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Aug. 17, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:07:27
Biden’s Dishonest, Cowardly Afghanistan Surrender Proves He Is Unfit For His Office | Ep. 1320
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President Biden triumphantly announces America's surrender in Afghanistan as the Taliban reimpose dystopian theocracy and murder our erstwhile allies.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty.
We are watching, in real time, the worst American foreign policy debacle of my lifetime.
Now, admittedly, I was born in 1984, so I do not remember the pullout from Saigon in 1975, but this is easily the worst foreign policy debacle since then.
Probably it is worse than that, because, remember, At least it can be said of the Viet Cong that they didn't, you know, attack the Empire State Building in 1955.
The Taliban sheltered the people who took down the World Trade Centers and attacked the Pentagon on 9-11, and now we are turning the country back over to them.
And what's most incredible about this is that our doddering fool of a president, and he is a fool, He did this for no reason.
None.
There was no rational reason for him to do what he did.
Certainly not in the way that he did it.
Even if you think we shouldn't be in Afghanistan, which, as we'll talk about, I think is a foolhardy idea.
But even if you believe that, there was a way to do this that was at least somewhat organized.
Biden didn't do any of that.
Instead, Biden, because he is an ideological idiot, decided that he would run his ideology directly up against the brick wall of reality.
Now, I will say I'm amused to see how many people In the commentary, I seem shocked by the idiocy of Joe Biden.
So, for example, Politico Europe has an entire piece about how people in Europe can't believe how bad Biden is at this.
Quote, Disbelief and betrayal.
Europe reacts to Biden's Afghanistan, quote, unquote, miscalculation.
The first line of this piece reads, quote, Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy.
Well, I guess all I can take away from that is that Europe is filled with clinical morons.
Because who in the world thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy?
He's not been right on a single major foreign policy issue for his entire career.
And now that he occupies the Oval Office, that's a very dangerous thing.
See, the thing is about the Presidency, the Presidency has to negotiate with Congress.
The Presidency has to work through the Supreme Court.
The Presidency on domestic policy has at least some checks and balances, including state-level authorities that come into conflict with the federal government.
When it comes to foreign policy, the Presidency, the executive branch, has nearly plenary power.
And that means that if the President of the United States decides to unilaterally undermine American foreign policy in unique and depressing ways, he can do it.
Joe Biden was fully committed to the idea that he was going to pull out of Afghanistan, damned be the consequences.
And the consequences are here and they are hideous.
You're going to see tens of thousands of erstwhile American allies slaughtered in the streets in Afghanistan.
You're going to see people who are abandoned to the predations of the Taliban.
You're going to see a geopolitical collapse around this.
There are real consequences to this that are not limited to Afghanistan.
We'll get into that.
OK, so all of that said, Joe Biden Yesterday, he gave a speech.
And his speech was supposed to lay out the rationale for this.
Remember, he was off in Camp David.
He had called a lid.
Joe Biden had no plans to actually speak to the American public until, like, Wednesday or Thursday.
Because, after all, Joe Biden was eating ice cream and watching Matlock up in Camp David.
He couldn't be bothered.
All he did over the weekend was release a photo of himself, a pathetic-looking photo of himself, alone in the Situation Room, talking via conference call with all of the generals who had already advised him not to do this.
And then monitoring the collapse of Afghanistan in real time.
Well, finally, he flew back to Washington, D.C.
He did a little speech at the White House.
And then he took like three questions and then he left.
And that was it.
Because here's the thing about your caring, grandfatherly, empathetic, old man president.
He does not give one damn about the people we made promises to.
He doesn't care that Americans are still stuck in Afghanistan right now.
Somewhere between five and ten thousand of them.
He does not care that tens of thousands, when I say tens of thousands, I mean probably at least a hundred thousand people are connected To the Afghan government, who are our allies, people who worked on intelligence with us, people who served in the Afghan military, with the United States military, and their families.
Those people are stuck there.
And they will remain stuck there.
And Joe Biden does not give a bleep.
For Captain Humanitarian Policy over here, it turns out he doesn't care.
It doesn't matter one iota to him.
Because in the end, he's just a venal, corrupt old politician.
That's all he is.
That's all he ever was.
He was never Captain Empathy.
Now, I've said a thousand times that you should not look to politicians for empathy.
If you're looking to politicians for empathy, you're looking in the wrong place.
Because politics shouldn't be about empathy.
Politics should be about making hard-headed decisions.
But that's the thing.
Joe Biden's decision here wasn't even hard-headed realpolitik.
It was not a realist foreign policy decision.
His decision here was very simple.
He was going to abandon Afghanistan, come hell or high water.
And hell and high water have come.
Hey, so he made the speech yesterday and it was notable for its complete lack of honesty.
The number of lies that Joe Biden told in the speech, it beggars the imagination.
The number of prevarications, the self-congrat.
I've never seen a president congratulate himself on a greater failure than this.
This is as though Gerald Ford had called the presser.
After the abandonment of Saigon and then congratulated himself for his bravery in abandoning millions of people to the evils of the Viet Cong.
Remember, Afghanistan, by the way, is 38 million people live in Afghanistan.
But that's exactly what Joe Biden did.
Joe Biden did a press conference where he blamed every single person other than himself.
Everyone, as we will see.
He blamed everyone for the decision that he alone made in precipitous fashion against the advice of his generals, against the advice of his intelligence authorities, against the advice of all prior presidents.
He made this call.
He owns this call.
But he tried to blame everybody else and he patted himself on the back as a man of high moral character for having abandoned people the United States made commitments to.
We're running out of allies to betray here.
We've betrayed the Kurds.
We've betrayed the people of Hong Kong.
We've done nothing for the dissidents in Iran.
We've done nothing for the dissidents in Cuba.
And now, we've allowed people who we actively engaged with, people we actively encouraged to fight back against the Taliban.
And by the way, they did.
50,000, five zero thousand, 50,000 Afghan military members have been killed in the last seven years alone fighting against the Taliban.
So when you hear all these people saying the Afghan military wasn't willing to fight, we were fighting their war for them.
The United States has not been in an active combat role in Afghanistan since 2014, when NATO officially stopped doing that.
Last year, since February 8th, 2020, the United States has not lost a soldier in combat.
Not one.
And we were losing either low double digits or single digits numbers of soldiers in combat in Afghanistan year on year since 2014.
Meanwhile, the Afghan military was taking tens of thousands of casualties.
So the notion that the Afghan military has been doing nothing over the past few years is just a lie.
We'll discuss that in just a second, because again, Joe Biden blamed the Afghan military for decisions he himself made.
But we begin at the beginning with Joe Biden's pathetic, mewling, disgusting speech.
I mean, this is really one of the most disreputable speeches I've ever seen an American president give.
It is despicable.
It is morally despicable.
It is a despicable lie through and through.
So let's start at the beginning.
First, he starts with an open lie.
He says he made contingency plans for this.
Bullshit.
No, he did not.
He didn't even come close to making contingency plans for this.
Here is Joe Biden just lying right out the gate here.
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including and contingency, including the rapid collapse we're seeing now.
Okay, you had no plans for the rapid collapse we're seeing now.
In fact, Joe Biden would later admit that.
By the way, what were those plans exactly?
I mean, let's go through what's exactly been happening in Afghanistan over the last several days.
Remember, this administration said that the Taliban would not take over the country, period, as of July.
Antony Blinken said, like a few weeks ago, there would be no situation in which the Taliban, over the course of a weekend, took over Afghanistan, which is basically what they did.
Took about a week, like a week and a half.
From them taking over the third biggest city in Afghanistan, to then taking over Kandahar, to then taking over Kabul.
I mean, let's just go through this.
We saw, over the weekend, helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S.
Embassy, evacuating U.S.
Embassy personnel.
Did he have a contingency plan for that?
We saw Afghans rushing the airport.
Now remember, this is because the United States decided to abandon Bagram airbase to the predations of the Taliban.
So we had no military airbase from which to fly people out.
Only the Kabul airport was available.
And the United States did not have enough people there to defend the Kabul airport.
So people were just rushing the tarmac.
You can see the Afghans climbing the walls, attempting to get in.
I mean, this video.
Afghans.
I mean, this is stunning footage.
Afghans running along with the U.S.
Air Force plane.
Clinging to the wings of the plane.
Clinging to the wings.
Was that the contingency plan, Mr. President?
Those are human beings.
Sitting.
Okay, this one is the most egregious of all, obviously.
You can see.
You see that dot falling right there?
Those two dots falling right there?
Those are people.
Those are human beings.
This entire debacle began with human beings jumping from the Twin Towers on 9-11 after Al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, harbored by the Taliban, hit the Twin Towers.
And now this debacle ends with Afghans falling from the wheels of American planes.
Those Afghans climbed into the wheels of the American planes to try and escape the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban.
By the way, another story from Politico today.
Body of dead Afghan found in landing gear of military jet leaving Kabul airport.
The body of an Afghan so desperate to escape the country hours after Kabul fell to the Taliban was found in the landing gear of a C-17 transport aircraft hours after it hastily took off from Hamid Karzai International Airport, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The body in the aircraft's landing gear has made it temporarily inoperable, the sources said.
By the way, some seven people were killed on the tarmac because of the rush on the tarmac.
Apparently, the Taliban are now going house to house and killing people.
That's the follow-up.
Bill Kristol tweeted this out.
He's been receiving texts from people in Afghanistan.
By the way, I'm getting emails from people desperately trying to get the Afghan interpreters they worked with, members of the military, who are now in the United States, trying to get members of the Afghan military who they worked with, their translators, people they worked with in the military, out of Afghanistan and receiving no support from the Biden administration in doing this.
I'm getting emails about it.
Bill Kristol tweeted out, I just got off the phone with somebody who recently returned from his third tour in Afghanistan.
He emphasized we had a responsibility, not just to translators, but to Afghan troops, pilots and special forces in particular, who'd fought bravely by our side.
And he continued by pointing out that he had received a text, quote, terrorists are going door to door and killing pilots and special operating forces, raping their families, taking their houses.
Two of my friends were shot dead in Kabul.
Meanwhile, just in case you didn't know what the Taliban are up to, they've also been painting out the images of women.
If there are any images of women in Kabul, they're going around with white paints and they're painting over them to make sure that women are never seen again.
That was the contingency plan from Joe Biden.
He said that right out of the gate in this speech.
That was his opening gambit, was we had a contingency plan.
It's a hell of a contingency plan right there.
That was just the beginning of the lies.
We'll get to more in one second.
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Alrighty, meanwhile.
Joe Biden continues, and he talks about, he makes the case that the United States actually accomplished its goal in Afghanistan.
Okay, well, not really.
I mean, here's the thing.
In order for us to accomplish our goal in Afghanistan, our goal in Afghanistan was pretty clear, right?
Our goal in Afghanistan was that we were supposed to counter terrorism.
In order to do that, we have to continue to counter terrorism.
And when you stop countering terrorism, you've no longer achieved your goal.
Here is Joe Biden.
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals.
Get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
We did that.
We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him.
That was a decade ago.
Okay, now here's the problem.
How about the fact that you just reconstituted the possibility of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?
According to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, he informed Congress terror groups are likely to reconstitute in Afghanistan within the next two years.
High probability.
According to Dr. Sajjan Goho of the Asia Pacific Foundation, quoted by the BBC, there are some 250 to 500 members of Al-Qaeda in Kunar, which is a heavily forested valley region of Afghanistan.
Right now, we were able to monitor that place and we were able to fight with them.
No longer.
Gohan now says the number is likely to increase, given the United States' lack of access to any intelligence network and its surrender of all air bases in Afghanistan.
Also, Pakistan has now cut a quid pro quo with the Taliban to now reject U.S.
bases on Pakistani territory.
So we can't even use Pakistani territory to launch attacks against the Taliban or against al-Qaeda.
Which means we are back to shooting camels in the ass with cruise missiles, Bill Clinton style from 1998.
So it's pretty likely that terrorist groups are about to reconstitute quickly in Afghanistan.
And I know that we live in the post 9-11 era.
I know that 9-11 was sort of a blip in a lot of people's imaginations.
It was 20 years ago after all.
But let's just remember that things that happen in far-off countries can have some rather radical impact in the United States.
Just a reminder, this is why we went into Afghanistan in the first place.
This right here.
I know we don't play this footage very often anymore.
I know we're not supposed to, because it's upsetting, and disquieting, and shocking, still, 20 years later.
That's the reason we went to Afghanistan.
Because 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11th by people the Taliban were harboring.
Hey, that's why we were there in the damn first place.
And those same people are just ushered back into power by Joe Biden.
Ushered back into power with no capacity.
The United States just destroyed its own capacity to wage war on these people.
That's what the United States just did.
By the way, the Taliban, you know, there's this myth out there being being portrayed and and perverted by the by the Biden administration that the Taliban is moderated.
Really interesting, because like two years ago, the Taliban chief spokesperson was saying, you know, Al Qaeda wasn't even behind 9-11.
This is on CBS this morning from just a couple of years ago.
More stunning was Shaheen's refusal to accept Al Qaeda's responsibility for the September 11th attacks.
So who's the real culprit behind that?
So that was not known.
Who?
Still it is not known.
Who was behind that?
Al Qaeda.
They claimed responsibility.
No.
If there is proof given to us, we are ready to try him.
So that was just two years ago.
The Taliban saying it was not al-Qaeda.
By the way, that was their original line as well.
You will recall.
So now they're back in power.
They're not just back in power.
They now have control of billions of dollars of U.S.
military equipment, including mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, drones, Humvees.
They have a lot of American intel.
We didn't burn our stuff before we left.
They have all that stuff because Joe Biden decided to pull out with no plan, with no forethought, because he is a moron.
He is a dead-set idiot.
I mean, either that or he's perverse.
I mean, those are really the only two choices.
And using Hanlon's razor here, I will always say somebody is stupid rather than perverse.
But this is stupidity bordering on the perverse.
OK, then Joe Biden started to make his excuses.
So his first excuse, the first excuse that he used here was that our mission was never about nation building.
It was always about fighting terror.
Yes, but as we've just established, you're not fighting terror anymore.
That's the whole point.
And I will say it is not entirely Joe Biden's fault that there was mission creep here, right?
I mean, there was mission creep from the very beginning, as we'll explore.
Here is Joe Biden perverting what exactly the Afghan war was about in order to make the case for us withdrawing, even though there really is no logical reason for us to do what we are doing right now.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building.
It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.
Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been.
Preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
OK, and then he, you know, he continued along those lines.
OK, so here's the thing.
He's correct.
Originally, the mission in Afghanistan had nothing to do with humanitarian missions.
Right.
Here is George W. Bush.
A long time ago now is from October of 2001, October 11, 2001, announcing that we are now at war in Afghanistan.
Right.
Listen to how he describes the mission.
The attack took place on American soil, but it was an attack on the heart and soul of the civilized world.
And the world has come together to fight a new and different war.
The first, and we hope the only one, of the 21st century.
A war against all those who seek to export terror and a war against those governments that support or shelter them.
Okay, now, the mission creep began pretty quickly, because the United States always has a tendency to move from realpolitik to sort of Wilsonian foreign policy.
And immediately to move from, we need to take out the bad guys, to, well, what if we could also build democracy there?
And historically speaking, one of the bulwarks that the United States has used to actually solidify places has been democracy, whether you're talking about Germany, whether you're talking about South Korea, whether you're talking about Japan, right?
Very often, the United States does build democracies in its wake.
In places that have not been hospitable to democracy before.
Including Nazi Germany.
Including Japan.
Right?
Over the course of decades of occupation.
But the mission creep itself opened the door to the counter argument, which is we shouldn't be there in the first place.
Remember, we went there to fight terror, and then there was a bit of mission creep.
And so people started defining the mission, not around fighting terror in the minds of the American public, but instead around the mission of fostering democracy in an inhospitable place.
So listen to how George W. Bush in his farewell address, for example, in January of 2009, linked together these two things, right?
Fighting Al Qaeda, and also at the same time, fostering democracy.
Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored Al-Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school.
Okay, now this opened the door, obviously, to counter-arguments, which is like, we shouldn't be in Afghanistan at all, we can't do a nation-building project there, which is not entirely incorrect.
But that was an argument made by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, right?
It was an argument that was commonly made.
We can't be there for nation building, but here is the difference between Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump both had a baseline understanding that a precipitous pullout from Afghanistan was a foolish thing to do.
An endlessly stupid thing to do.
I don't have a lot of kind words to say about Barack Obama.
Obama knew this better than Biden because he wasn't a dumbass, like a full-scale dumbass.
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Okay, so as I say, Joe Biden says, well, you know, we were here to fight terrorism.
Except that both Barack Obama, who is pretty anti-war, and Donald Trump, who is also pretty anti-war, at least understood you couldn't fully pull out of Afghanistan and remove all the military advisors and remove all the military support and remove everything without collapsing the country.
So in May 2014, Barack Obama announced that we were going to be drawing down our troops and redefining the mission in Afghanistan pretty dramatically.
But notice how he redefines the mission.
He says we're going to continue to be there, right?
I've made it clear that we're open to cooperating with Afghans on two narrow missions after 2014.
Training Afghan forces and supporting counter-terrorism operations against the remnants of Al-Qaeda.
Okay, right, so we kept troops there.
Right, we still had a couple thousand troops in Afghanistan.
And then Donald Trump, circa 2017, he gave a speech about Afghanistan.
He said, listen, my initial instinct was also to leave.
But then I looked at the actual facts on the ground and I recognized that a precipitous idiotic pullout would end predictably.
Right. Here is Donald Trump saying the correct thing.
My original instinct was to pull out.
The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable.
911.
9-11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country was ruled by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists.
A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and Al Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th.
Okay, that is a difference in kind from the moronic idiocy of Joe Biden, who's like, let's just take out all the troops.
Both Barack Obama on the left and Donald Trump on the right, both of whom had isolationist tendencies with regard to Afghanistan, both of them at least recognized you needed some base of operations against the terrorists.
Joe Biden is like, nope.
Okay, so then Joe Biden makes another excuse.
He says, well, you know, there are other places in the world that have terrorists too.
This is so, again, it boggles the mind how foolish the man, he's just a fool.
I mean, I keep repeating myself, but it is astonishing to realize that a man who's been working in Washington for 50 years, and was purported to be some sort of foreign policy expert, is this empty-headed?
Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.
Okay, but we do have military presence.
What's our military presence in Afghanistan going to be now?
Zero.
What's it going to be in Pakistan, apparently?
terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don't have permanent military presence.
We do have military presence.
What's our military presence in Afghanistan going to be now?
Zero.
What's it going to be in Pakistan, apparently?
Zero.
We don't have one Iran, so exactly where are we going to base our operations now?
By the way, every country that he mentioned, we currently have military advisors in, including Somalia.
We've had military advisors in Somalia fighting al-Shabaab for years.
We have American bases in Saudi Arabia.
For decades.
We have American military presence in Syria.
And Iraq.
And all these other places that he's mentioning.
So what the hell is he talking about?
Okay, then he gets to more of the blame game.
So this was the biggest portion of his blame game.
He blamed, in essence, a couple of sources.
One, Trump.
The other, the Afghan military for what just happened.
Okay, so he starts by blaming Trump by basically lying about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and the deal that Trump tried to cut with the Taliban.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
Under his agreement, U.S.
forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office.
U.S.
forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops and country.
And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
OK, so.
There's so many problems with what you just said, so many lies here, so many lies here.
OK, so let's start with this.
Okay, he says that when he came into office, he'd inherited a deal that Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
Okay, so Trump did have a Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, negotiate a deal with the Taliban.
It was conditional.
The Taliban had to fulfill certain conditions before the United States would withdraw troops.
The Taliban was in the process of not fulfilling any of those conditions.
If Trump had been reelected, he would not have been withdrawing the troops at this point.
Everybody knows this.
And if he had been withdrawing the troops, he would have been with more planning than this.
Hey, by the way, the notion that there was this false choice between we had to withdraw completely or we had to watch the Taliban go to war in May is nuts.
That's, of course, not true.
We would have just had the status quo, which was American forces in Afghanistan continuing to provide logistical and air support to the Afghan military.
Status quo would remain status quo.
When he says, by the way, right there, he says, our choice was to be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
Um, strange, because one thing I noticed is that winter is coming up.
The Afghan government explicitly asked, explicitly asked the Biden administration, if you're going to pull out and delay it until winter.
Why?
Because Afghanistan, the weather in the winter is really bad.
The Taliban doesn't fight in the winter.
There is a fighting season in Afghanistan.
It is the spring and the summer.
And once you get the fall and the winter, it stops.
So all Biden had to do was at least wait for a few months in order to facilitate a transfer.
That, by the way, would have also guaranteed an ability for people who wanted to get out to get out.
Instead, he decided to accelerate it.
He's telling many, many lies here.
Just this Sunday, here was former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explaining this is pathetic blame shifting.
There were actual conditions to our deal with the Taliban.
By the way, I was against the deal with the Taliban in the first place.
I thought it was foolhardy.
I spoke about this during the Trump administration.
I think that any deal you attempt to cut with terrorists is idiotic, whether you're talking about Hezbollah or Hamas or Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Anyway, even even with that said, the Trump deal is not what Biden did here.
And by the way, since when is Biden bound by deals made by Trump?
He's pulled out of every single deal Trump ever made.
He's undermined most of the deals Trump ever, like since when does he have to respect those deals?
Remember that that Barack Obama did the same thing.
Barack Obama, after he took over, he blamed George W. Bush for the status of forces agreement in Iraq and suggested that that required him to pull out of Iraq, which was eminently untrue.
In any case, here is Pompeo.
I wouldn't have let my 10-year-old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting.
He should be less focused on trying to blame this on someone else than to solving the problem of making sure that we protect and defend American security.
Go read the conditions that were built into the deal.
I was in the room.
I was at the center of working to deliver that.
We negotiated a deal that performed a basis for the conditions-based withdrawal from American soldiers.
I'm proud of the work that we did there.
Okay, so then we get to Biden shifting the blame.
He starts off by blaming Trump.
Then he moves to he's going to blame the Afghan military.
This is really despicable.
It's really, really despicable.
It's despicable when you understand what he actually did here.
So here is Joe Biden blaming the Afghans for their own plight here.
I always promised the American people that I would be straight with you.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
So what's happened?
Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.
The Afghan military collapsed sometime without trying to fight.
If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S.
military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not Be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
Okay, this is a slander.
This is a slander.
When he says the Afghan forces were not willing to fight in this war themselves, 50,000 Afghans were killed over the last seven years.
50,000 fighting the Taliban.
There's a reason why the Afghan forces collapsed here.
The Afghan forces collapsed here because the United States removed all possible logistical support.
So let's begin at the beginning.
April 14th is just a couple of months ago.
Here is Joe Biden announcing the withdrawal.
I'm now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan.
Two Republicans, two Democrats.
I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth.
After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats, And our development experts, with the Congress and the Vice President, as well as with Mr. Ghani and many others around the world, I've concluded that it's time to end America's longest war.
It's time for American troops to come home.
Okay, and then he pledged that there would be continued American support for, for example, the Afghan Air Force.
Okay, here is the problem.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, when he, I mean, the reason the Afghans turned tail and ran is because they did not, their entire operational structure was built around American support.
Quote from the Wall Street Journal, the Afghan army fighting alongside American troops was molded to match the way the Americans operate.
The U.S.
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 Afghans' planes and helicopters.
That meant the Afghan military simply could not operate anymore.
In other words, the force stopped existing when the United States, which had built the entire force around U.S.
support, withdrew the support.
According to the Daily Beast, by the way, it goes even further than that, quote, 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 allow contractors into the country to service the aircraft, effectively grounding some of the Afghan air force at the same time as the U.S.
had withdrawn direct air support to Afghan forces.
Afghan officials had hoped to draw back time at the beginning of winter, could buy them more time to strengthen defense against the Taliban.
The Biden administration ignored and pushed ahead with its own timeline.
So just to get this straight, We didn't only remove our own Air Force from the place.
We also refused to allow civilian contractors into the country to help the Afghans handle their own Air Force malfunction issues.
The Afghans were literally on Zoom calls, pointing their laptops at the helicopters, being like, guys, can you help us?
That's what Biden did.
Then he's like, oh yeah, and then they just, they dissolved.
I mean, they obviously didn't have the will.
Or alternatively, you completely undercut their ability to fight.
Alternatively that.
And by the way, negotiated continuously with the Taliban against the advice of the Afghan government.
Biden started lying about the Afghan government too.
He was like, well, you know, they just wouldn't cut a deal with the Taliban.
What deal was there to be cut with the Taliban?
I'm missing it.
Was there a deal cut with the Taliban that looked real good over here?
Because I'm sort of missing that.
The number of lies, the number of lies here.
And by the way, the biggest lie here, it really is an insane lie.
And he says it over and over, as we'll get to in just a second, is that because the Afghan military collapsed, this proves we needed to leave.
Okay, that is sort of like arguing that because the murder rate rose after the police stopped policing in America's major cities, this is a great argument for defund the police.
Yeah, no bleep, when you remove America's support, it turns out terrorists take over.
Is this an argument for removing America's support?
Why and how?
Explain.
Again, if the idea is that you remove the people who stand between the good guys and the bad guys, and then the bad guys take over, this is an argument for removing the people who stand between?
I'm missing the argument.
Why?
Status quo was status quo.
And by the way, he doubled down on this too, right?
He said, you know, it's, if we, no matter when we left, this would have happened.
There's some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers.
But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of U.S.
military boots on the ground would have made any difference.
Here's what I believe to my core.
It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan's own armed forces would not.
So I'm left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay, how many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not?
How many more lives, American lives, is it worth How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
This is the most cynical nonsense.
It's cynical nonsense.
We haven't had an American combat casualty in Afghanistan in a year and a half.
You may as well be asking, how many more American lives are we willing to risk to have thousands of troops in South Korea?
Or bases in Germany?
Or bases in Okinawa?
The hell is he talking about?
He's acting as though this is 2011 in Afghanistan.
It is not.
It is 2021 in Afghanistan.
So he's just lying.
That's just a lie.
And again, the idea that a little more time wouldn't have mattered at all?
Well, it certainly would have mattered in the sense that we maybe could have helped them restructure their military to the point where they weren't completely reliant on American air support.
What a damned liar he is.
And the lies get worse.
We'll get to that in a second.
I mean, they just kept getting worse and worse and worse.
This bloviating idiot.
It's more in a second.
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Well, after Joe Biden finished blaming the Afghan military for its own collapse and and blaming Donald Trump, he then just started saying very silly things.
So this, I think, was the silliest thing that he said in his entire ridiculous submission speech here.
He said that our enemies would have been very upset if we'd stayed in Afghanistan.
This is asinine.
At a level beyond most asininity.
It's like record levels of asininity.
Here is Joe Biden.
Honestly, you lose words when you hear things this stupid.
It's as though you're being spoken to by an alien intelligence that does not speak English anymore.
Except it's really old and has to drink cans of Ensure and is barely sentient.
Here's our barely sentient president.
Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
Oh, is that what they'd like?
Interesting.
China and Russia want us to want us to stay.
So what they would really hate is if we were to leave, right?
That's when that's when they would be like right now they're quaking in their boots because we pulled out of Afghanistan and abandoned hundreds of thousands of people to the tender mercies of the worst people on earth.
And we not only abandoned our allies and completely undercut our allies, we then celebrated ourselves in doing so.
Probably, like, nothing has made them tremble and quake in their boots more than this.
Unless it was us abandoning parts of the Ukraine to Russia, or abandoning Hong Kong to China.
The United States, over the last 20 years, has become very good at abandoning allies.
It's pretty impressive.
Normally, a good foreign policy requires you to be a good friend and a horrible enemy.
Right now, we're a horrible friend and a fairly good enemy.
Simple fact.
Okay, so here's the thing.
This is so easily debunkable, but we'll do it anyway.
Joe Biden says right there that China and Russia wanted us to stay in Afghanistan and that they would be upset with us leaving Afghanistan.
Weird, because China immediately seized on us leaving to say that they will recognize the Taliban and will now work with the Taliban to increase Chinese influence in the region via their Belt and Road Initiative.
According to Foreign Policy Magazine, China hopes to get its hands on Afghanistan's trillion-dollar rare earths metal.
They have mountains made of rare earths over there, which is the rarest minerals.
For their part, the Taliban are already saying they're happy to work with the Chinese.
They don't give a crap that the Chinese are imprisoning a million Muslim Uyghurs in Chongqing.
China's embassy in Afghanistan, by the way, our embassy is getting invaded.
China's embassy is still open over there.
So everything is going great with the Taliban, with China.
China has also solidified relations with Pakistan, presenting a solid face against India.
So the possibility of conflict with India has increased.
Also, just to add some insult to injury, the Chinese Global Times, which is an official CCP outlet, is an official Chinese Communist Party outlet, CCP outlet.
They tweeted out, from what happened in Afghanistan, those in Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island's defense will collapse in hours.
U.S.
military won't come to help.
As a result, the DPP, that's the Democratic People's Party of Taiwan, will quickly surrender.
So, yeah, clearly they are, you know, they're very upset that we left, clearly.
They're already, already threatening Taiwan.
And this is their goal, by the way.
Their goal here is to threaten Taiwan into basically electing friendly governments the way that happened in Hong Kong.
They're hoping to do this without having to fire a shot, but if they have to fire a shot, they're really not particularly afraid of the United States.
They added, quote, once a cross straits war breaks out, while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have had to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere. Sounds an awful lot like Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the USS Cole, right?
The United States is a paper tiger, it is a weak horse, I can do whatever I want, and the US won't do anything.
See, betraying weakness on the global stage is a horrible idea.
By the way, the Chinese?
It's not just completely sound and fury.
Apparently, The People's Liberation Army, Eastern Theater Command, on Tuesday dispatched warships, aircraft, and fighter jets for joint live-fire assault drills in the southwest and southeast areas off the island of Taiwan as a response to recent moves by the U.S.
and Taiwan secessionists.
So China is already militarily threatening Taiwan in order to presumably get them to elect some sort of conciliatory government that will allow Taiwan to be subjected to the same tyranny as Hong Kong.
Foreign policy abhors a vacuum.
Joe Biden created a vacuum.
Our enemies are rushing into the vacuum.
See, we can quit a war.
It doesn't mean our enemies did, guys.
We can quit a war and we can walk away and we can abandon our allies.
It doesn't mean that the bad guys just go away.
That is not how any of this works.
I know that we've spun into our memories the idea that abandoning Vietnam was a good foreign policy choice.
It only led to the deaths of two million people in Cambodia, hundreds of thousands of people floating off the coast in boats.
That's all it led to.
Abandoning Iran never had any bad consequences.
And this is all just, it's patter for boobs who don't follow foreign policy closely.
And Biden knows that.
He knows that.
All right, and he didn't stop there because it never stops there.
Joe Biden also decided it was necessary to gaslight the rest of us.
I think my favorite part of this, and by favorite I mean worst, is that Joe Biden, he gives this speech, right?
He gives his big surrender speech.
And in his surrender speech, he then lies and says, don't worry, we're still supporting the Afghan people.
No, I've noticed you're not.
That's what I've noticed.
Call me crazy, I don't think they feel very supported right now.
Here is Biden.
We will continue to support the Afghan people.
We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid.
We'll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability.
We'll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.
I've been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.
But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments.
It's with our diplomacy, our economic tools, and rallying the world to join us.
Oh, this pathetic sad old sack of crap.
My God.
Truly, truly unbelievable.
Don't worry, guys.
You know, we haven't abandoned the people of Afghanistan.
I'm going to say words.
You know what the Taliban take super seriously?
Verbiage.
This is their big thing.
If you send them a really pissed off missive, the Taliban are like, whoa, you know, when you had actual air bases here and you're dropping bombs on us, that was one thing.
But now that Joe Biden is going to say things, the guy who just withdrew and let us take over, he's going to say stuff.
And because he says stuff, we've decided women can go to school again.
We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid?
Who are you going to send the humanitarian aid to?
The Taliban?
How's that going to work exactly?
Our international influence with what?
The 8th century cavemen?
Our diplomacy?
Oh, well, I mean, if we send a few engraved letters via the U.S.
Embassy that no longer exists in Afghanistan?
Then things will probably be fine.
We'll speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people.
We'll speak out just as we do all over the world.
We'll say stuff.
We'll hashtag.
Hashtag, bring back our girls.
Hashtag, we stand with Afghanistan.
Hashtag.
I mean, there are so many hashtags.
The power of hashtag will emerge victorious once again.
That is Joe Biden's plan in Afghanistan.
He's been clear, he says, that human rights will be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.
The basic human right will be for the Taliban to come and just kill everyone.
That's a pretty big human right.
But you know, he'll say stuff.
He'll say stuff when, you know, between episodes of Matlock, he's got a t-vote.
He's got like a few minutes in between to really frame a nice tweet.
Or more importantly, have one of his aides frame the tweet so he can go back to sleep and get his sleepy time in.
The lies continued.
Then he said, you know what?
We are making sure that we are evacuating everyone.
That's what we're doing.
We're really making clear that our plans are in place.
We were a little surprised by how fast this went, but we're evacuating everybody.
Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights.
We're taking over air traffic control.
We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats.
Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.
Operation Allies Refugee, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States.
Amazing!
A stunning number!
2,000 Afghans eligible for special immigration visas and their families have moved out?
That's incredible!
What an amazing feat!
Out of 100,000 people!
100,000!
By the way, there are still 10,000 American citizens in the country!
Many of them are residents, journalists, or aid workers.
Most are trying to escape.
The U.S.
State Department sent out a tweet yesterday, I kid you not, in which they said, make sure you file your paperwork properly.
Then they took down the tweet because they realized how dumb that sounded.
The people are going to be filing their paperwork to get out of Afghanistan as the Taliban take over and start shooting people.
According to the Washington Post editorial board, the State Department and Defense Department basically now have two options.
Negotiate safe passage for American citizens with the Taliban, if possible, or send the U.S.
military out in the city to bring Americans back to the airport before the Taliban gangs find them.
Officials working on these cases inside the government told me they have no clear guidance from the White House and not enough support.
Also, the State Department is dealing with more than 80,000 visa applications for Afghans who worked with the United States government or find themselves at risk.
By the way, that is a very low estimate.
That's just the number of people who have applied in the last, like, couple of weeks.
If they could apply, I am sure hundreds of thousands of more people would want to get out.
In a joint statement, the State Department and Pentagon said, well, you know, our big mission is to secure the Kabul airport there.
I love that.
When Biden says our troops are working to secure the airfield, you know, you might want to think of that before you pulled out all the troops, you dope.
You might want to think of it before, you know, the Afghans were actually jumping onto the wheels of planes to escape.
You might have wanted to think about all of that.
That might have been a thing we're thinking about.
The statement said, quote, tomorrow and over the coming days, we will be transferring out of the country thousands of American citizens who have been resident in Afghanistan, as well as thousands of Afghans who are in danger.
But even the mission to secure the airport is going to rise, says The Washington Post.
On Monday, U.S.
troops shot dead at least two armed men who are among the masses storming the airport.
As of Monday afternoon, U.S.
officials said the flights to and from the airport had stalled.
There is one U.S.
military plane where the the People who are staffing the plane.
So many Afghans climbed onto like hundreds of extra Afghans trying to escape, climbing on the plane.
And you want to talk about actual empathy?
The pilots of the plane, the staff of the plane, the American military.
Talk about brave people.
They said, okay, we're over capacity.
We're taking off anyway.
They saved 640 people on that plane.
That is what American soldiers do.
American cowards act like President Biden acts.
American vet.
This was, I think, the most stunning thing on TV yesterday in terms of the commentary.
There's an American veteran.
His name is Matt Zeller.
He was on MSNBC with former four-star general Brian Williams, who still has, you know, when he's not dodging sniper fire in Iraq.
He was on with Matt Zeller.
And Brian Williams came on after the Biden speech and talked about how wonderful Biden was.
And then Matt Zeller proceeded to just crap all over him.
I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys.
I was appalled.
There was such a profound bold-faced lie in that speech.
The idea that we planned for every contingency.
I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office.
I've been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming.
We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people.
Nobody listened to us.
They didn't plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies.
They're trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour.
The thing that they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation.
Well, they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it.
Correct.
Correct.
This is correct.
But Biden didn't stop there.
I mean, it was just a firehose of lies.
Where's the fact check?
Where's Daniel Dayle at CNN to debunk all the lies?
I thought facts matter.
Facts first.
Well, here's Joe Biden continuing to lie.
He says, well, you know, some people might be wondering why we didn't start evacuating people sooner.
It's everybody else's fault.
Oh, you thought it was his fault?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's your fault, probably.
It's everybody's fault.
Aren't we all at fault in the end?
Aren't we all just sinners before in the hands of an angry God?
Here's Joe Biden.
I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans civilians sooner.
Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country.
And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.
OK, so a question.
He says, you know, the Afghan government and its supporters, they told us not to organize the mass exodus because it would trigger a crisis of confidence.
Oh, is that what happened?
Is that really interesting?
So you were saying, let's get everybody out.
And the Afghan government was like, please don't do that because it'll undermine the possibility of us fighting back.
And so Joe Biden was like, OK, or alternatively, Joe Biden was saying last month, none of this would happen.
Flashback, Joe Biden last month.
You want to know why people didn't flee?
Because the president of the United States said last month no one needed to flee.
Everything was fine.
All is well.
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 North Vietnamese army.
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 comparable.
So maybe people didn't flee because the president of the United States was lying to them a month ago.
Okay, and then the lies just continued.
He said, well, you know what?
If the Taliban start attacking people, we'll do something about that, won't we?
We'll, ah, we're gonna bloviate.
Yes, because, well, I'm not afraid to use force, says the man who just pulled out 2,500 troops for no reason and then has to send in 7,000 troops to secure the surrender of the 2,500 troops who are leaving.
Here's the president.
As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S.
presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful.
We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary.
Our current military mission will be short in time, limited in scope, and focused in its objectives.
Get our people and our allies as safely as quickly as possible.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure he's so credible.
OK, then Biden after blaming every other human being on Earth.
You blame the Afghan military.
You blame Trump.
He blames everybody.
It's everybody's fault except for this guy.
Then he says the buck stops with me.
Oh, yes, I believe you, sir.
I sure, sure.
I am president of the United States of America and the buck stops with me.
I'm deeply saddened by the facts we now face.
But I do not regret my decision to end America's warfighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism missions there and other parts of the world.
I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country's civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, Leaving families broken by grief and loss.
This is not in our national security interest.
It is not what the American people want.
It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve.
Okay, our troops, by the way, I hope you've talked to somebody who served in Afghanistan.
There is no one more devastated today by what Joe Biden has done than the people who served in Afghanistan.
Who spent their lives, who left their limbs in Afghanistan, in order to preserve America against terrorists taking over that place?
This ass just pulled everybody out to let the Taliban take over in the name of those soldiers?
Yeah, I think not.
I think not.
If the buck stops with Joe Biden, then it stops with Joe Biden.
The thousands of corpses in the streets, those will be on Joe Biden.
The women will get hit with acid in the face, that is on Joe Biden.
The rebuilding of terror groups in Afghanistan will be on Joe Biden.
The movement by China into the region will be on Joe Biden.
China's more aggressive movement in the South China Sea and against Taiwan will be on Joe Biden.
Russia's more aggressive movement with regard to the Middle East, Syria, Iran, that will be on Joe Biden.
Iran and Hezbollah moving on Israel, that will be on Joe Biden.
When you create a vacuum in American foreign policy, someone else takes over and it will all be on Joe Biden.
The buck indeed stops with him and so do the corpses.
They stop at his door because he created this.
He owns it.
And even though he tried to blame everybody else on earth, he is the one who owns it in the end.
He has created the Saigon.
It's amazing.
He spent a month trying to claim Saigon wouldn't happen, and then Saigon happened, and now he's bragging about it.
He concluded his speech by bragging that this was just like Saigon.
Remember a month ago, Saigon was a disaster.
This would never be like Saigon.
Never.
Now, it's exactly like Saigon, and he's happy about it.
I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn't going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should have ended long ago.
Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man.
I will not do it in Afghanistan.
Okay, so there he is, right?
He says that the ending of the war in Vietnam was supposed to end.
It was supposed to end.
Right, what happened in Saigon, the Democratic Congress defunded the South Vietnamese government.
It took four and a half months after that defunding, against the advice of Gerald Ford, for the Viet Cong to overrun Saigon, and for us to have to evacuate our embassy, and for hundreds of thousands of people to float off the coast in boats, and for two million people to be killed in Cambodia.
Joe Biden thinks that was good.
In the end, after all of this, after all of this, after he said this wasn't going to be like Saigon, it wasn't going to be like Vietnam, it wasn't going to be like any of that, he says, you know what?
It is like that.
And it's good that it's like that.
Because Vietnam, for so many people like Joe Biden, the Vietnam syndrome is not something to be avoided, it is something to be championed.
A weak America on the foreign policy stage is good.
Joe Biden does not see America's interests as interests to be pursued by a variety of ends, ranging from the diplomatic to the military, and sometimes in tandem.
Instead, he sees diplomacy as the end in and of itself, Military force is always bad.
And I'm seeing a lot of people on the right today saying things like, well, you know, now that we're bringing these military, we're not spending 40 billion bucks in Afghanistan every year, and we're not having the American military in Afghanistan, this will allow us to redeploy.
Show of hands, who thinks we're going to redeploy to the southern border?
Anybody?
Show of hands, who thinks that we're going to up our naval forces in the South China Sea with the resources we just saved in Afghanistan?
Or confront the Russians?
Or confront the Iranians?
Now, who thinks that what Joe Biden just did is going to be the predicate for a series of regional surrenders around the globe to other heterogeneous powers who are interested in seizing power against the interests of the United States?
This is the same administration that is busily working to surrender to China.
This is the same administration that is busily working to grant power to Russia by greenlighting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
This is the same administration that is attempting to currently negotiate a deal with the malocracy in Iran.
This is not a bug in the system.
Joe Biden is happy about it.
He does not look at what's happening in Afghanistan as an unfolding incipient disaster.
It was his goal.
It's what he wanted.
He bragged about it yesterday.
And by the way, he then took like two questions, turned around, left the room, went back on vacation.
That's how much empathetic grandpa cares.
That's how much he cares.
Because he thinks this is a victory for him.
And there are members of the press who are already championing it.
You're already starting to see editorial boards from the left going, oh, well, you know, it is heroic after all.
I mean, that speech, I mean, that really was an amazing speech.
And if people on the right fall for this crap, seriously, if they fall for the idea that this was somehow good for the United States, I don't know what to tell you.
The world has a habit of clocking American isolationist tendencies.
In the aftermath, like, one of the things that Joe Biden said here, and he continues to say it, is that the United States basically has no interest in the outcome of wars in other countries.
Well, we kind of do when it turns out that they have an impact on us.
It's happened many, many times in American history, where sort of non-interventionist policy ends up bearing some pretty rotten fruit.
Ranging all the way back to America's non-intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1918, where we basically just stood aside and let the communists take over with like a skeleton force.
That only led to 70 years of Cold War.
Or where the United States did not actually leave any sort of troops in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, leading to the rise and reconstitution of the Nazi power.
See, the thing is this, when it comes to foreign policy, foreign policy is very often about the risk that you take to stop things that have not yet materialized.
And so it's very easy for people who are isolationists to say, well, nothing's materialized.
It would have been that way anyway.
It's very easy to say, okay, you know, 20 years in Afghanistan, what did we get for our money?
What did we get for it?
And the answer typically from people on the right has been, what we got is no 9-11s.
That was the cost, right?
The cost was no 9-11s, no global Al Qaeda power.
That was the cost.
Right, that's what we got!
That was what we bought.
With all that blood and treasure, that's what we got.
And people, on the isolationist right, and on the far left, they will say things like, Well, you know, maybe that wasn't gonna happen anyway.
Maybe it was over already.
How do you know?
Well, there's no way to prove a negative.
Right?
We can't.
We can't say for sure that if the United States had never done anything in Afghanistan, that terror attacks wouldn't have stopped.
Maybe they would have stopped.
Who knows?
Who knows?
But there is one thing that is certain.
When the United States removes itself from the world sphere, the world becomes more dangerous for the United States, not less.
The world is not kind to people who cower behind their own borders.
The world is not kind to people who sit and do nothing on the global stage.
Particularly world powers.
The world is not kind to those people.
Because you can either fight the battles when they are far away and when they require a minimum of blood and toil as they do now, right?
Not at the beginning of the Afghan war, now.
And we are talking about $44 billion a year and zero American lives lost per year.
Or you can wait until global powers have decided that they see a vacuum and they move.
And the wars become ever more costly.
That is the lesson of the 20th century.
It seems as though we're going to have to relearn it in the 21st.
Alrighty, we'll be back here today.
With another hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
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Be sure to check it out over at dailyware.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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