is currently on diversion, meaning that if you call 911 with a child right now in Houston, you will not go to Texas Children's. You will be sent farther away, often up to the woodlands, for what that's worth, because they are out of room at that hospital,

largely due to COVID. We have failed this test, you know, the idea that we would have unvaccinated people and it would just be up to them and it wouldn't affect the vaccinated. That's clearly not true anymore. We've tried carrots. Is it time for a government-based vaccine mandate stick so that our children can actually get emergency room care? You know, can we kind of like speak a little bit more general, by the way?

First, and then I'll get to your question. Yeah. I think there has to be humility. There has to be humility in terms of how politicians speak about public health. when politicians speak about public health and they start playing politics with public health it is not good for public health and it's typically in the long term bad for the politician

that's not to say that you have to totally accept what the public health people are telling you because they're not balancing economic impacts but it is to say that we have to have some humility in October of 2010 Joe Biden said something along the order of Donald Trump clearly does not have a plan to end the pandemic, I do. And now we're eight months into his administration, and it seems

as if things have fallen apart. So I think there has to be humility in whatever you do. Secondly, we have tools that we already have. Society allows institutions, including schools, hospitals, et cetera, the armed forces, medical school, to mandate certain vaccines, to protect the person, but also to protect the person to whom they are involved with. This is different from the governor mandating. I'm against that. But when I went to med school, I had to have hepatitis B vaccine. You were vaccinated, Sarah.

Well, let me say, no, you're not that young. But in 1994, hepatitis B vaccine became mandatory for all newborns. To go along with measles, mumps, rebella, D.P.T. and multiple others. Hepatitis A is now included in that group. You cannot start first grade or kindergarten unless you're vaccinated as a teacher or as a student. Similarly med school, similarly college, similarly the military. We just do that because otherwise, not only would you get sick, you could give it to others. So we have mechanisms by which certain institutions have the responsibility and the right to mandate certain vaccines.

Now, there's a hospital, I forget, if it's Herman or Methodist in Houston, that has mandated immunizations for their employees. Methodists just did, yeah. Methodists. They got taken the court and they won. Because if you think about it, now the people watching us cannot see each other, cannot see us. But just at home, would you want to go to a hospital in which the employee might give you COVID? I feel like arms are not shooting up, okay? But let's phrase it the other way.

Would you want to go to a hospital in which everybody was protected against COVID, all the employees, so you know that you wouldn't get from those employees? Hands now are shooting up. That's the rationale of these public health measures. We already have the tools to do it within our society. The question is whether or not the institutions choose to do so. By the way, the armed forces just decided to do so. In the context of these requirements that you're talking about with respect to MMR and others that are required for school children, should governors be making the same kinds of requirements for school children now once the vaccine is approved for kids under 12? I think, Stephen, I'm going to, at this point, I'm going to say it depends upon local circumstances.

If you have an ICU that is full at Children's Hospital of Houston, in which a child in a traffic accident cannot get into the ICU because it's full because a child who should not be is on a ventilator and your schools are having to close because of widespread of COVID among students, then that would be a plausible thing for the school board or the state public health to work. require. Why not make it the same kind of requirement, again, on the condition that this is approved by the FDA, which seems to be taken an awful long time, why not make it the same kind of requirement that you have in the case of these other vaccines? I think that is a reasonable thing to consider. But you can also go to a community, which is having zero spread. And they may decide, well, you know, we're having zero spread right now. And typically students in a school year do not travel a lot. And so we feel as if in our community is not required. So these laws are not set up by the federal government. They're established by state and local government. And I think that he or she

who governs best governs closest to those who are governed, a good conservative maxim that we should be really, you know, be really adhering to right now. Now, sometimes you've got an outbreak which is statewide, at which point is the governor who's governing most closely. But at others, if it's a community widespread, then you'd have a different approach for a community-wise. I can give you lots of examples, by the way. Under Mike Pence, there was a needle exchange program because they were having an outbreak of HIV among drug addicts in, I think, southeastern Indiana. They put in a local – Mike Pence put in a local program for needle exchange to prevent the spread of HIV. He didn't do it statewide. So there needs to be some sort of – of –

of information. You got to inform yourself. You can't just make blanket policies and then have a fight over politics. You got to say, okay, you know, let's take public health. Let's take public policy and let's marry the two and come up with the wisest public policy for this area. What you just stated is a pretty basic principle of conservatism. Govern as close to the people being governed as makes sense. But that's not the policy of your party by and large right now. You have Governor DeSantis in Florida and Governor Abbott in Texas, both, in fact, having no mask mandates for school children statewide and threatening to punish school districts that choose to enforce a mask mandate because of local situations on the ground. What is your diagnosis for why the Republican Party

A, has abandoned that tenet of conservatism, but also why they see this as a politically advantageous issue to be the party of no mask, no vaccine mandates, you know, emergency rooms being filled? That seems like an odd political move. You know, I think you have to balance this with kind of government fatigue. There was a lot of conflicting advice given at the outset, and people felt a little whipsawed. And so, in fairness to those who are kind of tired of it, it's because they felt whipsawed. But there is, so you've got to respect people. But you also have to respect the truth.

And there's only way to build back credibility is to just keep on plugging away and telling people what the truth is. Right now, if you get vaccinated, your risk of dying from COVID is. close to zero, not zero, but close to zero. You're very unlikely to get hospitalized. But if you have one of these conditions, which is extremely common in our society, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, liver disease, lung disease, heart disease. If you happen to be over age 55, or if you happen to be less than one year of age, you're at much higher risk of dying if you get COVID. And the delta variant is much more infectious. So you just got to, you just got to plug away respecting people

where they are, but trying to rebuild the credibility that was lost when there was such conflicting advice at the outset. Senator, on impeachment, you voted to convict President Trump. And in the months since we've seen him escalate his conspiracy mongering related to the election. And we've certainly, I mean, really in the past couple weeks, learned a lot more about his efforts to keep Joe Biden from being sworn in as president. I wonder if you think that the events since that vote have vindicated it, number one, and number two, have you had any of your colleagues

who didn't vote as you did express regret given what we've seen in the months since? We don't talk about it. Really? Just it's not an issue of discussion. Sort of it happened and it's done. Why is it? I would think it would be, I mean, just sorry to interrupt,

but on sort of a human level, It was this big moment. You took a lot of grief for it from some of your constituents. I would think it would be a subject of regular discussion. It's not, though. If you haven't noticed, life's been pretty full. It's not like you run out of things to work on. And by the way, my staff tell me I'd do my second vote because I have a Facebook live in a few minutes.

so I apologize because I so enjoy talking to you and I've so admired the stuff you've read and said over the years and Stephen you're looking a little bit Ernest Hemingwayish man with the beard it happens to the best of us I think if you grew a beard you might have the same kind of salt and pepper with a little more salt

look the I certainly would the so we just I mean it's just something you've got to move on and and you know facts come out. And I made my decision based upon that which was presented. I had the privilege of

sitting in my chair for two consecutive days, listening to people, talk about something, and then making the best decision I could. Others voted differently. But I've publicly stated my reasons as to my rationale as to why I did. If more facts come out, it'll tilt American society one direction or the other. I respect my voters. But if they object to my vote, I say, please go back and look at that testimony. And then you decide. And some have, and they come back and say, oh, I see what you're talking about. I may still disagree with you, but I certainly think it was a rational decision.

By the way, and I also say, when I was elected, there's actually common ground between those who don't like my vote, because, and my vote, because I say when I was elected, the oath I took was the support and defend the Constitution. And I did my, that's our common ground. And I took a vote that I think supported. defended our Constitution. And so you may disagree with my findings, but I hope you understand that that was my motivation. And folks will say, yeah, I get that. Can I ask you one very important last question? New Orleans is my favorite food city on the planet. There is nothing better.

As the senator from Louisiana, I just want to know what is the number one dish that you tell people they have to get. Is it the shrimp poboy from mothers? Is it the turtle soup galatouard? Brennan's bread pudding? You tell me what is the Bill Cassidy, New Orleans food that you must eat? I love turtle soup. I mean, everything you just listed, but theoretically you get something just as good someplace else. I don't think you can. But turtle soup is just wonderful. And that's where you almost never get it any place but New Orleans, or from Louisiana, because you can get it else. were in Louisiana. I think that's pretty good advice. All right. So we're going to end. The doctor tells you. Turtle soup. Go get it. That's Sherry on top. Amazing. Thank you so much, Senator, for

joining us. We really appreciate your time. We know you've got to go vote. Get to it. Get back to the people's work. Hey, thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online,

no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build money. monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage, with a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos. It builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. We are here for the second half of our Friday Dispatch podcast, and I am happy to be joined by Tom Jocelyn. Tom is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, as a senior editor at Long War Journal.

And of course, for those of you who are dispatch members, know him as the author of vital interests, our foreign policy and national security newsletter. Tom, we're having you on it at not a very happy moment. in the history of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. It's been nearly 20 years since the attacks of 9-11. And if you're paying sort of casual attention to Afghanistan, you're a regular reader of the New York Times, watch the network news, average news consumer, you know that things have been going downhill

since Joe Biden announced the U.S. troop withdrawal set for September 11th, the 20th anniversary of those attacks. But things have really taken a turn for the worst over the past week. Can you just bring us up to speed and tell us what's happened? Sure. I think first, you know, I'd like to take a step back and say, you know, even before President Biden announced the full withdrawal, he was going to complete the full withdrawal this year, the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their allies on the ground were sort of steadily.

and slowly advancing against Afghan security forces. And what they were doing over the last few years, really, as the U.S. was pursuing this fanciful peace process with the Taliban, is that they were laying the groundwork for this siege and ultimately the capture of a number of Afghanistan's provincial capitals. And the way they did that was they seized a bunch of rural territory, and they were sort of softening up other territory to quickly take. And then they were going to encircle these provincial capitals,

sort of like a noose, and then as soon as the U.S. and NATO left, which is the effective deadline for that was May 1st of this year, according to the deal between the Trump administration and Taliban, they had planned that by May 1st, they were going to launch this offensive to then start taking more territory and ultimately take the provincial capitals. When President Biden confirms he's going to stick to this withdrawal basically this year and say we're fully out this year, the Taliban then pushes the button and basically goes ahead with this long planned offensive. And this long plan of events is what they did since May 1st is they took, they now control probably more than 200 of Afghanistan's 407 districts. Those were, that was largely rural terrain. And then in the last really week or so, they went on the offensive against these provincial capitals that they were encircling. These are the more populated areas. And so in the last week or so, you know, I'm writing this week's newsletter. I'll put it this way. When I sat down this morning to try and finalize the newsletter, my opening line was, you know, 10 provincial capitals have fallen on the Taliban. By noon, it was 11 provincial capitals that fallen on the Taliban. By 3 o'clock, it was 13 provincial capitals, had fallen to the Taliban. So this gives you a sense of the pace now that we're up to about, as we're speaking now recording this on Thursday night, about 13 of the 34 provincial capitals, including two of Afghanistan's largest cities have now fallen to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which are deeply involved in it. And so they,

The short version of it is they were preparing to take over the country all along, and Washington and a lot of people who were policymakers and a lot of people were involved in this were pretending that that wasn't the case. And so now we are where we are. So I want to push you on that. You, this wasn't a surprise to you or your colleague Bill Rozier at Longward Journal. You've been writing about this for us at the dispatch. You've been chronicling these, what were the slower advances of the Taliban at Longward Journal in great detail. You know, you have pieces going back as far as 2018 earlier, in effect, predicting something that looks a lot like this.

This is to take nothing away from you. I don't mean this is any kind of a slight. But if you, Tom Jocelyn and Bill Roggio saw what was likely to happen from the outside, without access to all of the high-level intelligence, all of the reporting that we got from our allies in Afghanistan and in the region, why didn't the U.S. government see this coming? It's a great question, but what I would say is that

I don't think that the analysis of the bill and I did was super complicated. I don't think it took any kind of special intellect or insight. I think it was just common sense. and the question is, why did Washington invest so much in defying common sense? Why did they invest so much effort into denying the plain reality of the situation? And that's a complex question, or at least the answer is complicated. I think, look, I think we're dealing with a broad failure across the political and military elite in Afghanistan. I think they failed. They did not,

they couldn't be honest about what was going on. And, you know, it all starts with this ambivalier right? You know, President Biden announced in April that, you know, he'd made a decision to fully withdraw. He's the third of the four presidents since 9-11. He's the third one in a row to say he just wants out of Afghanistan, right? That sort of political ambivalence coming from the Oval Office matters. It matters a lot. And, you know, since 2011, when President Obama brought his short-lived surge to an end, really the President of the United States, whether it be Barack Obama or Donald Trump or President Biden, has said they either wanted to bring a responsible end to the war in Afghanistan or they wanted to end the endless wars in Afghanistan. And that political

ambivalence, I think, trickled down in a lot of ways to the war effort. But by the same token, I don't think that a lot of U.S. military leadership, the generals in particular, really coded themselves in honor in all this. I don't think they stood up to tell the truth. Why? Why do you say that? Well, one of the things the Longward Journal has done is we've, you've asked why we could see these things and they didn't. We've kind of functioned as a the minority report basically and said, you know, look, no, you're, you know, to the powers to be, you know, you're wrong and here's why you're wrong. And we've said that over and over again. And I just think, you know, you can look, you say why, look just as recently as, just as

recently as last month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, was saying that there are 300,000 members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces that have been put on the payroll. We've stood up this force. And they have the capacity and ability to defend their nation. Well, look at what's happening right now. Does it look to you like there's this massive Afghan force that's standing in the way of the jihadis onslaught? Certainly no. So when you have this big of a misperception, right, when you're this wrong, right, shouldn't there be accountability for that? And what I would say is that this was just the latest example of how somebody in a senior position was wrong. And I can say for over a decade at least, nobody's

ever had been held accountable. I mean, one of the running jokes we've had is that, you know, one of the ways that General gets us four stars by going to Afghanistan leading forces and never winning a single battle, you know. And so this is, you know, I have a ton of respect for service members and the lower commands of serve time in Afghanistan. You know, I feel for a lot of those guys. But I think that they were fighting America's enemies, for sure, you know, but I think

their leaders failed them. So it's not just the military leaders, is it? I mean, you have political leaders. You have some of the country's top spokesman from the Trump administration, from the Obama administration, and certainly from the Biden administration, who have said things that are just totally at odds with the reality on the ground again and again. I remember a big fight that you and Bill had about how many al-Qaeda members were still in Afghanistan and the military and political leaders in the U.S. kept saying 150, 150. That was this talk to 100. It was 50 to 100. 50 to 100. Right. Was their talking point. And you guys pushed back on that at every turn. And then we discovered a huge camp that had more than what they had for the entire country in this one camp. I think about the comments that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said made in an appearance. on Face the Nation on CBS.

I think it was back in March of 2020 when he was talking about this deal. He was promoting the Trump administration's deal with the Taliban. And he went so far as to say that the Taliban, not only were the Taliban going to publicly renounce al-Qaeda, but the Taliban were going to fight alongside the U.S. against al-Qaeda. And then fast forward to destroy al-Qaeda, to quote-unquote destroy al-Qaeda. To destroy al-Qaeda, and fast forward to the Biden administration, you have the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, say, as the Taliban were advancing at the end of last week, taking territory, gobbling up territory, Ned Price said the Taliban wants a durable solution through negotiations. You've had others, the Secretary of State, make similar comments. Is it just that nobody cares anymore?

Is it just that people aren't paying attention to Afghanistan? So you guys call them on it. We've certainly written a lot about this, both in the Trump administration and the Biden administration. It doesn't seem to matter. No, and that's why I have mixed mind on all this, because, you know, if you were to say that from the perspective of an American service member, do I want an American service member to go into Afghanistan now to fight on behalf of his or her country?

The answer is no, I don't. You know, and I, because I don't think that anybody understands that the sacrifice they're being asked to make what that is, right? And I don't think that their leaders understand even what's going on. So I can't really ask that. I can't endorse that for American service members. The reason why I have a mixed opinion of it, however, is as the nerd who studies jihadis very carefully, terrorists really carefully, the U.S. has badly miscalculated here. You know, Al-Qaeda has always been much larger in Afghanistan than the dogma within U.S. circles dictated much larger. This is, they announced in March 2020, after the U.S. signed this deal with the Taliban in Doha, al-Qaeda issued a statement saying, this is a great victory for the Mujahideen, and we've won now.

we've beaten America. And all I can say is look out, right? This is now the victory message is coming out from al-Qaeda saying, not only did the Mujahideen defeat the Soviets the first time around in the 1980s and their superpower status. But guess what? A second superpower came here and we beat them too, you know? And there's definitely some fiction when it comes to the first time around. I mean, al-Qaeda wasn't even fully formed until around 1988. And, you know, they can't really claim that victory for themselves, although they played a minor role in it. But the point stands regardless, they did play a role in this second go-around. And this is, this is the thing that is the most baffling to me and all this is that, you know, you mentioned this, how they

kept getting the al-Qaeda presence of Afghanistan wrong. It's just stunning. You know, I'll give you one example. We, just, just to the last 24 hours since we recorded this, there's a province called Ghazni, which strows the south-eastern portion of Afghanistan, okay? And just to give you a few, just a few details of why this is important. Ghazni sits on the road connecting Kandahar and Kabul. And if you control Ghazdi, you basically control a major southern approach to the Afghan capital. Afghanistan is two biggest cities. Yeah.

Kabul and Khabel and Kandahar, right. And Kandahar, as we're speaking right now, Kandhar appears to have fallen. So they, the Taliban, you know, takes Kandah, I'm sorry, takes Ghazni in the last 24 hours. We've been tracking Ghazni. of course, we've been tracking everything as carefully as we can for many years. We literally wrote up a report this morning that cited, I don't even know, maybe 25 examples of al-Qaeda's enduring presence in Ghazni from 2007 through October of last year, right? I mean, just, I mean, you know, the U.S. is telling you there's only a few hundred Al-Qaeda guys

in Afghanistan. If I had to bet my house on this, I would say there's probably way more than that in Ghazni province, one of the 34 provinces alone, right? I mean, you know, this is a major hub for al-Qaeda. It's identified, you and I advocated for the release of Osama bin Laden's files. You remember that fight we had a long time ago, Steve? Certainly. Okay, well, here's why those files did matter. Because if you had read those files when they were captured in May 2011, if the people had read them carefully and really used to synthesize to understand what al-Qaeda was doing in Afghanistan, one of those files is a memo written

in the last months of Osama bin Laden's life that describes al-Qaeda's very strong military activity in Afghanistan. That's the phrase that his lieutenant uses. So at this point time now, in 2010, 2011, the U.S. has adopted this 50 to 100 posture. We only have 50 to 100 al-Qaeda guys in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is receiving memos describing their sprawling efforts across Afghanistan. One of the provinces identified as a safe haven, bin Laden says to his men, you know, they're hitting us with these drones in northern Pakistan. We've got to get you out. So we're going to send you to some places. And one of the places is, Gosney, right? And lo and behold, here we are now 10 years later. And one of the places that

falls is Gosny. One of these, and this is the same story I could tell this story a dozen different ways across Afghanistan. And that's to me signals, you know, here's the point, though, other than you and I talking about this right here right now, how many people in U.S. government know about that memo to bin Laden or synthesize it or understand what it means. So that's my next question, this is available that, this is information that has been available for a decade to U.S. intelligence analysts, to military planners, to civilian military leaders, to political leaders. Did they have the information and ignore it because it was inconvenient for their stated political desires of, in Obama administration's case, ending the war on terror, in the Trump

administration's case, getting out of Afghanistan, in the Biden administration's case, withdrawing. Or did they just not know? No, they knew. I mean, because, you know, we even have, you know, the official U.S. government translations, there were even some cases, you know, entered into court evidence. And it was a Brooklyn terror trial that used this memo in particular was in that Brooklyn terror trial. So it's, it was certainly known. But the point was, what I would put it is, it wasn't synthesized in a way politically or otherwise because of this ambivalence that we just talked about at the political level, right? If the Oval Office is saying, I just want out, I don't want to deal with this, well, then certain facts don't sink in.

They're not really understood or not top of mind for people. They're not, there's not a, you know, if you're a person in the Washington bureaucracy, or maybe you're not going to spend your time trying to get into the counterterrorism portfolio, if the President of the United States is saying, we just want out of this, we don't want to do this anymore, you know? And basically you have, that's not to say there aren't good people in this business because there are, and They've certainly done things to hunt down, you know, terrorists who are plotting against Americans repeatedly over the last 20 years. What I would say is, you know, if it were a priority to really win in Afghanistan, things

like that memo would have stood out to somebody other than you and me in a way that says, wait a minute, now I can connect that memo to the following 50 pieces of operational evidence that I've collected over the last decade, and it tells the story, right? Is there any chance, given what we've seen over the past week, what we've seen over the past 48 hours, what we've seen over the past 12 hours, it seems pretty clear that the Taliban are on their way to violently taking power in Afghanistan. There is no conceivable power sharing agreement with the Afghan government that we have been working with or in some cases sideline. You know, my colleague, Bill Roggio has been doing this map since 2014. That's when the U.S.

and now it's the official end of combat operations in Afghanistan. So just to give you a sense of how the ambivalence plays out, the official position under Obama in 2014 was we're ending combat operations. Now, of course, that wasn't the end of combat operations, but it shows you how desperate America has been to get out of this, right? That political and military leadership basically said, no, we're not doing combat operations anymore. Of course they did.

But he's been keeping a map because that was the formal transfer from the U.S. over to Afghan security forces. And this map that he built, I mean, he'll tell you, it's not perfect. It's very difficult work to do to figure out what's going on. But it showed a story. It showed a picture in what the Taliban was doing, what their basic sort of insurgency strategy was, and it was to take over the whole country.

It was not to carve off a piece of the country so that they could share power with Kabul. No. It was to encircle these provincial capitals, take them. Meanwhile, encircle Kabul and take that too. And so they've been fighting to win this whole time while the U.S. has been fighting basically either for a draw, which is what they forced the Afghans to believe was in the cards with the negotiated settlement. U.S. policymakers at the State Department of Military talked about this a lot or just to get out, right? So you have, on the one side, you have the

jihadis fighting for victory. On the other side, you have this ambivalence that leads to all sorts of confusion and a desire not that we don't want to fight to win at all. So guess what? Guess who's going to win in that scenario? Right. Right. Right. So Bill, Rogio, just tweeted as we were talking, confirming what you said moments ago. Bill writes, Kandahar City is now Taliban-controlled. Lakhshar Ghaz not far behind if it isn't Taliban controlled right now. The situation is grave. Afghan forces have collapsed in the north, south, and west.

Taliban can now focus on the east and the road to Kabul. This is close to the end game. If that's what happens, if that's what we watch over the next few days, Has the U.S. lost the war in Afghanistan? Decisively. You know, I would say that some people would say that the war was won in 2001 and then basically it lost, the U.S. lost the aftermath. I disagree with that wholeheartedly.

If the U.S. had won the war in 2001. David, our David French, has written something close to that. We'll have to get you guys together and put you in a ring and have you guys duke, duke it out. I don't know if you want to put me in a ring with him, but, yeah, I don't. don't, yeah, no, I think it's just wrong. I mean, look, I mean, it's very simple. So Mule Omar, the Taliban leader, defied America by continuing to harbor Osama bin Laden, contrary to what some Taliban apologists said. And, you know, that was his ultimate defiance was the reason why the U.S. had to go into Afghanistan to go after al-Qaeda and root al-Aqaeda. Was Muul-Omar killed

in 2001? No. He fled to Pakistan and remained elusive until he died of natural causes in 2013. Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, and is number two, Iman al-Zawahiri, the guys who sit atop this global terror network at the time and then going forward, where they killed in 2001. That should have been the prime mission, right? Should have been to kill Al-Qaeda definitively, decisively, in Torbora Mountains, and in Afghanistan in 2001, where they killed? No, they weren't. You know, it wasn't until nearly 10 years later that Osama bin Laden was killed. And guess what?

I'm in Al-Zawahiri is still, for all we can tell, still alive. and according to recent UN reporting, probably in Afghanistan. So, or at least probably somewhere along that poorest border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We don't really know. But the point is that I can go on like this for hours, naming other names. Those are the headline names. The point is that the U.S. did not decisively defeat the Taliban or al-Qaeda. What they did was they overthrew the Taliban's rag-tag regime.

This is a regime that didn't have an air force, didn't have air defenses, didn't have any kind of militarized army. It just was, you know, sort of a, you know, really a porous regime that was, you know, holding on Afghanistan and sent them scattering, and they, over the next few years, then reform themselves as insurgents to do what, to take Afghanistan back and to reform it as Islamic Emma Afghanistan, which is what they're on the verge of accomplishing to this day right now. So, but so let me take David's side in that argument for a second. So, but they did, by your own admission, send them scurrying. They dispersed Al-Qaeda through. throughout the region, the command and control was more or less methodically dismantled. Many, although bin Laden, you're right about Mullah Omar, bin Laden, Iman al-Zawahari, many senior Taliban commanders were killed. Senior Al-Qaeda officials were brought from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay. And most importantly, as David writes, you look at what our main objective was,

20 years ago, and it was to prevent al-Qaeda or other jihadists from another 9-11-style attack on the U.S. homeland. And while we've had attempts, and we've even had people get through, we haven't had that. Why shouldn't we count that as a success? Well, we'll start with the last point. That's a pretty low bar, right? I mean, you know, the point is- But it wasn't at the time. If I had said to you, I mean, I don't have to imagine this. It's not if I had said to you in the aftermath of 9-11, where are we going to have more of these? We talked about it all the time in those following few years,

and we thought there would be. No, well, I mean, there have been other plots and our attempts, but given the massive amount of resources spent on what was known as the war on terror, we should have been able to stop another big attack on the U.S. is what I would say, given the massive amount of resources. And tracking, you know, a lot of times people have been stopped just by tracking their travel. You know, I mean, something is as simple as that, you know. But here's the bigger point.

Here's why the failure to kill, and by the way, I wrote a vital interest newsletter, the failures of operation during freedom where I spelled this out. The reason why it mattered was because when the U.S. finally caught up with Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, the world had changed dramatically. And that initial scurrying didn't stick. They reformed themselves. They got their act together fairly quickly, actually. And basically got, they took advantage of the situation.

Iraq initially. They expanded their operations to other countries. And most importantly, they reformed this insurgency in Afghanistan to defeat us. And so the point is that bin Laden is getting, he's not just the spiritual figurehead at the time of his death. He's the head of a sprawling global terror network with a significant operational arm in Afghanistan. So basically, yeah, we sent them scurrying. But also here's the other point about that. So the U.S. as part of the whole initial war. One of the key things the U.S. did was it issued an ultimatum to Pakistan of like 10 items or something like that. You remember this Colin Powell and Dick Armitage, you know, right? Well, I recently re-reviewed that list of 10 things that Pakistan, the demands. These were

the initial war on terror demands of Pakistan. This is an initial part of that initial invasion of Afghanistan. It's very difficult to argue that Pakistan complied fully with any of the 10. And most of the 10, it obviously did not comply with, you know. And that was a key component of the whole initial push into Afghanistan. And so part of the reason why this war effort failed, in my view, is because you sent them scattering the al-Qaeda leadership and Taliban leadership to Pakistan, some of them also to Iran. And they were allowed to, instead of keeping constant pressure or figuring out that we have to keep this on the front burner, we have to keep this issue alive to say, no, we have to keep

on top of this after that initial scattering. The U.S. dropped the ball multiple times, you know. And so that's why it then takes, you know, 10 years, almost 10 years to find Osama al-A-Lan. And by the way, remember what I just said, they never even got Iman Al-Zawahiri. You know, if you think about this, this is a guy now, right at this moment as we're speaking, there are at least tens of thousands of fighters who are openly loyal to Iman al-Zaw-Hiri across several countries. And he is either in Afghanistan or across the border in Pakistan.

How is that a success? How is it a successful effort? I mean, you know, if you have to defeat al-Qaeda definitively in 2001, which is what should have occurred. I mean, Oslo-Hiri would not be alive today. You know, Bin Laden would not have lived to 2011. I mean, I can go down a roster of all sorts of guys. So I think that the war was a failure from the get-go.

It didn't accomplish what, you know, Sambenlind shouldn't have walked out to Arborra. And there's, I'm going to have more to say about that in the future because there's some of the Pentagon papers that have been, you know, released the Afghan papers, I should say, that have come out about the flawed thinking, I think, at times about this and how that reflected. I mean, there's a memo from Dona Rumsfeld, for example, you know, comparing, you know, what the U.S. should do in 2001 to the Soviet occupation of eastern Afghanistan. And it just was flawed logic, you know, the U.S. should have moved in and

ended bin Laden then and there. Didn't Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the real mastermind of 9-11, in effect, predict what we're seeing now, said you guys will go for the quick and easy kill, but we don't, time is on our side. We're willing to wait. He did. He knew that what he said to his interrogator reportedly was that he had studied the Americans and he knew that we think in terms of four-year election cycles and they, the jihadis, think in terms of generations.

And I think, I think that was basically right. You know, I mean, you look at it, I mean, I'll give you another name of a guy who wasn't killed in 2001 who should have been, which is Jalalid and Akani, the guy who really, you know, he's a key bridge between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He incubated al-Qaeda. He helped Osama bin Laden escape in 2001. He was a guy who was formerly worked with the CIA in the 1980s and then was a very duplicitous character and was actually simultaneously building up al-Qaeda's earliest ranks.

But his son, Sir Juddin Akani, so Jalaliden at some point passes away of natural causes. The Taliban announces this in recent years. But his son, Sir Juddinakani, is today the deputy emir, number two of the Taliban insurgency. And what do you see in the bin Laden files that we talked about from Abbottabad.

What do you see in all the evidence on this guy for the years? He's deeply in bed with al-Qaeda. In fact, the, in fact, the, you know, UN recently reported that he was part of the wider al-Qaeda leadership, you know? I mean, you know, how is that a successful war effort when these guys are, you know, can basically exist and reform themselves and live to fight another day for 20 years and reestablish themselves, you know, which is what Surah Juden did, you know, and his father did. So I think that this is, you know, there was really not the type of focus on

parts of this that there should have been. Speaking of Sir Juden Hakani, he is a noted New York Times author. Isn't he? What happened there? What was, what was his argument? Yeah. I mean, the New York Times in, I think it was early 2020. February 20th of 2020. Right before the dog. Under the headline, under the headline. what we the Taliban want. Yeah, and it was a very, this was an op-ed attributed to Serju and O'Conni. I took this a part of vital interest as well. It doesn't appear to me that was written by him.

I think it was written by somebody for him. He may have signed off on it, but I doubt that he wrote it. It uses a lot of weasel words, if you read it carefully, to get around certain issues. You'll notice that Al-Qaeda's not mentioned in the op-ed, for example, at all. He talks about extremist groups that are spoilers, but he could easily be just talking talking about ISIS, which is opposed to al-Qaeda, you know. It's not actually, he doesn't actually denounce al-Qaeda at any point in the op-ed. And, you know, basically makes it sound like they're not seeking totalitarian rule for the Taliban's Islamic Emirate. He doesn't say that, of course.

He just sort of implies that, you know, Afghans are going to have to decide for themselves what they want. What he means is his Afghans are going to decide for what they want for the future for Afghanistan, for their totalitarian regime. But here's the point, too, Steve, about us yes, about the failure here, right? Other than you and I, maybe a few others, how many people knew that that op-ed was likely disinformation or at a very, at a bare minimum, was contradicted by a mountain of facts? You know, I mean, how does this, how does something like this mean, Surgeon O'Conni, who's that op-ed is attributed to, is an internationally wanted man. He's, the U.S. has a standing boundary on him. He's a wanted terrorist by the U.S., and yet,

here the New York Times is publishing an op-ed attribute to him. I mean, this is kind of unfathomable, really. I mean, it speaks, again, right, to the failure. I mean, it speaks to the fact that nobody's really keeping on top of this stuff. Well, and I would just say as an editorial judgment, it was, I would say, lacking perspective, lacking seriousness. Remember, the New York Times op-ed page sort of blew itself up because they published an op-ed from a sitting U.S. Senator, but they also published an op-ed from a most wanted terrorist and Taliban leader. By the way, I disagreed with the cotton op-ed. That was an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton,

arguing that troops should be used to basically quell the violence in cities, something along those lines, or at least considering it. Sure. I would argue that that's well within the bounds of serious debate. Right. Right. I was going to say. I was a senior al-Qaeda leader or Taliban leader is not. But that's what I was going to say is, right, is that that shows you, you know,

when it comes to foreign affairs in particular and these issues in particular, I think the playing field now is very, very tilted. I think that, I think that somebody like Serju and Nakani or somebody writing in his name can get a free pass, whereas somebody who's the political opposition for New York Times writers doesn't, you know. And free pass in a way where you can't say, you know, like, you know, I mean, I disagree with the cotton op-ed, obviously, but you could say, well, it's debatable and let's talk about it, but without the sort of just this house cleaning that the Times attempted to do and did do

afterwards, you know, you'd notice that there was no public pressure from the left or anybody when it came to the Surajuna Connie, not bad. No, I think that's fair. I want to go back to a point that you made briefly earlier and asked you to expand on it. clearly if the Taliban control Afghanistan, there are, you know, tremendous humanitarian concerns. We're seeing them play out and there's real reporting about executing, surrendering Afghan national security forces, killing, wanton killing of civilians. You have reasons to be concerned in a Taliban-run country about the fate of women and girls and not just their ability to get an education,

which is one place where we've seen pretty tremendous strides over the past 20 years, but in their ability to survive and live with sort of basic rights. That is not the way the Taliban operates. But beyond Afghanistan and beyond the security question, Afghanistan, what does this, what are people like Xi Jinping? and Raeisi and Iran and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, what conclusions are they likely to draw from this? Or is it the case that Afghanistan is, you know,

as its critics have said for a long time, as people who have said who have argued to get out, really a backwater, it doesn't matter much. It's not, you know, we're not likely to see additional real threats emanate from Afghanistan. How do you look at the sort of global implications of this? Um, you know, I probably disagree with a lot of people in this regard. I, I do see the failure here and the defeat as indicative of a broader American failure. Um, I think that we are going through a very trying time now as a country, both domestically and internationally. And if I were a foreign adversary of America witnessing the confusion that just took place in Afghanistan and this, this war that at one point in time, the president of the United States said we had to win. And then America lost. I would, would, if I was an adversary of the United States, I would be buoyed by that. I would be very confident by that. I would say, looking at this, that, you know, it's easy for America to get

confused and not to really know what it's doing and war fighting. And if I were military strategies for a foreign adversary, I would take note of that, that there are ways to, you know, I mean, we were just talking about Sir Junacconi publishing hop in the New York Times. You know, this is, this goes to a fundamental crisis now within America, right? How is it that that type of thing can occur and nobody other than you and me and a handful of other people are offended by it, right? Like, how is it that the American consciousness, the American identity is shaped now to such a point that sitting U.S. Senator draws, you know, this dire outrage, but a internationally wanted terrorist does not, you know, this is a big problem. I mean, I, you know, I think America

is going through a real crisis here, and I'm hoping that somebody doesn't take advantage of it, but I suspect somebody will, is what I would say. Turning to the national security question in Afghanistan, what's the status of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan today? What's the status of ISIS in Afghanistan today? And more broadly, think back to August of 2001, you know, three, four weeks before the attacks of 9-11. Would you say that al-Qaeda today is stronger than it was in that month before those attacks? Or, you know, Or did we see the strength manifest itself in those attacks? Yeah.

So this is a very interesting question. This goes to the heart of the problems in the counterterrorism field, which 20 years after 9-11, there are still no commonly accepted definitions of al-Qaeda, believe it or not. This goes again to the broader failure, I would say. But when you understand that al-Qaeda has always been an insurgency organization first and an a certainty organization that uses terrorism as a tactic. If you define it that way, which I think is what's consistent with the primary source evidence and consistent with their operations and consistent with the whole history of the organization, I think in some areas right now, they are

stronger than they've ever been. I think they are well positioned to capitalize on the victory in Afghanistan because they have invested in the Taliban's Islamic Emirate and said that they were going to fight to resurrect the Taliban's Islamic Emirate. And they're about to do that. And so I think that that is something that is definitely a win for them. Other areas, of course, they've failed. And you talk about the failure to attack the West. And this is part of the reason why I was a, maybe I was a little too dismissive of that,

but here's why I find that to be a little too much of overplaying that hand, I would say, overplaying that argument. Years ago, we're sitting here in 2021, years ago during the so-called Arab Spring, we got indications that Al-Qaeda said, you know what, let's lay the groundwork for attacks, the West, but let's not necessarily pursue that right now because the world is going our way

and we can capitalize on some of these things and win in some of these areas. Now, it turns out that they didn't win in Syria. They've had some setbacks in Syria, though they're still a seller presence there. They didn't win in Yemen. They've had some setbacks, but they still have a significant presence there. They are doing pretty well in East Africa. They are doing pretty well in West Africa. They're doing very well in Afghanistan, right? So my point is that they, attacking the West was never al-Qaeda's central mission. Their central mission was, believe it or not, in the long run, to resurrect an Islamic caliphate. That's something that has been dismissed by U.S. policymakers, including John Brennan, the former counterterrorism advisor to President Obama,

who dismissed it as an absurd, feckless delusion, I think three years of the day before ISIS announced the resurrection of its caliphate. That ISIS quest to build a caliphate, what people don't understand was that al-Qaeda had already primed the pump on that for years. They've been saying that this is what we're doing, you know. And for them, the Islamic Emirate Afghanistan, and their religious, their theological outlook is meant to be the nucleus of a new caliphate. Now, they're not actually close to building a caliphate, right? But if you are a real believer in this ideology or could be a believer in this ideology, and you have al-Qaeda say, hey, you know what? We just beat the Americans in Afghanistan, and we've resurrected, we're resurrecting the Islamic Emirate.

And this is the cornerstone of our new caliphate. And, oh, by the way, this conforms to certain Islamic motifs, such as the black flag of Tahit or monotheism, is going to rise of the horse on, this mythological entity, you know, area covering Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's going to rise once again as a sign that, you know, laws with us. Boy, they now have quite a marketing message, don't they, to youth who may be attracted to that, maybe susceptible to their movement. So, so, yeah, they haven't done another 9-11, but they've, I mean, I would argue they've been invested in beating us in Afghanistan. And who's on the verge of that, of winning that war? Much of the debate here in the United States about what to do in Afghanistan has been taking place on what I think is sort of a polar plane. On the one hand, stay in Afghanistan, huge nation building presence, heavy flow of money, and many, many troops.

and on the other hand, withdraw. It seems to me that there were lots of possibilities for a solution that lived somewhere in between those. And in fact, that's what we've seen, really, for the past several years in Afghanistan. Why didn't we see more debate about that, about a limited presidents with a mission well-defined in scope that had American national security interests at the heart? I mean, it's a great question, you know, because that would require some sort of thoughtful calibration of our political rhetoric, right? And we've seen anything but that now

across a few administrations, you know, I mean, the political rhetoric had really gotten tied up in this idea of endless wars. And believe me, there's a, I can probably, I mean, let's be frank, I can probably criticize the war in Afghanistan as well as anybody, okay, and how it was conducted. But the point is right that you're making that the U.S. had gotten this down to a much smaller presence that was sustainable financially and in terms of, you know, in terms of the human footprint. You know, one of the things you mentioned David's Com, one of the things he wrote in there was that there hadn't been any U.S. casualty since February 2020. That's a little misleading, though, because the reason why there hadn't been in prison of Biden's right in this regard,

the reason there hadn't been a U.S. casualty since February 2020 is because the Taliban on al-Qaeda were letting us retreat. So they, with only a few exceptions, they basically said, we said, we said, we won't come after you. Now, where David does have a point is that if you compare it to 2019, there were minimal casualties for the U.S. before that. So that's the comparison I would make. So I think the general point is right, David's making was right. I just think that the 2020 hook was the wrong one. But the point is, but still, you know, even that, I, you know, if I still, you know, if U.S. leadership doesn't understand what it's doing and doesn't understand, articulate the mission in a way that makes sense, then even, you know, any loss of life on the American

side is, you know, it's hard to justify, right? I mean, all this is about casualty. And really, what did President Biden say in April? What did he say when he just, if you look at his speech, the one thing that really, I think really came for him that wasn't an argument that somebody around him, an advisor gave him, was, you know what? I don't want any more Americans to die in Afghanistan, so we're out. That's what he really said, if he cut to the, to cut to the chase. That's what he decided. And I got to tell you, of all of his arguments, that's the one I was most sympathetic to, you know. The other ones, you know, I mean, some of them were stronger than others, some of them were very weak. But the point is, is that, you know, if the U.S. isn't going

to be able to articulate why it's worth, you know, risking the lives of a small number of Americans, you know, ongoing and ongoing presence of Afghanistan, if nobody's capable of articulating that, which is the question you're really asking, right, you know, why is that? Why can't anybody articulate that at a political leadership level or, you know, in any level, really? And I think that that's a problem, you know? Well, the obvious follow-up question is, it's not, I don't think necessarily a question of why can't they, it's do they have the will to do it? Well, that's the issue we're seeing right now across the board, right?

I mean, this is why I think America is in trouble. I think that America lacks the will in a lot of ways to defend itself and to really carry forward as a leader on the global stage. You know, I think that's also the problem we're seeing in Afghanistan where, you know, you talked about the human impact, the cost on Afghans, right? The question really that comes up to my mind as I'm watching this is, how is it that the Afghan leaders failed to such an extent that they couldn't rally the people to put up a fighting force that could really stand in the way of the jihadis advances with all the American money and supplies and everything else? I mean, this is one of those areas where critics of the war, you know, have many valid points. You know, I mean, how is it that the U.S. could spend so many years on the train, advise, and assist mission building up this supposedly huge Afghan national defense and security forces? And then they just crumble the minute the U.S. leaves, you know, I mean, the thing is, like, if you're just, if you're thinking about political will or will to fight, if you're an Afghan woman or you're the husband of an Afghan woman or that's your sister or whatever, you've got to know the Taliban is coming, you know, for your woman.

You've got to know that. You've got to know that if you were opposed to Taliban all these years, you're either going to have to bend the knee or you're going to, or you're going to have to fight to the death. And I think, you know, look, I have saying all this, we've got to keep in mind, thousands of Afghan security forces have died since February 2020. This is another point in all this.

And thousands have fought valiantly, have fought valiantly. Absolutely. Thousands have. However, they did not have the leadership or the willpower or the willpower or whatever it was to really stand in the way of the way of the, the jihadi hordes in a way that mattered. And that's a, that's a troubling fact in all this, very troubling. Yeah, okay, we could go on for hours and we won't. I have two more questions for you. Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, tweeted this afternoon, there is a clear

difference from the way our administration dealt with American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that Biden administration is handling it. Donald Trump, former President Trump, put out a statement today that implied that he had pushed for a condition. based withdrawal and that what we're seeing in Afghanistan today could never have happened under a Trump administration, sort of a two-part question. One, are Pompeo and Trump right? And two, how much of what we're seeing today is owed to the fact that we saw something, at this polarized political moment, we saw something of a bipartisan consensus with

some some valuable outliers, but the past Republican president, the current Democratic president, both agreed we got to get out of Afghanistan. How much did the Trump administration's so-called peace deal play a role in what the Biden administration is doing today? Well, let's take the last part first. Okay, so I think, look, I mean, State Department's spokesman Ned Price basically said the American withdrawal was preordained. because of the Trump deal. I mean, that's not true, right? If the president of the United States,

President Biden decided that he had to keep an enduring presence of Afghanistan to prevent what we're seeing and to counter-terrorist threats ongoing, he could have certainly said the deal is off, right? And we should point out, as a point of privilege, let me just interject here. I mean, watching Ned Price at the State Department podium, much of what Ned Price says is just not true.

And we know that going back many years, going back many years. We tangled with him when he was a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama and would say things repeatedly and directly that were flat out false and he did it again and again and again and again. And unfortunately, the fact checkers who are now pretty active and certainly were active during the Trump administration, we're not nearly as active back at the time when Ned Price was saying things that were demonstrably false. Sorry, that's just an aside, but when people see, when our listeners see Ned Price on television briefing the press or see a quote from him in the newspapers, it's worth pointing out that he goes, in my view, beyond the, you know, sort of the spin job that you expect from administration spokesmen and spokeswomen, just saying things that aren't false. And he's being called on it in kind of an embarrassing way by some in the State Department press corps. Yeah, I mean, just as an aside, too. I mean, he's personally spread lies about my own work. So, you know, I mean, stuff that is just a, just blatant falsehoods.

So, you know, it's, yeah, and I put aside the personal stuff because I don't take any of personally. But, you know, I do see him as evidence in his role as evidence for other evidence of political failure, political elite failure, I would say. But so putting all that aside, I mean, he basically claimed just in the last week that, you know, basically the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was preordained because of the Trump deal. well, the Trump deal with the Taliban. Well, not really. I mean, you know, the Biden administration could easily have said because they supposedly reviewed the deal, which there's not much too. I always joke that this deal that the Trump administration signed the Taliban on February 29th of 2020, there's less to it than the deal you sign when you lease a car. You know, like if you go to like, you know, a rental car agency and you sign the paperwork, there's way more, there's way more verification mechanisms and all that sort of thing in that paperwork that you sign to rent that car than there is in this. supposed peace deal, which of course wasn't a peace deal, was a withdrawal deal. But they could easily have looked at that terse agreement and these few passages in it that are supposedly the Taliban's counterterrorism assurances and said, there's no way you're complying with any of these. We know

you're not complaining with any of these. The deal is off and the U.S. is staying because we have an ongoing terrorist threat that we have to manage. President Biden just decided he didn't want to do that, really, in effect. What he decided was he didn't want to, that if the U.S. stayed, then U.S. forces would come under attack and you could potentially lose some American forces going forward. And he didn't want to risk that. That's really what he decided, you know. So was the, was the Trump deal the reason why America got out? Yes and no. I mean, it basically what Trump locked them into was a retreat that meant that the U.S. could retreat without losing any significant personnel. And President Biden decided, you know, look, I just want to finish

off the retreat. But by the way, they didn't, they didn't even finish by May 1st, which was the timeline in the deal, right? They had to actually get the Taliban just to hold back for a few extra months so they could finish by the end of this month, by the end of August to get all American forces out, which goes to show that you could have just said, had that bargain with the Taliban all along and just said, hey, we're leaving, just don't attack us or you're going to make a stay. And they would have to say, fine. You didn't have to dress it up the way the Trump administration did in all these ways. And that gets to your broader point, your first point about Pompeo and Trump, right? Remember, so Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went way beyond sort of

just saying we're going to get out of Afghanistan or we're leaving Afghanistan. He went on to portray the Taliban as America's counterterrorism partner. President Trump did the same thing. I mean, he was, you know, President Trump said that they're going to fight the terrorist for us. Secretary Pompeo said that the Taliban is going to destroy al-Qaeda for us, work alongside us to destroy al-Qaeda. These, I mean, again, this is another indication to me of how much the American population and media was disconnected from this war, right? These are outrageous comments, if you know anything. Outrageous, outrageous comments. If you know anything about the Taliban, Al-Qaeda. And since they made these comments, there is literally an encyclopedia's worth of evidence

showing that the Al-Qaeda remains deeply in bed with the Taliban, right? So there's- But wait, let me stop you. I'm sorry. It's not just since they made these comments. We knew all along. I mean, the overlap between Taliban leadership and Al-Qaeda leadership is significant. You've written about it extensively. It was totally wacko to suggest that the Taliban were going to fight al-Qaeda, much less renounce al-Qaeda, which they never did. Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I mean, but here's the point, right, the fact that that stuff flew outside of just us objecting to it and saying, I mean, remember, going back to 2018, as you mentioned,

my earlier work on this, I call this in 2018 that this was coming, this nonsense, this revisionism on the Taliban was coming, this sort of apologia. And, of course, it then did come in 2020. money. But how is it that nobody cared across the American, you know, so-called elite about this? How come nobody even, when Secretary Pompeo says that on CBS News, there should have been like an audible gas where people are like, wait a minute, you know, we know enough, we know enough to know that that's a remarkable claim and you're going to need to show us remarkable evidence. Instead, it sort of just gets lost in this blizzard of lies and other

nonsense. And that's part of the reason why we are where we are, right? You ask, you know, people not care. Who if people not care, well, if you're, average American who's turning in the news, what do you mean, what are you going to get about Afghanistan? You know, I mean, if the lead general in Afghanistan doesn't know what al-Qaeda looks like in Afghanistan, how can you expect an American who was just turning on the news and nightly news after a long day of work to know anything about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? If, you know, if the entire counterterrorism community outside of us is invested in this idea that al-Qaeda is basically on death's door and it's down to four guys in a cave somewhere waiting to be

drone to death, right? If that, if many people were invested in that, how can you expect the American population to think that. And that it was, that was in effect what we were getting from the U.S. government, from U.S. government across a long time. Administrations, both Democrat and Republic. Well, speaking of something, last question for you, speaking of something that ought to produce audible gasps across the country when they read it, the New York Times reported today, earlier today, the U.S. government sent troops to help evacuate the U.S.

embassy to get U.S. diplomatic personnel. out of the country safely. Ned Price said it wasn't an evacuation. This is not the full withdrawal. Again, I advise that people take his comments and denials with mounds and mounds of salt. But the New York Times reported this in a story today. Mr. Khalizad, referring to Zag Kalizad, who's the U.S. peace envoy from the Trump administration, also now with the Biden administration. Mr. Kaliazad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the U.S. embassy must remain open and secure if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. Now, wait a second. If the Taliban is going to receive American aid, we are one month before. before the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

The 9-11 attacks took place in large part because the Taliban allowed them to take place, cleared the way, made possible for al-Qaeda to do what al-Qaeda did. There's the overlap in Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership that we mentioned earlier, and you're welcome to flesh that out a little bit in response to this question. How is it possible that the U.S. government would be considering today, and we know that there were these discussions taking place at the highest levels of the Trump administration as well.

So this is not a critique unique to the Biden administration. How is it possible today that the U.S. government is considering funding the Taliban who played a major role in making the 9-11 attacks happen? well this this is why i've got such a grim view of everything now right i mean you only get to this place 20 years after 9-11 if you know the u.s government's views of the taliban have become completely warped and this is part of the reason why i would say i have a hard time i would have a hard time for a policymaker asking a u.s. service member to put his or her life on the line afghanistan right at the same time if you were to try and ask that person to do that you have senior U.S. officials contemplating, giving money to, and financially assisting, the financial

assistance to the jihadis who are in bed with al-Qaeda and who have been trying to kill you for the last 20 years. This is insanity. But the way you get there is because, and this is what, you know, I get some commenters who hate this when I say this, and I don't care because I'm not going to stop saying it, because it's totally true. One of the things that happened in the U.S. government about a decade ago was this very influential revisionism on the Afghan war, this Taliban Apology has set in. And you can see this now in some of the media reporting. Like there's this guy Maddie Asan who reports for Peacock, right? And he's a reporter on Peacock. Which is an NBC, NBC. Right. Network thing, right? And he tweeted, oh, you know, just in the last few months,

he tweeted, oh, you know, basically the war in Afghanistan was unnecessary because the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over and the U.S. just was big bad U.S. kept the war going and just turned them down, right? And he provided a link to this piece in the Guardian to supposedly make his point. But if you click on the piece, I've seen this before. I've seen every iteration of this lie, okay? So if you click on the piece, first of all, it actually quotes Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, the actual decision maker, as saying, no, there are no conversations to turn anybody over, right? And then you can you can look at everything Mool Omar said in 2001 and they're on and said, no, you know, the U.S. has promised us defeat under Bush, Allah has provenance's

victory. I'm betting on Allah. That's what he said. And he bet on bin Laden and he defended bin Laden at that moment in forevermore. And basically what guys like Madi Asan and others have to seize upon are these very weasly statements by lower-level Taliban officials who had no power who were saying things like, well, if you provide us evidence that Bin Laden was actually behind 9-11, then maybe we'll consider having a trial and maybe turning him over, right? I mean, just think about this. So you go from the actual decision maker says he's not turning bin Laden over

to these weasily comments by lesser part. that are completely filled with caveats and are not actually credible whatsoever. And you hinge your whole view of the Afghan war on those lesser comments. You know, this is the type of nonsense that I would say it's not unique to Madi Asan. It's sunk in across a lot of places. I mean, there are a lot of places you can, I could find references in the New York Times in the Washington Post, the Daily Beast in recent weeks and months that have repeated this lie, various iterations of this lie.

And I can show you definitively why it's wrong, you know. So you think about it. But that type of stuff has infected the American mindset on all this, you know. And that's just one of many lies that have been told on behalf of the Taliban. I mean, think about it, folks, right? Think about this, Steve, right? So you and I were talking about the so-called peace process that the Biden administration has been talking about with the Taliban. And before that, the Trump administration was talking about.

What was the fundamental premise of the so-called peace process, which never existed really? It was what? The Taliban was willing to share power and wasn't going to actually seek a military victory to restore its Islamic era of Afghanistan. Excuse me, what's happening in Afghanistan right now, right? All those people who said the Taliban wasn't going to do this, that they wanted a negotiated settlement, that there was no military solution in Afghanistan.

Excuse me, the Taliban has a military solution for Afghanistan. Yeah, and I would just point out, just as an aside, I think this is an underappreciated fact in discussion of all of this, and it's worth reminding people every time we talk about it, the U.S. government purposefully cut out the Afghan government from those talks. So talk about a step that undermined the supposed future government of Afghanistan. The U.S. government said, you're not allowed to participate in these talks. Well, what message do you think that sent? Yeah, and I mean, we don't have time here, but all I can say

is that the entire history of the talks of the Taliban is farcical, it is the worst example or I should say the best example of servile diplomacy you ever witness. It was absolutely ludicrous. But you don't get that unless you have adopted an apologetic view or a revisionist view of the Taliban. And what I would say is my friends in the U.S. government who have been in this business for a long time, some of whom would put their professional careers on the line and it would deploy multiple times and have served America to keep Americans safe, they'll tell you that about a decade ago, this stuff, this rot sunk in. And that to this day, you have people, repeat these talking points as if they're true. And, you know, that even Salmeiqlizad was sharing

stuff like this throughout his talks with the Taliban, you know, sharing, sharing stuff like there was an L.A. Times op-ed that was totally full of nonsense along these lines. You know, something like the 9-11 wasn't even planned in Afghanistan. That's one of the other talking points now, you know. And what I would say, I just end on this note, what I would say something, I think Afghanistan has lost, but I think we've lost something even greater here, which is that now we're out a point where this ridiculous blame America first mindset has sunk into the point where you're not only have we lost in Afghanistan, but the, one of the dominant narratives is going to be we shouldn't have been there in the first place and that we, and that we were in the wrong all along.

And boy, oh, boy, that's bad. You're hearing that. You're hearing that a lot. Well, Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to do this on relatively short notice. We thought it was very important to bring your knowledge and expertise to our listeners. We're looking forward to your newsletter that will publish tomorrow on Friday after this podcast is posted. And we are looking at the possibility of trying to host a dispatch live so that some of our members can have an opportunity to ask some additional questions directly to you and have a deeper discussion of what's happening and what it means for the future of the United States and American leadership in the world. So thanks a lot, Tom.

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