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Nov. 10, 2021 - Kash's Corner
33:11
Kash’s Corner: With Many Left Behind in Afghanistan, What Should the US Do Now?
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Hey everybody and welcome back to Cassius Corner.
Predictably our topic for this week continues to be Afghanistan where we started off last week.
Before we kind of dive in, one of the big topics on everybody's mind has been the service members that were killed last week.
One of the probably the worst thing about being in a theater of war is the possibility of losing Americans and soldiers.
And we lost 13 of them this past week in Kabul due to a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that was executed by a terrorist group.
And, you know, in my service in DOD and in other departments, that is the single most hard, difficult thing to endure when you have to go home and inform their families that their loved ones aren't coming home.
And I just wanted to acknowledge the families before we started the show of those that had fallen in the last week.
You know, their loss is not in vain as far as I'm concerned.
They were serving a mission to help others who could not endure that mission themselves.
And so it's a very real way that impacts you when you're serving alongside them or in the DOD community that makes the decisions you make real.
Because, you know, like when I was running the Department of Defense, there's always a lot potential for loss of life in any of these conflicts.
And we had the biggest fatality, unfortunately, since Extortion 17 in 2011.
So it's quite a significant date, and we just wanted to acknowledge it and let the families know that we're with them.
I understand that they've now been airlifted to the U.S. Yeah, so what happens when service members are killed in combat or in a theater of war is there's a process called a dignified transfer.
And they are airlifted on military transport planes with their coffins and the flags draped over them.
And there's a formal transfer of their remains to the family members who are also at Dover, usually with high-level government officials.
And I had to do one when I was chief of staff at Dover just last year.
We lost five soldiers at a helicopter crash in Egypt.
And you go there and the most important thing is you meet with the families.
It's also the most difficult thing I've ever done in my entire career.
You can't help but weep with them.
You can't help but realize the magnitude of their loss and that your decisions could cause you to return to Dover for another dignified transfer.
And of course we do everything we can to avoid that.
But that makes your calculations, especially in a theater of war, so much more precise and necessary and needed to be based on intelligence and sound advice.
And so we try to learn from them, but those are some really hard times, the hardest.
As we're filming, basically the 31st deadline is looming.
So it's going to be past the 31st when this episode airs.
There's a lot of eyes on America and what America is doing, eyes on Afghanistan.
And there's a lot of questions about what really should happen next.
Even like what is the mission at this point, I think.
Yeah, it's a great question that you should ask of any administration that's leading the effort.
Right now it's President Biden's administration.
And unfortunately, I don't know that there is a plan except this so-called withdrawal date of 31 August.
And what I've been telling people lately is this is not a withdrawal.
This is an evacuation.
This is an unconditional surrender of a position in a theater of war we've been in for 20 years.
And we are reacting to situations as they occur.
We are reacting to try and airlift.
American citizens in country out.
We're trying to get Afghan allies that worked with us for decades out of the country are being targeted by terrorists.
And the suicide bombs or the vehicle Born and Prize explosive device from last week make that threat real.
And what I would like to have seen or see now is an actual plan.
My biggest fear is that come 31 August, we are going to leave thousands of Americans stranded in Afghanistan and without a plan to get them home.
And that's going to subject them to becoming hostages of terrorist organizations that are still in country.
And that makes the plan or lack thereof in Afghanistan all the more complicated and all the more deadly.
So, and from what I understand, the Taliban are basically asking for the money that was being transferred to the Afghan government now that I guess the Taliban is at least saying that they're forming the official government.
Well, so it just rewinded a little bit.
Yeah, so the Afghan government was always funded in part by America because the Afghan government didn't have a revenue stream that they could secure to run their entire center of operations.
And now what the Taliban is saying is we, the Taliban, are the government.
We are the Afghan government.
We are the President Ghani government.
So please give us the money to run Afghanistan.
And I don't know what the decision point is going to be for this administration, but it's a critical one.
Are we going to give the Taliban money when we know, and we can get into it in more details, what some of their actions have led to recently?
The 13 soldiers being killed, namely up front is the one that comes to mind.
But there's also the failure of the Taliban to permit American citizens to leave Afghanistan that wanted to leave.
And it's not just their failure.
It's also a failure of this government right now in terms of not going out into the country and retrieving Americans like we should have planned to do ahead of time.
That's why it's not a withdrawal plan.
It's an evacuation, which was highlighted most significantly by our Chinook helicopters literally airlifting Americans off the rooftops of our embassy in Kabul, something we haven't seen since Saigon in 75.
At this exact point of time where we're at, what could be the next steps?
You know, I'm out of government, so I don't know if they'll listen to me or unlikely.
But here's what I know what me and my team would have done.
We would never, and I've outlined previously sort of the conditions-based withdrawal that President Trump was going to, or did implement and did execute when I was running the Department of Defense.
But basically, we were never going to leave Bagram, first and foremost.
It's our center of operations.
You cannot operate in Afghanistan without Bagram.
And what I've been hearing and reading about lately is that the military leaders under this administration, that being the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, gave the advice to this president that they did not need Bagram.
I don't know if that's accurate, but that's what's being reported in media.
And I could not disagree more.
I don't know what intelligence they're looking at because that intelligence hasn't existed in the 20 years we've been in country and I don't think it changed overnight or over the course of a week.
So either that's the position that that's what they were advising him or they advised him they advised President Biden differently and he chose to leave Bagram anyway.
Ultimately the decision is the commander-in-chief.
So the decision was with President Biden and the surrender of Bagram has having cascading effects on not just our machinery and our weaponry, but our ability to go and save Americans who are stranded in Afghanistan.
So tell me a little more about sort of the importance of this base.
Like why is it, why is this such a centerpiece?
So Kabul, you know, and having been there a couple of times, Kabul is basically a civilian runway that is in a valley, meaning it's surrounded by hills.
And so from an operational security perspective, that's not good because you can basically aim down, have height coverage, and you are at a vulnerable position on the ground.
Bagram, which is about 20, 30 miles away from Kabul, was a separate geographic landscape that we, the United States military, owned and were able to securely house our soldiers and NATO soldiers as well.
Our Allied partners were there as well.
Not to mention be the central hub of military transport, helicopters, airplanes, and different kinds of air assets and house machinery, billions of dollars of machinery, not just weapons and bombs and guns and ammunition, but our cyber capabilities, our technological capabilities.
To run a theater of war, you need a logistical, what we call logistical node.
And think about it this way.
If you wanted to run any sort of operation outside of war, you'd need to be able to service the men and women who were there.
You need everything from laundry to food service to mail service to communications equipment to recreation, morale and welfare boosting services.
You need to provide this mini town all the logistical support they needed to function and to operate.
And that's what Bagram was for us, for all of Afghanistan, basically.
It was the lynchpin.
And losing that caused us, I think, a cataclysmic implosion of our security posture in the country.
And we saw the results of it in days with unfortunate bombings by terrorists against our military.
So in this reality, without the lynchpin, as you're describing it, without Bagram, what could be done here at this point?
Well, there's a couple of things.
We could restage to retake Bagram, and that would require some bit of military lift.
And I get that the people in the media and the politicians will say, oh, we're going back into Afghanistan.
Well, we up and left without a plan.
So now it's the time to implement an actual plan, a strategy that will allow us to safely remove American citizens, our weaponry, our machinery, and get out of Afghanistan in a coherent fashion.
If we don't want to go in and retake Bagram, there are other bases around the country that we could shift operations to, should the commander-in-chief decide to do that, to take the logistical component and shift it over there, to take our security requirements and move them over there and to take our allies and house them there along with our soldiers and have it be a point for lift,
as we call it, lift operations for helicopters and airplanes to conduct the necessary security movements in country to remove American citizens safely.
So they could do that.
They could also stage in an outside country near Afghanistan with capabilities to fly in as needed.
Those are multiple options that they could do.
I'm not seeing that they're doing any of them.
So when it comes to leadership in Afghanistan, of course, we have the Taliban.
There's different players.
We have the Taliban.
We have the Haqqani network.
Actually, it would be good to sort of understand the distinction there because, again, there seems to be a bit of confusion about that.
And then, of course, there's the Lion of Panchir in Panchir province in the north, which is basically a kind of declared resistance, right?
So if we're talking about, well, first, let's just put to bed this notion that there's a distinction between the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
When the Haqqani network was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States government in 2012 under the Biden-Obama administration, which was the right thing to do, their name, their formal name is the Taliban-Haqqani Network.
There is no distinction in terms of one group versus the other in terms of their terroristic capabilities.
Now, they, as a branch of the Taliban, tend to be more violent.
They are the ones that kidnap most of our hostages.
They are the ones, I believe, who are currently holding Mark Fryricks for the last two years in the AFPAC region.
He's a former Navy officer who was kidnapped about two years ago.
And I believe they're holding him.
And I don't know what's become of that.
But the notion that the Taliban is not in touch with their partner organization, who are the Taliban-Haqqani Network, I can't believe that this State Department just this last week said they were two totally separate organizations.
They're not.
In terms of leadership, this is the other question people are dodging, which is, well, who's going to run Afghanistan?
That's the whole point.
It's never going to be us under President Trump.
He wanted out because America didn't want to be there forever.
So you have to let the people whose country it is come together and work a negotiated peace.
Now, whether you like them or hate them, the Taliban number in the hundreds of thousands and have been in Afghanistan for decades.
It's their country.
It's also the country of the Afghan nationals who have been in Afghanistan for decades.
So these are two big organizations, two big groups of people who have controlled factions of the government for years, and they need to be able to govern together without America's presence.
But in order to do that, you have to engage them.
And I'm not saying that the Taliban are good people.
Most of the Taliban are not.
Most of the Taliban want to hurt American interests.
But you can't have it both ways.
You can't say we're leaving and not talk to the Taliban and say, will you negotiate a peace with the Afghan government so you can rule together jointly?
That was always our plan.
So yes, we did negotiate with them, but we put conditions in place to make sure that our citizens and service members were protected and the withdrawal was done in an orderly fashion.
And that's the difference between that withdrawal and what you're seeing now as an evacuation.
I don't know who in this government is currently talking to the Taliban or the Afghans or moving money.
I'm not sure of any plan.
I've looked, I've asked around, and I just don't see one.
Well, and so then what about the North?
So the North is very historical in Afghanistan.
And this guy, Massoud, who is running this northern province or this valley up there, his father was the same guy who cleared that area of Afghanistan against, at the time, the Soviets and others.
And so it's a very historical region for these people who live there, and they wanted to be there.
So that's another faction you have to take into consideration.
And it's sort of a repeat of history in that that region was cleared by the so-called Lion of Panjier back in 91 for the same reasons, because the Soviets' attempt to secure Afghanistan failed, and they wanted to make sure they had their own home territory.
So now this government's going to have to go ahead and deal with that reality, fast forward to 2021.
And that's, I think, also where Amarallah, the first vice president and now saying he's the president of Afghanistan is in that.
I guess it's anybody who's deciding to be not aligned with the Taliban has gone there.
Well, that's one of the problems when you have a collapse of a government and sort of have an implosion as we have in Afghanistan.
Many people are going to lay claim to be leaders of the Afghan people or regions in Afghanistan, not just the Taliban.
And you have to be able to bring those people together.
And that is the only way you are going to successfully have a government in place in Afghanistan.
And it's going to be hard.
It's not easy.
I've been on the ground.
I was negotiating with Ghani in just December of this last year with the Secretary of Defense.
This is not an easy task.
But you have to have those conversations.
You have to have those meetings.
And you have to have assistant mechanisms in place along the way to allow them to have a quid pro quo, if you will, for lack of a better term, in terms of the representations each side makes.
But no one's talking, from the best of my knowledge.
We were talking about the distinction between the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
What about ISIS and ISIS-K?
I think that could be lost on a number of people.
Well, great question.
And let's throw Al-Qaeda in there too so we can sort of delineate the distinctions.
Look, ISIS is the global terrorist organization that was and used to be led by Baghdadi before we took them out.
They broke off of al-Qaeda around 2011-12.
It was Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which became ISIS.
They have different interests in terms of how they operate.
They both hate America.
That's their common goal.
But they don't, they being Al-Qaeda and ISIS don't get along.
An example of that is in Afghanistan.
If you go to the north near the Mazr Sharif region, ISIS-K, or what's known as ISIS-Khorasan province, that's the region up there in Afghanistan, was fighting al-Qaeda.
And since we knew they were fighting each other and not us under the Trump administration, we let that continue because it's two terrorist organizations that have been designated that are fighting each other.
We don't need to be in the middle of that.
But what they did was in this evacuation, in this vacuum and implosion, they realized that they being ISIS-K and Al-Qaeda realized that they don't need to be fighting each other right now.
They can inflict a lot more pain in American interests, which is ultimately their goal.
It's always their number one priority is how do we hurt America and Americans.
And with little resources, you saw ISIS-K, a faction of ISIS.
So they have a official alliance with ISIS headquarters, for lack of a better word, and they are run by a separate emir of ISIS-K.
They implemented a plan and caused car bombs to explode at a gate that was supposed to be secured by the Taliban and that allowed ingress to the airport so that people could board flights to leave the country.
They knew that was probably one of the only gates doing that.
And they knew that if they just drove one or two of their cars in there, it would inflict mass casualties.
And I think a total, not just our service members, but a total of 200 or so people were killed in that explosion.
And they can do that with very little resources when they direct their attention against us.
And Al-Qaeda is doing the same thing.
And the Khani network and the Taliban are doing the same thing.
They know right now that affecting a significant loss of life for America is achieving their number one priority.
And I don't know that they're going to stop because there's nothing there to deter them from that activity anymore.
What do you make of the fact that the Taliban are facilitating, I guess, the movement of Americans and these SIV visa holders, or at least that from the information we're getting.
Yeah, I don't think they're helping really at all.
I think they're doing just the opposite and claiming that they're helping.
And the fact that right now we have an administration who has said, how are we going to rescue American citizens stranded in Afghanistan, they're going to ask the same Taliban whose security measures failed and led to the bombings that killed 13 U.S. service members.
I don't agree with their approach on this.
Our approach was very different.
It was we would go out and get Americans and secure their security before allowing the Taliban to get more of a peace settlement negotiated at the table.
And so I don't agree with this approach, and I don't believe the Taliban, the Taliban has changed their course.
They've now said publicly, since you broke, you President Biden broke the negotiated peace settlements that we were talking about in May, they publicly said we're going to wait you out.
And they have now waited him out and are taking over and are running past the August 31st deadline.
And they are not providing security in and around Kabul like they should be.
And so I have no trust in them right now to do anything on behalf of America.
So given the current reality, you know, how do you get these remaining people out?
Well, one, the only people I would currently trust to do that is America to get Americans out, maybe with the assistance of our allies, but most of our allies are now gone.
And it's Afghanistan.
Just to remind everyone, the roads are terrible.
There's no public transportation.
Security posture is terrible.
It is a theater of war.
So the only capable group to do that is the United States military and our intelligence community.
And the only way you can effectively put them out into the country without more loss of life is by having an intelligence-driven plan as to locate where our Americans are.
Now, that takes some time.
And I would have hoped and thought that our government would have been planning for this for these last eight months, planning to locate these Americans because and if the worst happened, we would be able to evacuate them safely, that there would be airplanes and helicopters ready with security personnel, weapons if needed for our military to go out and get them.
These types of operations require extensive planning from our DOD, from our IC.
They require briefings at the White House.
They require an assessment given by the leaders of our different agencies and departments and a recommendation of the President of the United States.
And ultimately, in this type of situation, either a green light from the president or full stop.
And you can't do that overnight.
So that's why, again, I go back to the point that this is an evacuation operation, which is totally reactionary.
And they themselves have said people are going to be left behind.
And for me, as an American who served, and I'm sure I share this with so many others, that's unacceptable, that there is no plan in place to remove every single American.
In the last few days, we've had, for example, one group of civilians, you know, ex-special operators, with some people actually on the ground and some people working out of like, you know, their bedrooms in San Diego, coordinating networks and this sort of nature.
There's been a bit of this kind of civilian effort.
Lara Logan has been involved.
This was Mike Brewer with his team.
We've had him on American thought leaders recently.
These activities are still happening.
And in fact, they're kind of promising to continue with these activities in whatever way they can.
So here's the reality.
Those activities, in my opinion, should never have had to happen.
Having civilians take up the role of government in a theater of war, I think, is the ultimate failure of the national security apparatus.
But Americans are so instilled with the belief to do the right thing and not leave Americans behind that I'm glad these individuals are coming together and banding together and going to continue these efforts.
I've been a part of some of these efforts and probably will engage more heavily in the near future on getting Americans and getting Afghans out.
Because you're right, we and the individuals I served with aren't going to stop when we hit August 31st.
We're going to keep going.
We've been sending information there.
We've been working on our allies and our friends on the ground.
And they have successfully removed a lot of people.
But it's going to require, I think, months worth of more work.
And if this administration isn't going to do it, I'm glad these folks that you're talking about are doing it.
And we're going to continue to be a part of it.
Well, and this also raises an interesting question.
You know, so there is, of course, a significant number of Afghanis that have worked with the Americans who are looking to get out because they have targets on their backs, literally from having worked with Americans in the first place.
And of course, there may be also other people who are just, you know, would want to take the opportunity to get out.
And of course, there may be people who have ill intent and want to take advantage of this chaotic situation, right?
Have you thought at all about how this should be dealt with in a reasonable way?
Because of course it makes perfect sense to support the people that have been supportive of Americans.
How could you not, right?
Yeah, from a general principle, I agree with that.
If you've helped us in the past, especially in theaters of war, then in a time like this, we should be able to help them in return.
It reminds me of the situation in Iraq in 2011, 2012, when there was a large-scale invasion to go into Iraq and re-up in that theater of war.
And we lifted many of our partners, airlifted many of our allies and partners out back to the United States.
And as you said, principally that's the right thing to do.
And I agree with that.
The problem then, and that's the problem I'm going to get to about now, is that some of the individuals that were transported to the United States of America were actually ISIS.
And it took us months to figure that out and find them because we didn't do an appropriate vetting procedure against them.
So fast forward to Afghanistan.
We are moving way more people out at a much higher rate of speed by the tens of thousands are arriving to military bases in the U.S. And you have to have a plan to vet people in country in place if you're going to vet them properly.
That is run them through the entire intelligence community, run them through the CIA, the NSA, the DOD, the DIA, and all these other databases and let our intelligence officers digest the information and the people that we're evacuating.
You can't do that in an evacuation that's caused as an emergency reaction to a situation.
You can't do that when you transport tens of thousands of people to America.
Now, I want every single one of the people that has helped us to be evacuated safely.
But the reality of the situation, the fear I have is there was no vetting procedure to look at these people's backgrounds.
And now they are in U.S. soil and there is no plan.
And so what we were going to do with them, these folks can't live on military bases their entire lives or even that long.
They're civilians from a foreign country.
And knowing al-Qaeda, how they operate, knowing ISIS and how they operate, knowing the Haqqani network and the Taliban and how they operate.
Yeah, I don't have access to the intelligence anymore.
But I'm telling you, those guys are taking advantage of the airlifts out of there to place their operatives on these planes so they can get a free ride to America.
And my fear is that they're going to start inflicting harm on U.S. soil.
And our vetting procedures just did not exist to the measure they needed to or to how we normally do it.
And so with the numbers that they've allowed in country, look, I hope I'm wrong.
And I hope everyone here is clear and innocent and wants to succeed in America.
But I just don't see how mathematically that can be possible with the amount of people we've let in the country.
But you're saying with adequate, strong vetting procedures and the right amount of time, this is conceivable.
Yeah, we do these vetting procedures all over the world.
It's not like they don't exist.
We don't just do them in theaters of war.
We don't just do them in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia and Iraq.
We do them all over the country.
Look, the U.S. is conducting operations or helping our allies all over the world.
And if we have, you know, informants that help us, if we have allies that help us on the ground in different locations, in whatever country, there is a system in place to help protect those people if their lives are jeopardized or if their families' lives are threatened.
So we have procedures in place to remove them.
And the vetting process is critical to that.
It's the critical first step to make sure we're removing people who actually have America's interests at heart.
And while it's not 100%, it is very close to 100% if done correctly.
And we just haven't done that now.
So what's the next step?
But this in your mind?
Well, I think we have to then, now with everybody that has hit American soil, we have to extensively vet them here.
Now, I don't know what the plan is in place to do that while they're housed on American military bases, but I would be putting together teams of intelligence officers, of national security officials, law enforcement, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and I would be sending these teams out to these separate bases and one by one,
categorically and methodically go through these individuals, look for what we call derogatory information in our databases, and run all those names against criminal databases that we have, Interpol databases that are available to us, and talk to our allies and partners about their connections in different parts of the world.
And that's how you do a full scrub to see if we, as America, believe they don't pose a security threat to our interests here.
That is a gigantic lift that requires, like in Afghanistan, it would have, an extensive planning operation.
And I haven't seen that from this administration.
So Cash, as we finish up here, you know, we've been seeing some pretty terrifying looking graphics of how much U.S. weaponry, for lack of a better word, vehicles and so forth, has been left in country and so forth.
But there's also been reports that they've been unable to use, for example, the Black Hawk helicopters that were left behind.
So, you know, what do you make of this?
Is there some way remaining to salvage this?
Well, part of our conditions-based withdrawal under President Trump was we would remove all the weapons and machinery that we could.
And the last thing we would do once we had secured a peace negotiation was we would destroy the remaining weaponry in country that we couldn't lift out.
To me, there's no distinction on the harm to America on whether or not you can or can't operate a certain piece of equipment or whether or not you can or can't operate a Blackhawk or what we call cruise service weapons or munitions or bombs, because they're there.
They're there for our enemies to examine.
They can break them open and look at our complicated, secure infrastructure systems, such as a Blackhawk, such as tanks, such as armored personnel carriers, and they can reverse engineer how to make things that will harm us.
They can use the components from that, from those equipment and machinery to inflict pain on us.
And it is a strategic misstep of the highest order to leave $85 some billion dollars worth of equipment in Afghanistan.
The people that now have it, terrorists, and make no mistake, that's who's taking this equipment.
We've all seen the photos, are going to use this equipment and technology for years against the United States of America.
And I think the fact that we have evacuated and surrendered Afghanistan without a plan, again, is highlighted by this failure to secure our equipment.
And it's not only just going to hurt American interests, it's going to hurt our allies' interests, which they've spoken up about tremendously because the defense industrial complex in America is second to none in the world.
We provide our allies with helicopters and jets.
We build the best stuff.
We have the best rifles.
We have the best weaponry.
And now the terrorists have all of it.
And that's not good.
And this 85 billion number, I've heard it a lot.
I've heard very different numbers too.
Where does that come from?
So it's the best guesstimate that we can come up with, that I can come up with with the information that's publicly available.
You have to remember, two decades, $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan.
How much of that equipment has been shuttered throughout the country?
How much wasn't collected?
How much has been stolen?
How much has been given away?
Based on the public reporting of armored personnel carriers, tanks, jeeps, weapons, munitions, ordnances, helicopters, that's our best guesstimate as a ballpark figure of what was taken.
Well, Cash, you know, I think it's time for our weekly shout-out.
Yeah.
So this week's shout-out goes to Eric Reinhold, aka Rhino.
He's a big supporter of Cash's Corner and also a local hockey player in the community.
And we appreciate your support to our program.
And also congratulations on your upcoming wedding.
All right, everybody.
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