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Aug. 30, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:40
The Americans Who Get Left Behind | Ep. 1329
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The Biden administration finally admits we'll be leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans and green card holders behind in Afghanistan.
According to the White House, it's time to rely on the Taliban.
And Joe Biden can't be bothered to answer questions about any of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so first, the updates on Hurricane Ida.
So, it has apparently taken out all power, essentially, in New Orleans.
There are 14 lines into New Orleans from the power companies, and 13 of them are apparently down, which means that for some three weeks, people are going to be without air conditioning and without power, unless they have a generator, which is just insane.
According to the New York Times, In a statement on Sunday night, Entergy, a power company with 2.9 million customers across the South, said that all eight transmission lines that power the New Orleans area were out of service and that it was not clear when power might be restored.
More than 199,000 customers in Jefferson Parish, part of the greater New Orleans region, were without electricity.
According to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility performance across the country, more than 193,000 customers were without power in Orleans County, while about 11,000 were without power in Plaquemines Parish, south of the city.
Before the outage in New Orleans, Entergy said that based on historical restoration times, people in the direct path of the storm could be without power for as long as three weeks, which is a humanitarian disaster in its own right.
The generators are not going to be sufficient, obviously, for that amount of power.
The hurricane has at this point slowed in speed, both in terms of the wind speed as well as the pace of movement over land.
It's now down to about 60 miles an hour as opposed to 150 when it first hit land.
So hopefully it will continue to weaken.
And the Biden administration is saying that they will be there for whatever support is necessary.
Here's the president yesterday.
We've already pre-positioned resources that we know are going to be needed and equipment and response teams in the region.
This includes 2.5 million meals and 3 million liters of water.
We've got generators in place and we're in close touch with the power providers to get and restore power as soon as possible because a lot of it, a lot of it's going to go out.
And we should be prepared that it can take a long time, no matter how much we've prepositioned, which we have, that it's going to take a long time for a lot of it to get back up.
It could take a matter of weeks for some places.
Now the good news is that the levies in New Orleans so far have held.
Apparently the infrastructure fixes that were done in the aftermath of Katrina have so far been solid.
So we'll continue to bring you the latest on that situation, obviously.
Meanwhile, the debacle in Afghanistan is coming to its semi-terminus tomorrow.
It is scheduled to do so when all American troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving behind hundreds if not thousands of American citizens and American green card holders, and certainly tens or hundreds of thousands of people who worked with the United States government during the last 20 years.
Joe Biden, for his part, continues to not answer questions.
It's an amazing thing.
I mean, the fact that Joe Biden will not answer simple questions about what's going on in Afghanistan, where we're currently going to be leaving behind, again, hundreds, if not thousands of American citizens and certainly thousands of American green card holders.
It's pretty astonishing.
So yesterday, while he was making his announcements about Hurricane Ida, a reporter asked about Afghanistan and he simply refused to answer the question and then sort of turned his back on them.
I'm not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead.
Mr. President, on Afghanistan...
I'm not going to answer Afghanistan now.
Can you say if there's still an acute risk of a short-term?
That's unbelievable.
I'm sorry, that's unbelievable.
He's the President of the United States.
He has no place to go.
He has no place to go.
He simply just turns his back on the reporter.
That's amazing.
And then, he actually is directed the wrong direction.
He starts to walk off in the wrong direction and then has to walk back in the other direction.
This president is not competent.
He is not with it.
He is certainly not capable of running the country at this point in time.
That is perfectly obvious.
And then, in a bit of a debacle yesterday, that is being undercovered by the media because if it were Donald Trump, you know, it would be, you know, the entire... It's amazing.
If this were Donald Trump, this would be the entire news cycle endlessly.
Because you remember that there was an entire news cycle during the last election cycle over whether Donald Trump had visited a World War I cemetery in Europe and at the time had made disparaging remarks about America's fallen soldiers.
Remember there was an entire Politico news cycle and The Atlantic had covered it and it was Jeffrey Goldberg over at The Atlantic covering it and it was all unnamed sources.
Imagine if Donald Trump had gone to Dover Air Force Base to do the dignified transfer of bodies of the American service people who had been killed in Afghanistan.
And imagine if he'd looked at his watch.
Really, this is kind of an amazing story.
So, this is not speculative.
Here's the video.
You can decide for yourself what Joe Biden is doing here.
He doesn't look like he's hitching his sleeve to me.
He looks like he's deliberately looking down at his watch and then realizing he shouldn't be looking at his watch while waiting for the bodies of American service members who are dead because of his Afghanistan policy.
That's an amazing thing.
And the media have thus far really not covered it.
Imagine if it were Donald Trump, right?
The callousness is the point.
The cruelty is the point.
But Joe Biden, who has structured an Afghanistan policy so absolutely incoherent that certainly tens of thousands of people are going to be slaughtered by the Taliban.
Certainly Americans are going to get left behind.
And now he's at a place specifically, first of all, There's a general rule that if you go to Dover Air Force Base to do the dignified transfer of troops, to be present for that, you don't let the cameras in.
George W. Bush famously did that.
George W. Bush famously went in the middle of the night to Dover Air Force Base.
Anna Perina talks about this.
She was his press secretary.
She talks about the fact that George W. Bush would go to Dover Air Force Base quietly and without the cameras there to do the dignified transfer.
Biden shows up, camera's in tow, and even then, he can't keep it together long enough not to apparently look at his watch.
I don't know what else to take from that.
Like, I haven't even heard an excuse from the White House on what he was doing there.
Because in the video, it's pretty da- I mean, I've looked at my watch from time to time when I'm bored with something, and it looks exactly like that.
So that's an amazing thing.
And again, if it were Donald Trump, all you would hear about is how little Donald Trump obviously cares about the troops and how much of a photo op all of this is and all the rest.
Joe Biden does it, and we're supposed to believe that he's Captain Empathy over here.
Meanwhile, new news emerging on exactly how Kabul fell to the Taliban.
There's an entire report in the Washington Post about the fall of Kabul, and it talks about the fleeing of the president of Afghanistan, how he was really supposed to stay for some sort of transition into a transitional government that would include the Taliban, which was going to be a fig leaf.
But there's one part of the story that's truly astonishing, and that is Joe Biden and his administration were offered control of Kabul by the Taliban to evacuate Americans, and Joe Biden turned it down.
It's in a piece titled, Surprise, Panic, and Fateful Choices, The Day America Lost Its Longest War, by Susannah George, Missy Ryans, Hyler Pager, Pamela Constable, John Hudson, and Griff Witt.
So like the entire staff of the Washington Post.
About halfway down in the article is buried this little tidbit.
U.S.
officials were as surprised as anyone.
The Americans had expected Ghani, who was the president of Afghanistan who fled because he was afraid he'd be disemboweled by the Taliban.
They expected Ghani would stay for an orderly transition to an interim authority as the agreement that negotiators in Doha, Qatar had struck promised.
News of Ghani's departure received secondhand meant that hope had been crushed.
He not only abandoned his country, but then unraveled the security situation in Kabul, said a senior U.S.
official.
People simply melted away from the airport to everywhere else.
In the void, law and order began to break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.
In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S.
military leaders in Doha, including Brett McKenzie, the commander of U.S.
CENTCOM, spoke to Abdul Ghani Baradar, the head of the Taliban's political wing.
We have a problem, Baradar said, according to the U.S.
official.
We have two options to deal with it.
You, the United States military, take responsibility for securing Kabul, or you have to allow us to do it.
So remember, this is the Taliban calling up the U.S.
and saying, listen, Kabul is breaking down.
It's in disorder.
We know you're leaving anyway.
So here are your options.
You can make sure that order is kept in Kabul with the military presence you have left, and you can evacuate your people, or you can trust us to do it.
And Joe Biden chose to trust the Taliban.
Throughout the day, says the Washington Post, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan.
The collapse of the Afghan government hadn't changed his mind.
McKenzie, aware of these orders, told Baradar the U.S.
mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies, and others at risk.
The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.
On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S.
officials.
The United States could have the airport until August 31st, but the Taliban would control the city.
Fighters were now on the move throughout Kabul with the group's spokesman issuing a revision of his earlier guidance.
The Taliban hadn't intended to even take Kabul that day, but Ghani's exit gave the group no choice.
I mean, that's unbelievable.
So the Taliban are calling up the United States and saying, would you like to keep Kabul for the moment?
Well, you know, while you evacuate your people and keep some order.
We're like, no, you do it.
That was the Joe Biden approach.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has been lying this entire time about the unanimity of his military advisors.
You noticed last week in the aftermath of the horrific bombing that claimed the lives of 13 American service members and probably 165 other people.
Remember, in the aftermath of that bombing, Joe Biden got on national television and claimed that there was unanimity among his military advisors about the strategy.
That was just an overt lie, according to the New York Times.
In framing the decision before him as either complete withdrawal or endless escalation, Mr. Biden has been telling the public that there was, in fact, no choice at all, because he knew that Americans had long since grown disenchanted with the Afghanistan war and favored getting out.
The fact that Mr. Trump was the one to leave behind a withdrawal agreement has enabled Mr. Biden to try to share responsibility.
Critics consider that either disingenuous or at the very least unimaginative, arguing there were viable alternatives, even if not especially satisfying ones, that may not have ever led to outright victory, but could have avoided the disaster now unfolding in Kabul and the provinces.
Megan O'Sullivan, Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, said, quote, the administration is presenting the choices in a way that is at best incomplete.
No one I knew was advocating the return of tens of thousands of Americans into open combat.
With the Taliban, indeed.
Some of the current military leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asserted keeping a relatively modest force of as few as 3,000 to 4,500 troops along with the extensive use of drones and close air support could have enabled Afghan security forces to continue holding off the Taliban without putting Americans at much risk.
General David Petraeus, the retired commander of American forces in Afghanistan and former CIA director under both Biden and Obama said, quote, there was an alternative that could have prevented further erosion and likelihood and likely enabled us to roll back some of the Taliban gains in recent years.
He said with the Afghans doing the fighting on the front lines and the US providing assistance from the air, such a forced posture would have been quite sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.
But the White House rejected such a middle ground, contending it amounted to more war.
So they're just lying, lying, lying.
And the result, of course, is Americans are now going to be trapped in Kabul, trapped in Afghanistan.
Many of them will be slain, because the question is, who reaches them first?
The Taliban to hold them hostage for cash, or ISIS to simply kill them?
By the way, what the Taliban got in this deal?
Basically, the result of this war is that the Taliban are now in a stronger position than they ever were from 1996 to 2001, because the amount of armaments that we provided them is just insane.
Hey, this Is a graphic in the New York Times on what the Taliban just received from the United States.
22,000 Humvees, 634 M117s, 169 M113s, armored personnel carriers, 42,000 pickup trucks and SUVs, 64,000 machine guns, 8,000 trucks, 162,000 radios, 16,000 night vision goggles and devices, which by the way, was the chief American advantage in terms of special forces, because none of these people could see in the dark, but our guys could.
We handed them 360,000 assault rifles.
So just, you know, Joe Biden is more interested in you getting an assault rifle if you're a member of the Taliban than if you're an American citizen.
If you want to buy an AR-15 in the United States, he thinks that you're very bad and very dangerous.
If you're a member of the Taliban, he, along with his administration, will hand them 360,000 assault rifles, 126,000 pistols, 176 artillery pieces.
thousand assault rifles, 126,000 pistols, 176 artillery pieces.
We handed them 33 helicopters, Mi-17 helicopters.
We handed them 33 UH-60 Blackhawks.
We handed them another 43 MD-530s.
Those are all helicopters.
So if you total that up, we handed them over 100 helicopters.
We handed them fixed-wing aircraft.
This is what we gave to the Taliban.
Four C-130 transports.
As someone pointed out, don't we have any ability to, like, turn off the ignition switches here?
We handed them 28 Cessnas.
We handed them 10 Cessna strike aircraft.
It's unbelievable.
We left them an enormous $85 billion arsenal.
That is what we handed to the Taliban because Joe Biden is an incompetent buffoon.
It's unreal.
And by the way, we also handed them Americans, which we'll get to in just one second.
Forget about leave no man behind.
Now it's how many people should we leave behind just to placate the Taliban and pretend that there's no problem here?
We'll get to more of this in a second.
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Alrighty, so it has now become absolutely crystal clear that we're leaving people behind.
ABC News' Jonathan Karl says, yeah, not everybody is getting out.
Our new poll with Ipsos shows just 38% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of Afghanistan.
84% say U.S.
troops should stay in Afghanistan until all Americans are evacuated.
That's not going to happen.
And here's the interesting thing about that poll question, the second one you mentioned, 84%.
It's consistent.
It's one of the only things I have seen for years, a question where Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, all over 80%, say exactly the same thing, that we should stay until all Americans are evacuated.
As you point out, not going to happen.
Yeah, so they're not getting out.
Jen Psaki is openly admitting this.
She says the U.S.
is not guaranteeing that American friends and visa holders are getting out after August 31st.
Once we're out, basically you're on your own.
If you're a green card holder or someone else who wants to get out, is the U.S.
guaranteeing that you will be able to get out?
I don't think we can guarantee, but what we can do is work toward, and this is what the President directed the Secretary of State to continue diplomatic efforts with international partners to secure means for third country nationals, Afghans with visas who may be eligible for our programs, of course any American citizen who remains in country to leave the country even after the U.S.
military presence ends.
Oh, so we're going to work to get them out.
We'll get to that in one second.
By the way, we don't even know how many people are on the ground.
Jake Sullivan, the NSA, he says we don't have a precise count on even who we're leaving.
It could be 300 American citizens.
We really have no clue.
We have evacuated at this point nearly 5,500 American citizens from Kabul.
We can never get an absolutely precise count of how many Americans were in Kabul because Americans aren't required to put themselves in a database as living in Afghanistan.
We believe that we're down to a population of 300 or fewer American citizens who have yet to get out.
We have evacuated more than 5,000.
We evacuated well more than 300 just yesterday.
So they have no clue, but they think it's 300, but they really don't have any idea as to how many people are stuck on the ground.
By the way, you've noticed how they shrunk this down.
Originally, Joe Biden said, and he said over and over, we're going to get all of the American allies we made promises to.
That went away.
Then it was Americans and green card holders.
You notice the green card holders have completely gone away.
They're just not part of the conversation anymore, even though green card holders have the same rights as American citizens in terms of being able to come back to the United States, which is why the United States had a real foreign policy problem when Jamal Khashoggi, a non-American citizen but green card holder, was killed by the Saudi government.
Now they've shrunk it down to just American citizens.
And then they say, we're not sure how many are out there, but we're doing a great job of getting them out.
Except for how you are not.
There were reports last night that American citizens were basically being turned away from the interior ministry and from the airport.
The administration is for the moment denying that, although we're hearing conflicting reports.
Meanwhile, Jake Sullivan, that same NSA incompetent buffoon from the Obama administration, he has denied that the United States gave the Taliban a kill list.
This was reported by Politico and actually followed up on by the New York Times.
The suggestion was that in order to get American citizens and SIV holders, special immigrant visa holders, and green card holders out, the United States had handed the Taliban lists of people to let through.
But that also gave the Taliban a list of people to kill if they decided not to let those people through.
And then Joe Biden said last week, you'll remember, he was asked specifically about it.
He said it might have happened.
I don't know.
So now Jake Sullivan denies that ever happened, but admits in the process that, yeah, we did give them lists.
A lot of these Afghan SIVs, as you know better than I, they think the Taliban's going to kill them.
And you've given them a list of their names.
Jake, we've actually aggressively and decisively disputed that report.
We have given no list of all of the American SIV holders to the Taliban or any other kind of big list.
Well, there was a Pentagon official in that report that referred to this as a kill list.
The idea of what you just quoted from a Pentagon official is not flat out not correct.
There is no such quote-unquote kill list.
That is, it is nonsense.
It is irresponsible and unfounded reporting.
Okay, but then he admitted in the same exact interview that we had, in fact, given them a list.
In terms of letting buses through, for example.
So of course we've transferred information over to them.
And we have reports that the Taliban are already going around just with captured information that they've garnered from American sources, and they're killing people.
That, of course, is not a shock.
Meanwhile, the people who are actually doing a lot of the hard work in getting people out are private organizations.
It's like Glenn Beck flying jets, flying planes into Afghanistan to try and get people out.
It's American special forces operators going without American governmental permission to go and try and get people out.
According to ABC News, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night, dubbed the Pineapple Express, to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News.
Moving after nightfall, in near pitch-black darkness and extremely dangerous conditions, the group said it worked unofficially in tandem with the U.S.
military and U.S.
embassy to move people, sometimes one person at a time or in pairs, but rarely more than a small bunch, inside the wire of the U.S.
military-controlled side of Khamid Karzai International Airport.
So we weren't sending American troops to do this ourselves.
We were waiting for the American troops to volunteer to do it.
And then we were unofficially working with them, presumably so if they were killed in the process, Biden could deny responsibility.
The Pineapple Express mission was underway Thursday when the attack occurred in Kabul.
A suicide bomber believed to have been an ISIS fighter killed at least 13 U.S.
servicemembers, 10 U.S.
Marines, a Navy corpsman, an Army soldier, another servicemember, and wounded 15 other servicemembers.
They were wounded among the Pineapple Express travelers from the blast.
Members of the group said they were assessing whether unaccounted-for Afghans they were helping had been killed.
As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets, and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to protective custody of the U.S.
military.
That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who'd been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters.
But they had to do it via retired Army special operators.
And by the way, people who were helping them working in like hotel rooms in the United States.
Where the hell is the U.S.
government in all of this?
Well, the answer is they've been busy handing over all power to the Taliban.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so, after August 31st, what exactly happens?
Are we gonna have people who are left on the ground?
Hundreds of thousands of people who were made promises by the United States left on the ground, presumably to die.
The Biden administration has a plan.
Their plan involves trusting the Taliban.
So for the last couple of months, we keep hearing from Joe Biden, I don't trust the Taliban, I don't trust the Taliban.
Weird then that you trust the Taliban.
So Secretary of State Antony Blinken Made the rounds yesterday.
And he explained that after August 31st, there will be no American presence on the ground in Kabul.
So for all the talk about how we are going to exert our best efforts to get people out, we will not have a single human being on the ground in Kabul to make that happen.
So basically, that means that we're going to be bribing people.
That's literally the only way that you get this to happen.
In terms of having an on-the-ground diplomatic presence on September 1st, that's not likely to happen.
But what is going to happen is that our commitment to continue to help people leave Afghanistan who want to leave and who are not out by September 1st, that endures.
There's no deadline on that effort.
And we have ways, we have mechanisms to help facilitate the ongoing departure of people from Afghanistan if they choose to leave.
Oh, they have so many mechanisms, like real mechanisms.
You only have one mechanism and that is bribing the terror group, the Taliban.
And Blinken basically admitted this.
He said, we'll be looking to the Taliban to be our friends and help out now.
I noticed that the Taliban is in fact a giant terror network.
I noticed that.
You may have noticed it as well.
Here's Antony Blinken talking about how the Taliban are our friends now.
I told you, as soon as you cut a deal with terrorists, you become a PR firm for the terrorists.
That's what the Biden administration is now.
You may have seen that just yesterday a very senior Taliban official went on television and radio across the country and repeatedly assured people in Afghanistan that they would have the freedom to travel after August 31st.
He even specifically said those who work for the Americans and those who want to leave for whatever reason will have that freedom.
Now of course we don't take the Taliban at their word, we take them by their deed and that's what we're going to be looking to.
We have more than a hundred countries, 114 countries The international community signed a letter to the Taliban, guys.
That's how we know people are going to get out.
community expects the Taliban to make good on a commitment to let people continue to leave the country after August 31st.
The international community signed a letter to the Taliban guys.
That's how we know people are gonna get out.
Because if there's one thing the Taliban is deeply afraid of, it's the international community.
By the way, during the Taliban's first run, three, count them, three countries even recognized the Taliban as a ruling regime.
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan.
That's it.
So clearly, the kind of pressure that Tony Blinken wants to bring to bear here, you know, the international community writing nasty worded letters to the Taliban leadership, the illiterate Taliban leadership, that's going to work out just fantastically well.
That's the kind of pressure he means to bring to bear.
NSA Jake Sullivan, again, deep incompetent.
He says the same thing.
He says August 31st isn't the real deadline.
We still have mechanisms.
We'll quit the Taliban afterward.
August 31st is not a cliff.
After August 31st, we believe that we have substantial leverage to hold the Taliban to its commitments to allow safe passage for American citizens, legal permanent residents, and the Afghan allies who have travel documentation to come to the United States.
We will use that leverage to the maximum extent, and we will work with the rest of the international community to ensure the Taliban does not falter on these commitments.
Wow, we're gonna work with the international community?
You know, it'd be great.
What if the international community had, like, an international fighting force?
We could call it NATO.
And let's say that we had troops on the ground, preventing the Taliban from taking over the country in the first place with zero American casualties.
What if we just... I don't know, what if we just left that?
I know, crazy idea, right?
No, we threw and we handed over the entire country to these barbarians.
And then we're like, but if we send them a mean message, if we DM them about how we're going to be supes pissed if they don't let people out, then probably they'll be really, really nice.
By the way, here is the text of the overwhelmingly brutal text sent by 114 nations, including Yemen and Zambia.
Wow.
I mean, if I'm the Taliban, I'm running scared from Djibouti.
That's a signatory to this.
Amazing!
They sent a message, guys.
Sure, the Taliban just ran the most powerful military on planet Earth out of the country for no apparent reason.
And sure, the Mujahideen did the same to the USSR.
And sure, the fighters in Afghanistan now believe they can defeat anybody who attempts to do anything to them.
And the evidence of that is that they are now in control of American weaponry.
And sure, they now have the backing of China and all of this, but none of that matters.
By the way, one of the things that you will notice, I'm looking at the letter right now.
You know what country is not a signatory to this?
China.
China is not on this list.
Right?
Isn't that amazing?
So you would think that after all, I mean, everybody is on the same page here, right?
You would think that probably China would be on the list.
You know who else is not on the list of countries?
Russia.
Okay, so China and Russia are not on the list of the government calling for these people to be able to evacuate.
Yeah, it's pretty incredible, is it not?
Here is the text of the list, quote, we are all committed to ensuring that our citizens, nationals and residents, employees, Afghans who have worked with us and those who are at risk can continue to travel freely to destinations outside Afghanistan.
We have received assurances from the Taliban that all foreign nationals and any Afghan citizen with travel authorization from our countries We'll be allowed to proceed in a safe and orderly manner to points of departure and travel outside the country.
We will continue issuing travel documentation to designated Afghans, and we have the clear expectation of and commitment from the Taliban that can travel to our respective countries.
We note the public statements of the Taliban confirming this understanding.
Wow.
Overwhelming, brutal message there.
They told us that they were going to do this, and therefore we note their public statements.
Oh, you can blow their hair back there.
That's some real heavy stuff right there from the international community that just cut and ran in the face of 8th century goat-herding barbarians.
Really tough stuff.
Even Martha Raddatz, who is a pretty reliable voice in favor of Democrats, even she was saying to Tony Blinken, you're saying we should trust the Taliban, aren't you really?
Just about 24 hours ago, a very senior Taliban leader spoke on television and on the radio throughout Afghanistan and repeatedly assured the Afghan people that they would be free to travel after August 31st.
But Secretary Blinken, they do not trust... I mean, I know you say you don't trust the Taliban, but now you're telling me we should trust what the Taliban said.
Those people in hiding... I'm not saying that, Martha.
I'm not saying we should trust the Taliban on anything.
I'm simply reporting What one of their senior leaders said to the Afghan people.
Oh, yeah, I'm not trusting that.
I'm just I'm just reporting what they said.
OK, well, would you report, you know, what Hamas says about their commitments to the international community?
No, you become their propaganda mouthpiece.
That's what this administration has become.
In the same way, the Obama administration became a propaganda mouthpiece for the Iranians.
That's exactly what you have right now.
It's unreal.
And by the way, at the same exact time that the Taliban is pledging that they're going to allow people to travel, They're shooting people!
Okay, Carlotta Gall for the New York Times is reporting.
When Taliban troops seized control of the Afghan capital two weeks ago, the invading units made a beeline for two critical targets, the headquarters of the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications.
Their aim, recounted by two Afghan officials who had been briefed separately on the raid, was to secure the files of Afghan intel officers and their informers, and to obtain the means of tracking the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens.
The speed with which Kabul fell on August 15th was potentially disastrous for hundreds of thousands of Afghans who'd been working to counter the Taliban threat, from prominent officials to mid-level government workers who have since been forced into hiding.
Few officials found the time to shred documents, and thousands of top-secret files and payroll lists fell into the hands of the enemy, two officials said.
So far, the Taliban has presented a moderate face.
But in allying provinces, it's pretty obvious what exactly is happening.
The scale of the campaign is unclear because it's being conducted covertly.
But the fear among Afghans is palpable.
Many people have gone into hiding, changed their locations and telephone numbers, broken off communications with friends and colleagues.
People are texting Americans saying, this may be the last time I text you because they're afraid the Taliban are going to murder them.
But don't worry, they're very trustworthy.
In fact, they are so trustworthy that John Kirby, the spokesperson for the Pentagon, refused to rule out Taliban's involvement in the ISIS attack that claimed 13 American lives the other day.
I understand that you're reliant on them for protection around the airport, but are you ruling out them being involved because you're so dependent on the Taliban right now?
Actually, I didn't hear General McKenzie put it that way, Jen.
In fact, I think in one of the questions he got, and I think it was Idris's, he said, Idris asked, was there a failure?
And the general said, of course, there was a failure somewhere, obviously.
And he even alluded to the fact that it could have been at a Taliban checkpoint.
So we've not been certain about that at all.
They're openly admitting the Taliban could have just let through the ISIS murderers, the suicide bombers that killed 170 people.
But don't worry, we trust them.
I mean, they did make some public statements, says Tony Blinken.
By the way, Kirby was also asked about question... He was also asked about the Taliban releasing ISIS fighters, because that is what happened when they swept into the prisons.
They just opened all the gates.
And Kirby just walked away from the question.
Okay, I think we're gonna call it a day.
We're gonna call it a day, Lucas.
Lucas, I appreciate it very much.
If thousands of ISIS prisoners were released in jail by the Taliban, is that evidence that the Taliban-ISIS might be in...
Bye.
We're done.
catch you later. Because we have to trust the Taliban now, because that's the actual strategy, to trust the Taliban. The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, won't even answer if the Taliban should be given a seat at the UN. Because we have now been forced into this position.
They're holding Americans hostage, and American green card holders, and American allies.
And so they've got the whip hand here. Everybody knows it.
We are the most powerful country in the history of the world, with the most powerful military in the history of the world, and we are being held hostage by a bunch of bedraggled illiterates, who are refugees from the 7th century, now handling our drones.
It's unreal.
Here's the State Department refusing to say whether the United States would have to back Taliban's admission into the UN.
Should the Taliban get the Afghanistan seat at the UN?
These are not questions that we're prepared to answer today.
And we are not prepared to answer them today precisely because we have heard a range of statements from the Taliban.
Some of them have been positive.
Some of them have been constructive.
But ultimately, what we will be looking for, what our international partners will be looking for, are deeds, not words.
So, we'll be looking for deeds, not words.
And also, we're not gonna rule out just admitting them to the family of nations.
All this led yesterday to a dramatic video of the mother of a fallen Marine, Riley McCollum, that's the name of the Marine who died in the last Kabul suicide bombing, blasting Joe Biden.
Now, as a general rule, I do not think that it is worthwhile to focus in on the family members of people who have been tragically slain.
I remember in the aftermath of 9-11, there was this real attempt by the media to push the 9-11 widows and to use them as sort of a front for their political agenda.
I remember Maureen Dowd suggested that they had unchallengeable moral authority, the so-called Jersey Girls, even though what they were saying was not politically super coherent.
But what's good for the goose is good for the gander here.
And if the Democratic Party continues to play this game, where every time there's a bad thing that happens, family members of the slain have unending moral authority, then certainly I think that we should hear from the mother of a fallen Marine, Riley McCollum.
Here is the mother blasting the President of the United States.
I wanted my son to represent our country, to fight for my country, but I never thought that a speckless piece of crap would send him to his death and smirk on television while he's talking about people dying with his nasty smirk.
It is so disgusting that these people cannot even acknowledge the fact that they just killed my son for nothing, for an ill-managed Um, debacle of a freaking withdrawal from a country that we had total control of.
That's what gets me.
Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller also has been making headlines because he is, in fact, as we say, a lieutenant colonel.
He was relieved of his command because he put out a video criticizing senior U.S.
officials for their failures in Afghanistan.
By the way, nobody's been held responsible for any of this.
Has anybody been fired?
Of course, nobody can be fired because this is Joe Biden's top-down policy.
There's no way to fire anybody.
You'd have to fire the president of the United States.
So, this Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel named Stuart Scheller, he put out a two-minute video calling for some sort of answerability from the people at the top of the military chain who presided over this debacle.
Instead, he was relieved of command.
Here is Lieutenant Colonel Scheller.
People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, we messed this up.
Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, hey, it's a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, the strategic air barriers, before we evacuate everyone?
Did anyone do that?
And when you didn't think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, we completely messed this up?
About 18 hours after this Lieutenant Colonel uploaded the video, he posted that he had been relieved of duty.
He said, to all my friends across the social networks, I've been relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence as of 2.30 today.
My chain of command is doing exactly what I would do if I were in their shoes.
I appreciate the opportunities the command provided.
To all the news agencies asking for interviews, I will not be making any statements other than what's on my social platforms until I exit the Marine Corps.
So that of course is no shock.
He says, America has many issues, but it's my home.
It's where my three sons will become men.
America is still the light shining in a fog of chaos.
When my Marine Corps career comes to an end, I look forward to a new beginning.
My life's purpose is to make America the most lethal and effective foreign diplomacy instrument.
While my days of hand-to-hand violence may be ending, I see a new light on the horizon, Semper.
Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden has been responding.
We'll get to the Joe Biden response in just one second.
It is pretty astonishing in its incompetence, as always.
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Alrighty, so in the aftermath of the devastating suicide bombing last week by ISIS that killed 13 Americans, the United States launched a couple of counter-strikes.
The idea was to show Americans that America wasn't just receding on the world stage, that we still had the power to do what we wanted to do.
So, on Friday, USENCOM announced that we had conducted an airstrike against an ISIS-K planter.
Spokesman Captain Bill Erdman said U.S.
military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today.
Notice the language here.
Right?
The reason they keep saying over the horizon is because Joe Biden has said that we are going to be able to conduct counterterrorism from quote-unquote over the horizon, despite the fact that our nearest air bases are going to be in Qatar, which is hundreds of miles away.
And the reality is that if you actually want to do serious damage to your enemy, you have to have eyes and ears on the ground.
You have to have somebody painting the target with a laser.
You have to make sure you know you're hitting the right people.
Okay, so we hit somebody.
We don't know who.
They haven't released any of the names.
We hit somebody who is associated with ISIS with a drone, and Joe Biden basically declared victory.
The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.
Indications are we killed the target.
We know of no civilian casualties, said Urban.
That announcement came a day after Joe Biden vowed to retaliate for a terrorist attack.
And so it is not clear who exactly they killed.
It is not clear exactly how high up they were in the ISIS food chain.
So until we find out that, I think a little skepticism is warranted, given the fact that the Biden administration has literally lied about everything else throughout this entire process.
So if we killed some ISIS higher-ups, then kudos.
If we killed some low-level lackey for ISIS, and this is supposed to somehow alleviate the problem of us having withdrawn from an entire country of 38 million people and handing it over to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS, I have doubts.
It's very much akin to the Bill Clinton strategy of Osama bin Laden bombs a couple of American embassies so we shoot a camel in the ass in Somalia.
It seems a lot more like that.
Meanwhile, there's a second attack in Kabul by the United States.
It was supposedly directed against a series of suicide bombers who had gotten into a car.
That was the initial report.
Now it's turning out that may not be the entire story.
According to CNN, nine members of one family, including six children, were killed in a U.S.
drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul.
A relative of the dead told a local journalist working with CNN.
Now, you always have to wait to see what facts come out here, because you see these sorts of reports in terror-prone regions nearly everywhere.
Every time the United States hits a target, whether it was in Iraq or in Afghanistan, It was very easy to see somebody come out of the woodwork and claim that it had been a big strike against civilians.
You see the same thing every time Israel strikes a Hamas target in the Gaza Strip, for example.
You'll have messengers of Hamas who tried out front to say how many children were killed and that it was really an attack on civilians, etc, etc.
So we'll have to wait to see what is reliable, what is not.
This is at least what CNN is reporting.
The U.S.
carried out a defensive airstrike in Kabul, targeting a senior, targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber who posed an imminent threat to the airport, according to CENTCOM.
The youngest killed was a two-year-old girl, according to a brother of one of those killed.
He said they were an ordinary family. We are not ISIS or Daesh.
This is a family home where my brothers lived with their families.
Neighbors and witnesses at the scene of the drone strike in Kabul told CNN several people were killed, including children.
A neighbor told CNN, quote, Another neighbor told CNN, The U.S.
and brought water to put out the fire, I saw there were five or six people dead.
The father of the family and another young boy.
And there were two children. They were dead.
They were in pieces. There were also two wounded.
Another neighbor told CNN they estimated there might have been 20 people killed in the strike.
Not much is left of their house.
Nothing can be recognized.
They are in pieces.
The US military acknowledged later Sunday there were reports of civilian casualties following the strike.
In an incredibly weak statement, Captain Bill Urban, he said, quote, We know there are substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle, indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties.
It's unclear what may have happened.
We are investigating further.
Bye.
The people on the ground there have been releasing lists of the folks that they claim have been killed, including an Afghan interpreter who's working with the Americans, allegedly.
Again, I say allegedly on all this because all the information is still emerging, so I keep emphasizing that it's uncertain, because in fact, it is uncertain at this point.
The vehicle that was targeted by the U.S.
in Sunday's airstrike was next to a building.
It contained at least one suicide bomber, according to a U.S.
official.
It remains unclear if the vehicle was intended to be a car bomb or if the suicide bomber was using it for transport.
The official says it was loaded up and ready to go.
Apparently, the threat could also have been a car bomb or somebody with a suicide vest, and Urban said that they were assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, but we have no indications at this time.
Also, the United States remains on high alert in the waning hours of the American movement outside of Afghanistan.
They're alert to the possibility of future terrorist attacks.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is focused in on all that which matters.
Apparently, according to the Telegraph in the UK, Joe Biden's advisors have been telling people that he will quote unquote, hold grudges and will punish Britain for Afghanistan because people in Britain have been criticizing him and saying that he is senile.
So I have my doubts.
Number one, that he will remember nearly anything.
I don't think that Joe Biden is in a state to remember nearly anything at this point.
But the fact that he is expending effort at this point, being angry at people when it is so clear that he is not only blown this, but that he's leaving people behind is truly astonishing.
Don't worry.
Within the week, we'll be hearing after the United States withdraws, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of people behind.
We'll be hearing in the coming week, I'm sure, the words of General Hank Taylor, Deputy Director of the Joint Staff for Regional Operations, talking about what a wonderful triumph this was for the United States, even as the Taliban take full control of Kabul.
Here was the General Hank Taylor.
Today I can report an updated total evacuation that is more than 117,000, the vast majority of which are Afghans.
Of this total number, approximately 5,400 are American citizens.
That's a massive win according to the people who bombed the Titanic.
Look how many people we've unloaded.
And yeah, forget about the people we're leaving behind.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show.
That's available right now.
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Joe Biden refuses to answer questions about Afghanistan.
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