Blinken: We Succeeded in Afghanistan!

CLAY: It is absolute madness as we speak, the Taliban taking back over all of Afghanistan. Buck, we played Joe Biden and showed how totally out of it Joe Biden was. But it’s worth mentioning the secretary of state, Tony Blinken. Remember, these were supposed to be the “adults” that would bring back normalcy, bring back diplomacy, bring back a semblance of American exceptionalism. That’s the argument they made, the experts.

BUCK: Right. Who are gone right now, Clay! Where are these experts all of a sudden?

CLAY: They’re all faded. But let’s listen. We played Biden in July. Let’s listen to Tony Blinken, expert secretary of state back in June. He said (summarized), “No way the Taliban’s gonna go from a Friday to a Monday taking over the country!” Oh, by the way, it took a little bit less than that.

BLINKEN: I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. Uh, so I wouldn’t, uhhh, necessarily equate the departure of our forces, uhh, in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate, uhhh, deterioration, uhh, in the, uh… in the situation.

CLAY: We didn’t even get them out of the country before things deteriorated, Buck! We weren’t even out! We weren’t even leaving ’til the end of August.

BUCK: Clay, it’s almost like you could have set the actual Taliban battle plan by whatever the Biden administration and top officials said would not happen. The Taliban was saying, “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s give that a shot!” This is an outrageous failure from the top down, and it’s just a reminder as well — and I think this is a place where we’re gonna have to have a lot more introspection and conversation.

Clearly, the U.S. government view of what was going on in Afghanistan — again, going back to a decade ago when I’m in country, we’re doing all the assessments, Clay. This was all this talk of shadow governance, of the Taliban actually providing services for people in areas, of providing Sharia courts, of paying people off, of having the police on the payroll, all of that.

This was a decade ago. They basically were already in position to run and overrun the whole country. And it’s like all the sudden our elected officials it no idea? At least the Biden White House had no idea? How is that even possible?

CLAY: And how about the disrespect? They weren’t even willing to wait ’til the end of August when we were leaving to take over the country. They aid, “Screw it. We’ll go ahead and do it to embarrass the Americans while they’re still here.” By the way, Tony Blinken also, he said, “Hey, guys, no matter what your eyes are telling you, this is not Saigon.” He said, “We succeeded in the Afghanistan mission. Listen to this. This is what he just said.

BLINKEN: No, we’re not! Remember, 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. And we have succeeded in that mission! The objective in a we set, bringing, uh, those who attacked us to justice, uhh, making sure that they couldn’t attack us again from Afghanistan, we’ve succeeded in that mission. Uh, and in fact, we succeeded a while ago. Uh, and at the same time, uh, remaining in Afghanistan for another f… one, five, 10 years is not in the national interest.

BUCK: So why did we stay there for the last 10 years, Mr. Blinken? We’ll answer these questions and coming back and give you real time updates about the catastrophe in Kabul and around the country in Afghanistan. It’s on the Biden administration. Don’t let them evade accountability.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Secretary of State Tony Blinken, one of the big questions that is out there is, “Will we end up with Afghanistan as a breeding ground for terrorism again?” He was asked, the secretary of state was, about that. Play cut 7.

BLINKEN: Jake, we have, uhh, tremendously more capacity than we had before 9/11 when it comes, uh, to counterterrorism. In places around the world where we don’t have forces on the ground, in Yemen, uhh, in parts of, uh — of Africa, in parts of Syria we’re able to deal with any potential terrorist threat, uhh, to our country and we’re doing that, uh, every single day.

We’re going to retain, uh — in, uhhhh, in the region the over-the-horizon capacity, we call it, to see and deal with any reemergence, uhh, of — of a terrorist threat. And look, uh, I can’t tell you what, uhhh (snickers) what the Taliban is going to do. But again in their self-interests, uh, allow a repeat of what happened before 9/11 — which is a terrorist group to reemerge in Afghanistan that has designs on the United States — well, they know what happened last time. So I don’t think it’s in their self-interest to allow that to happen again.

CLAY: Okay. Blinken, Buck, has been pretty much the only Biden administration official who has been talking at all for the past several days. Now, again, in about an hour Joe Biden is scheduled to speak from the White House about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. You just got, Buck, talking points from Nancy Pelosi’s crew.

But you know, I would say, almost as much, it feels like, as Tony Blinken does about Afghanistan. I think for people out there who may not care as much about foreign entanglements, should we be worried now that we’re completely out of Afghanistan that we are going to create another breeding ground for the next iteration, however it might arise to become a reality of a 9/11-type attack?

BUCK: Well, this is the center of the debate right now for what comes next, because the humanitarian catastrophe that’s unfolding right now — there would be executions, there will be women who are effectively enslaved, there will be abuse of children on a horrific scale — that’s happening, unfortunately. That’s going to happen with the Taliban and already is happening.

So then the “What do we have to think about from a U.S. policy?” perspective going forward, and that’s where you get into the will it become a jihadist safe haven? That would be the term. Or a platform for the global jihad. And I’ve gotta say that the over-the-horizon capabilities — and by that they tend to mean manned and unmanned flight.

So that’s using drones and using strike aircraft and bombers when necessary to go in and attack targets. It’s very hard to think that given what we’ve just seen here, Clay, that our intelligence capabilities — our intelligence gathering and knowledge and on-the-ground assistance in a place like Afghanistan — is going to be sufficient for us to use those over-the-horizon capabilities to strike at whatever it is that we think is a threat.

We are now losing so much visibility in Afghanistan as we’re drawing down, that we’re going to be able to see things coming and deal with them effectively again using those long-range strike capabilities, I think that’s a rosy-thinking scenario here. I think that we’re gonna see the Afghanistan Taliban… They’ll probably consolidate for a while. They will spend time proving their governance model.

Believe it or not, one of the reasons they were particularly successful in the Pashtun areas of the country in the south, in places like Kandahar and Helmand — and one of the reasons they’re so successful — is that they were creating shadow governance for a long time and they do come in, and their orders are respected on the ground. Meaning the Taliban leadership’s orders will be respected on the ground.

So they’re gonna try to become a country. They’re gonna try to become a regime that actually has the Chinese, the Russians, and otherwise recognizing them. And then the question will be, “Well, is this just a place that’s a place where terrorists can gather, or will there be a true alliance of some kind?” I don’t know if there will ever be the true alliance there was with Al-Qaeda that we saw in the past.

It was pretty open that they were the homeland for Al-Qaeda in the past. But there could be something along those lines. I mean, there could be essentially safe space for the operation of certain terrorist groups. This is also, if you’re looking for a region of the world, we have dozens of terrorist groups operating in the AfPak region.

And we should also start to think of Afghanistan as essentially an extension of northwest Pakistan, and then it makes a lot more sense. So I know that the administration is gonna say, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” But, Clay, to put it really simply, given what we’ve just seen how can anyone listen to Tony Blinken and say, “You know what? I think they’ve got a handle on the situation.”

CLAY: This is where I think this foreign policy calamity rolls into the domestic disaster, which is — building on what you’re saying, Buck — based on what you are seeing on your televisions and have seen of the Taliban rise up and take over Afghanistan faster than any of the — and I’m doing this in quotation marks — “experts” told us was possible, how is it that you can trust in any way the experts on covid?

How is it that you can trust the experts on inflation? How is it that you can trust the experts on the border? How is it that you can trust the experts on crime? All of these areas, Joe Biden is already failing in. To me, this further undercuts the idea of expertise in his administration across the board. If they can be this wrong about Afghanistan, how can they be trusted? And we know how wrong they’ve been about covid already. But I think all that builds on each other.

BUCK: Well, this is one of the points of genius of Trump, actually, was that he was willing to call out the credentialed elites as phonies and frauds who make bad choices and other people suffer the consequences and there’s no accountability for them because they wrong to this system of the elites. It’s one of the things —

CLAY: Right. It’s easier to say, “Hey, there’s a way to succeed in Afghanistan,” because that keeps you in good stead in the military —

BUCK: Of course.

CLAY: — than to say, “Hey, guys we’re screwed here. We gotta watch out. Let’s get outta here.”

BUCK: There was a script if you were either a senior diplomat, intel official, military. There were things you had to say about Afghanistan so that when you’d be invited to think tank meetings, when you’d have a profile written about you in the Washington Post, you were considered one of the good, smart people. And if you broke with that consensus, then you risked personally your career, your aspirations.

CLAY: This is something, by the way, that happens to both of us, right? Because we’re breaking a lot of times with conventional wisdom in the way we talk about covid. We’re trying to be as honest as we can with our audience. You’re not part of groupthink right? Groupthink has its rewards. You’re a good guy, you’re a part of the crew, but you’re not necessarily telling the truth.

BUCK: Well, neither you nor I will ever be invited on the Stephen Colbert Show, for example late at night —

CLAY: (laughing) Yes.

BUCK: — whereas there will be people who are boring and useless and worthless from, say, CNN who will —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — because they’re part of, again, that elite apparatus. Speaking of which, I didn’t mean to skip past this, but Nancy Pelosi’s office has released the White House talking points on Afghanistan, and it’s base… This is the White House talking about Afghanistan: “The president was not willing to enter a third decade of conflict and surge thousands more troops.

“It’s clear from the past few weeks that would have been necessary: More troops for an indefinite amount of time. The administration knew there was a possibility Kabul would fall to the Taliban. It was not an inevitability. It was a possibility. The administration planned for every possibility. We had contingency plans in place. But indefinite war was unacceptable to the president.”

So, yeah, exactly what you would expect here, which is that they’re just pretending like this is not a complete and utter disaster and a catastrophe and a huge black eye for the Biden administration. They’re saying, “Oh, no, no! Don’t worry. This is pretty much exactly within the plan. That’s why we’re sending thousands more troops. The whole thing.” They pulled all the troops out. They could send 6,000 in to block, to get everybody back out. This is what we’re actually facing and dealing with right now.