Rob O’Neill Drops Bombs About Dropping Bombs

CLAY: A guy who has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, and the most successful aspect of the entire war in Afghanistan actually took place in Pakistan when Rob O’Neill and his Navy SEAL brethren went in and took out Osama Bin Laden. Rob, I appreciate you coming on with us. What’s your reaction at a sort of baseline level as you watch everything take place in Afghanistan right now?

ROB: Hey, guys, great to talk to both of you. Thanks, Clay. Thanks, Buck. You know, it’s just very, very frustrating because this was so predictable that it’s sad how many people are gonna be killed right now, not in a good way. In a very, very bad way, tortured and killed and just amount of slavery that’s gonna happen with the young girls in that country.

They took the military out before they took the civilians out, and they can’t even decide if it’s between 5,000, 10,000, 11,000 15,000 Americans that are there, that really, really need the help. And it didn’t need to happen this way. There were… You know, it’s not black or white. There were definitely ways to withdraw, which we knew we needed to do eventually.

But it’s gonna get really, really bad right now because we just… We are the laughingstock of the planet and just we are a face of complete weakness, no leadership, even to the point where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior officer in the military… I hope he told President Biden, who’s the commander-in-chief, “We shouldn’t do this.”

I hope he didn’t tell him, “We should do this.” But either way, if he told him to not and the president did that, he should resign. If he agreed with the president, he should be fired. That’s when I was at war. If men and women on the ground actually fighting, if we were wrong like this, we either died or we got fired. That’s it, that simple. And it’s a spoof right now.

BUCK: Rob, it’s Buck, man. Good to have you on, my friend. Thanks for being with us. The Afghans on the ground right now who were interpreters and/or promised some kind of a visa to the United States, we’re seeing a lot of footage of them swarming around the airport. We’ve got Americans in harm’s way. The administration’s actually not prioritizing, they said, for all these flights, Americans.

So why don’t I do that actually for a second here and ask you about the Americans first. What do you think happens here tactically if we get to a point where the Taliban just says, “We’re not letting some of these Americans through.” And we don’t know what’s gonna happen to them. I mean, are we gonna have to send in guys like you to go get them out?

ROB: Yes. Yes. What… I mean, this… To be perfectly honest, this is not a complicated problem. You jump in the 82nd Airborne, you fly in some Marines, and you go kill everything that looks at you the wrong way. Simple. Period. That’s what we do. We’ve lost that in this woke culture of political correctness and garbage that we have Marines…

I’m not making this up. I’m still in touch with some people in Afghanistan. They’re saying that right now the Taliban are torturing people right outside of the walls of the airfield. Marines and soldiers are being told to stand down. Why aren’t every one of these officers fired? This is insanity. Marines can go in there and kill. That’s what they do.

Soldiers go in and kill. Infantry can kill. We can do this. We fought the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in 2001-2002 and crushed them. Web do it again. We’re just weak right now. We would rather have symposiums on, “Hey, you’re this soldier, but you have to use this bathroom,” and it’s nonsense.

CLAY: Rob, what should happen? I know we’re still… The first answer is we gotta get as many — hopefully, all — of the American citizens out of Afghanistan safely as we can. But you’re starting to see military and intelligence officials throw Joe Biden under the bus and say:

“We told him that this was what would happen if we pulled out, that the Taliban were advancing rapidly.” So far as I know, it’s rare that we’ve seen Biden take any shrapnel like this from military and intelligence advisers. Where do we go from here with the Biden administration and this disaster of a fallout?

ROB: Well, I think the first thing we need to do with the Biden administration is figure out who is actually in charge and who’s making the calls, who’s doing what. And, you know, I wish we could trim the fat, but we don’t really do that because everybody wants to stay in power because eventually, they’re gonna work for the military-industrial complex and get a cush retirement.

We… I mean, the reality here is we need to decide how we’re gonna take Bagram airfield back before China does. If you’ll notice, the Chinese embassy in Kabul did not close. The Russian embassy in Kabul did not close. There’s some stuff going on right here, and it’s… I mean, there comes a time that you need to plant your feet, stand your ground, and kick somebody’s ass.

And that’s where we’re at right now. I don’t think we have the leadership to do it. I don’t even know who the leader are, because it seems like everyone goes on vacation. We can’t even hear from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs! We get a national security adviser who, in his defense, has basically no idea what he’s talking about.

He’s trying to define when someone asks him, “You know, well, why did the president go on vacation again?” and he’s trying to say (laughs) just stumbling over his words with, “Well, you know, he… I know how he works and…” No! Unh-uh. That’s not the case at all, and it’s a sad state of affairs. We do have the people to go in and win this again. We just don’t have the willpower.

Most people on media or on social media are basically lying to not just Americans, but to the entire Western world of what’s actually going on. The realization that just because you don’t want to be at war with someone doesn’t mean they don’t want to be at war with you, and that’s where we’re at. I mean, we can give it to the Taliban and hope they never do anything, but hope doesn’t get us a long way.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Rob O’Neill, who’s a former Navy SEAL and was the man who shot bin Laden on that raid in Abbottabad about a decade ago now. And, Rob, I want to ask you, as somebody who was as up close and personal in this fight as literally any person could be:

Do you feel like we should have stopped, we should have withdrawn right after we got justice — thanks to you and your team and all the people that put you there — against bin Laden, or would you have wanted there to be some kind of residual special operations force staying either behind or at least in the region to do the counterterrorism mission? On the strategic level, what would you have recommended?

ROB: For that area of operation in Afghanistan, there’s obviously mistakes made and the way you get successful is you learn from the others mistakes and that’s fine. I’m not blaming anybody for that. We shouldn’t have done a huge surge like we did, but we really should have kept an airfield in Jalalabad which we had which was really nice.

And then Bagram airfield, and then obviously in Kabul, just for the counterterror operations across the border — drone strikes, whatever. Whenever we to need kill somebody, keep them right there. But the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS were afraid of Bagram airfield. All we had to do here — and I wish I was at least in the room or invited to one of the birthday parties with no masks where I could tell you people, you can —

CLAY: (laughing)

ROB: Here’s how silly it is. (chuckles) Not silly, but I’m trying to explain to your listeners: I’m not making this up. Bagram was a fortress. We could defend it. We have pilots, mechanics — everything — a hospital, a prison, all that stuff. We can have our brave pilots bomb the Taliban and literally be back in time for karaoke night and Green Bean coffee. That’s how we had it.

Look, would we rather go to Germany for deployment? Yes. But if you have to go to Afghanistan, it’s fine. Not that bad of a place. They’re scared to death. They will not try to do anything. Air power will win. And instead (laughs), we just left! Didn’t even have the courtesy to throw the Afghans the keys. Just leave, and then obviously…

I don’t know what they’re calling it, the military something, that the Taliban have their hands on. But they mean machine guns, guns, and tanks. That’s what we gave to them. Yeah, keep a presence. Because if you keep Bagram airfield right there in that part of the world, now you have a foothold against China, against Russia, against our enemies to the south, Iran.

You’re just there — which is going to happen, because we never learn from our mistakes. I mean, the fall of Saigon looks almost better than the fall of Kabul. But now we have to fly jets and bombers from other countries, aircraft carriers, refueling. Just the logistics involved is so complex now when we could have just flown from Bagram, killed them, home.

BUCK: Rob, what do you think of the…? The Taliban advance, obviously, caught this administration by surprise. That’s clear. But there’s a lot of back-and-forth over the Afghan army folding. Was this inevitable? Was this known? Was this surprising? I mean, from your experience working alongside some of our Afghan partners in the fight, when you saw this whole thing unrolled, what were your thoughts?

ROB: Now, again, some of the best, most loving, caring people I’ve ever met have been in the country of Afghanistan. And that is a fact, and they’re great people there and most people in a war zone are just trying to get on with their lives and I truly feel for them. Having said that, we used to do things towards the end of my service we were calling them Afghan-led missions, which is complete nonsense.

Working with them… Look, if you train someone for 20 years to fight, they should at least be a black belt, right? And the guys on the ground were saying, “Here’s what will happen: If we’re arming these guys with these weapons, the Taliban will have them eventually,” and here’s… Look, and I know people want to be politically correct and say, “No, I knew some of the best fighters.”

Here’s proof, and sometimes I get in trouble for telling the truth. Here’s the truth. If we have been training you to fight for 20 years, given you the weapons and vehicles and all that stuff, and you have twice the amount of fighters as the Taliban and you lose in three days, my guess is someone is not fighting.

CLAY: I think that’s fair to say.

BUCK: No doubt. Rob, man, thank you.

ROB: One more thing, too.

BUCK: Go ahead.

ROB: If you notice a lot of C-17s taking off with about 800 people on it? There was a heck of a lot of fighting-age males there that aren’t fighting, and I didn’t see one mask.

BUCK: There were not masks. I agree. Nor were they telling everybody —

CLAY: And how is covid not killing the Taliban? They took over the whole country, and it doesn’t seem like covid has even had any impact on them. We don’t even know what their preferred pronouns are.

ROB: Well, you gotta figure covid doesn’t hurt a lot of people in Afghanistan (laughs) because they don’t have televisions.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: There you go. Rob O’Neill, everybody, former Navy SEAL. His book is The Operator.

CLAY: It’s a great book.

BUCK: If you haven’t read it, go check it out. The man who shot bin Laden. Rob, thank you, man. I know you have a lot of people that say thank you to you all over the country, but we thank you for that and for joining us here today and we’ll talk to you soon.

ROB: I appreciate it. Any time. Congratulations on the new show too. It’s awesome. Appreciate it.

CLAY: Appreciate that.

BUCK: Thanks so much, brother.