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Aug. 19, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:05
President Empathy Doesn’t Actually Give A Damn | Ep. 1322
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President Biden says he has no regrets about the Afghanistan collapse and his botched strategy.
And our military leaders say we have no capacity to rescue Americans in Afghanistan.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Ben, we'll get to all the news.
It is horrific news this morning.
We'll get to all of it in just one second.
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Alrighty, so.
The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate.
There's now video of Clarissa Ward from CNN trying to walk the gauntlet from Kabul, just the main area of the city, into the airport, and the Taliban stopping her, threatening her crew.
As she says, it's nearly impossible for any normal Afghan to use their papers to get out of the country at this point.
Meanwhile, some 10,000 to 15,000 Americans remain stranded in Kabul at this point.
According to eyewitnesses, this is Sky News reporting, desperate women in Kabul are attempting to throw their babies over the razor wire to American soldiers in scenes reminiscent of Saigon, in which people are trying to get the hell out of the country before the Taliban come in.
For all the people out there who keep saying things like, well, you know, the people in Afghanistan, they're just going back to what they know.
Remember, the average age, the average age in Afghanistan, the median age, rather, The median age is 18.4 years old.
The United States has been occupying Afghanistan since 2001, 20 years.
So the average person in Afghanistan actually does not remember Taliban rule.
The average person in Afghanistan has been living in a country occupied by the United States with a nascent democracy.
For their entire lifetime, and this is particularly true for young women who are now going to be subjected to sex slavery and abuse.
That is the next move for young women all over the country, but particularly in the major cities, which were again a lot more urban and a lot more controlled by the central government than the rural outlying areas.
According to Sky News, You can hear a noise as you approach the high iron gates that are the only way into the compound that is the center of the British airlift operation out of Afghanistan.
On either side of a narrow road, inside the walls of the compound at Kabul Airport, exhausted British soldiers lie in the shade, waiting for their turn to head back outside into the burning sun and the chaos once again.
The noise is the sound of shouting.
It's the noise of desperation.
Thousands of people are flooding toward this innocuous place that will, for some, be the gateway to freedom, and for many others, the end of a dream of escaping the Taliban.
After two decades, this is what it has come down to.
A hasty retreat, a civilian evacuation, with the Taliban watching on.
As every day passes, this relief operation gets more and more urgent and desperate as the British military tries to move thousands of people out of Afghanistan in just days.
a dehumanitarian mission in what feels like a war zone, a makeshift barricade is all that separates the two armies who have fought for 20 years.
The Taliban are just one meter away from the British soldiers a picture I never thought I would see, writes Stuart Ramsey, who's the chief correspondent for the Sky News.
He says, there are women who are arriving day and night families, often with tiny children, risking their lives, ducking past gunfire at the gates of the civilian side of the airport, passing aggressive Taliban fighters who occasionally beat and harass them.
In the night, the paratroopers blockaded the road with cars and razor wire.
A senior officer told me they had no choice because the situation was out of control, but said the blockade will live with some of his soldiers for the rest of their lives.
Quote, It was terrible.
Women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them.
Some got caught in the wire.
I'm worried for my men.
I'm counseling some.
Everyone cried last night.
It looks like chaos, but there's a method.
The soldiers call out for interpreters as different nationalities arrive at the barricade, including Afghans with a valid asylum case.
Passports and paperwork are then checked.
If they pass mustard, they're directed to the entry gate to be processed.
Some make it.
Others don't.
Terrified men.
Terrified families.
Men, women, large numbers of children are sent back through the barbed wire.
This is, um, unfortunately, the reality in Afghanistan, thanks to Joe Biden's precipitous and meaningless and meritless pullout.
Fatima, not her real name, made it through the barricade clutching her daughter's hand.
She thinks she might have a case, but doesn't know who to speak to.
She's terrified and in tears.
Her husband joined the Taliban and took to beating her.
She and her four-year-old have nothing but a UN letter identifying them as victims.
Afghanistan is Taliban.
Taliban is terrorist.
My husband is a terrorist Talib, she explains to me.
She just says, we'll go anywhere, any country.
And this, of course, is going to be common across Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, women across Afghanistan, of course, are being stuffed back into the burlap sacks of the burqa and then back into the basement.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Zuhal used to drive herself to work.
This week, she started taking a taxi to avoid reprisals from the Taliban, who once banned women from driving.
It didn't help.
On the second day of the Taliban takeover, a Taliban gunman dragged the doctor, who didn't want to use her full name, out of the taxi and whipped her for filming the chaos surrounding the evacuations at the Kabul airport.
Since he's in control of Afghanistan, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than they were last time.
Now remember, last time the Taliban took over in 1996, they also pledged to be moderate and to amnesty everybody who was fighting them.
And then they proceeded to be one of the most brutal regimes on planet Earth.
Dr. Zuhal was six years old when the Taliban took over Kabul the first time in 1996, the same age as her daughter is now.
I have so many dreams for her, she said.
My life and my achievements are tearing in two pieces in front of my eyes.
I never want this to happen to my daughter already.
Women are retreating from the public sphere.
Fatima Ghalana, one of the few women that negotiated with the Taliban as part of the Afghan government, declined to comment.
Fauzia Koufi, an outspoken women's rights defender and parliamentarian, said she was unable to give interviews under the current circumstances.
In Kabul, many young women have never even worn a burqa.
Some often appeared in public without headscarves.
The wealthiest neighborhoods have come to resemble the West, with young Afghan men and women mixing freely in cafes modeled on Starbucks.
That's the lifestyle Fatima Hosseini, a 28-year-old photographer, was accustomed to.
Now she's afraid of appearing in public.
I had my liberty.
I had my freedom.
We went to the gym, to restaurants.
Sometimes I would not cover my hair in public.
Everything has changed in a week.
Right?
This is the situation in Afghanistan.
The good news is that we have President Empathy out there.
The most empathetic president of all time, right?
Super Grandpa Empathy.
He is out there just to show how much he cares.
What an empathetic guy.
Now, quick reminder.
He's not empathetic.
He has never been empathetic.
Back in 2010, he was asked by Richard Holbrooke, then the special envoy by the Obama administration to Afghanistan and Pakistan, about a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, and what that would mean for the people of Afghanistan, the people who had allied themselves with us, sacrificed their lives, sacrificed themselves, on behalf of, yes, an American mission in Afghanistan.
And his explicit response, according to Richard Holbrook's diary, this is Joe Biden, was, quote, F that.
Nixon and Kissinger got away with it in Vietnam.
And Joe Biden's main message here is no regards.
This is an astonishing clip.
So he was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos.
And when a Democratic president is interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, usually it is a human centipede performance, because that's George Stephanopoulos' job.
George Stephanopoulos was the press secretary for Hillary Clinton back during the 1990s.
He is a Democratic apparatchik who somehow ended up as one of the chief anchors at ABC News, which is wild.
Imagine if Karl Rove were one of the chief anchors for Fox News.
It'd be very strange.
Not like an opinion host, the chief actual news anchor.
So normally when George Stephanopoulos is doing an interview with a Democratic politician, it looks more like softcore pornography than it does like an actual interview.
But George Stephanopoulos could not save Biden from himself here.
He just could not.
So he asks him a pretty simple question.
He asks him, it's chaos at the airport.
We're watching people fall from planes.
Joe Biden's answer here is one of the most atrocious answers I've ever heard from an American president on any topic.
And go back and listen.
I was highly critical of many of the things that Trump said in interviews.
I was certainly critical of the stuff that Obama said in interviews on a regular basis.
This is, I think, the worst thing I've ever heard an American president say in an interview.
And that encompasses a lot of bad things being said in interviews.
Here is George Stephanopoulos with the President of the United States, God help us, Joe Biden.
We've seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17.
We've seen Afghans falling.
That was four days ago, five days ago.
What did you think when you first saw those pictures?
What I thought was we have to gain control of this.
We have to move this more quickly.
We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport.
And we did.
So you don't think this could have been handled, this actually could have been handled better in any way?
No mistakes?
No.
No mistakes.
It's been error-free.
It's a perfect, it's a perfect operation.
A perfect operation where Afghans are clinging to the wheel wells of planes escaping Afghanistan and then falling from 4,000 feet to their death on the tarmac.
Perfect.
Perfect operation.
More than that, I gotta say, when Stephanopoulos asked him about what just happened there, and he says it was four or five days ago, So, number one, I was unaware that if a man falls 4,000 feet from the wheel well of a C-17 to the tarmac, that he remains alive four or five days later, that he actually dies, and then four or five days pass, and then he's okay again.
It was four or five days ago?
That is the response of this petulant man-child president?
This addled president?
His response is, it was four or five days ago?
What?
What?
It was a year ago.
Would that make a difference?
Four or five days ago?
How in the world is that supposed to make any difference at all?
By the way, it wasn't.
It was two days ago when he gave this interview.
I understand that every time Joe Biden takes a mid-morning nap and wakes up, he thinks it's a new day, but it absolutely is not.
This is just an astonishing dereliction by the President of the United States.
And for Captain Empathy over here to be saying, well it was four or five days ago, and could you have handled anything better here?
No.
Nothing could have been handled better.
Nothing.
Truly nothing.
There were seven people who were trampled to death at this airport.
We have women throwing babies over the razor wire at this airport.
We still have 10,000 to 15,000 Americans, American citizens, who are stuck in Kabul right now as we speak.
We have another somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Afghan allies, people who worked with our military, interpreters, and members of the special operations forces in Afghanistan.
For whom American soldiers have signed affidavits basically saying that these are people who we ought to save.
These aren't random Syrian citizens who are just being put upon by the government and we don't have any background information on them.
These are people who actively worked with the United States government, with our military, with our military contractors.
They're stuck over there.
And Joe Biden can't explain how he could have done this any better.
Hey, then Joe Biden goes even further.
He says, well, there was no way, no way that we could have gotten out without chaos.
This was inevitable.
This was the inevitable ending to this saga.
Inevitable?
We were holding our bases in Afghanistan with a skeleton crew of somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 people.
If you look at the number of troops, United States troops on the ground in Afghanistan year on year, it had declined essentially every year since 2014.
We went from having tens of thousands of troops, as in like 30, 40, 50 to 100,000 troops in the 2010, 2011, 2012 period, all the way down to about 10,000 troops in the post-2014 period, and then all the way down to 2,500 troops officially in Afghanistan as of January of this year.
And Joe Biden decided that we had to precipitously pull out so he could get a headline about how he'd ended the quote-unquote endless war.
The thing that's so amazing about that, by the way, is that when you look at where American troops are stationed all over the world, Afghanistan barely ranks in like the top 10 by the time that we left.
Afghanistan had 25, 3,500 troops there.
We have over 5,000 troops in Qatar.
We have 5,000 troops in Kuwait.
We have 26,000 troops in Korea.
We have something like 12,000 troops in Italy.
We have 40,000 troops still in Japan.
We have 6,000 troops in Korea.
We have something like 12,000 troops in Italy.
We have 40,000 troops still in Japan.
We have 33,000 troops in Germany.
This is not a quote unquote endless war for the United States.
There was no necessity for this quote-unquote precipitous pullout.
And when he says there's no way to get out without chaos, no, there absolutely was.
Here is Joe Biden saying this.
It's insane.
The idea that somehow there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don't know how that happens.
I don't know how that happened.
So for you, that was always priced into the decision?
Yes.
Unbelievable.
By the way, quick note here.
If he thought it was inevitable that this chaos was going to happen, then why was he taking a vacation?
Really?
Why?
By the way, a bit of a conflicting message there.
We were told by his military it was totally unexpected.
A month ago, he was saying that the Taliban would not be able to take Kabul.
So either he was lying then or he's lying now.
Those are the only two choices.
Or he's lying both times.
It is quite possible that he was informed by his intelligence community that this was a significant possibility.
He lied about it a month ago.
Then it happened.
And then he said, oh yeah, it was totally foreseeable.
So he's lying both times.
That's the most probable situation.
I mean, remember, he says there was no way to get us out without chaos.
Just a month ago, here's Joe Biden saying the same can be Saigon.
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 comfortable.
That was July 8th.
July 8th.
Unbelievable.
Freaking believable.
By the way, Joe Biden also told George Stephanopoulos that the Taliban have changed.
He said, quote, I think they're going through a sort of existential crisis about what they want to be, what they, about, do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government?
Yeah, that's, that's exactly right.
Probably they're going through an existential crisis.
Well done, sir.
He's a delusion, delusional, fully delusional, fully delusional.
And by the way, Biden is now saying he's grateful to the Taliban.
He says, I'm not sure I would have predicted, George, nor would you or anyone else, that when we decided to leave, that they'd provide safe passage for Americans to get out.
Are we sure they've provided safe passage for Americans to get out at this point?
We'll get to that in just one second.
And this is full-scale insanity.
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By the way, Joe Biden, the only interviews he's doing are with people like George Stephanopoulos.
And the reason for that is because he doesn't want to take tough questions.
George Stephanopoulos is there to massage Biden through these awkward moments.
So Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday on vaccination.
Public speech on vaccination.
And then he just took off.
He ran from the room.
Because this is what the man does.
God bless you all and may God protect our troops.
Thank you.
Goodbye, catch you later.
See you later.
And he's out.
And now, he may be out, but the Americans who are stuck in Afghanistan absolutely are not.
According to Walter Russell Mead, writing for the Wall Street Journal, some 15,000 U.S.
citizens and residents are behind Taliban lines.
There is no easy way to get them out.
By the way, that is not even talking about our Afghan allies who worked with us.
Remember, just about a month ago, Biden's advisor, Cedric Richmond, was on with Jake Tapper, and he said pretty openly, we're not going to leave the Afghans behind.
We can't leave these people behind.
President Biden publicly promised that none of the more than 19,000 Afghans who have assisted the United States and at least begun the process of trying to get these special immigrant visas to flee Afghanistan so they won't be slaughtered by the Taliban.
None of them, he said, will be left behind when the military pulls out in the coming weeks and months.
But the Biden administration has been very light on details.
Nothing has happened yet.
These people, respectfully, sir, need more than words and promises.
They need action.
Jake, you know that this is a serious issue.
I think that the president was very clear that he's not leaving people behind.
But if you're asking us to give you numbers, locations, and details, and timing, we're not necessarily going to do that because of the sensitivity of the information.
We want to make sure that we protect the people who helped us and risked their lives to help us.
Um, no, you don't.
You're not protecting the people who risked their lives and helped us.
As we were going to see, the entire military intelligence apparatus is now saying a lot of those people are going to get left behind.
So they're just damned liars.
According to Walter Russell Mead, it's not just the Afghans, however.
One thing is clear, the Taliban hold the lives of thousands of U.S.
citizens and the future of the Biden administration in their hands.
The collapse of the Ghani government left as many as 15,000 Americans in permanent residence, along with an unknown number of other Westerners and foreigners trapped behind Taliban lines.
Tens of thousands of Afghans employed by the old government, allied military commands, and Western-oriented nonprofits are, with their family members, also desperate to leave.
While U.S.
forces control the Kabul airport, American citizens and Afghans with U.S.
visas must run a gauntlet of Taliban roadblocks and checkpoints to reach the American perimeter.
As for the thousands of Americans, citizens of allied nations, and endangered Afghan nationals stranded in other parts of the country, at press time, U.S.
officials had no plan in place to bring them to safety.
Congressional offices report being deluged with pleas for help from Americans behind enemy lines and from veterans seeking help for Afghan contacts and friends.
I've told you about how I'm receiving emails.
I, right?
I'm just a political commentator.
I'm receiving emails from people asking, how do I get somebody out?
I'm getting calls from people.
How do I get somebody out?
This is utter craziness.
I got a letter last night.
Quote, I'm a former Marine officer that served in Helmand Afghanistan in 2011.
I've been trying to assist my Afghan interpreter Tommy with an SIV for years now.
He served tenaciously.
In fact, I witnessed his vehicle getting blown up in front of me from an IED.
Even after this episode, he continued to work with and put his faith in us.
Tommy is currently stranded with his wife and young daughter a few miles from the Kabul airport.
Together, he and I are devising evacuation plans.
But as you know, the situation on the ground is very dangerous and uncertain.
And then this Marine officer asked for help in how do we get this guy out?
OK, that is the situation on the ground and for American citizens as well.
Well, 1100 U.S.
citizens, permanent residents and family members were evacuated on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There were reports of people being beaten and turned back from the airport.
Apparently, the U.S.
government is basically begging the Taliban to let people out.
And the U.S.
government has made clear that they can't actually provide people passage.
According to Caitlin Collins, the CNN chief White House correspondent, the U.S.
embassy in Kabul told American citizens in a security alert, quote, the United States government cannot ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Adding space on evacuation flights will now be available on a first come, first serve basis.
So the U.S.
government is saying, we can't even get you to the airport.
Uber can get you to the airport.
We can't get you to the airport.
All these people in Afghanistan, all the Afghans, are trying to erase their links with the American government.
They're trying to just erase the fact they ever worked with the American government because if the Taliban find out that they did, they will be murdered.
That is the situation on the ground.
The Taliban, for their part, this is the funniest story of the day.
Grimly hilarious.
So there are all these images coming out of the Taliban beating the living hell out of people and shooting people.
The Taliban, quote, they deny their fighters have been involved in this sort of violence, blaming the injuries on men impersonating the Taliban.
Ah, you know, those famous Taliban impersonators.
It's like Elvis impersonators in Vegas, Taliban impersonators in Kabul.
There is no real Taliban.
It's just in your mind.
Maybe Taliban is just an idea.
It's like Antifa.
It's just an idea out there.
In just a second, we'll get to the utter inability of the West to provide safe passage to American citizens to get out.
And the fact that the likely next step is going to be bribery.
Your taxpayer dollars are going to go straight to the Taliban.
That is the next step here.
We all know it.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
It's an absolute disaster in Afghanistan as far as getting people out.
The NATO Secretary General said yesterday, well, you know, NATO is telling the Taliban we expect them to provide safe passage.
This is Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General.
Well, as long as you guys are telling them that you expect them to provide safe passage, I'm sure the Taliban will do what you say.
Or alternatively, the Taliban now hold all the cards.
Because the United States decided to withdraw with no plan at all to even protect the American citizens on the ground, the Taliban hold all the cards.
What happens if the Taliban just say no?
Is the United States going to deploy thousands of troops into Kabul to go house to house to find the American citizens who are there?
Do you think Joe Biden is going to do that?
I don't.
What are you going to do?
Sanction the Taliban?
They have no economy.
What exactly is the threat here?
You guys just abandoned the place and then you're like, ah, you better let out our guys.
Why would they do that?
The answer is they would do that if we bribed them.
That is the next step here.
The next step is that the Biden administration is going to send pallets of cash to the Taliban.
And then Biden is going to say, look how they moderated.
Look at that.
They moderated.
They let all of our people out.
So really, this isn't that bad.
I handled this beautifully.
Everybody got out.
And then, a few weeks later, the Taliban will emerge from their caves to explain that in fact they were given billions of dollars by the Biden administration, hundreds of millions of dollars by the Biden administration in order to free what are essentially American hostages now in Afghanistan.
And they will humiliate Biden.
That is how this is going to play out.
With like 75% certainty.
Anyway, here's the NATO Secretary General threatening with nothing.
Our diplomats on the ground, our people on the ground, are working hard to enable those who are threatened, those who have worked for us, staff and others, to enable them to get to the airport.
And we're also sending a very clear message to the Taliban that we expect them to provide safe passage to enable people to get to the airport.
As of now, it seems like what you're saying is this depends on the good graces of the Taliban?
We don't control the territory outside the airport.
So yes, that's a yes.
We are relying on the good graces of the Taliban.
The Taliban have no good graces.
The only reason that they release the Americans here is if they're paid off.
That is the only reason.
Because what exactly is Joe Biden going to do?
Launch a bunch of airstrikes into the countryside?
What exactly is NATO going to do at this point?
Reoccupy?
They're not going to do any of that stuff, and the Taliban know it.
You just surrendered the country to a bunch of 8th century barbarian cavemen.
And now you're like, maybe they'll be nice.
By the way, again, Joe Biden is saying they will be nice.
He is telling George Stephanopoulos maybe they'll moderate.
CIA analyst Matt Zeller, who's been on CNN a lot, he said, here's what the Taliban's actually doing.
They're taking people's passports in Kabul.
So if you show up with a passport to try and get past the barricade and get into the airport, they'll just take your passport from you.
We need to basically tell the Taliban that they need to shut down their checkpoints in the city because they're actively taking people's passports.
I've had U.S.
citizens who have had their U.S.
passports taken from them, their green cards taken from them.
Afghans are having their documentation stolen from them by the Taliban in an attempt to prevent them from being able to even get into the airbase.
Okay, meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense of the United States, the most powerful military presence in the history of the world, he says he's asked about evacuating Americans, and he can't guarantee that we will keep troops in there for long enough to even evacuate Americans.
Look at the way he's hedging his bets here.
This is because this is reality, okay?
When we say that we are going to evacuate 10,000 to 15,000 Americans, there are a bunch of Americans who are out there in the countryside.
They ain't coming home.
There are a bunch of Americans in Kabul.
Many of those people will not be coming home.
The Biden administration knows this because they blew it.
They blew it all the way.
Here is the Defense Secretary of the United States of America talking about how we cannot evacuate Americans thanks to a ragtag backwater group of cavemen firing AK-47s and who were just handed billions of dollars in American military technology by a surrendering American pusillanimous president.
This is so humiliating.
It's the most humiliating thing I've ever seen in my life with regard to American foreign policy.
I mean, it is not close.
I think it may be the most humiliating thing any American has ever seen in their lifetime, period.
And it took two years for the United States to, after the United States' large-scale withdrawal from Vietnam, it took about two years for everything to collapse in Vietnam.
This took about five minutes.
And now the United States is left begging and pleading with the Taliban to evacuate American citizens.
Here's the defense secretary of the most powerful military power in the history of the world, Saying that, you know, we'll try and get people out until the clock runs out.
By the way, when he says until the clock runs out, that is a tacit admission that we are now working on the Taliban's timetable.
We're really working hard to get as many people through as possible.
And quite frankly, we're not, it's obvious, we're not close to where we want to be in terms of getting the numbers through.
So we're going to work that 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And we're going to get everyone that we can possibly evacuate, evacuated.
And I'll do that as long as we possibly can until the clock runs out or we run out of capability.
Okay, we'll do it until the clock runs out or we run out of capability.
The f- are you talking about?
The clock runs out?
Whose clock?
Whose clock?
There are only two players in this scenario, the Taliban and Biden.
That's it.
There are no other players.
So whose clock are we talking about?
Joe Biden's artificial timeline for getting out?
Or are we now talking about the fact that the Taliban has set a clock for the United States to leave?
And Joe Biden is going to obey the clock of, again, the worst people on planet Earth.
These barbarians, that's who we're going to obey.
Or our military capability runs out.
Our military capability, we spend billions, hundreds of billions of dollars every year on the United States military.
Our capability runs out for doing what?
Driving people to the airport in defiance of a ragtag group of people?
Armed with, like, bicycle locks?
What are you talking about?
That's the Secretary of Defense of the United— That guy needs to be out.
He needs to resign.
Frankly, Biden should resign.
I mean, he's not going to, obviously.
And he's not going to be impeached by a Democratic Congress.
But if anybody had any stones, they would.
This is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen in my life as an American citizen.
It is the most mewling, pathetic, disreputable thing I've ever seen in my life in terms of American foreign policy, and it is not close.
And we saw a lot of crap under Barack Obama.
This is abjectly pathetic.
The State Department Press Secretary Wendy Sherman was asked about this yesterday, and she says, well, no government could evacuate all these citizens.
No one could, really.
I mean, when you think about it, it's really hard.
Well, yeah, it is hard when you get rid of all the American troops that were protecting all the air bases that allowed people to leave.
Yes, that does make it rather difficult, does it not?
Maybe somebody should have conveyed that to the president.
Or maybe, having conveyed that to the president, if he insisted on going ahead with his plan, somebody should have resigned in protest.
Didn't we hear that a lot during the Trump administration?
If you hate it so much, you should leave.
Well, anyone?
Bueller?
Here's Wendy Sherman.
Kabul, I don't know if you've ever been there, is an enormous city.
enormous. And it has, in fact, had more and more people come to Kabul because they thought it was the safest place to be in Afghanistan. So it is difficult under any circumstances.
And I don't know of any government that would be capable of reaching out to where everybody might be, particularly those who have not signed up to us to help them.
which is why you shouldn't have surrendered the city.
The Secretary of Defense says, we don't have the capacity to collect our people.
We just don't.
We can't do it.
Right, so originally what was funny about this particular exchange is that Mark Milley, who we'll get to in just one second, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who's so concerned about white rage.
White rage.
It's really fortunate we have such geniuses running our military establishment.
Nobody gets fired for losing wars around here.
Pretty impressive.
You want to talk about a government make-work program?
Apparently the Joint Chiefs of Staff is one of them.
So is the Defense Secretaryship.
So he started off this little exchange, Mark Milley, by saying this is a political problem.
And then Lloyd Austin jumps in to save the President.
And he says, no, it's not a political problem.
It's a capacity problem.
I would draw a distinction, Barbara, between extracting someone in an in extremis condition or circumstance versus going out and collecting up large numbers of American citizens.
Do you have the capability to go out and collect Americans?
We don't have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people.
We don't have the capability to collect them.
Okay, you know what that capability amounts to?
It amounts to literally you drive a car where the citizen is, you pick them up in your car, you bring them back to the airport.
He's saying we can't do that.
The reason they can't do that is because the Taliban have set up checkpoints.
And so what they're really afraid of is that somebody will get into a shooting fight with the Taliban at the outskirts of the airport, and then the airport will be overrun by the Taliban.
That is the fear.
The fear is that America will attempt to deploy its forces into Kabul in order to pick up all the Americans, and the Taliban won't let them, and then you'll be in a shooting war.
And Biden doesn't want that because he doesn't want to have to put troops back into Kabul and then have an urban fight with the Taliban in a city that he just conceded.
So instead we'll just leave the Americans out there and then we'll hope that the Taliban are nice and the Taliban will be nice so long as we pay them American taxpayer dollars so they can continue to propagate their evil regime of rape, torture, and tyranny.
That's all that's happening here.
The United States is now going to be the chief funder of the Taliban.
That's what's going to happen.
We're going to end up giving them the money.
Because how else are we going to get our guys out?
And why exactly would they let us get our guys out if that's the case?
Meanwhile, Joe Biden had to be bullied by George Stephanopoulos into making a commitment to leave American troops there as long as necessary to get the Americans out.
By the way, that's not going to happen.
There are going to be Americans who get stuck in Afghanistan.
I'm just saying that's going to happen right now.
And if it doesn't happen, it's because Joe Biden is going to bribe the Taliban.
Commitment holds to get everyone out that, in fact, we can get out and everyone should come out.
And that's the objective.
That's what we're doing now.
That's the path we're on.
And I think we'll get there.
So Americans should understand the troops might have to be there beyond August 31st?
No, Americans should understand that we're going to try to get it done before August 31st.
But if we don't, the troops will stay?
If we don't, we'll determine at the time who's left.
And?
Oh my god.
You see, it's unbelievable how George Stephanopoulos has to walk him through that.
Right?
So he gives an answer.
And his answer is basically, we'll determine at the end of the August 31st deadline who's left.
And Stephanopoulos is like, um, what now?
So you're saying that if there are Americans left, we might leave anyway?
So he has to prompt Biden until he gets to the right answer there.
And?
And?
He just massages his ass until the correct answer comes popping out of there?
That's what George Stephanopoulos is doing here.
Amazing stuff.
But don't worry, it's not just Joe Biden who ought to resign and Lloyd Austin, our pathetic defense secretary, who ought to resign.
It's Mark Milley.
It's the entire infrastructure.
The entire infrastructure ought to be thrown out on their butts.
They all ought to be thrown out on their butts.
We'll get to Mark Milley, the important investigator of military white rage, in just one second.
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All right, we'll get to more in just one second on this, again, horrific day in American history.
The most pathetic display, frankly, I have ever seen in my life from the United States.
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So the rest of our military infrastructure just as bad as Lloyd Austin.
You'll remember General Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair, the heroic Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair who stood up to the predations of Donald Trump.
He said that Donald Trump had a Reichstag fire moment, made no sense about the January 6th events.
He also was preoccupied, preoccupied with the problem of white rage, went in front of Congress and explained why he had assigned troops to read Ibram X. Kendi's garbage.
It was very important.
Our focus in the military is on all the things that matter.
Like, six weeks ago.
Mark Milley was talking about how important it was to study white rage.
Here was Mark Milley just six weeks ago.
I'm not going to address specifically white rage, or black rage, or Asian rage, or Irish rage, or English rage, or German rage, or any other rage, right?
But I do think it's important that we as a professional military not only understand foreign countries and foreign cultures and foreign societies, that's important that we do that, but we also need to understand our own society and understand the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and the society they're coming from.
And I think that's important for leadership to study.
Thank you.
You said the words white rage.
Yeah, I said I'm not going to discuss it right now.
I think it's a very complicated topic, and we don't have the time to go into the nuance of it right this minute.
It's so nuanced, so important.
We had to study it.
We had to spend time on it.
And when we weren't spending time with our military leaders, when we weren't spending time with white rage, our Pentagon was spending time attacking Tucker Carlson for making disparaging comments about uniforms for pregnant pilots.
Here is our military back in March.
This is March 11th, 2021.
John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson, saying, I want to be very clear right up front.
The diversity of our military is one of our greatest strengths.
Would winning wars be one of our greatest strengths in the military?
Would abandoning our posts be one of the greatest strengths of the military?
Because I'm hearing that uniforms for pregnant pilots are very, very important to the Pentagon.
But not getting our asses kicked by a bunch of backwater tribesmen is apparently not super important to our Pentagon.
But I've seen it for myself in long months at sea and in the combat waged by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I've seen it up on Capitol Hill just this past month.
I see it every day right here at the Pentagon, said John Kirby.
What we absolutely won't do is take personal advice from a talk show host or the Chinese military.
Maybe those folks feel like they have something to prove.
That's on them.
Well, I feel like the U.S.
military leadership, not the military men and women, the military leadership has something to prove.
Like, can you win a God bleeping war?
How about that?
I feel like you have something to prove.
Can you win a war?
Can you not surrender?
Can you not leave 10 to 15,000 Americans hanging out in Kabul, waiting for the Taliban to arrive at their homes with the bull whips?
Maybe you have something to prove.
But I understand, look, it's a busy time in the U.S.
military.
Infrastructure, right?
In the higher chain of the U.S.
military, it is a busy time.
You have to make sure that you're pushing diversity, transgender troops, and white rage.
All those things, those are things that the Defense Department has to be on top of day in and day out.
What they don't really have to be on top of is whether Afghanistan is going to collapse inside of two weeks if the United States military pulls out and abandons our Afghan allies.
In fact, that's what we were told by General Mark Milley literally yesterday.
Mark Milley came out, he said, I had no information that would have led to this.
Really, you had no, there were no indicators?
None?
Seriously, like none?
This was a talking point for people who followed foreign policy for literally years, that if the United States pulled out, the Taliban would take over within weeks.
This is no shock to anybody who's watching this thing with any level of knowledge.
But Mark, listen, when you're reading Ibram X. Kendi, I understand it's absorbing stuff.
You can't be bothered to actually worry about what's going to happen in Afghanistan.
Now, Mark Milley apparently was giving warnings, according to The Washington Post, to Biden that this was a bad idea.
But apparently that didn't require any contingency planning by Mark Milley or anything.
I mean, the man does have priorities.
Here he was yesterday.
The time frame of a rapid collapse That was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months and even years following our departure.
There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.
Nothing he saw, by the way, nothing he saw.
Well, I mean, to be fair, he wasn't seeing a lot of stuff.
It is very busy being woke.
Very busy.
He didn't see anything.
Here's NBC News yesterday reporting that the CIA warned of a rapid collapse like weeks ago.
NBC News has learned that in recent weeks, the CIA had been warning about a potentially rapid takeover by the Taliban and total collapse of the Afghan military and government.
But we don't know if that message ever got to the White House, right?
Yeah, that's right, Joe.
And really, the Washington blame game is in full swing at this point.
You have military officials saying they wanted to begin evacuating our Afghan partners as early as May, but they were prevented from doing so by the White House.
You have the intelligence community saying they were shocked at the speed at which the military completed that drawdown within Afghanistan.
That was mostly done by July.
Oh, well, but I was informed by Mark Milley that there's no way anybody could have foreseen this.
At the same time, I was being told by President Biden that everyone foresaw it.
So really strange, the conflicting messages coming out of this garbage administration.
Really strange, by the way.
You know, it's not just Joe Biden.
We've been hearing that it's the Biden-Harris administration.
See, that's the way that the press likes to work this thing.
It's the Biden-Harris administration when they're doing something the press loves.
But as soon as it's a bad thing that everybody acknowledges is bad, then it just becomes the Biden administration.
There's only one problem for Kamala Harris, the successor to Joe Biden, who is on his last legs here.
She owns this.
She was part of this.
According to Noah Bierman writing for the Los Angeles Times, Vice President Kamala Harris has been at least visually front and center as President Biden has overseen America's retreat from Afghanistan.
She attends most of his security briefings and had to leave a meeting with business leaders Thursday afternoon to attend an urgent intelligence session as the Taliban rapidly cemented control over the country.
When the White House released a photo Sunday of Biden sitting alone at a telebriefing from the Situation Room in Camp David, Harris was on the other end of the screen, occupying the central square among Biden's coterie of virtual advisors.
She watched his high-profile speech Monday from a nearby room at the White House, a detail officials made sure to highlight in a continuing effort to brand the Biden-Harris administration as an unusually close team.
The harrowing images are likely to be a defining moment in Biden's presidency, but the execution of the withdrawal will also be added to Harris's resume.
Yup.
They own this crap.
They own it.
They own it all the way.
There is no unowning it or disowning it.
Not going to happen.
Nancy Pelosi, for her part, she can enthusiastically embrace any piece of horrifying news coming out of her own party.
A woman who enthusiastically embraces the Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omars, and AOCs on the cover of Rolling Stone can certainly embrace a complete rapid pullout from Afghanistan that results in the complete subjugation of 38 million human beings and the essential hostage taking of 10 to 15,000 Americans.
I mean, what can't Nancy Pelosi embrace?
What cannot Nancy Pelosi embrace if called upon to do so by her God, the Democratic Party?
Here is Nancy Pelosi defending Joe Biden.
I commend the president for the action that he took.
It was strong, it was decisive, and it was the right thing to do.
We should have been out of Afghanistan a while back.
But now we are, unfortunately, one of the possibilities was that it would be a and disarray as it is.
But that has to be corrected.
And it is my understanding from the assurances we have received that the military will be there negotiating with the Taliban for the safe exit of American citizens and friends, people who have helped us, our allies there.
Oh, we're going to be negotiating and that's going to work.
Yeah, it'll be bribery, gang.
Watch for the pallets of cash.
I'm telling you right now, bribery.
If you like paying your tax dollars to the Taliban, you can thank Joe Biden for that because that's exactly what we are going to be doing.
You think that it was a big mistake to spend, you know, $40 billion or so propping up the Afghan government and making sure that we had a base of operations from which to strike terrorists in Afghanistan?
Wait until we're paying billions of dollars to the Taliban for the tender grace of having them allow American citizens to leave the country.
Meanwhile, the Democratic defense of this is just, it's amazing.
They'll defend pretty much anything.
Not all of them.
We played Representative Seth Moulton yesterday, ripping into Biden.
But the most ardent Democrats absolutely will.
Here's Representative Barbara Lee.
She says, you know, it was just a matter of unpreparedness.
I mean, if we'd been a little more prepared, it would've been fine.
I believe that the execution, as all of us have seen, has not gone well.
I believe that we should have been better prepared.
But I also know that, for instance, with many of the Afghans who have provided the type of assistance that we desperately needed, there were very few lists, if any, of who they were.
And so that's just an example of the lack of preparedness.
Oh, it's just unpreparedness, guys.
Perhaps the best comment comes courtesy of Democratic Representative Jared Golden.
He was asked specifically about the fall of the United States Embassy.
Here is his response.
The thought that the American Embassy there is going to be occupied by the Taliban on 9-11-2021, the 20th anniversary, what emotions go through your mind when you hear that?
It's a building.
You know, it's a building.
Let's point out, by the way, we've still got about 6,000 troops on the ground at Kabul International Airport, and hoping every one of them comes home safe.
But their mission is important.
They've got to stay there until we get all American personnel out safely.
That's their job, and I know that they're proud to be doing it right now.
Man, I mean, Golden should know better than this.
He was a Marine.
He was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's a congressman from Maine.
It's a $700 million building that was sovereign United States territory, by the way.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of, I'm sure, depressing content.
Coming up soon is The Matt Walsh Show, airing at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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