Biden Reads Speech, Resumes Vacation as Afghanistan Falls

BUCK: Obviously, the chaos in Afghanistan and Joe Biden’s speech yesterday afternoon is big news. He rolled into the White House, he read off a teleprompter for around 20 minutes, he went immediately back on his vacation. This is one of the most tone-deaf foreign policy decisions and outcomes that has happened in most of our lives. Let’s listen, cut 1 here as Joe Biden reinforces, in his mind, that he made the right decision based on the chaos.

BIDEN: After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we were still there! We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I would be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened?

Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.

CLAY: All right, Buck Sexton. This is not really a huge surprise. We kind of hinted at this. He also blamed Trump and his other predecessors in the White House for not being willing to make the decision to end the war in Afghanistan beforehand. But what he tried to do — to much criticism, honestly, across the board from Democrats, Republicans, independents as well.

Even, as you said yesterday, not many Democrats are trying to carry water for Joe Biden right now. He focused on the decision to leave Afghanistan as opposed to the disaster of the way that we are leaving Afghanistan, which is what most of the American public has been upset by. What did you think of what Biden said and his attempt to avoid blame for the chaos?

BUCK: There are just certain things he said that were obviously untrue. The only real concession that was made seemed to be that it happened faster than they anticipated, which is obvious to everybody, right? I mean, there’s no way that you’re pulling out troops and then sending in 6,000 troops because this thing happened the way that they thought it would.

And all you have to do… You don’t have to take my word for it or Clay’s word for it. If you listen to the Biden speech from about a month ago, the stuff that he was saying now just looks preposterous. In fact, as I said yesterday, it’s almost as though the Taliban was listening to what Biden said and they’re like, “Oh, well, actually, the thing he says will not happen? Let’s make that happen.”

CLAY: We’ll accelerate it and embarrass them.

BUCK: Yeah. We’ll go even faster. It was like Biden laid out a road map for what he thought was going to occur in this country. And instead, the Taliban decided that they would create the entirety of the road map. So Biden said, “The buck stops…” Pardon the phrase, of course, from me.

CLAY: (chuckling)

BUCK: But he said the buck stops with him and then said that, oh, there was this deadline that Trump put into effect. And the truth about that is, on all these different areas of foreign policy, Biden brags about breaking with the predecessor administration, right? He brags about how he has a different approach to climate change. He has a different approach to the Iran deal.

These are things he says, “I won’t do it the way Trump did,” but on this one, his hands were tied? There’s no way to make this look good. The optics of this, which, as you know, is the obsession in D.C., couldn’t be much worse unless there was really mass violence, God forbid, against the U.S. and our allies.

CLAY: Which could still happen. This story is not over.

BUCK: We have thousands of Americans that are still trying to get out of Afghanistan. There are reports that Americans aren’t even being prioritized by American resources at Kabul airport, which I think people hear that and they’re just… Their minds explode. We would think that Americans would obviously be the first by far priority. But I should say, that should be the case.

I think with this administration it’s actually not surprising it isn’t the case. But now we see the Taliban are in a negotiating position with us. They’ve got checkpoints set up, Clay. They’re blocking access to the airport. So while Biden’s saying we prepared for every contingency, really?

With thousands of Americans still stuck in Kabul, not able to even get to the airport, never mind get on those flights, we’re being told that this is what they planned for? That’s obviously not true. There are certain things he said in that speech that were just clearly false.

CLAY: And also, Buck, the big issue now is, we don’t control what happens in Afghanistan in any way. We are relying on the largesse, on the generosity, on the rationality of the Taliban now when it comes to what’s gonna happen to American citizens and also the allies that worked with us in Afghanistan. And this a group that has historically impressed you with their generosity and their fairness?

BUCK: Right. This is a group that, as we all can recall — and I think this has been suppressed in a lot of our minds because the Taliban has been an insurgency operating in the shadows, mostly, now for decades, although in some areas they’ve had shadow governance and been operating Sharia courts — particularly in the South of Afghanistan — stretching back for years.

In fact, they’ve been able to leverage the opium crop for not only funding themselves, but also creating deeper ties into the community and having better… Believe it or not, they’re gonna try to have better governance in some areas of the country, and I mean this. They’re gonna try to do that.

CLAY: That’s their plan.

BUCK: Their plan is they’ll have governance that is more to the liking in some parts, Pashtun-dominated parts of the country with the central government.

CLAY: Almost Nacos-esque.

BUCK: That’s right. This is classic when you look at narcoterrorism. You brought up the show Narcos.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You look at Colombia. They understand. They’ve been fighting this insurgency for a long time. The Pakistan ISI which was also working very closely with the mujahideen back in the day against the Soviets. The Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence agency has been working and will be working very closely with the Taliban going forward, providing training, assistance, intelligence support.

That’s what they always do. Pakistan is not an ally, obviously, against the Taliban and not even an ally, really, in the War on Terror anymore. That’s a whole other conversation. So what you’re gonna see, Clay, is the Taliban consolidating. We’re all focused on Kabul because that’s where we have visibility.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: It’s the rest of the country we have no visibility no, we have no idea what the heck is goes going on. Who’s gonna speak to an American (chuckles) or who wants to be a journalist these days in Kandahar, or the outskirts of the city even more so? So they’re gonna have these videos we’ve already seen. Remember yesterday you played the CNN reporters who said they’re yelling, “Death to America!” but they seem kind of nice.

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: We’re gonna see these videos —

CLAY: Incongruities.

BUCK: You’re gonna have Taliban spokespersons with Twitter accounts which we’ve also pointed, saying, “Oh, no we want decent governance. We’re not gonna punish minorities,” and all this.

CLAY: They’re trying to pretend to be a kinder, gentler Taliban, right? Right now.

BUCK: That right now is a strategic move for them. Meanwhile, there will be these reports that continue to bubble up. People see of them taking women not as wives but as sex slaves. That’s actually what’s going on. They use the term “wife,” but it’s really sex slavery at the point of a gun, and they’re going to execute people.

They’re going door-to-door already in Kabul. So they’re gonna use the public international community facing pronouncements as cover for the atrocities. The Taliban used line people up in soccer stadiums and execute them and stone people to death for perceived offenses against the Koran. That’s who these guys are, and that hasn’t changed.

CLAY: And we have to also keep in mind it may not even be the top-down organizational decision that ends up creating a crisis inside of Afghanistan right now, right? If you have guys going door-to-door, there may be lower-level leaders who have a great deal of authority that could put American citizens in incredible danger even if “the kinder, gentler” — and we’re putting that in quotation marks — Taliban is trying to play nice with the United States government on some level right now, you can’t negotiate with terrorists.

You can’t rely on these guys and you certainly can’t rely on them to have a top down, well organized structure. There could be violence, there could be death that befalls American citizens. We certainly hope that that’s not the case. But this is what makes, in my mind, Joe Biden’s dismissive nature of this story in general. You fly in from Camp David, you show up, you give an 18-minute address, you don’t take a single question, you don’t address the chaos that’s going on right now. You only address your choice to decide to leave Afghanistan, which isn’t what is at stake right now.

BUCK: The Taliban spokesperson has answered more questions from MSNBC, as we have seen. If you’re Tucker, you can’t interview Viktor Orban in Hungary, a Western democracy that’s an ally of the United States and a great country. You can’t do that without them freaking out. But you could sit down and be a mouthpiece for the Taliban effectively or a platform for the Taliban right away and all the sudden we’re supposed to think that’s fine. Look, Clay, we all see this. Everyone listening to this knows that they could have known, meaning the U.S. government, the Biden administration. They did not know what was going to happen here in terms of the speed of the collapse at all.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And they could have prepared to actually get everyone out.

CLAY: He should have had a lot of those people out already.

BUCK: Already. They delayed this to the last minute. The tactics, the implementation of the withdrawal is an abject catastrophe. It could get worse, God forbid, but hopefully won’t.

CLAY: We’re already seeing China take shots over Taiwan.

BUCK: The saber rattling you’ll see from them over whole bunch of issues I think is only gonna go up, now the Biden administration looks so feckless.