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Aug. 17, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:15:20
20210817_bidens-afghanistan-blame-game-with-robert-oneill-a
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Megan Kelly and Neill Bio 00:02:14
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
Today, more fallout in Afghanistan.
And Biden, who says, I stand squarely behind my own decision, in fact, seems to be pointing the finger at anyone and everyone else.
He took responsibility for nothing yesterday, and very little's changed other than assurances that he is going to get our personnel out of the embassy, that he is going to try to get the Afghans who helped us out to safety, though very unclear how he's going to do that.
We're sending another 6,000 troops in.
After we withdrew, the some odd 2,500 left.
And the condemnation against him remains near universal.
Some of the more leftist media personalities, such as Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace, are starting to defend Biden.
But this is a humiliating moment for him.
The images that came out of Afghanistan yesterday are nauseating.
They were completely unnecessary, and they are on him.
So we're going to be joined today with a reaction from.
Rob O'Neill and why he's feeling disgusted by what he's seeing.
O'Neill changed his Twitter bio description of himself to, quote, just a dude who fought for this country for no reason.
So Rob's here, and we're going to talk to Rick Grinnell, former acting director of national intelligence, former ambassador to Germany, on the finger pointing at Trump and whether, in fact, some of this is Trump's fault and whether Donald Trump would be sitting there right now watching the Taliban take over in Afghanistan without doing anything.
which is essentially the implication.
What do you think?
Going to get to our guest in one minute, a quick ad, and we'll get right to it.
Rob, how are you doing?
I'm well, Megan.
How are you?
I'm good.
Oh, my gosh.
I'm so happy that you're here.
I'm dying to talk to you about everything that's going on.
Let's just start where I left off yesterday, which is what do you think of the Biden remarks?
Bagram Escape and Responsibility 00:15:09
Well, it's one thing to say the buck stops here, and then it's another thing to take responsibility.
He took zero responsibility.
He did what a lot of people do nowadays.
They come out.
Blame Trump, not my fault.
Buck stops here though, even though it doesn't.
I think he came out, he read a speech someone else wrote for him and he left.
Yeah, right.
He gave it lip service.
The buck stops with me.
But then the rest of the speech was, but it's Trump's fault and the Afghan army's fault and the Afghan government's fault.
And literally, there wasn't one moment in which he took responsibility for anything.
No.
And this is, there's so much going on here.
This is something that happens when you just surround yourself with yes men.
And that's what a lot of people do.
I mean, to include military people, you get up to a certain rank in the military, up to the colonel or general officer or admiral level.
Everyone surrounds you to tell you exactly what you want to hear, even if it's fake.
And every general and admiral tells the politicians what they want to hear because everybody wants a job as a contractor or in government once they're done with the military.
And it's all very personal to them.
And that's it.
So when they're being told yes, anyone on the ground could have told you that most of the Afghans are going to throw down their guns and run away.
And if you look at the pictures of the people coming out, they have a C 17 full of I don't know how many hundreds of people.
They're all males.
600.
All males.
Yes, it's like only a smattering of women.
Yeah, they're talking about women and children that are going to get brutalized and raped and murdered by the Taliban, yet they don't even take them with them.
We could have seen a lot of that coming.
They were never ready to, and that's, you know, that's a lot of it's our fault.
We trained them as best we could, but some of them were just there because we gave them an easy paycheck.
Just like President Ghani, he left.
He put so much cash that the American taxpayers gave him in a helicopter, they couldn't even close it.
So that's where your money goes to him.
He left.
He's out of there.
Unbelievable.
Right.
I know their leader did flee, there's no question.
And a lot of the Afghans just laid down their arms.
But some now are defending some people who I respect and really like Mark Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute, General Jack Keane.
Who orchestrated the surge?
He was the one who, the architect of it in Iraq, the successful surge.
They've come out and said, Biden is a little out of line in going after these Afghan soldiers.
They were saying they were doing fine when they had American air support and intel.
And once we decided to stop doing that and sort of ceased combat operations, the Americans back in 15, the Afghans shed a lot of blood and treasure.
That they had some odd 53,000, 57,000 of them dead, 2,500, I think, just this year, that they did fight.
They tried, but it It wasn't easy.
They couldn't do it without our actual support once we decided we weren't providing that.
Yeah, I've been in gunfights a lot, and it's definitely better when air support is on your team.
It's definitely a force multiplier for obvious reasons.
And they didn't have air support and they were used to it.
And the Taliban's always been saying the entire time we were there that the Americans have the clocks, but we have the time.
We can't stay in Afghanistan forever.
That's pretty obvious.
We shouldn't have been there with that many people for that long.
We basically had it one.
In 2004, I think there was no improvised explosive devices.
You could drive around.
I used to drive a motorcycle around Jalalabad.
We could eat at the shawarma stands.
You know, we don't do that anymore.
It's just, there's so much going on.
And these are, I mean, to a lot of people too, this is just a political thing.
You know, no war, no war.
They've never been there.
These are real people.
If you're hanging on to a jet that's taking off thinking you're going to hold on because that's how bad it is on the ground, something went bad.
And I mean, the Taliban are serious.
Everyone we captured that's still alive is out.
And, It's just, it's a complete mess.
It could have been done a lot easier, a lot better.
It never needed to be a, we're either going to leave or we're going to be all out war.
There's airfields there in Kabul, in Bagram, in Jalalabad.
Keep those open.
You don't even need to have people go off base that aren't locals.
You know, keep the air support.
And the Taliban shows up in trucks.
They come in convoys.
Well, now they have Humvees and MRAPs, but they come in trucks and convoys from madrasas in Pakistan.
Bomb them.
You have to do it.
It sucks.
You know, war is not fun, war is not pretty.
I don't recommend it to anybody, but that's what you have to do if you're dealing with evil, which we are.
Well, that's the thing.
So, we had all these troops over there, and that's some 14,000 plus when Trump said, you know, we got to withdraw that, we got to come up with a different deal.
And then it was down to 2,500 when Biden started to just pull the troops over the summer during the height of the fighting season.
And the Afghans were left high and dry.
I mean, they really didn't really have any support.
And even though Biden says, oh, they were 300,000 strong, Without the air support, most military experts are saying they didn't really have much of a chance against the Taliban, who were more determined.
The Afghan forces weren't getting paid, the corruption at the top, they weren't getting fed in all these instances.
And so their hearts weren't necessarily in it.
Whereas the Taliban, for them, this is a totally different jihadist mission.
Can we talk about that moment, though, with that?
Is it a C 17, Rob?
The aircraft?
Okay.
So it's an American C 17 leaving.
The airport, and you see all these Afghans running to get on it.
And I'll tell you again, Mark Thiessen starts a column for the Washington Post, he writes weekly, and as follows On September 11th, 2001, Americans literally fell from the sky.
Jumping from the top floors of the World Trade Center to escape the fires set by Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that aided and abetted them.
Today, almost two decades later, it is our Afghan allies who are falling from the sky after clinging to the fuselage of a U.S. military aircraft taking off from the Kabul airport in a desperate effort to escape the Taliban regime.
He says, the debacle President Biden has unleashed in Afghanistan today is the most shameful thing I've witnessed in over three decades in Washington.
I mean, that was a shocking image to see the three, at least three.
People died falling from the aircraft that they couldn't get on.
They thought somehow it would take them out, that they could escape, they could live holding on to the outside of the airplane.
We got on as many as we could, but some grabbed on the outside and their fate was sealed.
And it really was, it struck me too, the juxtaposition between I know the people you fought for, the people you were thinking about when you went in to kill bin Laden, the woman who had to jump from the top of the World Trade Center, and those guys falling from a plane, whatever you think of them, these are people who were told had been helping us and we just abandoned them.
Yeah, these were, if they're holding on to a plan like that, they had definitely had something to do with the Americans and the Taliban, knew who they were.
And that's what they're doing now.
And again, to humanize what happens, I always say that it doesn't matter what you feel, if you portray calm, people around you will be calm.
But if you panic, other people will panic.
And if people start leaving the front lines running for cover, more people are going to be inclined to do that.
It's like in SEAL training when someone quits, someone looks at him and goes, well, if he can't make it, I can't make it, then he'll go quit.
It's just a sympathetic.
Reaction that happens naturally.
And gunfights are scary.
And the Taliban has been gearing up for this in Pakistan, which is a whole different conversation to have.
Why didn't we just move on from Afghanistan into where we know they all are in Pakistan?
But yeah, I mean, it gets scary.
People quit.
And then they start thinking about their families.
What if they get out, but then their kids don't?
The Taliban, I don't really care what they say on some news network.
They're not mostly peaceful.
These are horrible, horrible people.
They are capable of doing something to another human being that shouldn't even be run through your head.
It's so bad.
I know it's kind of people are watching them in most instances hold their fire right now as we effectively surrender.
I mean, they're holding their fire to let us surrender and we're going to get out and then they're going to have complete control.
And then our Afghan allies are going to be left to the Taliban's evil forces and desires.
And what are we going to do then?
Now we're not even going to have an Air Force base or any sort of base.
To go back in through, you know, from which to regain control or provide security.
It's done.
They're being smart.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Just lie to everybody.
Tell them you're going to be peaceful.
Let the Westerners leave.
They're even, you know, even though a lot of those reporters, there's one in particular that I give her credit even for being there.
She was saying they're peaceful.
They're really not.
But just to show your face in a place like that with the Taliban, that does take guts.
Maybe because they can't quite get out yet.
And the Taliban's going to leave them there.
But I mean, there's a lot more going on to this, too.
You'll notice the Russian embassy didn't close down.
They're not getting overrun.
China will be in there soon.
It's all working into their hands.
It all comes down to the weakness this administration is showing worldwide.
You know, President Biden, yesterday he came out and basically said, Look, I understand how hard this is for the troops who fought.
He said, I realize it's deeply personal.
These images are crushing, it's painful for the vets.
You had some thoughts for President Biden I saw on Twitter.
What do you want to say to him?
He seems to be trying to show empathy for the veterans who fought.
This was just, I'm hoping, like I said, I think earlier, that I'm hoping some senior advisors were telling him this is a bad idea.
I'm hoping he knows it was a bad idea.
Everyone knew Kabo was going to fall.
Not a lot of us knew it was going to fall this soon.
And it's just, it's a shame to, I mean, I don't want to start naming people.
I know that died over there.
And now it's like a for what?
It's like we never even went there.
And we, you know, you got young Marines and airmen and soldiers walking through minefields watching their buddies get blown up.
And we just gave it all back to them without a fight.
I mean, a fight that wouldn't, it's going to cost us more to fly in from aircraft carriers now and refuel or from different bases in the Middle East, refueling long, long flights just to, you know, Throw bombs at people that they could have done in a matter of minutes if we kept Bagram.
I mean, Bagram alone would have been enough.
We had enough air power, enough ways to defend ourselves.
And without the need, I mean, maybe we should have realized okay, maybe we shouldn't be out there trying to build schools and keep the peace, but we do need to, for our own national security, because if you think ISIS and Al Qaeda aren't coming in too, and they'll all work together with, you know, they don't mess with China because China will do what warriors need to do.
And they know they'll kill them bad, but if they don't mess with them, they won't mess with each other.
I would just tell them that it does seem like it's in vain.
I have no doubt that President Biden has a big heart.
But he's been wrong about a lot of foreign policy things.
And I was showing my frustration because it's hard to watch these Taliban, these Taliban in our weight rooms, on our treadmills, knowing that they're in the presidential palace.
We shouldn't be bombing them right now.
It doesn't matter where they are now.
If the president's not there, I mean, the president of Afghanistan is not there.
It's not his palace.
The Taliban are inside with their leadership, taking selfies, hit them with a few JDAMs.
Well, we're going a different way.
We're not interested in that fight anymore.
I mean, Biden made that very clear.
And You know, has struck this agreement like we're not going to hit them and they're not going to hit us as we tuck tail and run.
His point yesterday was no more American bloodshed.
You know, I'm going to be the one to do it.
I'm going to be the one to get us out.
I'm just going to play the soundbite so folks can listen.
I stand squarely behind my decision.
We were clear eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency, but I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
So, what's happened?
How many more lives, American lives, is it worth?
How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
I'm clear on my answer.
I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past.
After 20 long years of bloodshed, the events we're seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan.
When I ran for president, That I would bring America's military involvement in Afghanistan to an end.
While it's been hard and messy, and yes, far from perfect, I've honored that commitment.
What do you make of that, Rob?
Yeah, I mean, it is going to be messy, but again, it's not a black and white decision to stay all out or just leave, and it shouldn't be made like this one is as a political talking point.
It shouldn't just be a distraction, something we talk about and then get rid of it.
This is very serious.
There are people being tortured as we speak.
And it's horrifying what they're going to go through.
There's going to be a lot more bloodshed.
And I mean, there's going to be more combat when we have to send airborne troops back in there to get.
We're already sending 6,000 troops back in there right now.
Right.
I mean, which we wouldn't have had to do if we had handled this appropriately.
Right.
It doesn't.
Why are you going to take them out just to put them back in?
It doesn't make any sense.
If we've been there for 20 years, we should know what's going to happen if we just leave like that.
We know Bagram well, and we could have maintained that and had a more peaceful transition.
You know, slowly letting the Afghans do all the work by themselves.
But even when we were working, in my experience anyway, working with the Afghans, they were never, they weren't, we would call them Afghan led missions, and nothing could be further from the truth.
And a lot of people that I know, because these are people that'll either show up for work one day or won't and just say, Well, God willing, God didn't want me to come to work today, so I didn't.
You know, they need to get more serious about what it's going to be like to fight without as much air support as they're used to it with us.
We didn't do a proper handover.
And it's easy to say this stuff from Camp David at the White House because you're not seeing the horrors of what's going on now.
But wait, so let's walk through that.
Because I've heard it both ways when it comes to the Afghan soldiers, as I mentioned, Jack Keane, Mark Thiessen.
And in fact, let me just play the Jack Keane soundbite so we know what we're talking about.
This is him.
He's not exactly defending the Afghan military, but he's trying to explain what really went on here.
Here, listen to him.
And I would like to point out a couple of factual errors in those remarks that deal with his defense of his decision.
When he's saying that the Afghans are not willing to fight, that's not telling the whole story.
They have suffered over 50,000 casualties.
What happened this year is the United States said to the Afghan security forces and to their government that we are no longer willing to support.
Your efforts.
And as a result of that, that had an incredibly adverse impact on them, knowing full well that would be the first time that they've ever not had air support and robust intelligence to enable their fighting.
The Afghans have fought in the past.
They are not a strong military by any means, and anyone who's been in Afghanistan knows that.
But with U.S. enablers, what we were able to achieve is a stalemate.
We pulled the plug on them, and they collapsed.
That's a fact.
Leaving Forces Behind 00:15:54
They have fought and they certainly have suffered.
And Thiessen was pointing out as well.
He says there's not a single U.S. ally in the world that could defend itself without U.S. help.
He's saying to say, you know, as Biden suggested yesterday, these guys are just not willing to fight is libelous because they did.
This is Thiessen saying in January 2015, Afghan forces assumed full responsibility for combat.
U.S. combat deaths dropped to an average of about 17 a year.
During the same period, between 53,000 and 57,000 Afghan soldiers were killed in action.
He says to Today, to say they weren't willing to fight is libelous, but you know, they couldn't do it without the U.S. mission planning, intel, and air support that had enabled them to succeed.
So, which is it?
Is it that they were trying to fight, it's just not possible without some U.S. air support, or there are a bunch of derelicts who wouldn't fight for their country?
And so, why should we?
No, I'm not saying they're derelicts.
I, you know, I've worked with them quite a bit.
I just don't think they had the capabilities that we did, especially with our air support, obviously.
And General Keene hit it pretty much on the head.
Once we left, we left.
But the problem is, we're We've been treating them with kid gloves for so long.
Yeah, maybe we let them patrol the streets of Kabul and a couple places like that.
But look up, I mean, Kandahar, we never really had anyway.
The Taliban's pretty much owned that the entire time.
And again, I mean, it's a fair factor.
I'm not there with them right now.
I don't know where their minds are.
I just, if you have an army that doubles the size of the other army and they lose in a few days, someone wasn't fighting.
Something's gone very wrong.
So do you believe, as Biden said, that, look, we needed to go like another five years, another one year, another 20 years?
The Afghan forces wouldn't have done any better.
This isn't our battle, and it's sad, but bye.
Yeah, I mean, it's very sad.
And think about all the, you know, everything that we've lost.
Of course, the lives that were lost there are Americans and coalition forces, all the money that we wasted there.
And, you know, we just leave everything behind, everything from flat screen TVs to vehicles and weapons, which the Taliban now have all of.
I mean, yeah, I mean, we have enough smart people, I think, in the Pentagon to have figured out a better way to do this.
And like I said, I really hope they were telling the president that.
I don't think, well, I don't really think it matters what he thinks anyway, because there's people behind the scenes making these decisions and writing these speeches.
There's just no, I mean, I did say a couple of years ago we should have been out there.
Out of there because they don't want our form of democracy.
They've proven that maybe they did in the cities, but we didn't.
I mean, we pulled the rug right out from under them.
And it's just, it's, it's, this doesn't make me happy at all.
Yeah.
But what's out of there?
What's out of there?
Right.
Cause it's like you can take away the 15,000 fighting forces that we had over there when Trump made that decision.
But, you know, wouldn't a few thousand have been able to at least hold the status quo?
You know, it's like, no, it's not ideal to have us in perpetuity running these, you know, this air support and this intel for them.
But, I can see the argument that it's much better than the alternative, which is vacuum, void, Taliban in control, new base for Al Qaeda.
Like, was it so bad when our troops were there over the past few years just providing support?
We've got tens of thousands over in Japan, South Korea, Germany.
I'm not sure why it was so necessary to pull the last few thousand.
That's got to be just politics or bad policy, but we're one of the same.
Yeah, but no, it's not that bad over there.
There's a The airfield, there's a base on the airfield in Jalalabad where I stayed for a few months.
It was like a European resort, full with like a bar, a dance floor.
They have green bean coffees at Kabul and karaoke night and paved roads.
And it's not, I mean, it's not all driving through.
I mean, everyone that raised their hand for this country, I respect them all.
But not everybody's out there doing the really, really hard work that a lot of the people who died aren't getting the credit for.
And I don't like the long term effect.
This is like, Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.
And we knew they were going to come back, but then we just forgot about it.
And then they came back.
And they build their bases there to keep enough of the ideology going on and the fanaticism, especially with our open southern border and more importantly, our open northern border.
They haven't forgotten about us.
We're the paper tiger.
And I'm worried about the homeland.
If they have camps over there and can get people into this country, they'll do it.
And they'll get them right to Times Square if they can.
Yeah.
And you tell me whether, how can we run counterterrorism operations?
In Afghanistan, when we're not in there, right?
Like from the Gulf.
Like, what, how are we going to do that?
Well, we lost a major foothold there because we have, you know, we have the stands up north and Russia, we get China over there and Iran, and we're right in the middle of them when we can do everything from run sources to have spy aircraft fly over them.
It's just more difficult now.
Some of the, we'll be able to monitor from up above, but it's going to be a lot harder to run sources, especially, I mean, if I was an Afghan right now, I wouldn't want to be a source for Americans.
Right, right.
Of course, after the way we just treated them, there's been heartbreaking reporting coming out about people who helped us, not just the translators, but all sorts of guys.
I mean, you're in a better position to talk about that than I am, but there were a lot of Afghans helping our troops.
And they're coming out now saying, oh my God, you know, this is just, here's one of them.
I just pulled one testimonial.
I don't know what the U.S. did to us, says this one guy.
We're betrayed.
We're trapped.
We're waiting behind a closed door for someone to come and haul us outside and execute us in front of our family.
This is so terrible.
We will not survive.
This is Deseret News and name withheld a guy out of Kabul, Afghanistan, who spent 10 years as a vehicle contractor for the U.S. military.
His special immigrant visa applications were repeatedly rejected because of errors in the recommendation letters from his U.S. supervisors.
So, you know, we've made it pretty hard for these guys to get out.
And I realize not all these guys are excellent guys who we want moving back to the United States, right?
But some, I think, really helped.
And there doesn't seem to have been any thoughtful process to figure out.
Who do we need to stand by?
Who do we need to fulfill our promises to?
A, because it's the moral thing to do.
And B, for the reason you just pointed out, because we want to send a message to others.
Help the United States.
We got you.
Don't worry.
We won't abandon you.
Yeah, I mean, that message is very clear right now that we're not in anything for the long haul.
We are at a point now where people say and do stuff just to get elected again, personal power.
I don't know what's going on with Russia and China, everything from closing down the Keystone Pipeline to opening up the Russian pipeline, watching as China expands all the way into Africa.
It's almost like we're closing our eyes and making up stuff.
To yell at each other about when there's real problems and real issues that concern all of us.
And if these fanatics with their IDL, and again, there are tons of really good people in Afghanistan, but if these fanatics can get here because they train there, they will.
And that's on all of us.
They don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican, or white or black.
If you're a Westerner, they're going to kill you.
And they're going to do it here.
And it's sad.
Well, can we talk about that?
Because Biden said we must focus on today's threats like ISIS, not threats of the past.
So, he's really sort of diminishing even Al Qaeda, right?
It wasn't exactly the Taliban that we were worried about that attacked us directly.
It was that they provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and others to plot attacks.
That's why they were looped in.
That's why we went after them.
So, what is he talking about?
We must focus on today's threats like ISIS and not threats of the past.
Well, this threat will come back.
And the Taliban at first didn't give up Al Qaeda because they didn't think we were serious about coming in, which we were.
And I've had Taliban guys tell me personally if they would have known we were going to do, they would have given us.
Al Qaeda, because you got to figure, Al Qaeda, mainly not Afghans.
They're Pashtun, the part that I was in.
And Al Qaeda, like it or not, are foreign fighters and they don't really want them there.
But now that there could have been something, anything as far as I disagree with negotiating the way we did with the Taliban, but there are ways to hand over.
If they're just going to run in and take it, there are ways and agreements.
I mean, agreements is a tough one because they lie to us as much as they can.
But now that Al Qaeda sees it and ISIS, I mean, they'll just.
That flag will be flying in eastern Afghanistan if it's not already.
And they, you know, they're hell bent on the caliphate.
They want to take all of that land back.
They've got a base to do it now.
And it's, you know, it's a smaller world than it used to be.
So it's pretty easy to get here, especially now.
Up next, Rob was fired up on Twitter yesterday asking about whether his brothers in arms died for nothing.
That's how a lot of men and women in the military are feeling right now.
We'll get into some of those questions and what Rob thinks next.
Why are we pretending that the threat is just suddenly gone?
We've managed to deflect it for the past 20 years because we've been over there fighting, keeping them fighting abroad.
You guys have been.
And the homeland hasn't suffered a major terrorist attack during that time.
We've had some domestic attacks launched, but nothing on the scale of 9 11.
And now we just want to say, oh, the threat's done?
But why?
I don't remember Al Qaeda surrendering.
I don't remember the Taliban saying, you know, yeah, now we feel all warm and fuzzy, not just about the Afghan people, but about the United States as well.
They're out in the streets.
Chanting death to America right now.
All depends on what a lot of media tells you.
Well, these are the peaceful Afghans.
These are the good ones.
They're the peaceful protests.
We've seen that here.
They lie to our face while there's buildings on fire behind them.
These are not peaceful.
And Al Qaeda and ISIS are way worse than Antifa, just in case anyone's wondering, because Al Qaeda will come to kill and they do not discriminate whatsoever.
And they really have no souls.
They're capable of anything.
And it's just, I don't like seeing it.
It's this 24 hour news cycle where something happens and look at the shiny object and all we do is talk about that.
We yell at each other on social media and then there's something new.
This might go away as far as we're concerned for a while, but it's going to be there and it's brewing.
We're going to hear from someone that came from there again.
You tweeted out yesterday my friends who died for no reason would be disgusted with this administration.
What do you mean?
It's a shame that, I mean, it's a shame in the first place that so many great people died trying to get like a guy that our American families don't even know the name of them, just unnecessary missions.
And so I agree with that's why I didn't want that big of a footprint there anyway, because I did have an admiral tell me in about 2005 there are no IEDs in this country.
And I remember talking about the surge.
Well, you surge this many, doesn't matter what your intentions are, you look like an occupier, and there will be IEDs in this country.
And naturally, because there's, there's, So many fewer roads in Afghanistan than there's in Iraq as far as highways.
So they're going to bomb us there, which they did.
And it just frustrates me to see parents of guys that I knew really, really well on television talking about it.
And they've even said, What were we going after?
When a helicopter was shot down, who were we going after?
How important was he?
And it's just now that the Taliban's back and they're turning the music off and killing women, it's like we never even went there.
People basically died for nothing.
Other than fighting the people beside them, which is.
Which is what it gets down to.
Again, I have nothing but respect for the men and women who went to Afghanistan and a lot of respect for the men and women that are there now.
We have it better.
They definitely have it a lot worse.
But it just, it's every veteran, combat veteran I've talked to just feels empty.
It's sadness followed by anger and then reevaluation and then retweet.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, think about it.
That matters.
That kind of thing should be taken into account by leaders like Joe Biden when they're making plans and leaders.
Like Trump, too.
I mean, I know you were critical of his negotiating with the Taliban and coming up with this deal.
His defenders say at least his planned withdrawal was conditions based.
Biden's was explicitly not conditions based.
I mean, he made that very clear.
We're pulling out no matter what you do, Taliban.
So, you know, enjoy because we're definitely leaving.
And so, I mean, it's almost like, look, there are the people who think we should have left forces there, at least some healthy residual force like we have in places like Japan.
And I would say Jack Keane and Mark Thiessen are in that.
And Andy McCarthy are probably in that group.
We should have left some forces there.
You don't need 15,000, but you need a few thousand, maybe 5,000, to keep the peace in a region that is important to us.
And then you have people who are sort of diehard Trump supporters, like I would say Molly Hemingway of the Federalists, who have said this was a sort of a bullshit proposition.
This was democracy building.
The military generals had been lying to us for years about the strength of the Afghan forces.
And of course, that's been documented.
The Washington Post had an article on the Afghan papers.
That revealed that people like Rumsfeld and others had been really overstating the rosiness of the Afghan training and how things were going in Afghanistan.
Anyway, those people are like, just out, we're out, you know, it's done.
And then you have the other people who are maybe in one of those two camps, but whatever your position is, are upset about the way we did it, right?
I think most people are upset about what happened over the past 72 hours, how Biden handled the withdrawal.
So I don't know what the answer is, you know, I'm not sure exactly what the answer is, but I do think that the withdrawal and what we've seen over the past Three, four days is an indelible stain on Joe Biden's legacy.
And I think it's embarrassed America in a way that will invite further attacks and has actually endangered the security of the American people.
What do you think?
Yeah, we're more unsafe today than we were yesterday.
And this will be a stain on his legacy, and it should be.
This is a big mistake.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, they're going to send another couple thousand troops in there right now.
So, you know, we took them out, sent them back in.
It's going to be harder because they're going to be in bed and they have our bases and our weapons now.
But I mean, more Americans are going to fight.
If we're going to get those Americans out of Kabul right now, some Americans are going to have to fight again.
And that's men and women from the United States.
Blood on the ground again.
And it's sad to see it.
But a lot of times, you know, it is, it's not as cut and dry again as people want it to be.
But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people that are not telling politicians and the public the truth about what's going on on the ground.
I've heard there's a, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of different experiences.
I just know what I've seen.
Not there now, but I think, yeah, I think we're unsafe.
The president on 9 11 2001 was George W. Bush.
You talked about.
Him saying, and you remembering when you were off to kill Bin Laden, President George W. Bush saying, freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended.
How do you view that comment, that commitment right now?
The commitment, yeah, the commitment's not there because no one really has a stomach for it.
We have been there for a long, long time.
And I just think that this, a lot of, there's a lot of factors here, but one is we've let political correctness become the most important thing in everything, including our military.
And we're just taking our eyes off the ball.
It's to fight.
You know, Marines don't need to build schools.
They need to break things and kill people.
And, you know, we had it in us and we kicked everybody's butts when we started.
We just started worrying about everything else and we started worrying about social experimentation.
We just, we've taken, we don't remember what's important.
And then if something is the truth, we'll just lie to each other so we feel better.
And we're basing everything off politics and emotion instead of facts.
People don't like to hear facts.
You can get banned from social media for saying the truth.
Yeah.
Public Disgust and Truth 00:05:58
And, and, What about our generals, Rob?
Because I've seen you ask Has anyone resigned yet?
Anyone at all?
You know, I mean, why do you think that's necessary?
And who specifically do you think needs to step down?
I'm just disappointed with the highest level of general officers and admirals in the Pentagon who are just towing the party line because they want that job at a contracting place in two years.
Keep them, you know, they just people have a tendency to lie to their boss to make them happy.
And there's a lot of that going around.
I know enlisted guys that called, Called the Pentagon the five sided wind tunnel because all it is is wind going around.
You know, with obviously a lot of taxpayer money they can just waste because it's not theirs.
I think that we need to try something new.
We haven't been able to win a war since World War II.
And I think that what that means is if you get to a certain level, you shouldn't be making decisions without advisors who have at least been on the ground telling you the truth.
I think the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should be an 04, a major or lieutenant commander instead of a four star general.
And not because, I mean, most generals I've met.
I love.
I mean, really, I think everyone wants to do a good job, but you get to a certain point and you get used to the good old boy network and just start promoting people because you know them and whatever.
And it's just, again, loss of focus, loss of leadership, and complete loss of humility.
Wait, did you say that you think the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should be a what?
An 04, a junior officer, like, you know, it's an 01 through 010, an 04, who's been on the ground, who knows the leadership skills.
At least advising.
I just think it's time for something new.
You need to have the captains and majors in there.
What do you think about General Milley?
Well, he has an extreme egg on his face.
He won't resign, though, because again, at that level, they just don't care.
Yes.
Why?
This is a failure.
This is one of the biggest failures in the history of the country.
He's the senior officer.
Biden said the buck stops here.
He should at very least be firing people because someone gave him bad advice at some point and they all look like wimps.
I don't know.
I mean, who knows what happened?
But what I read in the papers is that Millie and Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, went to him and said, dude, not a good idea.
This is not, don't set September 11th as the withdrawal date.
That's the last thing you want to do.
You're basically giving the Taliban a photo op.
You think you're giving it to yourself.
That's what Biden thought, that he was going to have some sort of a victory lap on that day.
In fact, it was exactly the opposite, which was foreseeable, and that he overruled them.
Now, I don't know whether that's true or not, but it's Biden's fault or it's Millie's fault.
Well, it's somebody's fault.
And, you know, they don't seem to care.
If we screw up like this on the ground, we either die or get fired.
But they keep their same parking spot.
Can I just ask you this before we wrap, Rob?
How, like, what are you feeling, right?
Because you today, I feel I what I hear from you is sort of resignation in your voice, like disgust, a bond with your brothers who fought in arms, just frustration with the leaders who are over the troops.
But you explain it to me because today, to me, you sound very frustrated and I don't blame you on that, but I want you to explain it.
Very, very angry all weekend watching this happen.
I and I'm sure my social media reflects that.
Sad at the same time, but angry.
I was actually with a few veterans, Army and Another two to two other navy seals, too.
I just complete disgust.
Uh, it's almost like, uh, you know, the wind taken out of your sails.
Um, my a great majority of my life was in the navy, and that was my job.
I know it doesn't matter, you know, we're out now, but I know a lot of kids who are never going to see their dads again because they didn't come home.
And it's just, it's just almost a lack of respect for everyone involved and watching politics and political correctness take over.
And this is what happens you want to be weak, there are people that are strong, and you can lose to them if you give them an inch.
That's It's a sad week.
It's going to continue to be like this for a while.
I mean, I have to tell you, I understand all of that.
But as a citizen, I think most of us are still so grateful to the troops for all the sacrifice that was made on those fields.
Men like you who went in and did take out bin Laden and did keep us safe for those 20 years and stopped a massive terror attack from happening on U.S. soil.
It wasn't all for naught.
I don't know if you can say we lost.
I really don't know.
I know that that's the headline.
We've lost.
We didn't end it well.
We.
Didn't end it gracefully or with honor.
But what happened over there, I don't know how you can describe it as a loss, given that you kept us safe for 20 years.
Well, yeah, it's, it's, I guess it's, um, there, the Taliban are going to announce that we lost, and a lot of news outlets are going to pick that up because it's a big upset.
If, I mean, I can't remember a time on the ground losing, and our troops, our soldiers, and Marines don't lose.
Um, but you know, people do get killed because a bullet needs to be right once.
And, uh, we just, I've seen, I've seen that a lot, and it's just, uh, it, What is a win, though?
We won when we killed Al Qaeda.
We won when we killed bin Laden.
More people pop up and just go kill them.
We killed Abu Bakr, Al Baghdadi.
The army did that.
I wish I had an answer.
The answer would be what's all this fighting about?
What are we all really doing?
But again, it's a man made ideology.
They hate us, they'll always hate us.
And it's just knowing them and spending so much of my time, my life away from my kids for this is just, it feels gross.
Yeah, the troops deserved better, and our Afghan allies deserved better, but the troops deserved a better ending than this.
And it's not the end.
That's what you and I both know.
It isn't by far.
Gosh, I'm so grateful for your service and that of all of your comrades.
Polls Show Withdrawal Support Low 00:04:27
Rob, thanks for being back with us.
Thank you for having me.
Always good to talk to you.
Up next, we're going to be joined by Rick Grinnell, the former acting director of national intelligence under Trump.
What does he think about this situation?
Who should resign?
We'll get to that in one minute.
But first, I want to bring you a feature here called Sound Up.
And this is where we have some sound that we think you need to hear.
And today, it's funny because Steve.
Crack hour, my executive producer sent this to me.
And you know who else thought this would be a good addition for Sound Up?
Mr. Doug Brunt, my husband.
So, Steve, you and Doug have the same taste, which explains a lot.
Today, the sound is from Nicole Wallace of MSNBC, a former Republican political operative turned anti Trump, hard anti Trump, anti Republican pundit, turned supposed news host on the cable news network MS. Oh, sure.
I mean, like, if this is a journalist, okay, I'm the president of Afghanistan.
She gave her assessment of Joe Biden's speech, and guess what?
She absolutely loved it.
And not just her, she wants us to know that you loved it too.
Listen 95% of the American people will agree with everything he just said.
95% of the press covering this White House will disagree.
And for an American president to finally be completely aligned with such an overwhelming majority of what the American people think about Afghanistan is probably a tremendous relief to the American people.
She's an idiot.
I'm sorry, but this woman is an idiot.
God, everything she says is dumb.
No wonder she was spearheading the Sarah Palin operation.
I mean, I'm sorry, but with all due respect, whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she should not have been on that ticket.
She's wrong again.
All right.
In fact, according to a new political poll, 25% of Americans, just 25%, think the withdrawal in Afghanistan is going well.
And less than half support the withdrawal.
Less than half now, down 20 points from April.
So we were talking about this yesterday, right?
Like the American public, yes, they were.
In large numbers, overwhelmingly in favor of pulling the troops from Afghanistan.
But the thing, Nicole, about reporting the news is that before you make sweeping statements like the one you just said, that 95% of the public is going to agree with everything he said, you should actually see whether the numbers have changed, right?
You should actually check yourself.
And there was a political poll just, or a political reporting, a poll just yesterday that now, where it stands now is, let's see, I want to get you the numbers 49% support the withdrawal.
which is down from 69% in April.
69% of Democrats still support it.
But guess what?
Republicans, only 31% of them still support withdrawal.
Only 31%.
But in MSNBC and Nicole Wallace's world, that's 95%.
If you've got 69% of Dems, you've got 95% of the population.
That's how their math works.
38% of Democrats think the withdrawal is going well.
Do they really?
I'm surprised it's even that high.
Only 14% of Republicans think the withdrawal is going well.
And then, when asked if the withdrawal creates opportunities for groups like Al Qaeda to establish operations in Afghanistan, do you support it?
Only 35% say yes, I still support it.
Only 35%.
All right, so Nicole Wallace doesn't, as usual, know what the hell she's talking about.
Yet another reason not to watch that hideous channel, which is indistinguishable from CNN.
Although I will say CNN has been doing good work on this story through people like Jake Tapper.
I don't know if I'll vouch for the rest of the lineup, but Jake's been doing a good job.
And Jake is, I wouldn't call him a Trump supporter, but he's far less partisan than the rest of the guys on that channel.
If I'm going to turn on CNN, which I really don't, I would only turn on his show.
Okay, anyway, that's the kind of analysis you're going to get on MSNBC and probably why you don't watch it.
So you stick with us and we'll bring you the news fair and balanced, truly fair and balanced, and we will keep bringing it to you in the form of segments like Sound Up.
To Rick in one second, refers to this.
Rick Ronell, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thanks, Megan.
Can I start with this?
Mike Allen of Axios has like a daily newsletter, and he began it this morning with a picture of that C-17 aircraft and hundreds of desperate Afghans running alongside it.
Real Time Ground Reality 00:15:40
As it took off from Kabul and says, and I quote, this is the defining image of the exit debacle, and many Democrats fear Joe Biden's presidency.
That image is searing as sort of the ultimate tell of how we abandon our allies in Afghanistan.
We abandon our mission in Afghanistan, and it was done in a way that has been almost universally condemned.
Your thoughts on where we are today, now, less than 24 hours after Biden attempted to defend himself by saying, the buck stops with me after blaming virtually everyone other than.
Than himself.
The images are haunting.
And I think the images are also simple images for the Americans to understand.
You know, we have a lot of busy Americans who don't always pay attention to the details of foreign policy.
But when you see an aircraft, U.S. military aircraft, taking off, and it's clearly dangerous, the video is scary from the moment you start watching it.
But then to see Afghans literally clinging to the air.
Plane as it takes off and then dropping from the sky is barbaric.
And it shouldn't be happening, and it certainly shouldn't be happening at an airport that the Americans can easily make safe.
And we just had a debacle.
And I think it's a rush job from Joe Biden.
We all know that the criticism of Joe Biden has been loud, not only on this particular issue, but A lot of people have thought for decades that he's always been on the wrong side of foreign policy issues.
You could go through a laundry list of where he's been wrong.
And now we see the consequences when he's totally in charge.
Before, I think as a senator, he just was voting the wrong way and speaking out in terms that were not helpful.
But now that he's the implementer, we see the disastrous effects of his policies.
The buck actually does stop with him, whether he blames others or not.
It does stop with him, and he will be held to account.
In the viewpoint of the American people.
I mean, that's sort of our history has proven that when you have a foreign policy debacle like this, the people will generally hold the commander in chief accountable, responsible for it.
But what he essentially did on Monday was to point the finger at Trump and the Afghan army.
And let's talk about that.
As somebody who worked for the Trump administration, let's talk about whether this is Trump's fault, because here's how, here was Biden with some finger pointing yesterday and explaining how we got here.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1.
There was no status quo of stability without American casualties.
Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.
The Afghan military collapsed.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future.
What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.
They failed to do any of that.
Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.
I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner.
Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country.
And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.
So let's start with that.
It was Trump's fault because Trump was the one who negotiated the deal for us to withdraw our troops, was supposed to be by May.
Biden decided to extend it to over the summer, which is the peak fighting time for the Taliban.
Makes no sense, but let's just focus on that Trump's the one who struck this deal.
Biden was just enforcing it.
Well, let's talk about what Joe Biden did inherit.
He inherited a stable Afghanistan.
He inherited a situation where no U.S. soldier has been lost on the battlefield since 2020.
And the American people's desire to have this 20 year war end had a negotiated settlement.
I don't buy.
Any of this that somehow Joe Biden is trapped into exactly Donald Trump's policies.
And then when they go wrong, he suddenly says, oh, well, that's Donald Trump's fault.
I mean, look at the southern border.
Look at the Paris Climate Accord.
There's a whole list of things that Joe Biden decided to change and do something different when he got into office, which is his right.
But to somehow pick and choose to say, well, this is the policy that was handed to me.
And so I have to continue the exact policy.
Our position is that the policy was good and stable, and that the implementation that he was handed is what messed up.
He was not able to implement the agreement in a safe way.
I've served with General Milley.
I'm not just talking about someone that I don't know.
I think that a lot of this blame has to also be on Joe Biden's team.
And that means the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley.
They were more concerned with identity politics and wokeism over the last six months than they obviously were about implementing the Afghanistan pullout.
And if we've ever seen someone on the job who's completely in over their head, you look at our policies with China, with Iran, it's very scary.
To have a national security advisor like Jake Sullivan, who clearly is too inexperienced to deal with crises on the world stage.
So, you know, one never knows whether these articles get leaked to protect somebody's rear end.
But, you know, what we're hearing is that Austin and Millie tried to stop Biden from doing this.
And Biden said, I don't, I'm not listening.
I'm going to be the one to pull the troops and I'm going to do it my way.
And, you know, that's the end of that.
I don't know who it is.
I don't really care.
I really don't.
I just feel like, To me, it's six one way, half a dozen the other.
It does end with Biden.
Biden's the one who did it.
He made the final call.
This is his.
And I know that he's pointing the finger at Trump, but let's be honest, Rick.
You work for President Trump.
Love him or hate him.
Does anyone really believe that Trump would be sitting there allowing this humiliation to the United States right now?
That he would not be bombing different cities in Afghanistan as the Taliban took them over one by one?
Let me be very clear that in the negotiations with the Afghan government, we made it.
Perfectly clear that if the Taliban began to take over, the U.S. military would strike hard and that they would see the penalties of allowing the Taliban to take over.
We made that clear to the Taliban.
We made that clear to the government of Afghanistan.
And not only was it clear, but they believed it.
A credible threat of military action is better than a threat of military action.
The credible part is important.
And I think that what we're seeing from The government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, or Iran, or China, or Russia, is that they don't believe that Biden has a credible threat of action in case something goes wrong.
They know that Donald Trump would do it.
They knew that in real time he would be watching, that he wasn't going to be on vacation or away from Washington for three days.
What they knew is that in real time, Donald Trump would react.
And I think that's a big difference in what we're seeing now.
We had, as one of the conditions, remember, Donald Trump had many conditions on the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.
And those conditions were going to be monitored on a daily basis, on an hourly basis.
And if those conditions weren't met, then we would adjust the policy.
We had lots of discussions, and General Milley was there and very comfortable with exactly what was going to unfold because he could monitor and adjust the policy.
Clearly, through these leaked news stories, where I think you're right, Megan, that it's a lot of after the fact.
People covering up their reputation, which is Washington 101, that people leak stories to say, well, I was against this policy.
It's to protect their future job prospects.
They want to distance themselves from a disastrous policy, and that's what happens in Washington.
But can I just take you on the Trump policy of withdrawal to begin with?
Because I don't see, given where we are now, let's just put for this moment the withdrawal itself to the side since it was.
Handled so poorly.
When you see the 300,000 Afghan security forces totally overrun by the 75,000 Taliban, whose hearts are in it, you know, the Taliban hearts are in it for sure.
The Afghans are, they don't like the Taliban.
85% of the Afghan population doesn't like the Taliban, but they're, the Taliban are fighters and they're mean sons of bitches.
And, you know, when you see how easy it was for them to take control city after city, it does make me ask if things have gone perfectly.
And we had withdrawn all of our security personnel and all of our embassy staff, and then we had taken our troops out of there and we had no one left, as was the plan.
They just would have done it then.
They just would have, the Taliban just would have been doing this, taking, going city by city once we were out, and we would have been left in this same position, no?
Well, I think that's what I was referring to in the previous question is that, first of all, I think it's a great question and it's something that we should always be exploring.
But as I was referring to in the previous question, we were going to be doing real time monitoring.
And make no mistake that if the Taliban began to take over territories, they would have been confronted by the US military from an air campaign.
The military strategists will say, well, it's better to have boots on the ground.
And to my reaction to that is, yeah, no shit.
Of course, it's always better to have US military getting real time information on the ground.
But we have to be able to, as a country, evaluate whether or not that's a good idea.
Look, having Americans there at the embassy is one option.
Also, recognizing that we may not have perfect information in real time in some countries is a sacrifice that we make in order to not have our men and women in harm's way.
And so these are tough choices.
But I go back to this, Megan.
My criteria for U.S. military boots on the ground in any country is whether or not there is an immediate threat to U.S. national security.
I'm sorry to tell you.
The world is a terrible, dangerous place, and there are little girls in the Congo that don't get to go to school.
And we have this entity called the United Nations, where we pay one fourth of the bill.
One of the things about the Trump administration.
Is that not only did we say America first, but we said allies need to step up.
We encouraged allies to do more and to share their obligations.
And let's be honest, many of our allies wanted Joe Biden, and now they're seeing the disastrous policies of Joe Biden.
And I can tell you this they know that the world was going to be more stable now under Donald Trump than under Joe Biden.
Yeah, I don't know.
I look at it, all I want is safety and security for the American people.
That's what I want.
And I want the troops to be respected and not put into Unsafe.
Well, I mean, they're all unsafe, but just foolishly unsafe situations, right, for them.
But I think that, you know, just looking at this, and I don't even want to say hindsight's 2020 because people were jumping up and down when Trump said we're withdrawing the troops, making this point.
Because you, you know, you were ambassador to Germany.
We've got tens of thousands of troops in Germany.
Why couldn't we have kept 5,000 troops in Afghanistan just as a peacekeeping measure in a place that needs it a lot more than Germany does right now?
Well, Afghanistan is a different place than Germany.
Germany is stable and, and, US military can bring their families, and it's a completely different paradigm shift.
When it comes to Afghanistan, we're dealing with Pashtun on Pashtun violence.
We're dealing with an unfolding civil war.
I would push back and say to people who make that argument when do we stop?
And what are the lines?
Why aren't we in many countries in Africa?
There's an incredibly slippery slope of countries where little girls don't get to go to school.
And violence.
Let me jump in and say it's not about this particular question, it isn't about the little girls, with all empathy for them.
It's about Al Qaeda.
Look, we got fewer troops in Iraq now than we did before.
We crushed ISIS.
We took out Soleimani.
We took out al Baghdadi.
Make no mistake, Donald Trump is the guy who was monitoring the situation in real time and responding in real time with incredible force.
So I don't buy the faults.
Argument, the false choice of either we have tons of boots on the ground or Al Qaeda takes over.
And I think that we are sophisticated enough.
We have technology now different than we did in 2001, where we can monitor.
And I can tell you, as former acting director of national intelligence, again, the intelligence is always better when you have boots on the ground.
But the question that we need to be asking is is it enough to monitor the situation to make sure that U.S. national security is?
Safe and secure without having boots on the ground with today's technology?
I think the answer is yes.
You tell me because our boots on the ground, our intel over there either didn't see this coming, which is what that's the party line.
I mean, that's what Biden said yesterday in the only semblance of responsibility taking.
We underestimated how quickly this would happen.
So they either didn't see this coming or they did and we didn't care, right?
Like that's the truth.
Either Biden said, I know full well we're going to collapse and that this is going to be a calamity and didn't give two dams.
Or he wasn't getting good information.
And now it's going to go from bad to worse because now we have even fewer boots on the ground and less resources over there, which none of these makes us feel any better.
Well, I hope that you promise me that you invite me back on your next podcast where we have a whole discussion about intelligence because there's so much to say on that question that you just nailed it.
You know, the quality of intelligence, we need to discuss that in America.
Blame Game and Media Rush 00:09:28
I mean, look, when I was acting director, I brought the entire team into a room.
That gave us the information that if we moved the embassy to Jerusalem, there would be World War III.
There wasn't.
There wasn't even chaos.
As a matter of fact, many of our allies in the Middle East liked the move.
And the move opened up the Abraham Accords.
So I bluntly asked them, what went wrong?
What are you going to do to fix this problem?
Because the information you gave the President of the United States and all of his advisors, there would be chaos and a war.
That intelligence failure didn't result in pictures on TV in a chaotic situation, but it is a major intelligence failure, which Impacts policies.
And we need to fix these issues.
Look, I could go on and on about the Russia team, for instance.
The Russia team in the United States intelligence agencies is highly political.
I don't think that they do the American people a service because their prioritization of intelligence is completely upended by those on the team that will leak personal information.
Private, raw, untested intelligence for political gain.
There you go.
Let me ask you that.
So let's go there just for a minute.
Why are all the intelligence failures seemingly woke, right?
I'm sensing a pattern here, right?
Like, you can't possibly move the embassy to Jerusalem.
Oh no, it would result in massive unrest in the Middle East.
Well, it didn't.
Well, you can definitely withdraw all the troops just in time for your 9 11 photo op, President Biden, and don't worry about a thing.
Oh, whoops, that was totally wrong.
We We got it wrong again.
Russia is a thing, and here's the dossier and all.
So, why are all the intelligence failures seemingly ideological?
At this point, I would be remiss if I didn't defend the intelligence agencies because the reality is intelligence is an assessment, and we give our best assessment to policymakers at the time.
Is this a tested long term assessment?
Is this a new assessment?
Was this assessment done by just one aspect?
Of intelligence, it gets very complicated.
But I tell people all the time intelligence is an assessment, and we need to remember that it's not always a perfect science.
And so when we do have information like moving the embassy would be a disaster, I can tell you from my personal experience, there wasn't any other voices saying, but maybe you could do it in a safe way.
Maybe you could do it.
But in a way that would not cause chaos.
Many times, though, we do have assessments that hedge, that say, well, the Taliban may be ready to come back.
It could be quick or it could take a while.
Now, those assessments generally are not very helpful, and you want to dig in.
But at the end of the day, we need to hold our intelligence community to a higher standard.
And this is where I can get very critical of Avril Haynes because I think she came in.
Saying that she was going to be very transparent about the process.
And as you just pointed out, Megan, we have a huge dilemma.
Did the intelligence community tell Joe Biden that the Taliban would take over fast, or did they fail to tell him that?
He, Joe Biden, has blamed the intelligence community.
Avril Haines needs to come forward and explain.
Did her team fail, or is Joe Biden the director of national intelligence?
Yes.
Can I ask you a question?
Because one of the questions I've had in watching all the coverage of this is, Obviously, I believe that Americans of both parties are upset with the way this was handled, and the images are upsetting and searing.
However, I also wonder.
Is this, in fact, what we're really upset about?
Or is it the feeling that we've lost the war, that the war didn't end the way we'd hoped, you know, that so much blood and treasure was sacrificed, and there will be no spike the ball in the end zone moment?
I think it's both.
Americans obviously are accustomed to winning, and we do have the greatest military in the history of the world.
We are always capable of winning.
And when we mess up at the end, then I think Americans are right to hold.
us to account.
Who is responsible?
Yes, we know that Joe Biden is responsible, but he's not going to resign.
But we need to see changes.
Is it the National Security Advisor?
Is it the Secretary of Defense?
Or is it the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
But let me tell you, somebody needs to be held to account and be fired.
This is the type of thing that Donald Trump the next day would have fired somebody over.
But in Washington, that's not what happens.
It's a blame game and it's a rush from the media, which we could do a whole nother segment on the failures of the media when it comes to rushing us into war and then not Holding people accountable on the military side.
So, is this, Rick, do you think a story that will move past quickly?
You know, the troops will come out, the diplomatic personnel will come out, whatever Afghans we choose to remove will come out, and we'll move on?
Or do you believe this will be a permanent stain on the Biden legacy?
And this will be, if not the thing, one of the top things he is remembered for?
Well, I think I go back to my opening comment, which is the images.
Are seared into the American people's minds.
And so that's never going away.
So I think Joe Biden's legacy is ruined.
I think it fits the narrative that secretaries of defense in the Obama administration have said, which is that Joe Biden has always been on the wrong side of foreign policy issues.
I think he's turned out to be a disaster.
We know he's weak.
In terms of the State Department, they'll move on.
They won't blame anybody, they won't blame the ambassador, which I think the acting U.S. ambassador should be held to account.
For this, he should have spoken up.
He should have had his people evacuated beforehand.
We knew that we were drawing down.
There's no excuse for having too many people at the embassy.
I think there's a lot of blame to go around, and we would rely on journalists to point out and to help sharpen the criticism.
But we don't have a DC press corps that's willing to do that.
But, you know, Megan, But I have to say that there's one aspect of this that really you have a very unique insight to, which is the Bergdahl Five.
And you were the one who broke that story by talking to Bo Bergdahl's platoon mates.
And one of the individuals in the swap that President Obama and Vice President Biden did, who he let out of Gitmo, one of those individuals, Just led the revolt for the Taliban and came roaring back.
And, you know, Senator Tom Cotton has been warning for a very long time that this would happen.
And there are consequences to that swap.
Yeah.
Oh, that story was chilling.
Don't leave me now.
We got more coming up in 60 seconds.
There are consequences to these decisions.
This has been, you know, we're now four administrations in, mistakes have been made across the board.
And the guys who went over there and fought, and the families, the Gold Star families who lost some 2,500 Americans, are left wondering was it worth it?
But I will say on a larger scale, Rick.
To me, this is feeling, I said it yesterday, I'll say it again very Jimmy Carter esque.
It's feeling like a Jimmy Carter moment because it isn't just what's happening in Afghanistan.
It's what's happening with COVID and hints of maybe we're going to lock down again.
And everybody has to mask up based on one outbreak of Delta in Provincetown that happened over a weekend with a population that was taking risks.
Andrew Sullivan described for us it's just absurd that don't apply to the general population.
It's shutting down our oil production and then asking, OPEC to come up with more.
You could go on with the number of things that are happening domestically that right now, inflation on a massive scale as we spend looks like over $4 trillion more money that we don't have.
I just think it doesn't feel like it's going so well, the Biden presidency.
Even if you like him, even if you hated Trump, I'm not sure how you look at all these data points and say things are going swimmingly.
I feel really optimistic.
Yeah.
Well, look, I have two thoughts.
The first, Is that we need to be very clear to our US military who served in Afghanistan that their service was not in vain.
Optimism on Biden Presidency 00:03:16
They did exactly what they were asked to do.
They made America safer by defeating the terrorists and making sure that that was not going to be a terrorist haven.
The fact that politicians and the Washington types screwed it up at the end is not their fault, and they should have their head held very high.
They made us safer.
That's the first point.
The second point I would just say I'm very cognizant that every great civilization has lasted roughly 250 years.
And Ronald Reagan's warning that every generation has to step up to secure liberty.
You may not be storming the beaches of Normandy, but we can't give up our liberties.
We are the greatest idea that has ever been thought of in the world.
And we need to protect that.
And American people need to understand that.
That they can't get fat and happy.
And I'm concerned because the first and second generation Americans realize this.
They came from fascism and they're very sensitive to a media that becomes the mouthpiece of the ruling class and the little attacks on our liberties.
I think the problem we have are the sixth, seventh, eighth generation Americans who, you know, like Megan Rapineau, who, as a soccer player, let's be honest, a lesbian.
Soccer player.
The U.S. women's team is filled with lesbians.
Don't you think that lesbians on the world stage should be the most vocal for America?
They're playing against 69 countries that criminalize homosexuality.
They're playing against nine countries that will kill them.
And yet we have an American lesbian who sits down and kneels for the American flag while she's cashing her check as the subway spokeswoman.
It's outrageous.
The white And I shouldn't say white, but it seems like there's a lot of sixth, seventh, eighth generation white families in America that somehow think America is a terrible place and they're teaching their children that.
And it's the exact opposite.
And they haven't tasted what life is like overseas.
And so they've become fat and happy.
And there's a reason those Afghan family members were trying to get on that plane to get out of a country like that, where they're so worried about the Taliban taking over.
Covering up the pictures of the women on the outside of the barbershops and the hair salons because you're not allowed to show your face, your hair.
That's Afghanistan, right?
And they talk about the United States like it's the same.
And there was just a report this week that Hope Solo, former U.S. Women's soccer player came out and said, Megan Rapinoe's been bullying the other players on the team to make sure they kneel during the national anthem.
So she's not just somebody who doesn't love her country.
She's a bully and she objects to people who do love their country.
That's Megan Rapinoe.
How does she get tired as a spokesperson for anything, right?
I don't eat Subway, but I'm certainly not going to eat it now.
I'm not wearing my Nike sneakers either.
I've stopped drinking Coke.
There are little things that make you feel a little bit better about fighting back.
Megyn Kelly Saved the Day 00:02:54
But you're right.
We have to speak out and we have to hold our leaders accountable.
And what's happening now.
Could really lead to something very dangerous in the United States.
I echo your point, though.
Look, for 20 years, from 2001 to the present day, we have not had a massive attack on American soil launched by Al Qaeda.
And there's a reason for that.
Those who died over there, they died for that.
They kept us safe.
Who knows how many American lives they saved during that period?
They did their job.
What happens from this point forward is as a result of politicians' decisions, and they too should be held to account.
And decisions can be reversed, and leaders can be ousted.
So, we still have options available to us.
Rick, I wish you were still in there.
I wish we had a voice like yours speaking to power right now.
Well, thank you for that.
And thank you for these podcasts.
What you do and defining so many issues is really valuable today.
Don't miss the show tomorrow because we're going to have Ayan Hirsi Ali on the rise of Islamic terror again in Afghanistan and what we should expect now that we've effectively handed the keys over to the Taliban and perhaps Al Qaeda.
We're also going to be joined by John Cass, a legendary Chicago journalist, longtime columnist out there who has been really closely following what's happening with the police and just wrote a barn burner of a column recently on what happened after the death, after the murder of this young 29-year-old Chicago female officer and what's going on with the cops there now literally turning their backs on the mayor, who, let's face it, turned hers on them long before.
We'll get in-depth on what's happening between the cops, the mayor, and the public.
In Chicago, Illinois, and how it's representative of what's happening in so many police departments across America.
Don't miss that.
Go ahead and subscribe to the show now.
Download too, if you don't mind.
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I'd love to know your thoughts on Afghanistan.
And we're still taking your guest suggestions there.
If you go on Apple Reviews and offer a guest suggestion, we get actually quite a few great ones, and I have them all saved on my phone.
So still reading them.
Appreciate it.
And we'll talk more tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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