KIRBY: From a military perspective, John, our focus is at the airport, right? Uh, security and stability at the airport so we can keep operations going. We’re working hand-in-glove with the State Department uh, uh, uh (sputtering) in terms of supporting their plans, uh, at processing these individuals. Uh, but, uh, again, that’s something that we’re gonna be doing on a case-by-case, day-by-day basis.

Right now, though, uh, I don’t want to set the expectation that we are, uh, uh equipped (sputtering) and — and — and, uh, able to go out into the countryside and physically move people into Kabul. Our focus right now, the troops that we have there are at the airport. The idea is to make sure we can get that, uhh… The air operations, not only have they resumed, but to keep them in place for as long as possible.

JOHN: If they can’t get to the airport, what does it matter if you have the capabilities to get ’em out from the airport?

KIRBY: John, I understand that, and we all understand that the security situation in Kabul is not ideal. Uhhh, right now the airport is open. Uh, and people are able to get through, uhh, through the gates there. There’s a processing process that actually has to occur.

BUCK: Welcome back the Clay and Buck show. That was just from this morning you had the Pentagon spokesman, Kirby there, saying, “It’s not ideal,” which is quite an understatement. We have Americans who are still… We have U.S. soldiers, of course, thousands of them in harm’s way, but also Americans beyond that, journalists, aid workers.

Thousands and thousands of Americans remain in the country right now. A lot of people reached out in the last 24 hours with military backgrounds talking about how — and I think, Clay, this is just another one of these areas where it shows the lack of foresight and planning. And the fact that they gave up Bagram Air Base, which is the primary air hub for the 20 years of this war.

And they essentially abandoned it in the middle of the night and said, “Okay we’re gonna leave this to the Afghan army,” and the Afghan army abandoned it to the Taliban; so we could have had two air bases, more logistics, better preparation. Instead, we now have Taliban checkpoints that are preventing… As I’m speaking to you right now, as we’re talking all across the country there are Taliban checkpoints that are preventing people from even being able to get to the airport.

We don’t know how many. They’re asked that. They don’t know how many Americans are currently waiting to get to or trying to get to the airport. Clay, this could turn really frightening and tragic in a hurry. So we’re talking about this as though the Biden administration has suffered the political and optics nightmare and it’s over, but until every single American that’s supposed to get out of there is on a plane in the sky out of Afghan airspace, this thing’s not over.

CLAY: No doubt, and the Wall Street Journal just sent out an alert as we were sitting here doing the show saying that people can’t get to the airport because the Taliban is surrounding it, and there are some jets… They said a jet took off with only seven people on it. So you’ve seen probably that viral photo, a lot of you have, of one of these big military planes with 600-some-odd Afghans —

BUCK: C-17.

CLAY: — all loaded in there as tightly packed as they can possibly get it. That is the ideal scenario, right? You want to get as many people as you can out safely before the Taliban takes control completely of the airport. But right now, the reports are that there are thousands of American citizens that are not able to get to the Kabul airport, and this is where…

We keep talking about Joe Biden as Jimmy Carter 2.0. This is where obviously the embassy situation is not the same, but we could end up — and I hope we don’t, but we could end up — in a situation where some elements of the Taliban try to take American hostages in an effort to either try and get some sort of payment or to try and demonstrate their ability to stand up to the United States in political perspective. We don’t know how this is gonna shake out, but things could still go very, very ugly, messy, even more so than they are right now. And we hope it doesn’t happen, but it could.

BUCK: And I think it’s interesting when you look at what the Biden administration — what Joe Biden himself — was saying a month ago about how this won’t turn into a Vietnam-like circumstance. That’s actually pushing in the wrong direction or taking the wrong perspective on it in that the South Vietnamese fought on for two years after the U.S. military withdrawal. We still supported them, and then the Congress actually pulled that financial and logistical support. But the South Vietnamese Army actually did continue the fight against North Vietnam for a pretty long time before the fall of Saigon and all the things that we now have become so familiar with.

CLAY: Saigon on steroids right now.

BUCK: Yeah. This was just collapse. It felt like instantaneous collapse and the Biden administration has to deal with this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: This part of the narrative is going to get a lot of debate, a lot of consideration, I think, in the days ahead, which is that the Biden White House is now saying that essentially the Taliban offensive was so powerful to begin with — the Taliban blitzkrieg, as I’ve been calling it — starting in spring of this year, that there was already a loss of ground going on all over the country and the U.S. was gonna effectively have to actually go to war with the Taliban to stop the collapse anyway.

CLAY: Which is ironic because 5-1/2 weeks ago on July 8th, Joe Biden told the American public the exact opposite of that, Buck, which was what’s happening now was not going to happen.

BUCK: Yeah. So where did they go?

CLAY: Decide that it wasn’t gonna be safe and there was no way they could stand up to the Taliban because that’s two different stories being told now in 5-1/2 weeks. Also, Buck, Jen Psaki has ended her vacation and at least is showing up. Now, this was not her talking yet, but I’m curious whether they got so ripped for Biden not taking questions that they had decided they had to come back today and take media questions.

BUCK: Yeah. You work for the White House and you have the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster in a generation, I think you gotta show up. I think you gotta stop working on your tan and actually decide that you have to address the American people. But it’s interesting. Another thing, Clay. Maybe this just annoys me ’cause I used to work in the intel side of things.

But the Democrat White House whether it’s Obama or this White House under Biden they have these advisors, they love to… They use terms that nobody else does. Remember when it was ISIL with the Obama administration?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: No one said ISIL except for Obama and his top advisers, always ISIL, right? And you might have heard him here, Jake Sullivan say, “ISISK.” For any who’s wondering, that’s what they’re referring to as the Islamic State of Khorasan. Khorasan appears in a has had Ethiopia. It’s a geographic area that’s roughly analogous to what’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, and some of the surrounding countries today and there’s a hadith that says men with black flags will come out of Khorasan and march all the way to Jerusalem.

It’s kind of an end of days thing. Big with the jihadis. But, anyway, when they say ISISK. I can assure you no one out there really had any idea what they were talking about, but whether it’s Tal-ee-ban… Why can’t they just say Taliban? I know this seems small, but I think it’s an arrogance thing.

CLAY: It’s the Taliban. All right?

BUCK: We’re Americans. We call it the Taliban.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: They don’t speak Pashto. We don’t need to hear them go Tal-i-ban, you know? We don’t have to hear that. I know people say, “Arabic,” but that’s not the point. They don’t care about what it is that they’re now trying to communicate to the American people being all true. They care about how it makes them look, and that’s what I think we continue to see play out here with the White House and Jake Sullivan.

CLAY: That’s why they’re having this before he is briefing right now is because Biden failed yesterday. I think it’s fair to say, this response today is an indication that Biden’s address failed in many ways, and they knew that he would get criticized for not taking questions. So they brought Jen Psaki back out of her vacation. She’s gonna trot up there; say she’ll circle back a few times.

And the media that is otherwise been furious because the White House hasn’t shown up for basically a week to discuss, like you said, the biggest calamity, I think it’s fair to say, in a couple of generations from a foreign policy perspective. Right now, they’re trying to catch up with their week’s worth of failures both on the ground and in media. And, by the way, a lot of this time when they’re talking we’re seeing videos that counteract what they’re saying, right? They may have the airport open, but are people allowed to reach the airport? That’s a big parts of as well.

BUCK: And there are videos. Because we live in this social media era there are videos. The Taliban does not have… Unlike some other situations like, you know, the Chinese government, the Russian government can shut down communications — and the Taliban has spent a long time trying to blow up cell towers and create chaos just to do that. But they don’t have the ability to stop cell service and shut down everything nationwide.

So you are seeing a lot of video you’re seeing a lot of real-time updates on what’s happening on the ground here. And that means that you have, for example, right now video circulating of Taliban lining people up and against the wall in Kabul. Fortunately, you have not seen widespread executions yet.

CLAY: Yet.

BUCK: But from what I understand you can hear in some of the audio, I’ve been reading some of the transcripts of this stuff you can hear people yelling, you know, “Amriki.” We all know what that means, when you’re lining up people against the wall in Kabul now and you hear something that sounds like America, it’s, “Did you work with the Americans?” and we all know that the wrong answer to that could get people killed. So this is a pretty terrifying situation that continues to play out here, and the Biden administration receiving all due opprobrium on this one and then some.

CLAY: But look at you, SEC — SAT — word, breaking ’em out.

BUCK: SEC, SAT, whatever it takes.

CLAY: Those are definitely not SEC words. I’ll tell you that right now.

BUCK: (laughing) Whatever it takes.