Will There Be Accountability for Epic Afghanistan Failure?

BUCK: Accountability for Afghanistan is going to be something we talk a lot about here. You’re going to have people that are trying to say that the Biden administration made the right call and so the circumstances of this do not really change the ultimate choice, right? “The ultimate decision here was the right one, even if it came down through all these disasters on the way.” That’s what they’ll eventually say.

We haven’t even gotten there, yet though, so I’ll put a pin in that for a moment and remind everybody that we are reliant in the next 24 hours on the Taliban, a terrorist entity that once allied directly with Al-Qaeda refuse today give Al-Qaeda over to us after 9/11. That same entity, with Haqqani also very tight. The Haqqani Network is also tied in at a very high level. We are working directly, the U.S. Government, with them to provide security.

And to Clay’s point, from last hour, it is very likely that we perhaps were tipped off by the Taliban about ISIS-K. So who even knows, although that would go into sources and methods that neither Clay nor I have access to at this point. But here’s Blinken, the secretary of state — who I think has looked befuddled at some of the worst moments here in this whole situation — saying that the Taliban promised that they won’t seal off the country.

BLINKEN: First, just, uhh, about 24 hours ago, a very senior Taliban, uhhh, leader spoke on television and on the radio throughout Afghanistan and repeatedly assured the Afghan people that they would be free to travel after, uhh, August 31st. Uh, I’m not saying we should trust the Taliban on — on — on anything. I’m simply reporting what one of their senior leaders said to the Afghan people.

BUCK: Clay, they actually are saying — because they have no choice — that we have to trust the Taliban on some of these things, or, rather, they have no option other than to try to take them at their word for right now. We’re looking at a situation where the Taliban is in charge of the U.S. evacuation at some level. That’s what no one’s really been willing to say. That’s true right now.

CLAY: Not only is that true right now, it’s going to be true for a long time to come, Buck, because even in the absolute best case scenario, we are going to be leaving behind a large group of U.S. citizens. And according to multiple reports that basically the White House has confirmed, we handed over the names of All-American citizens and their location to the Taliban, which is a sign that basically we are desperate for them to not do anything of a negative nature to those people, or to many of the allies that worked with us. And this is going beyond, Buck, negotiating with terrorists.

You remember what the idea is — and you well know, you worked in the CIA — you don’t negotiate with terrorists, because you legitimize terrorist groups by negotiating with them. We’re not even negotiating with the terrorists! We are allowing the terrorists to tell us what we can and cannot do — and, frankly, I’m stunned that this hasn’t been a bigger part of the storyline. Twenty years ago, the Taliban allowed Al-Qaeda to attack us. Twenty years later, after $2 trillion, we are saying, “Hey, Taliban, you tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”

BUCK: Clay, we’re asking them for favors.

CLAY: Yes!

BUCK: Let’s be honest. We’re saying, “Hey, guys, can you do us a solid, Taliban? Can you make sure you let the Americans through?” By the way, I was getting reports over the weekend that there were even some Americans not being let through. The whole thing is a mess. But to give you an idea of how much of a mess this is, here’s PBS’s Jane Ferguson. She was on ABC’s This Week, just giving a sense of what it was really like on the ground during some of the moments here of the evacuation.

FERGUSON: We also saw panicked crowds of the soldiers. When we talk about security at the time, much of the discussion of security was how to keep the soldiers, but also the people safe from the panicked crowds, from stampedes, from the heat. There were people lost to the stampedes and killed there. Right there in the streets. So to say it was chaotic is an understatement. To say that there was a semblance of security checks is a misunderstanding of what was actually happening.

RADDATZ: You heard Tony Blinken say, “Oh, look, it’s just like an embassy.” Not like an embassy.

FERGUSON: Not like an embassy. It’s like a stampede of people trying to be controlled by various armed groups.

BUCK: A complete mess, an abject disaster in terms of the organization and the control — and obviously from a security perspective, too, on the ground, Clay.

CLAY: There’s nothing — and, again, I understand your point of, “Hey, let’s see what happens with the final evacuation before we start making decisions about the way this thing went down.” But here’s what I’m afraid is going to happen, Buck. I think the Biden White House is going to just pretend that this (laughing) story never happened, right? They’re going to try to turn the page. I think a lot of media are going to acquiesce in that request, and they’re going to immediately move back to, “What’s Ron DeSantis doing in covid? ” You pointed out before we came on the air that they’re already trying the drum beat of the insurrection on January 6th all over again.

BUCK: They’re subpoenaing all of Trump’s family’s phone records on January 6th. The Trump’s family! They will be pulling Ivanka and Don, Jr.’s phone records. Congress is actually going do that. Of course, this is just meant to feed that craziness. But that’s the idea.

CLAY: To the point, there may not be any consequences for this failure. The American public, I think, is going to render a verdict next year, which is going to be incredibly damning for the overall Joe Biden White House. But in terms of there being somebody who loses a job? Buck, what’s crazy is, the only person I’ve seen so far that has lost a job in the American military over this situation is the lieutenant colonel who spoke out and said — and I’m sure you saw that video, too — “Hey, the leadership has been a failure. This is all a mess.” Now, he did it in uniform, and I can understand. But the idea that the only guy that would lose his job over Afghanistan is a lieutenant colonel who points out how much of a failure this entire process is, is, frankly, totally unacceptable.

BUCK: Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller. He was the one who published the video that went viral. He was calling on his superiors for the massive failure underway right now in Afghanistan, specifically from a tactical perspective.

CLAY: Yes!

BUCK: Completely insane decision to abandon Bagram Air Base which we remember General Milley was saying a few years ago, “Eh, Bagram Sh-magram. Who cares!”

CLAY: General Milley all worked up about white rage and white racism, but he can’t protect his people.

BUCK: Oh yeah. Well, it turns out when you’re passing out reading lists with a lot of Robin DiAngelo on it, you don’t have time to think about actual battle plans as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, yeah, we’re talking about accountability. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Sheller was relieved of duty and then he resigned. He’s got his whole pension apparently now that is at risk from all this. He’s taking a real stand, and Kevin McCarthy is saying: There’s got to be accountability for the people who actually failed us here.

MCCARTHY: I say, my moment at this time, at this moment, is getting every American out. When we get beyond that point, we’re going to collect all the data, and we have a constitutional responsibility to hold people accountable, and we will take it wherever the facts bring that forward.

BUCK: Constitutional responsibility, absolutely. But, Clay, right now, next 24 hours, I think everyone needs to get ready for what I think is going to be a Biden administration spin cycle, because they are going to withdraw. They’re going to keep going forward with the withdrawal of U.S. troops. And at that point, they’re going to be saying, “We’re still in contact with the Taliban, to let people leave the country.”

And I think I’ve been hearing from folks that they’re worried that this is going to turn into they’re essentially going to have to pay off the Taliban, especially for any Afghans that we want to get out, still. So it turns into a hostage situation they’re going to call it something else, and that’s a massive one, and that’s what we’re facing.

CLAY: It is competence on a generational level, and my concern is: You should learn from incompetence on a generational level. Multi-generational level. Buck, you and I have not been alive for a more disastrous, I would argue, foreign policy individual discrete event like this, the leaving of Afghanistan. And, yet, Biden and his administration are just going to try to play the distraction game.

If you have ever had a kid who is got to go to the doctor and they got to get a shot and you try and draw their attention away from the fact that they’re about to get a shot, because you don’t want them to see what the painful thing that’s about to happen to them? That’s what the Biden administration is going to try to do with Afghanistan in general.

They’re going to try to distract the American public and find something new for everybody to focus on, whether it’s going to be covid, whether it’s going to be constantly obsessing with January 6th. I don’t think there’s going to be any real consequences for the biggest American foreign policy failure since 1975 Saigon.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck, I wanted to hit you with some of the data here, where they finally have been able to figure out exactly how much we left behind, and some of these numbers are absolute madness. Here’s some numbers I’m going to hit you with, Buck. We left over 22,000 Humvees for the Taliban, 8,000 trucks, 169 armored personnel carriers. We left 42,000 pickup trucks and SUVs, in addition to the big trucks that we left behind.

We left 358,000 assault rifles, 64,000 machine guns, 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 33 MI17s, four C-130 transport planes, 23 jets. As you run through all of this, this is unbelievable futility that we would leave behind all of this gear for an organization that is effectively a terror-based organization that has spent 20 years trying to kill as many Americans as possible and we just gave them more material than many countries that are our allies have.

BUCK: Let’s be very clear about what this is. The taxpayer has now effectively — I mean, this is the end result —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — armed, thoroughly, the largest terrorist army in the world.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s actually where we are, and we are now hoping, going forward, that this Taliban is going to be so different from the previous Taliban. Remember, we said to the Taliban after 9/11, “Hand over everybody in Al-Qaeda or we’re coming,” and they said, “Nope, not handing over anybody.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: So maybe they’ve changed some of their strategic thinking since then since they’ve seen what U.S. power can actually do, in the early stages of this war, the different stages when we had troops that were in actual forward combat roles. But, Clay, you go down that list; you just say, “How can anyone see this an anything other than an utter failure of the entire apparatus of national security analysts, elites and the people at the top of the food chain, so to speak, who are telling us…?”

I have seen it. I was in Afghanistan a decade ago. What people would say then is every 12 months is, “Oh, we figured it out now and we’ll implement it in the next 12 months.” Every 12-months cycle, which coincided with deployments of whoever the theater commander or whoever was the ambassador at the time, whatever it may be, they’d say, “Okay, we’re making progress. We’re making progress.”

And there were some people all along, Clay, who were saying, “The progress is a phantom. It’s not real. We’re propping it all up,” and we see that those voices were drowned out. They didn’t get promoted. They weren’t told that they were put in charge. And the people who did get to make the decisions were so wrong that it’s still unbelievable. You still sit here to say, “How is it even possible?”

CLAY: To put into perspective how much gear we left for the Taliban, I saw a rough approximation of the value, and the suggestion was that per capita, every single American citizen basically handed the Taliban over $250 in taxpayer funds that we have allowed them now to be able to use better than any terrorist organization ever has the utmost technology and equipment that we have created.

We just handed it all off to them, and it may well be used against us in terror attacks in the years ahead. And for anyone out there who’s trying to argue in the Biden administration, “Oh, this wasn’t a panicked withdrawal,” I would say that since we handed over billions and billions of dollars of our best equipment to these guys basically ends the argument on the contrary.

BUCK: Yes. Of course it was a panicked withdraw. Every one of those Black Hawks you cited costs about $6 million! Every one of those helos… I don’t even know what the price tag is on a C-130 but it’s a lot more than that. It’s hard to think about how you could have so many people with such resources on our end so wrong that they end up arming — as I said, we have armed thoroughly what is now — the largest terrorist army in the world. Although will we take them off the terror list the next year or so? That’s a whole other conversation, ’cause I think that’s what they’re gonna try to get going too.