WILLIAM COHEN: I think the relationship should be one very arm’s-length. The Taliban is not going to convert into a civilized nation. Certainly not overnight and not in the foreseeable future. So, I think we have to keep them at very arm’s length, and I think we have to maintain communication with them from the military point of view to the extent we can. But also, our intelligence community will have lines of communication open.

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. There you had a former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, who was saying we have to keep the Taliban at arm’s length. This is going to be a big deal, a big issue on the foreign policy front for a while now. Because, let’s remember, we left more than half of SIV recipients — and, yes, first and foremost, we left over 100 — and I’ve been talking to people that are still trying to work to get people out of Afghanistan.

They believe that it’s significantly more than just over 100. They think it’s hundreds. But we don’t know. It’s not clear yet exactly what the number is. But we have to get them out. And, Clay, we are entirely reliant right now on the Taliban letting these people get out, which means we’re going to have a relationship with them. He says, this guy — Cohen, who was the defense secretary — that we’re going to have intelligence community contact with them. Which, yeah, sure. That will be.

But I think we’ll have to get used to the fact that there’s going to be a lot of effort by the Taliban to try to present themselves as a semi-normal player in the international community, which is mind-blowing but I don’t see a way around it. This is where you have them saying the last couple of days — I forget who the reporter was who was trying to push a member of the administration — “Is the Taliban the enemy?”

And I understand actually why they’re not going out saying, “Yeah, the Taliban are still our enemy,” because we’re having to ask them, because of the Biden calamity. To let us have our people back. Because the military was instructed to pull out. We did leave people behind. So, yeah. We’re not going to be able to antagonize them. So it is in this Bizarro World of a month ago, we were ready to back our — or at least verbally back our — Afghan National Security Forces partners to go toe to toe with the Taliban. “Fight them! They’re barbarians,” and now we’re kind of like, “Well, we gotta see what happens.”

CLAY: And what we’ve been saying from the get-go is, I just hope that we’re not going to have a series of hostage-related crises involving the Taliban or ISIS-K or Al-Qaeda, any of the people that are sweeping in to be able to take over. And, Buck, you know, you talk to a lot of people. I talk to a lot of people. One of the things I’m hearing most frequently is the idea that the Taliban is a well structured…

I know this is going to shock a lot of people. The idea that the Taliban is a well-structured organization is laughable. You have a lot of essential, feudal lords, all over this country, who — depending on the city or the geographic region of Afghanistan — have different degrees of control. And that matters, because the upper echelon of the Taliban may be trying to rebrand, effectively, as I saw Kat Timpf, who you did a show with recently on the Gutfeld show talk about the rebrand of the new Taliban.

It’s like New Coke or something. Like, hey, maybe don’t stick with the name Taliban if you’re going to try to rebrand and do something different than what you’ve already represented. But some places out there where the Taliban is in control, are already establishing Draconian controls. They’re not allowing, for instance, girls to go to school after the sixth grade now in some parts of Afghanistan.

They’re dragging out people who are involved in entertainment in any way and executing them, right? And so, to what extent is there going to be any kind of consistency that applies here? And how ridiculous is this going to make an already ridiculous administration in Joe Biden look, Buck, when all of these stories blow up? And if we have hostage crises — or God forbid, multiple hostage crises — it’s just going to legitimatize everyone who pointed out how absurdly catastrophic this entire policy has been.

BUCK: Even some Democrats realize that this is a mess still. A lot of them were saying a week ago when the images came out — because they were effectively running for cover themselves as politicians or as journos or pundits or whatever. Here is Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna, who is one of the more reasonable Democrats I will say out there in general.

KHANNA: I do think there has to be accountability, Neil. As a member of Congress, I knew the idea that the Afghan army was gonna fight the Taliban successfully was foolish. We had generals come tell Congress over and over again, “Oh, we’re winning! We’re winning! The Afghan army is doing well.” And then they’d go off record, as you know or other journalists know, and say, “No, we’re not winning.”

So what I want to know is how is it possible that you had advice that the president of the United States thought this Afghan army was gonna successfully fight the Taliban, and were we that deluded about the corruption in the Afghan army, the sense that most people were doing it for a paycheck — they had no real allegiance — and that the Afghan government never had the consent or the attachment or the loyalty of their people? We definitely need oversight over that.

BUCK: I mean, we’re going to talk about oversight — and we call it for it here, for accountability. But, Clay, the only accountability comes with the Democrats taking a shellacking over the midterms which, as you know, is a year away. And a lot can change between now and then. No resignations. No firings. The only firing was a guy, the lieutenant colonel, who said there should be accountability!

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s the only guy that we know of who basically got real consequences for all of this. And it just goes to show you that when Trump was in office, they were always talking about how he was “undermining faith in our institutions.” Nothing undermines in institutions quite so much as them failing catastrophically and then looking the American people in the eyes, and saying, “Yeah. We did a great job.” It’s like a kid that wrecks his dad’s car and then says, “Look what a good driver I am!”

CLAY: That’s a good analogy. And also, the analogy here is that the Democrats are homing that people have the memories of goldfish, and that they’re not going to be able to recall by 2022 how disastrous Afghanistan was in concert with all of the other Joe Biden administration failures. I thought we had a good discussion about this too. Your argument, which I think is an interesting one, is that Biden is so bad right now, it’s like he’s cratering.

And it’s hard for him to go lower than he’s already going right now. I mentioned that I was going to give us an update on the poll situation. I mean, these polls right now for Joe Biden — and, again, I understand people out there are like, “Hey, you can’t really trust polls. Because we know how wrong they were on Trump.” But usually, Buck, polls are overstating the support for Democrat candidates.

BUCK: Right. If a poll looks bad for a Democrat, it’s really bad.

CLAY: That’s right. And right now, Joe Biden is underwater everywhere as you look at his overall poll results. And he’s underwater in places that should be — I think this is significant, in places that should be — historically favorable to him. Politico, Morning Consul. This came out today with disapproval of Joe Biden. We know Rasmussen disapproves. But the level of disapproval is crazy. All the way down to 42% approval, and in the NPR poll, down to 43% approval for Joe Biden. I mean, he is cratering, unlike any Democratic president in most of our lives.

BUCK: I feel concern over this just in so far… The good side of it is that at least we’re not living in an entirely parallel universe where that middle ten to 15 — or, as you said, 20% — of Americans are persuadable based upon the issue or circumstances about who they’ll vote for and what they’ll support. At least there is some reality that that is based on.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We’re not living in a completely upside-down world where they’re saying, “Yeah, Joe Biden. Great job in Afghanistan!” We all know that’s not true. My concern here is just that — and look, we’re projecting a long ways out. But when you look at the Biden administration, where it is right now (chuckles), I almost worry, Clay, that the American people will become numb to the ineptitude and failures of the administration.

The normalcy that Joe Biden promised us is manifesting itself through, “Yeah. It’s normal. Crappy normal! But this is kind of the way things are,” and then they’ll trot out the War on Women, and the insurrection, and the socialism, and all the usual nonsense and the shiny objects to distract the public from what’s really important and really matters in this country. And momentum, as you know, matters a whole lot of politics. Right? It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish on Election Day.