The Megyn Kelly Show - Afghanistan Falls to the Taliban, with Sean Parnell and Charles C.W. Cooke | Ep. 146

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Sean Parnell, military veteran and Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, and Charles C.W. Cooke, senior writer for National Review, to talk about Afghanistan falling to the Taliban, President Biden's lack of response to the debacle, the still-unanswered questions regarding the foreign policy ramifications of what's happening in Afghanistan, the mixed feelings the military veterans of the war in Afghanistan feel, what might happen next in Afghanistan with the Taliban in charge, the political ramifications for the Democrats and Republicans, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Well, we had a different show planned today, but we switched it up because we need to talk about Afghanistan. The Taliban is now saying the war in Afghanistan is over and that they won. They're back in control nearly 20 years after we first went into that country in the wake of 9-11. It was October 7th, 2001, that President Bush announced airstrikes on the Taliban, on al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. And about a month later that the Taliban forces lost control of the capital city of Kabul, which they now control again. They've taken over all the

major cities in Afghanistan. They've taken over our Bagram Air Force Base. They are letting al Qaeda prisoners out by the day. The Afghan security forces are surrendering in droves or simply taking off their uniforms. There is terror among those who helped us in Afghanistan, the civilian population that helped us as translators or helped us navigate the roads or navigate food supplies and so on and so forth. The journalists, Afghan journalists who took up pens and pencils and paper and tried to document what was happening over there are writing now of their feelings of betrayal that they were promised that

they would be helped out of the country and we've abandoned that promise it's not going to happen they can't they they have to go on to some website and try to fill out forms all of which are in english which okay you're a translator but still there's some obstacles there. And they've basically been left behind some between 18 and 23,000 Afghans who helped us not to mention American citizens who are having difficulty getting out because we just picked up our toys and went home. And President Biden is now being criticized from the left, from the right, even the media piling on at how poorly this was handled, how he's embarrassed our country. He has humiliated the United States in the way he handled this.

President Trump, former President Trump, of course, is blaming Biden, saying he ought to resign in disgrace. Biden's pointing the finger back at Trump, saying you're the one who struck the deal, saying our troops would leave by May 2021. I extended it to September, which is why they were leaving over the summer. But you have only yourself to blame. So what's the truth? Well, we're going to get into all of it.

And we've got a great, great set of guests today. We've got Sean Parnell. He is a decorated combat veteran. He's the bestselling author of the book Outlaw Platoon, which details his service in Afghanistan and how rough it was and all the sacrifices that were made. Well worth your time. And he's yeah, he's running for Senate in the state of Pennsylvania on the Republican ticket. We've also got Charles C.W. Cook, who's an editor at National Review, who is really helpful on exactly what the Biden administration should

have done here. Yes, it was Trump's decision to say we should pull out no more troops in Afghanistan. And you may quibble with that. Many do saying, why don't we leave a residual force? We've got thousands of troops in Japan, South Korea, in Germany. Why wouldn't we leave some there? Right. It's a it's a hotbed for terror. It always has. But why wouldn't we leave a few thousand there? But he's got the actual specific questions to ask, even if you want them all out. Why did we do it the way we did? What what exactly, he'll explain, should Biden have been doing that he didn't do that is leading to us now seeing people who work at the embassy on the rooftops waiting to be

evacuated? Because this is part of the visuals that we've been watching on television, the ones that Joe Biden said would never happen, never. Well, he was wrong about that and so many things. And just as we put this show to bed, we learned that the Biden administration has updated the president's schedule. He is now expected to speak at 345 p.m. today on Afghanistan. He's been dragged kicking and screaming, essentially, out of his vacation at Camp David. He wasn't going to speak. He wasn't going to come back until Wednesday, wasn't going to speak until the earliest Tuesday. The pressure's mounting on him so much he had no other choice.

There's a lot to go over, so we're going to get to it in just one minute. Stay with me. Sean, hi. we meet again. We meet again. How you doing? What a disaster. What a disaster. I mean, we just talked about this, but I think it's unfolded in a way that some had indeed predicted, but now we're just learning about how little Biden cared about how this was going to happen, who was going to hurt, who is going to endanger, what kind of images it was going to create that would be used against the country, how we would abandon all of our allies who'd been helping our troops, guys like you who'd been over there trying to fight nobly, local Afghans who'd been our translators, who'd been

our assistants, who'd been getting us from town to town, just left there now begging, crying. And it really seems like absolutely no thought went into this. Your thoughts? It's hard to describe the sheer ineptitude of the way Biden has handled this withdrawal. It's just simply stunning to me how removed he's been from this process. And it's very, very important to draw a distinction between what President Trump was trying to do with withdrawal and what Joe Biden's trying to do. Now, anytime you try to withdraw from a place like Afghanistan, the so-called graveyard of empires, no plan is going to be perfect. But at least President Trump's plan was conditions based.

In other words, certain conditions on the ground had to be met before they moved on to the next phase. At least President Trump was engaged with regional leaders. Like, for example, Joe Biden hasn't talked to the president, the prime minister of Pakistan since the seven months of being in office. I mean, Pakistan's obviously a major regional stakeholder in the area. They share a border with Afghanistan. Don't you think if you're the leader and commander in chief of the United States of America and planning retrograde operations in Afghanistan, don't you think it'd be important to engage the prime minister of Pakistan? And this is something that I just can't wrap my mind around, the fact that Joe Biden moved President Trump's withdrawal date from May to August – or I'm sorry, from May to September for strictly political reasons. the space to consolidate, reorganize, and plan an offensive, and in the interim, meet with China,

who absolutely has a stake in what's going on in Afghanistan. They are absolutely involved behind the scenes. And so, Megan, there were so many, and I don't, I mean, gosh, we could spend hours talking about Afghanistan, but there were so many strategic blunders here that it's it's hard to imagine messing up Afghanistan more than the Biden administration has done. But here we are. For folks who weren't paying close attention over the weekend, the Afghan government has collapsed. President Ghani has fled the country. The Taliban's taken Jalalabad, the last major city besides Kabul, not held by them, but now they're in Kabul too. Taken Bagram Air Base, Parwan Prison, where we were keeping bad guys. Then we handed that over to the Afghan security forces a few months ago, and they promptly lost it to the Taliban now. And they let all these prisoners out, including al Qaeda operatives.

They're now going to implement Sharia law because that's what the Taliban believes in. We've got choppers ferrying U.S. diplomats out of Kabul to the airport. The United States is completely pulling out of our embassy over the next day or two. We are inside our operatives. Our people are inside the embassy burning important documents, burning American flags. It's our policy not to leave those behind to be used for propaganda. The fact that our that our diplomats are being put in this position where they're unprotected, they've got to burn all the last remaining things that the Taliban did. I mean, what kind of an operation is this? This is something you do when it's unexpected attack. This is totally foreseeable.

First of all, there's a couple of things that I want to make very clear here. There is absolutely a zero percent chance that our intelligence and our military did not know about this Taliban advance. Megan, we listen to their communications 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you don't need any sexy commo equipment to do it. Just simply a walkie talkie tuned to the right channel. Our intelligence operatives knew about this. Now, who in the Biden administration, what suit disregarded that intel? I think it's critically important. A couple other things. As we move forward, I am very, very afraid. We still have thousands of Americans behind enemy lines, surrounded in a city that's controlled by the Taliban. Thousands. Now, there are only so many places in Afghanistan that you can actually land a commercial airline, secure it, and get civilians out.

One is in Bagram that the Taliban control it. One is in Kandahar that Taliban control it. Kabul airport is completely overrun. There's another airstrip in Gamal that special forces used to run black ops out of in and around the Afghan-Pakistan border. You can land a C-130 there, but I doubt that there's anybody even in the Biden administration that knows about that. So we are in a very, very desperate situation. And Megan, the commander in chief is missing in action. He's completely AWOL. In times of crisis like this, look, put the partisanship aside. Democrat, Republican does not matter. Americans are trapped behind enemy lines. In times of crisis, real leaders are involved and not detached. And this country desperately needs

to hear from Joe Biden today at the absolute latest, because there is a major leadership vacuum in this country right now. And the world is watching and our enemies are laughing at us. It's an unbelievable embarrassment. He's been sitting at Camp David. They put out a picture of him getting briefed via Zoom and some technology or like it. And Jen Psaki, the White House communications director, White House press secretary, has been, her out of office notification is on, Sean.

She's taken the week off. Like, I'm going to be out of off. We'll get back into the office and get your boss back into the office and speak to the American people, speak to the families of the troops who now are going to have to go back there. So what happened was Trump drew down the remaining force in Afghanistan to twenty five hundred right before he left office. And then you had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley, and you had Austin, the SEC DEF, go into President Bideney, and you had Austin, the SEC DEF, go into President Biden and say, you got to hike that back up.

We got to go up to about 4,500 in Afghanistan to make it safe to get out our diplomatic personnel, to make sure this sort of transfer to the Afghan security forces goes as well as we wanted to. You know, this thing has to be handled carefully. We can't just, you know, willy nilly jump out of there. And Biden didn't want to do it. And now you have the scenes of the people on the on the rooftop of the embassy or the building right next to the embassy.

The exact thing Biden said would not happen. It happened in Saigon, Vietnam when we left there. And now it's happening in Afghanistan. You've got that. And we have to send back in 5000 troops. Now we have to send more than he was advised to send. And he refused to do it. So you tell me whether that's I mean, it's just obvious he's mishandled this. This has been completely botched. I'm telling you, he it's it's a disaster. It's an unmitigated disaster. And by the way, look,

I'm wearing my tactical commander hat here. It's not simply as easy as sending in 5000 troops anymore. Where do you send them? The United States doesn't have a foothold in Afghanistan anymore, Megan. And so this is why I talk about, like, who made the decision within the Biden administration to abandon Bagram Air Base. I mean, obviously, the buck stops with Joe Biden. He's obviously responsible. But in what world does it make sense to abandon the only air base that you have that can secure and exfil thousands of Americans who are still left in Kabul and are allies? I mean, and by the way, there was a prison and there's a prison in Bagram as well that contained 5,000 of the world's worst terrorists who are now all on the loose. That abandoning Bagram Air Base before we could get all our people out is the strategic blunder of the century. It is something that will haunt the Biden administration for a long time because the reality is, Megan, the Taliban just a few weeks ago in their meeting with the Chinese were trying to buy surface-to-air missiles. So can you imagine?

That's a game changer, right? You can't simply – and this is why you're watching CH-47 helicopters in and around Kabul discharged flares. They were flying in pairs, the lead helicopter discharging flares and the helicopter in the rear picking up people, right? You're going to have to have special forces teams on the ground. You're going to have to have them clear for surface-to-air missiles. You're going to have to have them secure a landing strip to get people out. And then once that happens, then maybe you can get 5000 troops in there. But as of this morning, Kabul airport is shut down because the runway is is overrun with panicked Afghans. I'm telling you, I'm very, very afraid that there is going to be

a hostage crisis here in Kabul. And I don't know what the future looks like. But again, I'm not I'm not even throwing political jabs here. It's just wargaming the situation and thinking that the end of the day right now, the situation is Afghanistan has fallen. There are thousands of Americans trapped behind enemy lines. And our commander in chief is MIA. Oh, wow. Senator Tom Cotton said the same. He said he's getting reports from local Arkansans over there saying we we don't know how to get out. We need help. And so it's not just the Afghans who helped us. As you point out, it's actual American citizens who are stranded without any meaningful way of getting out in the video of these Afghan, I guess, security forces. Maybe it's just Afghan citizens literally hanging on the side of our aircraft on that runway. They're stunning. And it just speaks to how poorly this has been done, how poorly we've treated our guys, our our allies there. But I think the answer, Sean, is Joe Biden is the one who made the call, because not only was Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, telling him, you've got to increase the troops.

This has got to be handled just right. Otherwise, the Taliban is going to take over. And Lloyd Austin, secretary of defense, said the same. But they appointed Congress appointed an outside independent panel to look at this headed by military guys. And they came back and said, if you pull out too soon without the appropriate sort of precautions in place, this is what's going to happen. And it's everything that we're seeing happen. And Biden reportedly said to these guys, I don't really care. He said, I'm not keeping the troops there any longer. I'm going to follow the plan that Trump set.

You know, and in his defense, Trump did say troops out by May. He extended it to September. And he said, if if we need to stay longer, whose son or daughter do I send? If you want your son or daughter to die when the Afghan security forces won't. Because and you look at it, this is in his defense. The Afghan security forces ran. They did nothing. We spent eighty three billion dollars trying to train these guys. They completely gave up as soon as the Taliban showed up. And so I see the point that Biden will probably make when he comes to the microphones of why should you fight?

Why should we send the Sean Parnells of the world when the locals won't fight? Yeah, well, I think there I think let's just be clear. It's time to leave Afghanistan. Right. We've been there 20 years. I just turned 40 in July. So think about that. We've been in Afghanistan for half of my life. It's time to go. But it's the manner in which President Biden conducted the withdrawal is was just disastrous it seemed again we talked about him just being disengaged um but yeah of course we don't want to send america's sons and daughters into the fight anymore and investing 88 billion dollars in the afghan national army that collapsed internet selfism in a month questions need to be asked uh how did this happen um but joe biden he owns this disaster i mean president, again, at least had a conditions-based withdrawal. So for your viewers, what does that mean? It means he's

talking to regional leaders. He's talking to the Afghan National Army. He's talking to the Afghan security forces. He's keeping contractors at Bagram and in Kandahar who can perform maintenance on their aircraft. I think, again, as a military commander early on, right, watching the Taliban advance over the last week or so, the Afghan National Army and the Afghan Security Forces early on tried to fight back, right? But then they realized that they weren't getting backup from their aircraft. They had no air support whatsoever because our contractors who service the Afghan National Army's Air force were gone. They were pulled out of the country by Joe Biden. And I think they just gave up the, um, the former ambassador to

Afghanistan under president Obama. Okay. This is, you know, he worked for Obama, for Obama, Biden, Ryan Crocker came out. This is a quote and said, I am left with some grave questions in my mind about Biden's ability to lead our nation as commander in chief, to have read this so wrong, or even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care. I mean, to have somebody like that coming out and say that Biden's getting no support. I mean, the only people I've heard support what's happening right now, interestingly, are kind of, well, you've got sort of the crazy sort of like former Governor Jerry Brown of California. All right. So sort of far leftists. But then you've got people who are

truly Trump loyalists who are very America firsty and sort of like, hey, this has been a failed experiment. You know, we we kept our eye. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and no more, not another American life. Let's get out. I've heard some people just sort of say, you know, we're sad. We're sorry for the Afghan folks who helped us, but no more, no more American bloodshed, not one more. You know, if we've got to get out ugly, let's just get out. Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, this, this is, this is the balance, right? Megan, the question on the Republican side of the aisle anyway, and probably on some of the Democrats, is the humanitarian crisis that would ensue after an American pullout. And I think that if our withdrawal was conducted properly, a lot of that humanitarian crisis could have been avoided or at least delayed for a long time to the point where we can get our allies out of that country.

But as leaders, right, as people who are making the decisions to send America's sons and daughters into the fight, this is why I always say, you have a moral obligation. We as a country have a moral obligation that when we send our sons and daughters into the fight that we win. Otherwise, you're going to have an entire generation of Americans who served, fought, and bled questioning and wondering what the heck it was for. And at the end of the day, right, yes, we had an obligation and we made a promise to the Afghans that, yes, we are going to protect you, fight for freedom, and we's a question that all of us as Americans need to ask, and especially our leaders in Washington, is when is that obligation fulfilled? Is 20 years enough? I think it is. Because as leaders, right, we also have an obligation to the Americans who are going to go fight, bleed, and die over there, right? The idea that the mission is clear, that victory is clearly defined, and that end state operations are also clearly defined. And this is why I've been saying over the last couple of weeks is that this nation, I think,

really needs to get back to the days of declaring war, right? And the last war we did that in was World War II and involving Congress and putting our mission down on paper and being accountable to that mission and what end state looks like, because when wars aren't declared, right, they tend to go on forever. And the mission changes, it evolves. And that's how we end up in a situation like we're in Afghanistan, where we've been there for 20 years. And we wonder what the heck it was for. So what about that? Because I'm thinking about those, I'm thinking about the families of the 2300 servicemen and women who died in Afghanistan. I'm thinking about the 20,000 like yourself who were wounded over there and wondering, you know, I don't think you can necessarily say we won. I think that's a stretch. But I also know I, like you, experienced 9-11 as an adult. I was a little

older than you. And I know for the last 20 years, we haven't had a massive terror attack on U.S. soil because we've been fighting them over there. And that was part of the goal. Yes, we started to do democracy building and so on, nation building. And Afghanistan did have democratic elections, I think, three or four times. But look, that's a tough, tough territory to go in and try to revamp, you know, to do it to have a makeover in. So did we win? What what what how do you see the fight and the loss of blood and treasure over there now? Well, I would say that American service men and women who served in Afghanistan have a lot to be proud of. They did a lot of extraordinary things over there. They defeated the enemy at every turn. We killed a lot of people, bad guys, very, very bad guys in Afghanistan that would have done the United States harm, no question about it. We built wells for villages. We delivered humanitarian assistance. We taught little girls how to read.

We built schools. We did a lot of good for the Afghan people. And we gave them a shot at freedom. Their service was not wasted. At some point, the Afghan people are going to have to stand up and fight for it on their own if they really, truly want it. But I'm not going to lie to you, Megan, this has been a real complex time for me, you know, emotionally, I I'm surprised by how much this is affecting me. You know, when you serve and you went to Afghanistan and you go to combat and, and,

and you fight, uh, and, and you take life that changes you and you leave a portion of yourself over there. And I think that's part of the reason why veterans from every generation go back to the battlefield years later. And I think that in hopes to find that part of themselves that they lost and watching Afghanistan collapse in on itself, basically, was just like going back to the Stone Age, really, because that's, you know, you want to go back to a time where Jesus Christ walked the earth at the AK-47 in the pickup truck, and you got Afghanistan. And so it gets, you half wonder, it's like, am I ever going to find that aspect of myself that I lost over there again? And so if you're someone that's watching this and you have a veteran in your family that fought in the Afghan war, you know, a gold star family, a family that lost someone over there, reach out to them and check

in on them because I guarantee you this is not an easy time for them. Yeah. Wow. I, I feel, I feel every word of what you just said. I think about the fact that they're letting these Al Qaeda operatives and bad Taliban operatives out of the jails, out of the prisons that we set up. And it's like some of our soldiers died trying to get those guys captured. Right. And now it's just like, well, here's the keys. Come on back. And that's the thing about terror. You know, the just a couple of headlines on it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, again, Milley said he told the senators that the U.S. homeland is now at greater risk from terror groups, that Afghanistan is just a couple of headlines on it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, again, Milley said he told the senators that the U.S. homeland is now at greater risk from terror groups, that Afghanistan is very likely,

say the experts, to become a sanctuary for radical Islamic terrorists again, that it's going to be a terrorist safe haven now. Al Qaeda is still heavily embedded with the Taliban. And the BBC had a report out just yesterday saying the Taliban promised al Qaeda that the two groups would remain allies. So, you know, General Jack Keane, who I love on Fox, he's been jumping up and down about this, saying, look, this battle, whatever, however many tributaries it went down wrongly or rightly, the battle really has been about fighting Islamic terrorism and stopping it from coming to the United States. And that battle doesn't have an end date. So it's still on. And I'm I'm worried. I'm worried. I as much as we have all this time on our hands, Sean, we worry about all this woke, woke bullshit here in the United States. Right. It's like we've taken such a weird turn. Like the real fight is. Genuinely frightening and it may be seriously back on. Megan, it is. And I have to tell you, it really upsets me that over the last seven months,

and I've talked about this a couple of times over the last week or so, that it seems like our generals, the people that are supposed to be leading us are focused on you know critical race theory in the ranks and testifying to the importance of understanding white rage on capitol hill and pronouns and bios and things like that and boy the threat that's out there though is real and and again i talked we talked about this in the last show, is that people talk about diversity as if it's the be-all, end-all. And, of course, it's very, very important. But what makes our military exceptional is the unity beyond all that. And being unified in the face of the great many threats that this nation faces is very, very important. And over the last seven months, it doesn't seem like our generals are focused on that at all. It doesn't seem like our generals were focused on the withdrawal in Afghanistan, right? And we're seeing the disastrous consequences of that distraction play out on the battlefield right now, in very real time on our television sets all around America. What is this? What message does this send to the world about whether they can trust America?

Right now, it's the message that we're projecting across the world is one of weakness. And again, where's Joe Biden? I'm sorry. Where is the commander in chief going on? How are we going to get our people out of there? It's difficult to describe how weak this makes America look. And it's very, it should concern everybody. I don't care what political party you come from, but this should worry everybody. And I think this also needs to be said. Does Joe Biden, and gosh, I'm not trying to throw political jabs here, okay? But does Joe Biden have the wherewithal to do this job. Does Joe Biden and gosh, I'm not trying to throw political jabs here. Okay. But does Joe Biden have the wherewithal to do this job? Does Joe Biden have the wherewithal to be president of the United States? It certainly doesn't seem like he does. And in times of crisis,

that's especially apparent, is it not? I mean, it's this this crisis has gone on for 72 hours and we haven't even seen the president of the United States. He hasn't even taken a single press conference like anything from him is better than nothing. So I really do think it's fair to ask. Can he handle this? Because if he can't step aside, please let somebody else do the job because America needs leadership right now. And I'm not sure that Joe Biden can provide it. So and you've got Kamala Harris, by the way, jumping up and down and saying, I was the last person in the room when he made the decision for the withdrawal. I was I was a critical part of all of this. Like, would you just be quiet? That's not helpful to you or anyone else. Yeah, I, you know, I agree. I just think that, Megan, this nation is really perilously balanced on a knife's edge.

And I feel like everybody knows it and feels it. And it's so, so incredibly important right now for us to come together as a people and face the great many of threats, the great many threats that we have abroad together and really unify in support of our country here at home. Because we've got to work overtime to make sure that our kids inherit a country that is great and free. And right now, the way things are going, it certainly doesn't feel like they're going to have that, does it? I just, America for the longest time has been, it's actually the greatest benevolent superpower the world has ever known. And our leadership on,

you know, whether Democrat or Republican, right? We've always sort of filled the void of that benevolent superpower, the leadership that we've always had a leadership role in the world, right? But it certainly seems like that role is diminishing. And it's Joe Biden is just, I'm telling you, he's just not up to the task to do this job. And this crisis just highlights it. Now the message is, you know, you don't trust us at your own peril because we made promises to those tens of thousands, they're saying, translators, guys who helped people like you when you were serving over there, deal with the locals and sort of make progress. You have to be able to speak a language or have somebody with you who can and navigate Afghanistan in other ways. And we made promises to all those guys that we would look out for them. We would get them out of the country.

Now they're sitting there as sitting ducks, just waiting for the Taliban to come kill them. And the Taliban saying things like, oh, you know, we're not going to be that kind of leader. You know, we're going to be benevolent. And yet we're already seeing reports. We talked about this last week where they're executing people who have surrendered Afghan security force members who have surrendered to them. We're seeing the cops over there, Afghan police officers just take off their uniforms and just dump them to go, you know, so they don't get hurt by the Taliban and sort of a full surrender. Not to mention, Sean, what's going to happen to the women and what's going to happen? You know, you talk about how we help little girls learn to read. Well, you can forget that now because Sharia under Sharia law, the women don't get to go

to school. The girls don't get to go. And so I don't know. I just feel like they're the international community looking at us and abandon our promises. You know, we abandoned the Kurds under the Trump administration, and now we're abandoning our Afghan helpers under the Biden administration. I wonder how we're going to get helpers in the future when we have to unleash some sort of military operation. Well, the humanitarian crisis that's about to unfold in Afghanistan is going to be tragic.

And ultimately, it requires the Afghans and Joe Biden. And I think President Trump were right about this, that it is going to require the Afghans to stand up and fight for themselves. We can't be there in perpetuity. But this, this, it is tragic. What's happening there. I think it was a wholly unavoidable, a wholly avoidable tragedy. I mean, I, again, Why couldn't we have kept the 2,500 or, you know, the 3,500 troops there to avoid this? You know what I mean? Like, I understand let's get out and we don't want to see any more loss of American life over there. It's been 20 years, but why couldn't we have troops all over the world, you know, maintaining a military presence for us or a bait. So we can,

why, why couldn't we have kept doing that there? My position, my position on Afghanistan is of course, we need to draw down combat operations. Of course, the Afghan people and the Afghan government, they need to govern and secure themselves. But again, this speaks back to the decision to give up Bagram Air Force Base. Bagram Air Force Base is safer than any major city in America. You could have kept a very small presence in Bagram of American troops. That gives you an airstrip. It gives you the ability to target the worst of the worst without any real American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You can conduct airstrikes right from Bagram anywhere in the country to help the Afghan National Army do the job and

keep the enemy at bay. Could have done that with probably twenty five, twenty five hundred troops pretty easily. And again, speaks back to the fact of why, why, why did we give up Bagram? Right. And again, like. Well, but what about that? You defend Trump on that. But Trump is the one who said we're getting them all out and we're getting them all out by May 1st. And even Trump came out and said about Biden originally saying, like, let's get the troops out. He said Biden's Afghanistan troop withdrawal program is, quote, wonderful. This is not this is not now. This is in April. A wonderful and positive thing to do. But he said the U.S. should be actually doing it earlier because he wanted it to be May and not September. So why in response to both of those guys, why not? Why? What's so

wrong about twenty five hundred? I get twenty five thousand. Twenty five hundred as a peacekeeping measure doesn't seem that crazy. Well, I think Trump's intent, and he said this many times before, is to have people ready on a moment's notice to conduct airstrikes. And so, you know, but Biden, his plan was a wholesale withdrawal without even talking to any of the regional leaders on the ground, none whatsoever, no communication whatsoever. Just to add to that, you mentioned this earlier, Trump said it would be conditions based. And the problem here is that not only it seems like they didn't look at conditions at all. There was a really good piece in The New York Times the other day by an AEI fellow talking about how the Taliban takes the winter off.

They're basically not around in the winter or really so much the spring. It's the summer where they're their strongest. And when does Biden say, you know, we're going to pull all of our guys? In July, in July and August. It's no accident it went down the way it did. He just refused to look at conditions on the ground. And it's no accident that all of this is happening under Joe Biden. The enemies of this country are not afraid of him.

The enemies of America were petrified of President Trump. When Soleimani attacked our embassy, like two days later, he was dead. The enemies of America knew that they couldn't mess with in Afghanistan is just getting kicked off in May. The is has begun was also a disastrous decision. There were so many strategic blunders as part of Biden's plan here that it's just hard to wrap your mind around all of them. And honestly, you tell me, Sean, it was to get a photo op. It was so that on the 20 year anniversary of September 11th, Joe Biden could look into the cameras and say, I'm the one, I'm the one who got all of our guys out. And instead, we're going to be looking at the Taliban in the presidential palace, flying their flag. They already released a mock photo, taking the US troops at Iwo Jima, hoisting the flag. And it was a bunch of Taliban operatives hoisting the Taliban flag, implementing Sharia law. That's now the photo op we're going to get.

And apparently this was a contingency Joe Biden forgot to consider. Absolutely right. And, you know, Joe Biden is going to he owns it. He owns it. He, the fact, this is something that bothered me a lot as well. The fact that, that his first statement, he blamed, essentially blamed president Trump for what happened in Afghanistan. I inherited it. I inherited it as if he has no powers. It absolutely, it absolutely disgusts me. As commander in chief, Joe Biden is responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen or everything that happens or fails to happen under his command. Period.

End of story. The buck stops with him. Thinking about you today. Thank you for your service. You and your fellow veterans and our active duty personnel. I just, I can't imagine what this is like for all of you. Thank you for the heartfelt moment on that. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, Megan. I really appreciate the time. Up next, Charles C.W. Cook on the insane Biden predictions on what would not happen

in Afghanistan and how he's been wrong at every turn. Well, let's start with how bad a disaster this is, how big a disaster this is. Top of the Sunday New York Times, free fall in Afghanistan. Jack Keane, General Jack Keane, who orchestrated the surge, he was the architect of the surge in Iraq, back in the day, calls this astounding and humiliating. Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, calls it an indelible stain on Biden's presidency.

Kevin McCarthy, an embarrassment for our nation. Axios, even the press getting in on it, saying a stunning failure for the West, an embarrassment for Biden. I could go on. And you say? Well, I think all of those descriptions are appropriate. It's a disaster. And it is not acceptable or meaningful to respond to that sort of criticism by saying, well, what do you want to do then just stay forever, given that what we're talking about here is not the decision to stay or go, but the manner in which it was done, which was botched,

botched in a way no foreign policy execution has been botched in decades. The comparisons to Vietnam abound today, his Saigon moment. But before we get to that, the Biden promises. I mean, he's if you look back on Biden's history and I remember when he was saying we should divide Iraq into three or four different states. Remember this? I mean, he's just been so out there on foreign policy for so long and so wrong. And but unfortunately, now he's actually president. So he gets to put these ideas into action. And you called him out for this in a column yesterday.

It's been making the rounds, but we put together a butted soundbite of his predictions about what would happen in Afghanistan and more importantly, what wouldn't happen. And let's talk about how wrong they were. Listen. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. That is not true. So what is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse? The Afghan government and leadership has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place. Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable? No, it is not. Why?

Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped, as well-equipped as any army in the world and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling? None whatsoever. Zero. The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army. They're not, they're not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the, of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.

You've spoken to the fact that the Taliban are sort of at their militarily strongest point that you've seen in 20 years. How do you feel personally about that with the benefit of hindsight and all of the dollars and investments and American troops that were sent there? Relative to the training and capacity of the NSF and the train, the federal police, they're not even close. Wow. Yep. I mean, it's really stunning, right?

He was wrong about every single one of those. And Charlie, this was July. That's when he was saying all of that. Yeah. One of the criticisms of the critics, if you will, has been that Trump put this into motion and Biden was just executing it. And I think we should start by pointing out this is false. I'm not defending Donald Trump's foreign policy or Donald Trump in general. Donald Trump is not president of the United States anymore. Joe Biden is. Joe Biden was not bound by Donald Trump's agreement. He was not executing a treaty that had been ratified by Congress. He was not executing a

statute that had been passed by Congress or a provision within the Constitution that he was obliged to advance. And as we've seen during the last two weeks, Joe Biden doesn't actually care when he is supposed to do these things. Joe Biden was making a decision as the commander in chief, just as he did, for example, with the Iran deal, which Trump made a decision on and Biden reversed, just as he did with the Paris Accords, which Trump made a decision on and Biden reversed, just as he did with the Paris Accords, which Trump made a decision on and Biden reversed. If you go back and you look at the press reports, if you go back and you look at Joe Biden's own statements, and in fact, Kamala Harris's own statements too, you will see that

this was his call. This was his policy when he was running. It was his policy 10 years ago when he said we shouldn't be over there fighting for women's rights. It's not why we were there. He wanted to leave and he overruled his staff to do so. Now, it is totally acceptable for him to overrule his generals and his advisors. Sometimes conservatives say, can you believe it? The president overruled the military. Well, the military is under civilian control and it should be. But when you do that as a president, you have to own it. And he did.

He owned it. He said, finally, we're going to do this. He made all the predictions that you just played and he got it wrong. And even if, even if he hadn't had as much wiggle room, as much latitude, as much power as he did here, he would still have been charged in charge of the minutiae. You know, I have said probably on your show before, I wish Congress were more involved in our foreign policy. I wish they declared war. I wish they rescinded the declarations of war. I wish they didn't pass these open-ended AUMFs that sit on the books for 20 years. I wish they set more concrete goals. But even if they did that to the letter, the commander in chief still has to deal with

the details in the field. That's why we have a president primarily. And the details here were botched from start to finish. This is just an extraordinary example of incompetence. There was no reason here that this had to end up like this, even if he decided that we should get out of Afghanistan and that we should do it now. Yeah. Can you go through, because I thought you did a good job of listing some of the questions that we need to be asking in terms of the timing, you know, why did we pull all the military before all of our citizens were out was one of the questions you asked. But there are a few questions we need answers to. Sure. Well, I would like to know, as somebody who is not a foreign policy expert, why, and again, assume that leaving is the correct thing to do, and assume that he even

had no choice in the long run. I would like to know why, as a matter of detail, as the man in charge of the military and various federal contractors, the Biden administration chose to pull out thousands of troops before we had got out all American citizens, before we had got out the, I believe, 23,000 Afghan citizens who helped us during the last 20 years of war, before we had got out any international staff and contractors, frankly, before we got out anyone we wanted to get out for any reason. I'd like to know why we have a whole bunch of military hardware in Afghanistan now that has fallen into the hands of the Taliban. I'd like to know why the prisons are now being opened up and the people that we've spent 20 years and a lot of American lives capturing are being put back into the same ranks that they left when we got them. There is no situation in which saying, well, we should have

left answers those questions. I mean, this is a silly analogy, but it's a bit like saying, well, should I sell my house or not? And you say, okay, I'll sell my house. And then in handing it over to the next people, you smash all the walls down. You can't at that point say, well, I mean, I thought it was the right decision to sell my house. Yeah, maybe. But you had a choice as to how you did it, how you handed it over, how you executed that. And this just seems to have been done in a completely incompetent way and in a baffling way, because journalists were asking the White House in April, when the decision was first telegraphed, well, what are we going to do about the 23,000 odd interpreters in Afghanistan? What are we going to do about, oh, there of the contractors who were necessary to keep the Afghan Air Force in the air, which has done two things. One, it prevented that Air Force from being able to give ground support to the Afghan troops that were fighting the Taliban. Two, it left all those airplanes on the ground and they're now in the hands of the people we've been trying to prevent sweeping across the Middle East for the last 20 years. And those were choices. Those were Press with Chuck Todd over the weekend. And Chuck Todd, to his credit, put it right to him, his earlier soundbite, where he actually said, I don't think that the Taliban overtaking everything.

I don't think it's going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. It literally was from a Friday to a Monday. OK, so he was asked about this, the secretary of state on NBC over the weekend. Take a listen. I want to play something you said in June about the withdrawal and get you to respond to it on the other side. Here it is. I don't think it's going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. So I wouldn't necessarily equate the departure of our forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the in the situation.

How did that assessment end up so wrong? Is that an intelligence assessment that went wrong? Is that Pentagon assessment that went wrong? Your own. How does not age well? Two things, Chuck. First, we've known all along that the Taliban was at its strongest position in terms of its strength since 2001. When we came to office, that was the fact. And we said all along, including back then, that there was a real you that the inability of Afghan security forces to defend their country has played a very powerful role in what we've seen over the last the last few weeks. So the answer is Trump. Trump allowed the Taliban to get very strong, the strongest that they've been since 2001. And what can I tell you? The Afghan security forces are terrible. They were weak. They put down their arms. And, you know, sorry, but there's only so much we could do.

The entire rationale for the Biden presidency was not to be Donald Trump. And sometimes I think that's a good thing. And sometimes I think that's a bad thing. But for this president and his staff to say, well, this is Trump's fault, I think is passing the buck. Joe Biden has been president now for seven months, and he already missed the deadline that was set by the deal that Trump came to. Some of the provisions of that deal, for what it's worth, were violated by the Taliban. So even if you took a formal legalistic approach to this, Biden did not have to abide by all of them. There had been a prior material breach.

Right. He didn't abide by them. I mean, had been a prior material breach. Right. He didn't abide by them. I mean, this was supposed to be done already. And they delayed. And that shows they're capable of delaying. And his staff told him, look, the troop levels you're talking about are insufficient to hold the country in check. And Biden made his own

call. And again, that is his role. We do not have rule by generals in the United States. But if you're going to take that decision, own it. And of course, this brings us to another question, which is where on earth is he? I'm not big on that as a libertarian who would like to see the executive branch diminished in general. But this is the moment that you really want your president to be front and center, because this is what a president is supposed to do. You could be Calvin Coolidge, and this is what a president is supposed to do. And he's hiding.

He's nowhere to be seen. He's acting as if this is a story that can be addressed on Wednesday or Thursday. And it can't. And it's very, very disappointing, frankly. Well, it matters not only for the, you know, the Gold Star families who have lost sons and daughters over there, but for the people who have been wounded over there and those of us who support them and so on. It matters for those of us who are concerned legitimately, rightfully about terror and

what's going to happen now that all these Al Qaeda fighters who are guys sacrificed lives to put in prisons over there are now free running around out there. And the whole country is being run by a force that's dedicated to Islamic law that already harbored al Qaeda for many years. And I realized in the deal with Trump, one of the promises was we won't allow anybody to plot attacks against the United States and Afghanistan. But Charlie, they can't even get the water to run the way it ought to. You want to tell me even if they were inclined to stop terror groups from forming, that they

could do it? So that's the kind of thing you would like to hear some reassurances from your commander in chief on. I think that, and of course, this applies less to Joe Biden because we haven't heard from him. I think the Democratic Party's position on this is the least sustainable of all. As far as I see it, as a realist, you have two options. One is to say, look, America first, we've been there 20 years, we've lost a bunch of young men, we've spent a lot of money, it's not working, we shouldn't be in the business of propping up governments either way. Yes, the consequences will be terrible if we leave, but that's life. And you essentially adopt the same approach as we do to, say, North Korea. We know what happens there. We just don't think on balance

that it is worth invading, whether for geostrategic reasons or we don't want to lose people. We don't think that it's worth it, and we take that trade. The other option is to say no, human rights are universal. America is predicated upon a commitment to the individual. And we have a responsibility, whether to everyone in the world or just to the places we've already invaded, as in Afghanistan, to maintain order and peace where possible. If we leave, we know what's going to happen, especially to women. So we can't. Those are two coherent positions. I'm not saying that they're equal positions, but they're coherent positions. The position that the Democratic Party seems to be taking in the last couple of days is we should get out. It's the right thing

to do. Well done to President Biden. Also, we're horrified by what's about to happen. Well, what does that do for anyone? Nancy Pelosi on Saturday, she said that there was wisdom in President Biden's decision. And then she then said she was extremely worried about what was going to happen to women in Afghanistan. Well, the wisdom Joe Biden supposedly demonstrated is going to lead directly to what's going to happen to those women. Jen Psaki preposterously last week said the Taliban needs to think about where it wants to sit within the international community, which is a little bit like saying Jeffrey Dahmer really needs to think whether he wants to be a member of this church. He doesn't, you know, they, they know where they sit in the international community. They're live streaming what they're trying to do. And, and as such, I find it especially distasteful, far more distasteful, frankly,

than the Trumpian whatever, because they're taking the Trumpian approach while pretending that they are defending human rights and they're doing no such thing. You know, again, own it. Up next, we'll talk to Charles about the politics of this. How do they play? Where do we think the American public's sentiment on this is going to be? And a remarkable day in American media history, at least modern history, where the press is doing the right thing. We'll get to that next. But first, I'm going to bring you a feature we have here on the show

called Asked and Answered, where we try to get after some of our listener and viewer mail. And by the way, speaking of viewer mail, we have viewers now because we're posting some of our clips on YouTube. So if you want to check it out, just go to youtube.com forward slash Megan Kelly, M-E-G-Y-N-K-E-L-L-Y. And you can see, oh, so we sort of pick a couple each day because we're gearing up for putting the whole show on YouTube starting on September 7th. So we're kind of get our feet wet and you can take a look at the guests. It's kind of fun to see them, right? Even for me, it's fun to see them. Although now I have to do my hair and makeup. I'm no longer

wearing the same outfit every day, three days in a row. I've made an effort. In any event, okay, so we're going to bring you this feature, Asked and Answered, and Steve Krakauer, our executive producer, calls through the questions and comes up with some good ones. Hey, Steve. Hey, Megan. Yes, this comes to us from Jenna Powell, who wants to know, with all the crap going on in this country right now, and I guess as we know from today's show around the world, she's struggling to maintain a positive outlook. She's a mother of a 26-year-old daughter, a 23-year-old son. She worries for them and her grandchildren. And she says it irks her that so many Americans are wholly uninformed or have zero interest in finding out.

So how do you do it, she wants to know, because clearly you're far far more informed than her and she still sees that you're positive and happy and hopeful. She wants to get some help. Oh, well, thank you for that. I will say you're right. I think people who are not closely following the news tend to be happier people. I think, you know, you are right. Ignorance is bliss. And the people I know who follow no news tend to be pretty happy. But, you know, you're either built that way or you're not. And it sounds like you're not. So don't fight it. You're going to be consuming news because you want to know what's happening about in your country and in the world. And I'm the same. And it can be dark and it can bum you out. There's there's no question. I think the reason I just don't feel pessimistic in general about the country or the news, you know, on a

larger basis is I believe in Americans, you know, and I believe in the concept of America and how we're built in our spirit. So, and I also believe that the press misrepresents how people really feel and they're not representative of the majority of Americans, nor, nor is Twitter or anything on social media. You know, it's, um, and I know this having lived it, right? Because I've been through a bunch of controversies where people beat up on me in the press and I think, oh my God, I must be the scourge of the nation. Then I go outside and I see real people and they're so loving, even if they don't share my politics, they're so kind, they have a nice word. And that's one nice benefit of being somebody who's well-known is strangers will come up

to you and offer you their opinions of you. And it's always kind. It's not to say that there aren't haters out there, but I'm just saying it reassures me that what you see online and what you hear from the media isn't real. It's not actually representative of real Americans and how they feel. So you just have to keep reminding yourself of that, right? Like hysterical press. They're not to be trusted as you know, and it's just a huge, huge asterisk on everything they try to spoon feed you. But I do think the other thing is you

got to limit it to some extent. You got to remember to spend time with your family, with your friends, watching stupid TV every once in a while, turn on a Real Housewives or watch sports or I don't care, whatever your guilty pleasure is, do it. You know, have a glass of wine or go for a run or do an exercise class or just spend time doing like Play-Doh with your kid, whatever it may be. Your kids are older. So let's say you go to a movie and make it a stupid one. Don't always do sad documentaries that Hollywood's forcing it. Go watch a rerun of Animal House. See the eat me cake running down the bleachers. You can't not laugh.

I don't know. I like that stuff. My family right now, actually, we're watching as a family, modern family. You know that sitcom? It was on for 10 plus years. We never saw it. So we're watching it night after night, just a half an hour here or there. And it's so funny.

It's laugh out loud funny. You need to begin or end your day with a laugh, not the news. I do not subject my children to the news. I would never sit them in front of the nightly news at all. They'll have enough time to worry about that stuff later. And do the same for yourself, right? You're in charge of what you consume. Make sure it's fact-based. Don't go down the YouTube rabbit holes and make sure you're monitoring content, whether it be not too many hours on social media, which is depressing. People don't really look like that. They don't really feel like that. It's all a product meant to manipulate your brain and your buying habits or just your news consumption, which is also very manipulative. Not this show. I try to be honest and not push

agendas on you, but a lot of the cable news shows out there and a lot of the podcasts too, to be perfectly honest. Anyway, protect yourself and don't forget to laugh. Um, all of which brings me to my mother. I have a funny story to tell you about her. If I want to laugh, I call her cause she's now 80 years old, but she's just as funny as she ever was. And I thought I have a, I have a story that is going to make you laugh. So my mom's talking about how she doesn't always remember everything. Now, you know, she's telling a story and she loses it mid sentence, kind of like Biden, except she doesn't have access to the nuclear codes. And my mom says her new thing is to say, oh, you know what I'm saying? Tell me what I'm

saying. So that's where we are now. We have to pay extra attention in the stories because I may have to repeat it back to her later or just figure out where it's going and bring it to her. So keep fun people in your life who make you laugh, who make you smile, and not all serious, serious dark souls like you see in the news. Anyway, thank you for trusting us to be part of your news feed. And I hope, you know, by consuming the news in a way that isn't totally dark and depressing with me, you leave feeling more optimistic about the world

and our role in it, our ability to battle some of the darker forces and enjoy and still enjoy our limited time here, right? Our limited time together. Anyway, okay, so thank you. And anybody else who wants to write in it's questions at devilmaycaremedia.com, or you can go on Insta, you can go on Twitter, or, um, you can even post a comment on YouTube or go to Apple even better because that helps our algorithm and our show. If you go to the comments on Apple and issue a review and rating that helps us. I

still don't understand. I don't really care to, uh if you do it, it's helpful to the show. And I appreciate it. And check us out on YouTube, too. OK, back to Charles in one sec. We have Sean Parnell, and we spoke with him a week or two weeks ago about Afghanistan. And in his book, you know, he talks about his service over there. And I didn't repeat it in the interview because it was too disturbing and I won't hear. But he does a bit on who the Taliban really are and the child rape, ongoing child torture that he and our other guys witnessed. This is a despicable group of people. And we knew full well who we were dealing with when we cut the deal with Trump. I mean, Pompeo was asked about that. Trump's secretary of state was asked about that on Fox News Sunday by Chris Wallace,

you know, saying, hey, you know, they're pointing the finger at you. This is not a good group of people. Why do you think you could trust the Taliban? And Pompeo said, you deal with the enemy you have. But Biden was in a position, if he's going to come out and criticize this, to change it. He was in a position to change it. And instead, he just wants to point at Trump. I want to ask you about Pompeo, though, because the Trump administration and those who are in it are pointing hard at Biden right now. And Biden's pointing hard at them saying, I inherited everything and you let the Taliban get so strong. But here was Pompeo trying to trying to explain why this actually isn't Trump's fault and why this would not have happened under President Trump.

The plan should have been much like we had, was that we would have an orderly conditions based way to think about how to draw down our forces there. We actually delivered on that promise. I think weak American leadership always harms American security. So this is in the context of a Biden administration that has basically abandoned the global stage in favor of climate change, right? They've been focused on critical race theory while the embassy is at risk. What do you make of that? I don't buy that. I'll tell you why I think this probably wouldn't have happened under Trump. And that's that I think he would have backed off as Obama did for eight years and as Trump did for four and as Biden did for eight years, and as Trump did for four, and as Biden did for a little bit as well. And remember, Biden blew past the deadline.

But I don't think that this would have been different in its end result under Trump. I think it's possible that it would have been managed better, not because Donald Trump is a great manager, but because I think his department would have been more focused on this and less on critical race theory and climate change and all of that, and wouldn't have fallen into the bad habit of speaking about the Taliban as one might speak at a Harvard symposium on intersectionality. That is a real flaw in the Democratic Party. And I think that's going to hurt them. The politics

are the least important part of this, but I do think it's going to hurt them. And the politics are the least important part of this, but I do think it's going to hurt them because this reinforces every single stereotype of a movement that thinks that you can use words to create reality. And sometimes in liberal Western societies where we're all committed to broadly the same thing, as much as we fight, that's true. But not when you're dealing with 7th century theocrats who are open about what they want to do. You can't shame those people. They're not hiding it. They're open. They have a philosophy. They have allies, Al-Qaeda, Pakistan. They know what they're about. So I do think that could have been a little bit different, but I think this was going to happen.

Once again, though, where I find it the most repugnant of all is that it is now not possible even to pretend you think you can have it always. You cannot say, well, I think we should get out and I hope it works out because it hasn't worked out. So now we know what we're dealing with. And so we have a clear choice. And for Nancy Pelosi and Jen Psaki to say, well, we really hope the international community can bring pressure to bear and leave this country in a solitary state. Come on. come on. Oh, please. Right now. But let's talk about the politics of it, though. The American people are overwhelmingly in favor of withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. They're they're over this.

That's not to say they're going to maintain that position on, you know, the last twenty five hundred now in the in the wake of what we've seen. And obviously we're sending 5,000 back over there to try to get our people out. We'll see how that goes. But anyway, the, the public sentiment has largely been in favor of withdrawing the troops that the American people are over the, the, the Afghanistan war. Uh, however, this has been an interesting situation when it comes to the media coverage, because for once, Charlie, they're not running cover for him. They're not. The media coverage has been pretty unflattering for Joe Biden. We put together just a little sampling, a montage, but it's been pretty brutal. Listen. Hello, I'm Jake Tapper in Washington,

where the state of our union is watching a tragic foreign policy disaster unfold before our eyes. The rapid crumbling of the country has caught the Biden White House flat footed. It seems shocking that President Biden could have been so wrong. And Tim, we're hearing comparisons of this moment, what we're seeing in Kabul, to the fall of Saigon, the iconic image of people fleeing the U.S. Embassy by helicopter. Aren't we already in the midst of a Saigon moment? No, we're not. Remember, uh, this is not Saigon.

We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9-11. Isn't that exactly what we're seeing now? I mean, even the images are evocative of what happened in Vietnam. Let's take a step back. This is manifestly not Saigon. This is the Saigon moment for President Biden, and that this will be a legacy, an albatross around his neck for the rest of time.

And you also had a really massive intelligence failure here that the U.S. did not realize how quickly the Taliban could take over. I'm not shocked at all. And I thought Kabul was going to fall right around now. That was just a gut instinct. And I think lots of people that I spoke to believe that. It was quite clear that this that it was going to come to this when you started to see the

Taliban take territory without having to fight months ago. It's looking very much like the Taliban will be back in power on the 20th anniversary of 9-11. That penultimate thought there was from Richard Engel of NBC News, who's been saying this is so predictable. Why is everybody acting so shocked? And I mentioned this, but Ryan Crocker, the former Obama administration, the ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, said, and I quote, I'm left with some grave questions in my mind about Biden's ability to lead our nation as commander in chief. Well, I want to start by slightly questioning one of your premises, which is the American people are in favor of this. I think that's correct. And of course, they've they've chosen dovish candidates since George W. Bush. Arguably, he was the dovish candidate too.

Although I did see this morning a couple of things that made me wonder. The first is, if you ask the question in a slightly different way, should we leave a good number of troops there to prevent the Taliban from coming back? You have a majority saying yes. And the second someone pointed out to me was that you saw similar polling on Iraq until ISIS started to rise up. And at that point, the sentiment changed. So it'll be interesting in two, three months to see whether this is what people want, which I suppose in a cynical sense is what Biden's relying upon. And I think with the press, the press is, of course, correct here. And that coverage is deserved.

It does show you how biased the press usually is, because on this one, they've either taken the view that this is deserved, it does show you how biased the press usually is. Because on this one, they've either taken the view that this is what they are upset about, whereas usually it is not, or that it's just unavoidable. I mean, maybe this is impossible to spin, but it was just a little disconcerting yesterday watching the morning shows

because you think, wow, this is what the press could be like every single day. I mean, obviously we don't have this sort of disaster every single day, thank goodness. But the harsh questions, the inability and refusal to let dissembling slide, just the tone in general was what the press should be. And indeed what the press was for the entirety of the Trump administration.

But yeah, I mean, this is a monumental failure and it has to be evaluated, as the press has done a good job of doing independently of the broader goal, which is, yeah, if you decide to leave, then leave, but not like this. So the politics of it, you know, because people are focused on the midterms a bit, you know, we're still a ways out, but the Republicans are all looking at the midterm elections as some sort of saving grace to these far left policies Biden's been pushing. This obviously doesn't help. But traditionally, would something like this drive votes? I think it depends. I think it depends on.

What else happens and how this relates to Joe Biden as he likes to present himself. If by next year, the Biden administration is mired in, maybe crisis is too strong a word, but that's a good word, is mired in malaise, then this is going to really hurt them. I mean, you can see a scenario in which we have reached $30 trillion worth of debt. We have enormous deficits because the Democrats on the back of both parties spending $5 trillion fighting COVID decided to spend another four, maybe more. You can see a scenario in which the inflation risk

is real and doesn't look like it's going away. You can see a scenario in which various culture war fights, and I don't use that disparagingly, meaningful culture war fights have trickled down to the local level, for example, critical race theory, which, despite what many in the press say is not fake, is actually motivating real people at the local level, and in which our foreign policy looks like a disaster, and America seems embarrassed on the world stage. And you can see the swing voters and the middle class voters who abandoned Trump saying, well, Trump's not on the ballot. This president's not doing a good job. And we're going back to the Republican Party. So, yeah, I can absolutely see this.

I don't think if everything's rosy by next year and the economy's booming and the country's fine, that too many voters will look back and say, well, yes, but do you remember what happened in Afghanistan? But unfortunately for Joe Biden and for America, it doesn't look as if everything's going to be rosy by next year. So, I mean, he should be worried about this. And the other piece of it, of course, is that the threat of a terror attack. I mean, that's what we that's what we really need to worry about, that they are going to use this land to do what they did prior to September 11th, 2001, which is, you know, form groups to plan our demise and come up with clever new ways of getting at us that we hadn't anticipated or considered. And I just don't know whether Joe Biden, to round back to our original point, who's been wrong about so many things in his foreign policy history,

is going to be anticipating that in the way we would want of a sound, sage commander in chief. Well, look, Joe Biden is not a sound, sage commander in chief? Well, look, Joe Biden is not a sound, sage commander in chief. I think it is fair to say that we have not had great leadership in the White House for quite a long time. And that whatever virtues Joe Biden possesses that Donald Trump did not have, do not change that. He has been wrong on pretty much every foreign policy question. He also has the benefit of correcting himself when he's right. I mean, he's a guy who almost goes out of his way to make the wrong calls. This is a man who voted for the second Iraq war but opposed the first. He voted for the second one, but opposed the surge.

He was against the killing of Osama bin Laden. He wanted to partition Iraq. And look at every single thing he predicted in July that he played. He's just always wrong. And we put him in the White House. And I'm sure people had various reasons for doing that. But if you were to go up to 30,000 feet and scour the country for someone to be the commander in chief, it would have been somewhat odd to pick Joe Biden. And he is now in that position. And it just it really, you know, I don't think I've said but the last president in

my entire life writing about politics, Megan, it's just not how I think. Even two days after the new president has been inaugurated. But seven months, that is not how America works. We invest a huge amount of power in the executive branch, far too much in my view. And the least we can expect of the people who acquire it is to take responsibility for the decisions that they make. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. All right, last question. How worried do you think we should be

about other conflicts breaking out now? If when a country loses a war, that's what's happened here. I realize you can argue it different ways, but if a country loses a war, that's what's happened here. I realize you can argue it different ways, but if a country loses a war, they're not too keen on getting dragged back into another one. And there's been some speculation in the press I've read about what's going to happen with Taiwan now. What happens with other countries and power grabs by by places like China, are they likely to get more aggressive or the Russians to get more aggressive because they don't think there's any American appetite from the top on down to stand up to the world's bullies? Yeah, I think it's the combination of

sensing a lack of appetite. And I think that that is the correct instinct. And for example, do you think there would be a broad desire in the United States to go to war over Taiwan? None. Ukraine? And the sense that a given administration is weak or chaotic or can't be trusted. And that's another embarrassing part of this. It's not just that we messed up here. It's that there are people out there saying with good reason, well, we clearly can't trust the United States. The United States is unreliable. And when you get to that stage,

you neither sense that the American public would want to fight, nor sense that irrespective of what that public wanted to do, the president or the Congress would stand up. So yeah, I do worry about it. I don't think this is going to happen tomorrow. But I do think that over time, as the result of various bad decisions that we've made as voters, the conception of the US has changed. There was probably a high watermark of

respect for and fear of the United States, probably around 1991. You came off eight years of President Reagan. And then you had George H.W. Bush, you had that lightning fast victory in Iraq, Kuwait. Now, no. So yeah, this is, of course, a big worry. Yeah, it's starting to feel a little 1970s-ish. It's starting to feel a little Carter-esque. And we all know that's not a good thing. Charles C.W. Cook, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this and being here. Thank you so much for having me. Coming up tomorrow, we're going to be back on Afghanistan as well.

Don't miss the show. This whole week, we'll get all the news covered for you, as always. Have a great day, and don't forget to subscribe, download, rate, and review. We appreciate it. Talk to you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.