BUCK: I come bearing more bad news out of Afghanistan. It is falling so rapidly that even people who were expecting all along the Taliban would once again seize power in this country are staring with their eyes wide open, their jaws hitting the ground as they see how quickly the Afghan National Security Forces are folding.
Now we’re at the point where the Biden administration is having to do PR stunts trying to figure out a way to convince people that this isn’t the fall of Saigon all over again or this isn’t a very rapid evacuation. Here’s what’s gone on in terms of cities that have been lost. Well, actually, it’s much easier to tell you what cities in Afghanistan have not been lost yet.
As of now, the central government still controls the capital of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Mazar-i-Sharif. That is, in terms of major cities in the entire nation of Afghanistan, pretty much the sum total of it. Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province which U.S. and British troops fought fiercely to keep out of Taliban hands for years? Gone. Firmly in Taliban hands. Kandahar the heart city, if you will.
The central city for the Taliban stretching back for a long time that we took back and kept out of their hands for 20 years, gone. Ghazni, Saripul, Kunduz, Taliqan, Herat all fall to the Taliban in a matter of weeks. This is an army that we trained! This is a military that worked alongside our own not for a few months or even a few years, for decades.
Tens of billions of dollars of military equipment just given to the Afghan National Security Forces, and now elders all over the country in villages that have not yet been taken are looking to negotiate if they’re on the edge of the Taliban blitzkrieg that has now turned into a rout. It was quite an offensive and now it is a massive retreat for the other side.
That’s what we’re seeing happen. If this were happening under Trump’s time in office, I can assure you it would be blasted as the primary headline, the major story across CNN and New York Times, and it would be firmly on Trump’s doorstep. It would be his fault, they would say. But with Biden we get something else going on here. Here is State Department spokesperson Ned Price — now, he works for the administration I know; we’ll get into the press part of it in a second — trying to tell you Baghdad Bob style, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.”
BUCK: (impression) “They are evacuating the embassy, Clay.” They’re just doing it in phases.
CLAY: Buck, 3,000 soldiers to help preserve the safety of the remaining American citizens that we still have in Afghanistan because they don’t want to have another Benghazi occur. When you’re in a rough spot — when you’re trying to pull all of your forces out but in order to pull all of your forces out you have to send more forces in to allow that to occur — this is starting to look like Saigon.
I feel as if we’re gonna see helicopters taking off with people at the last minute as the Taliban takes over probably our own embassy. We’ve spent — and this is just regardless of your background and whether you paid a lot of attention Afghanistan. We have spent a trillion dollars, and the entire country is going to be as if we were never there before we even initially leave the country. For people out there who are wondering, this is far in excess worse of a collapse of the Afghan government than even the worst forecast could have ever predicted.
BUCK: Clay, when I was in Afghanistan a decade ago and I was living there for months on end, every person that I knew who understood that country… All the people that had a good, top-level view, if you had asked them — especially the talk to a noncommissioned officer who’s on his fifth tour in Afghanistan. Now some of them are on their 10th tour, their 12th tour, and more than that even for some guys.
You ask any NCO, “What’s gonna happen in this country the moment we go?” You know what they would have said? “It’s just a question when the Taliban takes over.” This is what I heard across the board a decade ago. So I bring this up because look at the military the military-industrial complex and what has happened in this country and the narrative around Afghanistan for years and years now.
Not only is this one of the biggest intelligence failures since 9/11, I think you could argue since 9/11 the biggest intelligence failure that we’ve seen. Although ISIS’s rise in Iraq was also pretty catastrophic and surprised the Obama administration. How is it possible that this wasn’t known in advance as the reality and, therefore, preparations were taken against it from our massive footprint in the country stretching back for years.
All the surveillance, all the intelligence assets, the military, the diplomatic assets? I would argue it is because the people at the very top, Clay, not the NCOs that are actually doing the war fighting day to day as well as the officers and the enlisted. The people that were trying to get on CNN when they came back and be contributors (I’m just being honest with you), they always came with the same story. “We figured it out this time! We’re making progress! We figured it out. We’re making progress.” That just wasn’t true.
This is, I think, an abject failure, and we talked about this a couple days ago, I think. The only way — and again, hindsight is often 20/20. But the only way we really could have left Afghanistan and declared a victory for purposes of the narrative was right after we got Osama Bin Laden, right? Otherwise, what’s your choice?
BUCK: You’re propping up a shaky, at best, government that was essentially installed with U.S. and international mentorship, but that’s what you’re nation building.
CLAY: And you’re gonna have to leave troops in Afghanistan forever to prevent this from happening. So what have we actually accomplished in Afghanistan, after spending a trillion dollars and 20 years not to mention the lost lives?
BUCK: Can I give you the neo-con answer, by the way, just so we don’t leave it out? Because there are people that are making this case. I obviously think it’s wrong.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: But the neocon answer to your question, “What did we accomplish?” is they’ll say, “We denied a safe haven to Al-Qaeda.” I think the response that one should have to that is Al-Qaeda has been operating with relative safe havens in Yemen, in Nigeria, in…
Well, depending on we’re talking about ISIS or Al-Qaeda specifically, but in Somalia, in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. There are all these different places. I mean, plotting a mass-casualty terrorist attack against the U.S. does not actually necessitate —
CLAY: That you do it in Afghanistan.
BUCK: — operating open-air training camps with thousands and thousands of jihadis going through them. It’s just some guys with a really diabolical and evil plan and Al-Qaeda funding them and telling them to go for. So I don’t think that the answer, Clay, to your question is compelling. I think we should address it. That’s what they’ll say, “We didn’t have another 9/11.” We did have a lot of terrorist attacks, however. That’s often left out of this.
CLAY: Also, by the way, the answer could be we might have another 9/11 now because we’re giving back over Afghanistan, in theory, to the terrorist elements that allowed 9/11 to occur the last time.
BUCK: I don’t know if you saw Jen Psaki, though, really slapped down the Taliban by telling them that they need to think long and hard about what kind of role they want to play in the international community?
CLAY: Yeah, I saw. NATO is gonna be really upset at the Taliban.
BUCK: Jen Psaki gonna take all the cupcakes away from the Taliban unless they play nice with everybody. But, Clay, again, if this were not Biden who — as you say, Weekend at Bernie’s style — is so propped up by the media and the Democrat apparatus around him; if we were living in a world where people who worked in the information dissemination field really cared about honesty and integrity, they would say, “This is a catastrophe.
CLAY: And he’s also not solving covid at all. In fact, things are getting worse.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: David in Massachusetts, what do you got?
CALLER: I just want to say, what’s gonna happen in Afghanistan is gonna be the same exact thing as (garbled cell) the Iraq pullout. It’s gonna be Biden’s ISIS rise, whoever it is, Al-Qaeda, this, that, the other, Taliban. They all knew that this was gonna happen. Everybody in the military, every politician, everybody knew that this was gonna happen, and what the Taliban is doing (garbled) and what they’re going to do is just gonna make (cell drop).
BUCK: I appreciate it. You’re cutting off a little bit there. But, Clay, on this point, this is the part of it that for everyone who’s saying it’s — and look, Trump wanted to pull out. Republicans that I know feel like we’ve been there long enough. A lot of people in the conservative base feel like we’ve been there long enough. So it’s not just… Now, managing the withdrawal and making it just a complete and utter… I can’t even say what on the air.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: But think of the words for a complete debacle, that’s something that the Obama… Sorry, the Biden administration (Obama’s third term, basically), that’s on them. But if they come back in and they create a terrorist safe haven there, we’re gonna have some really tough choices in the years ahead. Is it going to happen? (big sigh) No one really knows right now, Clay, but the way things —
CLAY: It’s certainly more likely now than what was year, and it’s gonna be more likely next year than it is now.
BUCK: Yes. If you were a global jihadi in the last few years, remember how Trump destroyed the whole ISIS caliphate in Raqqah, rolled into Syria?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: He sent our troops in, unleashed our incredible military to go after them in a way that finally went for the jugular of ISIS. Jihad’s been quiet for a while, friends, but the global jihad may have quite a rallying cry into the collapsed vacuum hellhole that is Afghanistan.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: Clay, we’ve gotta also just update everybody on this, and we’ve got the border issue to come up to as well. They’re saying, “Afghanistan right now on verge of complete Taliban takeover.” That is the news ticker on CNN. And on Fox News they had a headline up there:
“DOD source: Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, could fall tomorrow.” Clay, it feels like a few platoons of U.S. troops in this massive country would do a better job of defending it from Taliban takeover than the 300,000-on-paper strong Afghan National Army? You’ve got to be… This is crazy.
CLAY: It feels like the fix was in and there was already an agreement. Maybe it’s not the case, but for that much of the Afghan government to fall this fast, it feels like behind the scenes they had basically already agreed with the Taliban that as soon as the United States pulled out, that they were not gonna have control of the country anymore.
BUCK: That’s where the intelligence failure component of this comes in that this was not… Look, does anyone really think the Biden administration would have committed to this course if they thought that they wouldn’t even last ’til Labor Day? No way, right? They clearly didn’t see this coming. They clearly didn’t make the provisions necessary with knowledge of what they were up against. Massive intelligence failure.
CLAY: My mind is blown here, Buck. If you start thinking about what’s going on with the murder rate, if you think about what’s going on with the border, you think about what’s going on with covid, you think about what’s going on with Afghanistan. This is right now, the first six months of the Biden administration, the worst presidency almost of any of our lives.
BUCK: Yeah.
CLAY: What have they managed? And that doesn’t even take into account inflation or all the ridiculous money that they are spending. Everything that Biden is touching is turning to the opposite of gold, which would be a word that we probably can’t use on this radio program.
BUCK: I gotta say, it’s like an extension of the old Office Space question, “What would you say ya do here?”
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: In this case it’s, “What would you say you do here that isn’t terrible?” That’s what the Biden administration should be asked. What would you say you do that isn’t awful when it comes to decision-making?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: So, Clay, we do have right now a briefing at the Pentagon. We wanted to JIP it. Can we join this in progress, guys, live? Here’s John Kirby, Pentagon press secretary.
BUCK: All right. So we just wanted to give you what the Pentagon is saying here. They’re really just focusing in on the force protection, Clay, of what they’re not saying is an evacuation. But I can tell you, having worked in places where we had to think about evacuation plans and had to prepare for it, this is the “Everybody get to the lifeboats but don’t panic” moment of the Pentagon.
That’s what we’re seeing right now unfold, and I appreciate that we have Americans in harm’s way. We want all of our people back safe and sound, first and foremost, the most important thing. So I appreciate Kirby’s tone and poise here. That’s what you would want. But let’s not make any mistake about this, Clay. They’re saying Kabul could fall tomorrow. It’s like there was no Afghan army to fight against the Taliban.
CLAY: And it’s like we were never there. That’s what’s wild. You are seeing all this American military apparatus, billions of dollars effectively now in Taliban hands, and the question that is going to be asked I think for years to come is, how much danger are we creating by effectively allowing the Taliban to take back control of Afghanistan?
By the way, we want our American soldiers and all our American employees in the embassy to get out safely. We don’t want another Benghazi. But remember all the talk, Buck, about how we were lifting up all the women of Afghanistan and how we were gonna give them opportunities to get educations and go to school, and we were gonna nation build and we were creating a new dynamic in that country?
All of those people are now back under the thumb of the Taliban, which, when you look at the disconnect between the egalitarian world that the Democratic Party claims to favor and what is now going to be the case in Afghanistan, it’s just another failure and hypocrisy for Joe Biden. And, really, I wonder. At some point are people going to start to point to all of the failures of this Biden administration? I think it’s gonna be hard to avoid.
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