All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 16, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:13
Biden’s Saigon | Ep. 1319
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Afghanistan falls to the Taliban in the worst foreign policy debacle for the United States since America's withdrawal from Vietnam.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Protect your data from big tech with the VPN I trust.
Visit ExpressVPN.com.
Slash Ben.
We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
It is a very bad day in the news.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, let us talk about a simple fact.
You are spending too much money on your cell phone bill.
Take a look at it.
Right now, if you're with Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile, you are simply paying too much.
It's time to switch over to PeerTalk.
PeerTalk can save your family over $800 a year.
They've got the same great coverage as all of those big providers because PeerTalk is on the exact same network as one of the big three, but at a fraction of the price.
And switching is as easy as switching out your SIM card.
You can keep your phone, keep your number, or get huge discounts on the latest iPhones and Androids.
Plus, right now, you can get unlimited talk, text, and six gigs of data for just $30 a month.
If you go over on Zeta, they're not going to charge you for it.
There's a reason Pure Talk is the highest rated wireless company by Consumer Affairs, why they are the preferred wireless partner of AMAC.
From your cell phone, dial pound 250 and say my name, Ben Shapiro.
Save an additional 50% on your very first month.
That is pound 250.
Say my name, Ben Shapiro, to save a bundle on your cell phone coverage.
And again, you're going to get the same exact grade coverage as one of the big providers, except at a fraction of the price.
Go check them out right now.
Dial pound 250.
Say my name, Ben Shapiro, to save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage of Pure Talk USA.
Alrighty.
Well, obviously the big news of the day and of the year, and frankly of the last 20 years, is the Taliban is now in charge of Afghanistan again because Joe Biden decided it would be a wonderful, wonderful idea to simply leave.
With no plan, with no actual transition, with no support for the people who are still there.
And so what we have on our hands is a full-scale disaster area.
Now remember, it was just one month ago that Joe Biden was saying that, don't worry, it's not going to be like Saigon.
It's not going to be like the United States leaving Vietnam with helicopters taking off from roofs and the Viet Cong simply rushing in and killing everybody they don't like.
It's not going to be anything like that.
It'll be orderly.
After all, there's a big Afghan army and we've been arming them and supporting them.
Here was Joe Biden saying what is now in retrospect the dumbest thing he possibly could have said one month ago.
Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling?
None whatsoever.
Zero.
What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy.
Six, if I'm not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army.
They're not they're not remotely comparable in terms of capability.
There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.
It is not at all comfortable.
This dunderheaded fool, this unbelievable coward, all of that was a lie.
That was a lie.
And it was perfectly obvious it was a lie at the time.
Here's the thing.
They're still lying in real time.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, he was asked on Sunday whether this was like Saigon.
And here is what he had to say.
President Biden said that under no circumstance, and those were his words, under no circumstance would the U.S.
embassy personnel be airlifted out of Kabul in a replay of the scenes that we saw in Saigon in 1975.
So isn't that exactly what we're seeing now?
I mean, even the images are evocative of what happened in Vietnam.
Let's take a step back.
This is manifestly not Saigon.
The fact of the matter is this.
We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission in mind, and that was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9-11.
And that mission has been successful.
Okay, this is insane.
It's exactly like Saigon.
By the way, it's not like Saigon.
Let me just show you a picture of Saigon and a picture of what happened the other day.
This is a side-by-side.
Okay, so on your left-hand side, you'll see Saigon.
You have people attempting to escape, attempting to climb onto U.S.
helicopters to get out of the way before the Viet Cong rushed in and killed everybody.
And on the right, that is an American ferry helicopter that is taking off from the top of the United States Embassy, trying to evacuate people from the top.
Nothing like it?
Nothing.
You see it?
No resemblances?
None?
Weird, because they look really exactly the same.
Like, exactly the same.
And by the way, you have the Taliban taking full control of the presidential palace in Kabul, in scenes reminiscent of Vietnam circa 1975.
Here is some of that footage.
What you are looking at right now is Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace.
Taliban fighters placing their guns on the desk, sitting behind the desk of, we assume that is the desk of the Afghan president.
A fairly stunning turnaround of events.
In Kabul.
Okay, remember last week, last week, the Biden administration said it would be somewhere between 30 and 90 days before the Taliban even had the capacity to take over Kabul.
It took about 30 to 90 hours for them to actually do it.
30 to 90 hours.
CNN's Kylie Atwood now reporting the American flag at the U.S.
embassy in Kabul has been taken down.
She says this marks a final step in the evacuation of the embassy.
By the way, how bad was this?
The withdrawal of embassy personnel is happening, quote, incredibly rapidly today.
And the process is now expected to conclude by this evening, she says, minus the small number of diplomats who will stay at the Kabul airport for now.
By the way, how bad was this?
This is so bad and so rushed and such a botched job that the United States left behind billions of dollars in equipment for the Afghan Taliban to simply take over.
According to the Agence France-Presse, the United States spent billions supplying the Afghan military with the tools to defeat the Taliban.
The rapid capitulation of the armed forces means that that weaponry is now fueling the insurgents' astonishing battlefield successes.
President Joe Biden said, we provided our Afghan partners with all the tools.
Let me emphasize all the tools.
But the Taliban have just been seizing all of the weapons caches.
They've picked up Humvees.
They've picked up Apache attack helicopters.
In the western city of Farah, fighters are patrolling in a car marked with an eagle swooping on a snake, which is the official insignia of the country's intelligence services.
The Taliban Blitz has handed the group vehicles, Humvees, small arms and light weapons, as well as ammunition, according to the Weapons Tracking Group Conflict Armament Research.
Experts say that such hauls have given the Taliban a massive boost.
The weapons will not only help the Taliban march on Kabul, but strengthen its authority in the cities it has already captured.
So they just ended up with a bunch of your taxpayer dollars in their hands, in the form of actual weaponry.
According to the New York Times, Taliban fighters poured into the Afghan capital on Sunday amid scenes of panic and chaos, bringing a swift and shocking close to the Afghan government and the 20-year American era in the country.
President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan fled the country.
A council of Afghan officials, including former President Hamid Karzai, said they would open negotiations with the Taliban over the shape of the insurgencies at takeover.
By day's end, the insurgents had all but officially sealed their control of the entire country.
Hastily arranged American military helicopter flights evacuating the sprawling American embassy compound in Kabul, ferrying American diplomats and Afghan embassy workers to the Kabul military airport.
At the civilian airport next door, Afghans wept as they begged airline workers to put their families on outbound commercial flights, even as most were grounded, in favor of military aircraft.
There are apparently reports as well that some of the airlines, the civilian airliners, wouldn't let people aboard because they didn't have a COVID test.
So they're just gonna stay behind and get slaughtered because they didn't have a COVID test.
Really solid stuff all the way around for the West.
A bunch of 8th century barbarians who are now taking over sophisticated military equipment from Western powers.
They just took over auspices of the 700 million dollar American embassy in Kabul.
Sovereign American territory that was just taken over by the Taliban.
And of course, the people who are let out were let out largely by fools in the West.
And by the way, this is a bipartisan problem.
Barack Obama and George.
So Georgia, let's start from the beginning.
George W. Bush mystified the mission in Afghanistan.
The mission in Afghanistan was very clearly to get rid of Al Qaeda and get rid of the Taliban to prevent them from taking over again and letting Al Qaeda back in.
The mission was not.
It was a side mission.
It was nice.
The mission was not human rights.
The mission was not establishment of a long-term democracy.
The mission was preventing this from being a terror base.
Period.
End of story.
If that had been made clear over and over and over again, perhaps the American people would have been willing to make the, what amounts to at this point, a relatively minute sacrifice to maintain a small troop presence in Afghanistan.
At the time the United States left, there were 3,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, largely to control, for example, Bagram Air Base, which is now controlled by the Taliban.
Those 3,500 combat troops represented a tiny, minute proportion of American military power all over the world.
The last American soldier who had died in combat was killed February 8th, 2020.
It has been a year and a half.
The United States is spending on average about $40-45 billion a year on Afghanistan, which amounts to approximately 1% of the federal budget before COVID.
Now with the new budgets, it's going to amount to half a percentage point of our federal budget.
This was not a quote unquote endless war that required the United States to pull out forthwith, leaving people to be slaughtered in the streets and the Taliban to rush back in to take back over the entire country with no possibility by the way of America now being able to stage attacks on actual terrorist positions because we don't have air bases there anymore.
Okay, so George W. Bush misdefined the mission, fair.
Then Barack Obama runs on the platform of pulling out in 2008.
And then as president, he realizes that this is actually not such a great idea.
And so he sort of takes a halfway position.
Instead of actually securing our position in Afghanistan, he starts doing like a mid range surge.
And then, he starts making backdoor overtures to the Taliban.
That continues under President Trump, who also campaigned on ending the war in Afghanistan, and was making pretty open overtures to the Taliban.
I mean, there was American negotiation going on with the Taliban in Qatar.
And then, that was followed by Joe Biden, who decided to finish this thing by simply pulling out with no negotiations, with no possibility of real commitment, with nothing.
For no reason at all.
None.
Hey, and the net result is going to be that look, the American people apparently are willing to go to war, but we are not willing at this point to see these things through, even if it means a minor, and it is in the scheme of how America's spending goes in the scheme of America's military commitment, a minor commitment to baseline security in places like Afghanistan.
And by the way, that gap will be filled by somebody.
Now, what's funny about this is that was Joe Biden's calculation all along.
Joe Biden's calculation was, if I pull out, there will be some sort of political boon for me.
I don't think that boon is coming.
I think the American people are going to be reawakened to the threats that the Taliban represent, and that Al Qaeda represents, and that terrorist states in the Middle East represent, when there is no militating backlash by the United States and or its allies.
In the meantime, however, the United States made a bunch of crucial errors.
For example, emptying out Gitmo under Barack Obama, negotiating with the Taliban.
Okay, here is a Taliban fighter literally saying, oh yeah, by the way, I was in Gitmo for eight years.
The United States released a bunch of the leaders who are currently in charge of the Taliban were released at the behest of the United States.
I was in Guantanamo for eight years.
According to The Guardian, Abdul Ghani Baradar, who's the Taliban leader, he was freed from a Pakistani jail at the request of the United States less than three years ago.
He has now emerged as an undisputed victor of the 20-year war.
Baradar is the political chief in the most public face.
He was said to be on his way from his office in Doha to Kabul on Sunday evening.
In a televised statement on the fall of Kabul, he said the Taliban's real test was only just beginning.
They had to serve the nation by presumably stuffing women back into bags and or into basements, making sure none of them ever read again, and ensuring that women don't walk publicly without a male next to them.
Operating in the 8th century seems to be a way of running the nation.
Bardar played a succession of military and administrative roles in the five-year Taliban regime.
By the time it was ousted, he was deputy minister of defense.
During the Taliban's 20-year exile, Bardar had the reputation of being a potent military leader and a subtle political operator.
Western diplomats came to view him as on the wing of the Qatar Shura, the Taliban's regrouped leadership in exile that was most resistant to ISI control, that's the Pakistani intelligence service, and most amenable to political contacts with Kabul.
The Obama administration was more fearful of his military expertise than hopeful about his supposedly moderate leanings.
The CIA tracked him down in Karachi in 2010, and then persuaded the ISI, which is the Pakistani Secret Service, to arrest him.
In 2018, Washington's attitude changed.
Donald Trump's Afghan envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, asked the Pakistanis to release Baradar so he could lead negotiations in Qatar.
Because everybody on both sides of the aisle decided that this was not a war worth a minimum of effort at this point at all.
Now, I think all of that is wrong.
But even if you think all of that is right, what is certainly wrong is the insane way that Joe Biden just decided to pull out of this thing.
Even if you think it's good policy for the United States not to be involved in Afghanistan, the way that Joe Biden has performed this is the crappiest way anyone could have ever performed this.
It truly is an astonishing failure by Joe Biden, who also is saying that he's not going to do any pressers.
He's not doing it.
No need.
Does he have to talk to you?
Nah.
Matlock is on.
He's too busy.
He's got things going on.
We'll get to Joe Biden's reaction in just one moment.
First, let us talk about keeping your home safe.
There are a thousand reasons why protecting your home matters to you, and there are a lot of reasons why protecting my home matters to me.
If somebody stops by or something is going on outdoors around the house, Ring will let me know.
It is peace of mind anytime knowing our home is protected.
You can protect your home with Ring Alarm.
Ring Alarm is a powerful, affordable, whole home security system.
You can easily install yourself.
It works seamlessly with other Ring products in one simple app.
For a special offer, go to ring.com.
It is the perfect way to start your Ring experience.
Keep an eye on every corner of your house with indoor and outdoor cams.
See what's happening right from your phone.
And Ring Alarm is super easy to install.
Like, really, you can do it yourself.
As soon as we moved from California to Florida, my wife's first priority, making sure that the Ring devices were on the house, and now I can keep track of my kids, no matter where I am.
Protect your home anytime from anywhere with Ring Alarm.
Go to ring.com slash ben for a special offer on a Ring Alarm security kit today.
You can build a system right for your home, have it up and running in just minutes.
That's ring.com slash ben.
Once more, ring.com slash ben.
Again, that is ring.com slash ben for a special offer on a Ring Alarm security kit today.
Okay, so, things are getting incredibly ugly over there, obviously.
CNN reporter Clarissa Warren, she says, people here are absolutely terrified.
We can certainly hear quite a lot of gunfire going on over the course of the last hour or two, particularly, I should say.
Again, very difficult to know what exactly that gunfire is because you do hear a lot of it in Kabul.
But certainly fair to say there's a lot more of it tonight than we're used to hearing.
And certainly also fair to say that people here in the capital are utterly petrified and essentially have nowhere to look to now.
That, of course, is no shock at all.
People are attempting to flee, and the videos are just horrifying.
If this was not supposed to be like Saigon, I just have a question.
Maybe it's not like Saigon.
Maybe it's just World War Z. Because these videos look like World War Z. It looks like the zombie invasion is coming, and people are attempting to get on planes.
They're climbing up the on-ramps on the planes, and they're just flooding them.
There's no organization whatsoever.
It's insanity.
Here's some of the videos.
You see this?
Those are civilian airliners in the background.
People flooding onto the tarmac, desperately attempting to get out.
People showing up with their families, trying to leave before the Taliban come in and kill everybody who is perceived as a collaborator.
That was just some of the video.
The evacuations underway at Kabul airport are shocking.
Some of the video shows people, it's a lot closer up, you can see people actually climbing up the stairs and they're just falling off the railings.
I mean, it's utter insanity.
And Afghans are of course being stranded by the thousands by the thousands by the hundreds of thousands at this point.
None of this should be any sort of shock at all because it isn't according to the Wall Street Journal.
Rahmat said he was relieved when the Central Intelligence Agency phoned him for an interview and weeks later, arranged to shelter him on an Afghan base while the State Department processed his application for a visa to flee Afghanistan.
He feared the Taliban were hunting him down for his work spying for the CIA in a remote border area of Afghanistan for almost a decade, and lacked the paperwork to apply for a visa.
But Rahmat isn't in the clear.
The Taliban are advancing on Kabul.
Even if he can make it to the capital from his hideout in a province hours away, the Afghan commander of the base has since told him he can't shelter there.
I'm very worried, he said in a text message.
We are feeling in danger here.
Please save our family.
Rahmat's story reflects the fears of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S.
during the war and now face a desperate race to leave the country.
The Wall Street Journal agreed to only use his first name to protect his safety as best they can.
About 18,000 families who have applied for the U.S.' 's special immigrant visa remain on the ground in Afghanistan.
Okay, this is as of two days ago.
Thousands, 18,000 families.
Remaining on the ground in Afghanistan.
No way to get out.
Half of those are outside Kabul, in areas either already under Taliban control or likely to fall soon, which now is everything, because it's all fallen.
In addition, the State Department this month said tens of thousands more Afghans would be eligible for priority treatment under a U.S.
refugee settlement program.
The new criteria apply to Afghans who work for U.S.
contractors, U.S.-funded programs, and U.S.-based media or non-governmental organizations, as well as their families.
But how the hell are you going to get them out?
The answer is now, you're not.
You're not, because you had no orderly transition process.
The entire place has been taken over by the barbarians from the 8th century.
No one is getting out.
Former soldiers, aid workers, others who previously worked in Afghanistan have been inundated with requests from former Afghan colleagues and employees seeking letters of recommendation and help in fleeing the country.
This is just obviously horrifying stuff.
It's going to get more horrifying, by the way.
The footage will eventually emerge of people simply being shot because the Taliban is apparently doing this.
The Taliban is simply taking places over and murdering people.
The New York Times reporting on what it's like living under the Taliban as they rush into Kunduz.
It was his first day as the Taliban-appointed mayor of Kunduz, and Gul Muhammad Elias was on a charm offensive.
Last Sunday, the insurgents seized control of the city in northern Afghanistan, which was in shambles after weeks of fighting.
Power lines were down.
The water supplied powered by generators did not reach most residents.
Trash and rubble littered the streets.
The civil servants who could fix those problems were hiding at home, terrified of the Taliban.
So the insurgent commander-turned-mayor summoned some to his new office to persuade them to return to work.
I said our jihad is not with the municipality.
Our jihad is against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers.
But day by day, as municipal offices stayed mostly empty, Mr. Elias grew more frustrated and his rhetoric grew harsher.
Taliban fighters began going door to door searching for absentee city workers.
Hundreds of armed men set up checkpoints across the city.
At the entrance to the regional hospital, a new notice appeared on the wall.
Employees must return to work or face punishment from the Taliban.
Just a week after the fall of Kunduz, the insurgents are now in effective control of Afghanistan.
Now they must function as administrators who can provide basic services to hundreds of thousands of people.
In just days, the insurgents, frustrated by their failed efforts to cajole civil servants back to work, began instilling terror, according to residents reached by telephone.
I'm afraid.
I don't know what will happen and what they will do, said one.
We have to smile at them because we are scared, but we are deeply unhappy.
Three days after the Taliban took control in Kunduz, Atikullah Omar Khil, a civil servant, received a call from an insurgent fighter telling him to go to his office.
The mayor of Kunduz wanted to speak with him.
Mr. Omar Khil had been staying home since the retreat of government forces as insurgents flooded into the streets and a sense of unease gripped the battered city.
He had experienced a similar moment twice before when the Taliban seized Kunduz in 2015 and 2016.
Both times the insurgents were pushed back with help from the American airstrikes.
This time, days after the Taliban took control, the entire Afghan Army Corps charged with reclaiming the city surrendered to the insurgents.
They gave them their weapons and they gave them their vehicles.
All of the government's vehicles, garbage trucks, and computers were exactly where he had left them before the Taliban took over and young fighters poured into the city.
The only sign of change was blank spaces on the walls where photos of President Ashraf Ghani had been.
Instead, the Taliban's white flags had been hung.
Mr. Elias assured the workers they would not be targeted by the Taliban and instructed them to return to work to improve morale.
Halfway through the meeting, a shopkeeper pleaded with the Taliban bodyguard to see the mayor.
Like hundreds of others, his kiosk had been mostly destroyed by fire during the Taliban's final push.
He said shopkeepers wanted the Taliban's promise they could return to the market to collect their things safely.
The mayor complied.
For the rest of the day, Elias met with other municipal leaders trying to get services restored.
There was some progress, but nearly every shop is closed.
The shopkeepers are fearing that they will be looted by the Taliban fighters.
About 500 Taliban fighters were stationed around the city, manning checkpoints on nearly every street corner.
By the end of the week, many residents' fears were being realized at the regional hospitals.
Taliban fighters seized a list of employees' phone numbers and home addresses, began calling them, demanding they return to work.
One person who had fled to Kabul received a call from a Taliban fighter demanding he return to work.
At the hospital, armed Taliban were keeping track of attendants.
Female staff wore sky blue burqas, as they assisted in surgeries intended to wounds from the airstrikes.
Things are going to go great.
Things are going to go just beautifully.
Okay, so it's not just that there are terrible ramifications for everybody who is stuck in Afghanistan, of course.
It's that there are bad ramifications for the United States.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, when he's not lecturing everybody about the evils of white privilege, he told senators on Sunday a previous assessment of how soon terrorist groups will reconstitute in Afghanistan will speed up.
On a Sunday phone call between top Biden officials and senators from both parties, Senator Lindsey Graham asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Milley whether they will revise an assessment to Congress in June of a medium risk of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan within two years.
Milley said yes.
He would have to assume that timeline would now be moved up.
He would be happy to brief senators in the classified setting.
Sources on the call described a surreal experience listening in on the Biden officials brief them on the situation while checking their cell phones and seeing real-time chaos unfolding in Kabul.
Senators from both parties pressed Milley and Austin on efforts to evacuate U.S.
personnel and the many thousands of Afghans who helped Americans in the war effort and are desperately trying to escape.
A source said the sad reality is there's no way they can evacuate by August 31st the more than 20,000 Afghans who want to escape the country.
And that's not including their families.
You're probably talking more like 75 or 80,000 people who want to escape the country and are not going to be able to get out.
Two takeaways for me, what said one source, we're going to leave tens of thousands of people behind and a timeline in terms of threats has now accelerated.
Remember, that was the original reason we went there in the first place. Anthony Blinken was asked, is the Taliban controlled territory now going to become a hotbed of terrorism again? He just avoided the question, as he is apt to do. You don't think that Afghanistan now is going to become a hotbed of terrorism? Jake, we have tremendously more capacity than we had before 9-11 when it comes to counterterrorism.
In places around the world where we don't have forces on the ground, in Yemen, in parts of Africa, in parts of Syria, we're able to deal with any potential terrorist threat to our country.
And we're doing that every single day.
And look, I can't tell you what the Taliban is going to do.
Um, that would be a complete non-answer.
So he asked him, is Afghanistan going to become a terror hotbed?
And he's like, well, Yemen isn't.
So, well, I noticed that Yemen isn't in Afghanistan.
So that's a weird answer, Antony Blinken.
By the way, when the United States leaves a vacuum, somebody rushes in to fill it.
According to Foreign Policy Magazine, it is not merely a question of what happens in Afghanistan.
It's also a question of the United States' global enemies maximizing their benefit right now.
According to foreignpolicy.com, U.S.
President Joe Biden's announcement U.S.
troops will be gone from Afghanistan by August 31st will remove the most formidable obstacle to total Taliban takeover of the country.
For 20 years, the U.S.
presence in Afghanistan, though not always appreciated, has nevertheless served as a predictable and stabilizing force.
Now, the prospect of renewed Taliban rule has sparked major anxiety among the region's powers.
For example, Earlier this month, Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar visited Moscow and Tehran while Taliban representatives were in each city, raising questions about whether back-channel negotiations are ongoing.
So India doesn't want to be on the outside looking in because Afghanistan, which will ally presumably with Pakistan, now provides a threat to India.
So India is going to start making overtures to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, China is going to be making overtures to Afghanistan as well.
Russia is making overtures to the Taliban.
Moscow is preparing to leverage the Six Nation Collective Security Treaty Organization to address potential trouble at the Afghan-Tajik border, which is being taken over by the Taliban on the Afghan side.
Islamabad has now negotiated, that's Pakistan, a quid pro quo with the Taliban to reject U.S.
bases on Pakistani territory in exchange for the Taliban's assistance in combating Pakistan's own Taliban-style militants.
So now, it's not even that the United States is going to lose its bases in Afghanistan.
Also, the U.S.
is going to have no staging bases in Pakistan.
Okay, which is next door.
So there went the security cooperation with Pakistan, whatever that was worth.
Amid all of this regional angst, China is quietly attempting to secure its interests in post-US Afghanistan.
Beijing has been actively engaging with Kabul on construction of a Peshawar-Kabul motorway, which will connect Pakistan to Afghanistan and make Kabul a participant in China's Belt and Road Initiative.
Up until now, Kabul didn't want to do that because the United States was helping them out.
Now, Beijing is building a major road through the Wakhan Corridor, a slim strip of mountainous territory connecting China's westernmost province of Zhejiang to Afghanistan and onward to Pakistan and Central Asia.
According to a 2014 report, Afghanistan may possess nearly a trillion dollars worth of extractable rare earth metals locked within its mountains.
China will now have some control over that.
Yes, when the United States leaves a vacuum, bad things happen.
Okay, so time to ask a serious question.
How did any of this happen?
How did this happen in the first place?
I gave you a sort of brief history of Afghanistan and the failures of all the administrations prior, but let's talk for just one second about Joe Biden.
So, Joe Biden is now blaming Trump.
He, of course, says, well, it's not my fault that I decided to simply precipitously withdraw.
They put out a pathetic picture, like over the weekend.
This White House tweet, they tweeted out a picture of Joe Biden alone in the Situation Room saying, this morning, the president and vice president met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the drawdown of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies and the ongoing security situation in Kabul.
Well, I mean, if you took a picture.
I mean, as long as we know that's not a stock photo or anything.
There was speculation that was a stock photo.
By the way, we don't know if that's true or not.
The speculation was because on the wall, the time difference between Moscow and China is apparently two hours when it should be three.
And the reason that it is two hours is because before March, it's actually a two-hour time difference.
So people were speculating that's not actually a photo from like right now.
It doesn't really matter very much.
Bottom line is, Joe Biden is not present.
According to the Wall Street Journal, during the 2020 political campaign, Biden presented himself as a globe-trotting leader who had helmed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as Barack Obama's point man on complex international issues, and who was determined to bring a steady hand to national security.
Yet the turmoil that has now engulfed Afghanistan, which has led Biden to send 5,000 troops back to the country, by the way, which, by the way, that's double the number of troops that he was taking out in April.
So remember that time when we were supposed to withdraw?
Now we have 6,000 troops total into the country, apparently.
Well, wait a second.
confronted the White House with a rather large crisis.
Biden said in a statement on Saturday, one more year or five more years of US military presence would not, would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.
And an endless American presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me.
Well, wait a second.
I'm questioning.
It wasn't about us being present in the middle of another country's civil conflict.
It was, do we have the capacity to back allies in killing terrorists or not?
That we do all over the world, by the way.
The United States military is present in over a hundred countries.
This apparently will not be one of them, even though it is now a chief terror target.
Meanwhile, by the way, Blinken ramped up the Biden administration's effort to deflect criticism, saying that Trump had allowed the Taliban threat to grow.
Okay, so here's the question.
Even assuming that's true, even assuming that Trump blew it with regard to the Taliban, you came in and then just handed them the country, along with all of our allies who will now be slaughtered, along with all of our resources, because you decided to precipitously pull out, announce the date, and then just leave.
And by the way, it's even worse than that.
Joe Biden wants to take credit for that.
He overruled everybody to do this.
His own intelligence officials were saying, this is an idiotic idea.
His own generals were saying, this is moronic.
I mean, President Biden said on Saturday he's going to be sending approximately 5,000 U.S.
troops to safely evacuate U.S.
and allied personnel, according to the Wall Street Journal, a force slightly larger than the 3,000 personnel who are already in transit back to Afghanistan and the 1,000 already there.
But this spectacular failure stemmed from built-in flaws of the Afghan military, compounded by strategic blundering of the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
The Taliban took advantage of U.S.-sponsored peace talks to deceive Kabul about their intentions as they prepared and executed a lightning offensive.
Here's the key part, you ready?
Here's how bad Biden blew this.
The Afghan army, fighting alongside American troops, was molded to match the way the Americans operate.
The US military, the world's most advanced, relies heavily on combining ground operations with air power, using aircraft to resupply outposts, strike targets, ferry the wounded, and collect reconnaissance and intelligence.
In the wake of President Biden's withdrawal decision, the U.S.
pulled its air support, intelligence, and contractors servicing Afghanistan's planes and helicopters.
That meant the Afghan military simply could not operate anymore.
The same happened with another failed American effort, the South Vietnamese Army in the 1970s, said retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger, who commanded the U.S.-led coalition's mission to train Afghan forces in 2011 and 2013.
So, just to reiterate, the United States worked with the Afghan forces.
They trained them in a certain type of combat, namely, they could call American airstrikes in.
They had the ability to call in American air resources to clear an area or to pick up the wounded.
And then what did Joe Biden do?
He said, we're not doing any of that anymore.
So it's not just a matter of air support disappearing.
It's a matter of the entire model was rooted in a particular level of American support.
And without any warning whatsoever, Biden just withdrew the support.
Boom.
All the supports are gone.
Okay.
That is like a house that exists in the Hollywood Hills and the foundations are not particularly stable.
You could shore up those foundations or theoretically you could just dynamite them and then be surprised when the house falls down.
Joe Biden decided to dynamite the foundations for whatever the security strategy was here.
There's always a tendency to use the model you know, which is your own model.
So General Bulger, who now teaches history at North Carolina State University, when you build an army like that, and it's meant to be a partner with a sophisticated force like the Americans, you can't pull the Americans out all of a sudden because then they lose the day-to-day assistance they need.
When U.S.
forces were still operating here, the Afghan government sought to maximize its presence through the country's far-flung countryside, maintaining more than 200 bases and outposts that could be resupplied only by air.
There were no resupplies available once the United States removed its support.
Extending government operations to Afghanistan's more than 400 districts has long been the main pillar of America's counterinsurgency strategy.
Mr. Ghani had ample warning of the American departure after the Trump administration signed a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban calling on U.S.
forces and contractors to leave by May 2021, but the Afghan government failed to adjust its military footprint to match the new reality.
Many officials didn't believe that they would actually leave.
Okay, by the way, Joe Biden was informed of all of this.
He was told about all of this, and then he just did it anyway.
That's the part that's so stunning.
I mean, he overruled his own advisors.
None of his advisors told him that this was a good idea.
They were all telling him it's a terrible idea.
They were telling him exactly what was going to happen.
This wasn't an intelligence failure.
People are trying to blame this on the intel community.
This is not an intelligence failure.
This is a political failure by Joe Biden.
He did not care what happened next, period.
That's the end of it.
I mean, how bad was this, by the way?
How bad did Joe Biden absolutely F these people?
How bad?
He did it so bad that President Biden refuses to allow contractors to continue operating in the country.
There's no support.
He withdrew all of it.
They're all gone.
According to the Daily Beast, in the last few weeks, Afghanistan's air force became a sticking point in negotiations between the Biden administration and Afghan officials, according to one person familiar with the talks.
The country's mostly U.S.
provided air fleet was dependent on foreign contractors to assist with maintenance.
As the U.S.
withdrawal took hold, the Biden administration refused to even allow contractors into the country to service the Afghan military's aircraft.
The United States effectively grounded the Afghan air force So we took away our planes, and we said, you can't use those anymore.
And the Afghan government said, okay, fine, we'll use ours.
Can we at least borrow some of your contractors so that, you know, our airplanes fly?
And the U.S.
is like, nope.
You're on your own.
You're gonna have to get Mohammed over there, the guy who's herding the sheep.
You're gonna have to get him over here.
He's gonna have to fix up the Apache.
And then they're surprised at what happened?
In the interim, Afghan air crews were forced to get creative.
Maintenance personnel were relying on Zoom calls with American experts in order to figure out how to maintain the aircraft left behind by the Americans.
I'm sure that was going great.
I'm sure customers are, okay, can you get a better angle?
You got your Zoom ready?
Okay, we're gonna take out your laptop.
You're gonna aim it in the general direction of the engine of an Apache attack helicopter.
And now I need you to explain to me why it's not working.
Gonna go fantastic.
Now it's a mood issue.
Photos posted to social media show that Taliban fighters have captured US-provided A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft and MD-530F helicopters.
Former British International Development Secretary Rory Stewart told the BBC on Sunday, everything is going wrong. Schools are shutting down across the country. Clinics are shutting down across the country. People are taking refuge in their home. Looting is taking place.
And of course, again, everybody who had the temerity to work with us is going to be murdered.
That is the likely next step here.
Now, the good news is that, again, the State Department is making some very strong statements here.
Like, some very, very strong statements.
In fact, the State Department put out this particular statement, and it is a stunning masterpiece of just self-importance and delusion.
Quote, Given the deteriorating security situation, we support, are working to secure, and call on all parties to respect and facilitate the safe and orderly departure of foreign nationals and Afghans who wish to leave the country.
Those in positions of power and authority across Afghanistan bear responsibility and accountability for the protection of human life and property and for the immediate restoration of security and civil order.
Afghans and international citizens who wish to depart must be allowed to do so.
Roads, airports, and border crossings must remain open and calm must be maintained.
The Afghan people deserve to live in safety, security, and dignity.
We in the international community stand ready to assist them.
Stand ready to assist them?
You literally just left!
You literally just left!
Okay, this is a domestic argument where the police officer arrives and the husband is literally beating the wife to death.
And the police officer takes one look and he goes, you know what?
Can't do anything here and walks away.
But as he walks away, he says, lady, if you need help, remember, I'm only a 911 phone call away.
That's what this is right now.
That is so unbelievably delusional.
So unbelievably delusional.
But by the way, the delusions don't stop there.
We'll get to more delusional nonsense from the State Department.
This is crazy.
I mean, it's absolutely nuts.
Don't worry, though.
Joe Biden is not going to miss an episode of Matlock.
He has not spoken to the American people over the weekend at all.
He wasn't planning to.
The Taliban had a press conference from the headquarters of the Afghan government.
But Joe Biden?
That dude's playing shuffleboard up at Camp David.
He cannot be bothered.
We'll get to more in just one second.
I mean, you know how many Americans died to secure at least a base, a foothold for the United States to target terror in this region?
You know how many Americans were wounded in Afghanistan?
Tens of thousands of Americans.
Lost limbs.
Were wounded.
Suffer severe psychological distress.
In order to maintain a base of operations from which we can kill terrorists so we don't get another 9-11.
And this dumbass decides, you know what?
I'm pulling out.
I'm not providing any support.
I'm going to not even allow contractors in there to fix their airplanes.
But how did this happen?
And by the way, it's nothing like Saigon.
I mean, just nothing.
How could you even see a similarity between this and Saigon?
Unreal.
We'll get to more in just one second.
First, let's be real about this.
When you are thinking about sleep quality, you tend to think about your mattress, which is great.
You tend to think about a lot of things in your room.
One thing you probably don't think too much about, your sheets.
You need an excellent set of sheets.
Experience uncompromising comfort with the best-selling 100% organic cotton Signature Hem Sheets from Bull & Branch.
Bull & Branch make the world's best sheets.
The Cloudweight Super Soft Satine Weave gets softer with every single wash.
It's crafted to the highest standards and attention to detail from sourcing to packaging.
It's the perfect balance of weight and breathability to pamper warm or cool sleepers through any season.
Give your bed the White House treatment with sheets that three presidents have fallen in love with.
Bull & Branch is dedicated to quality at every single step.
Sheets designed and manufactured for maximum comfort and durability.
No cutting corners.
There are no middlemen between you and Bull & Branch.
You get luxury quality for the fairest price.
Honestly, like, the only sheets that I now own and use regularly are Bull & Branch sheets.
They're just that good.
Go check them out right now.
To experience an entirely new standard of comfort, visit bullandbranch.com.
Get 15% off your first set of sheets with promo code SHAPIRO.
That's B-O-L-L and branch.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Go check them out right now.
All right, we'll get to more in just one second on this very dark day in American history.
First, if you have been searching for a daily morning podcast without an agenda, look no further than The Morning Wire.
It's been topping the Apple and Spotify charts since its recent release.
It is the only daily news podcast that values your time and the truth.
And while we are working overtime to bring you the news you need to know, we need your help to keep the facts trending toward number one.
So, subscribe and start listening right now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
Other news!
If you've been wondering what it's like to sit front row at Candice's new show, Candice, you might just be in luck if you sign up now as a Daily Wire member with code VIP.
You get 25% off your new memberships.
Right there.
That is a great deal.
But also, you're automatically entered for a chance to win a trip for two.
You and a guest to the Dailyware Studios to see Candace live.
Not only will you meet Candace, you'll get an inside look at her studio and front row seats to watch her take down leftists live and in action on her talk show, Candace.
So, get a great deal on a new Daily Wire membership at dailywire.com slash subscribe with code VIP and 25% off so you can automatically be entered for a chance to win that VIP experience.
Hurry!
This deal is going away after Wednesday.
Act fast.
Get your membership discount and a chance to win.
That is dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get 25% off with code VIP.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Alrighty, so the State Department's response to this, the Biden Administration's response to this is so unbelievably insane.
I mean, it's truly crazy.
It really is.
And it is as though O.J.
Simpson just murdered a bunch of people.
It's at least some guy who's just standing there watching O.J.
Simpson do it.
It's like, don't worry guys, I can always, if you need me to step in, I'm right here.
Meanwhile, I'm just sitting there, having a pina colada, watching O.J.
kill his ex-wife.
Like, this is pretty much what is happening right now with the United States.
The State Department's statement where they said that they stand ready to assist in any way is just so crazy.
Nancy Pelosi loved it, by the way.
Nancy Pelosi actually put out her own statement.
She said the president is to be commended for the clarity of purpose of his statement on Afghanistan and his action.
The Taliban must know the world is watching its actions.
We are concerned about reports regarding the Taliban's brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls.
Oh really?
Oh, really?
Are you concerned?
Quote, the U.S., the international community, and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.
As we strive to assist them, we must recognize that their voices are important and respect their culture.
Is she, is she addled?
I mean, the answer is clearly yes, she's addled.
I mean, there is a screw loose.
All the lights are not on upstairs.
There are marbles missing from the marble jar.
That pinball machine broke long ago.
I'm running out of euphemisms for how crazy that statement is.
That is so crazy!
I mean, what?
So, we care deeply about the Afghan women and girls.
And the Afghan government bears serious responsibility.
And I, Nancy Pelosi, will tut-tut the 8th century cavemen about their treatment of women and girls.
That's how much we care.
We care so much.
The international community will hold you responsible by completely leaving and letting those girls get hit with acid in the face for going to school.
But Nancy Pelosi cares so deeply about women.
She's so much for women's rights that she tweets angrily about things that don't even make any sense.
My good.
She is a couple of cards shy of a full deck.
That lady.
Wow.
Wow.
Hey, Tony Blinken, for his part, the State Department Secretary, he says, you know, it's not in our interest to stay after all.
Like it or not, there was an agreement that the forces would come out on May 1st.
Had we not begun that process, which is what the president did, and the Taliban saw, then we would have been back at war with the Taliban.
By the way, from the perspective of our strategic competitors around the world, there's nothing they would like more than to see us in Afghanistan for another 5, 10, 20 years.
It's simply not in the national interest.
That's insane!
They would like to see us stay there?
Then why is it that the minute we left, the Russians and the Chinese all rushed in?
And the Pakistanis, and the Indians, and everybody else.
Why?
Why?
We all know the answer to this.
Not in our interest to stay.
But our strategic competitors are happy if we stay.
In what world?
In what insane world?
This is so disconnected from anything remotely resembling reality.
This is what's maddening.
What happened here is that a perfectly pure and beautiful idea ran up directly against the brick wall of reality.
And the brick wall of reality is winning.
It is not a shock.
The Biden administration decided to drive, Thelma and Louise style, this car directly over the cliff.
And it was fun until gravity applied.
The movie, it turns out, didn't end with the car in slow-mo sailing over a gap.
It turns out the movie continues.
And then the car bursts into flame when it hits the bottom with the two ladies inside.
That's the part they don't show in the movie.
Because it's not heroic.
When you burst into flame at the bottom and you die, it means you were a moron.
And what they've done here is moronic.
And it is not only intellectually moronic.
It is politically moronic.
It is, in terms of foreign policy, immoral.
Tony Blinken, I love these kind of statements.
He then says, you know what?
But here's the thing.
We will not legitimize their government.
If they don't do what we want them to do, we won't give them legitimacy.
You literally handed them the country.
We won't legitimize that government.
Well, if you don't invite them to your Georgetown cocktail party, I'm sure the Taliban are going to be super pissed.
If they can't get a nice Manhattan, they'll probably just cry themselves to sleep with their AK-47s and the Apache attack helicopters you just gave them.
Probably they will weep into their beer over not being able to eat caviar with Anthony Blinken.
Here's Blinken saying, we're not going to legitimize their government.
We wouldn't do that.
They are illegitimate.
You, sir.
You, sir, are illegitimate.
What in the world?
Illegitimate.
Again, I go back to the O.J.
thing.
It's like O.J.' 's stabbing his ex-wife and the guy's like, Sir, you seem unpleasant to me.
What you're doing is quite illegitimate and I insist that you stop.
Yes, this is working out well.
Here's Anthony Blinken.
A future Afghan government that upholds the basic rights of its people and that doesn't harbor terrorists is a government we can work with and recognize.
Conversely, A government that doesn't do that, that doesn't uphold the basic rights of its people, including women and girls, that harbors terrorist groups that have designs on the United States for allies and partners, certainly that's not going to happen.
Oh man, we won't be happy with you.
By the way, the agreement that you insisted on keeping also had requirements of the Taliban.
Like, don't invade the entire country.
You know what they didn't do?
Listen to any of that.
And then you say that you're abiding by those agreements.
Whatever agreement Trump made was also contingent on Taliban performance of their end.
You didn't care.
You've said you didn't care.
You've said if they violate the agreement, you wouldn't do anything.
And you didn't.
By the way, here's the good news.
President Biden is expected to address the nation, according to CNN.
Not like there's anything going on in the world.
He's busy.
He's a busy guy.
He's at Camp David, cutting his toenails and making sure that he eats his cream of wheat in the proper measure.
He, the man needs his can of Ensure every morning.
He doesn't have time for you and your petty worries about, you know, the destruction of an entire nation because we failed to keep any sort of basic level of moral or foreign policy commitment.
He's a busy, busy man.
That's all.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today with much, much more.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show that is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliott Feld.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Bluver.
Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
Post-Producer Justin Barber.
The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
As the Taliban takes over Afghanistan, the Department of Homeland Security insists that the real terrorists are American conservatives.
▲
Export Selection