To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Jared and Nick discuss the tragedy at the airport in Kabul, as two suicide bombers killed 13 American soldiers and at least 90 Afghans. The fear is that the Republicans will use this act to call for more militarism and leverage it as a political cudgel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| Get it. | |
| Get it. | |
| Boom! | |
| That could have ended up bad. | |
| That was a mess waiting to happen. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the McCraig Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared H. Sexton. | |
| I'm here with Nick Halseman. | |
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| You're going to want it. | |
| Well, by the way, we have a Discord where you can discuss the episodes amongst a whole bunch of other things we have there. | |
| And there's nowhere else to discuss podcasts, as far as I can tell. | |
| There's no comment section in iTunes, whatever. | |
| So that's why it's so awesome. | |
| No. | |
| And talk about events that are going on. | |
| And I have to tell you, it's nice to have a place where people can have Actual intelligent human conversations at moments like this. | |
| Unfortunately, we have to spend this episode talking about this tragedy that took place at the Kabul airport. | |
| For those who haven't heard it, we're taping this on Thursday, August 26th. | |
| Earlier today, at least two suicide bombers. | |
| ISIS has taken responsibility. | |
| The gift that keeps on giving with ISIS. | |
| Two suicide bombers killed, depending upon who you listen to, 12 to 13 members of the American military, upwards of a hundred Afghan people trying to leave the country. | |
| It's an absolute tragedy. | |
| For days on end, we have heard of the possibility that something like this might happen. | |
| And now it has. | |
| And in a world that made sense, we would not be in Afghanistan and a tragedy like this wouldn't take place. | |
| And also in a world that made sense, we would not be looking at an aggressive right-wing attack. | |
| on the government, which seems like they're rooting for tragedies like this to happen. | |
| It's a really bleak little situation, Nick. | |
| Jared, ISIS is dead. | |
| Haven't you heard? | |
| Didn't you hear that we eliminated it? | |
| Yeah, Donald Trump buried them, right? | |
| Yeah, he said that they completely and utterly wiped them off the face of the earth. | |
| And you know, I think that that is an interesting tidbit because Our foreign policy, I think, tends to believe that kind of stuff, right? | |
| Like somehow there's a way to simply eliminate this nebulous group of people who can shift and change and recruit and grow and shrink day by day without any kind of central command and who doesn't play by any kind of normal governmental rules. | |
| This is not surprising, but I wonder how much mileage Trump was able to get out of his, you know, support for his foreign policy by being able to declare this kind of bullshit, when in reality they just waited. | |
| And they waited, they knew we were gonna leave, and we leave, and now they're gonna take over. | |
| By the way, ISIS-K, which is the new iteration in Afghanistan, they want to kill a Taliban too. | |
| This isn't like a nice, you know, partnership that's gonna go on going forward. | |
| Yeah, let's give this the context that our media fails to give you constantly. | |
| I have to tell you, Nick, I've been so frustrated paying attention to this all day. | |
| Again, it's as if we just got dropped into Afghanistan and there's no explanation of how that happened. | |
| For those who might not know, everything that we're dealing with right now is the repercussion of operations within Afghanistan in the Middle East over the past few years and decades. | |
| Of course, Al-Qaeda, which was the original target of U.S. | |
| operations, was an offshoot of Afghan troops that we threw in our lot with in order to fight the Russians. | |
| Eventually, Al-Qaeda, of course, turns into the small group that comes after us, and we turn it into a worldwide crusade that cost us God knows how many lives, killed how many people, lost how many trillions of dollars, destabilized this entire situation. | |
| And then on top of that, once that was destabilized, who comes out of it? | |
| ISIS. | |
| ISIS is able to put together the pieces from this situation that we created. | |
| So, this again sticks, unfortunately, with what we've talked about over the past couple of weeks. | |
| We shouldn't have been there in the first place. | |
| Every time that an empire attempts to go into a country, tell people what to do, kills them, operates in those countries, the results are never good. | |
| It always results in tragedy, the loss of human life, human suffering. | |
| However we got out of there was going to be brutal. | |
| And this, by the way, is brutal. | |
| And tragic. | |
| And you have to call it that. | |
| But meanwhile, We have to look at how we got there. | |
| We have to look at how we've arrived at this situation and how all of these factors we have a hand in. | |
| And we need to get out of there. | |
| We need to get as many people out of there as possible. | |
| We need to end the tragedies as much as we possibly can. | |
| But you cannot look at this in a vacuum, as if all of those things aren't true and didn't lead us to this moment. | |
| Right. | |
| And, you know, you made it generally in terms of going into a country and having this become a shit show. | |
| It's Afghanistan, very specific. | |
| We talked about it last episode, too, where this is the place where, no shit, empires do go to die. | |
| Remind me what happened to the Soviet Union soon after they ended up pulling out of Afghanistan? | |
| Died. | |
| They fell. | |
| They fell apart, right? | |
| Not that there was a direct, complete direct correlation to that, but like... It didn't help. | |
| This doesn't help. | |
| And this doesn't help America either. | |
| I mean, like, how many of these setbacks are we going to have? | |
| Although I will, I do want to give props to Biden, which we should talk about now, about what he had to go through with his press conference today. | |
| You know, we had an American president, in reaction to us pulling out, acknowledge that our foreign policy sucks and that this whole thing was kind of a nightmare. | |
| He really, in no uncertain terms, has been willing to accept the responsibility and acknowledge that in a way that we normally, you wouldn't hear a president ever say anything like that. | |
| That would cast any kind of negative light on the military or our foreign policy. | |
| So, maybe there's a corner being turned there. | |
| But certainly doesn't make anybody feel any better based on the fact that we've now had more single, higher single day deaths in the military in Afghanistan since like 2011, I think. | |
| It's been like 10 years since we've had that many. | |
| And I don't think anybody was, we were not surprised. | |
| We knew this was going to happen. | |
| The warnings were there. | |
| Yeah, I want to start. | |
| We like to call it like it is around here and not necessarily partisan and can criticize people when they need to be criticized. | |
| We're not Biden lackeys. | |
| I think that we both thought that pulling out of Afghanistan was an act of political courage that should be lauded. | |
| The way that he handled it, I thought should be lauded. | |
| And again, we talked about this the other day. | |
| It's been a total shit show getting out of there. | |
| And there are a lot of people who deserve a lot of blame for that. | |
| And our government screwed up the leaving. | |
| And most of the leaving, most of the problem has been bureaucracy. | |
| Most of it's been about making sure that people can get there safely and that they have visas or they have the papers necessary to leave. | |
| And it's been a total shit show. | |
| And there's more than enough blame to go around. | |
| Biden, of course, gave his press conference today. | |
| And he said, I've got it here, we will not forgive and we will not forget. | |
| We will hunt you down and make you pay. | |
| I got in my car after teaching all day, Nick, and I was listening to to the press and a press conference about this thing. | |
| I'm hearing things about terrorists. | |
| I'm hearing things about hunting people down. | |
| I'm hearing things about operations. | |
| I'm so tired of it. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I'm so tired of this. | |
| Constant drumbeat of this stuff. | |
| Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense, who by the way, quick Jared story, I once had a drink with just randomly at a bar in Washington, D.C. | |
| But Leon Panetta immediately tells everybody, we got to go back in. | |
| We're back at war. | |
| It's time to go back. | |
| We got to root out ISIS. | |
| Oh, do we? | |
| We need to go back in and root them out? | |
| We need to have military operations doing all that? | |
| We have to stop. | |
| We have to stop this thing. | |
| And I think you're right. | |
| The pulling out of Afghanistan was the beginning of turning a corner. | |
| It had to be because we can't keep doing this. | |
| And this is it's absolutely absurd what American empire is and American jingoism is. | |
| And in this moment right now, I'm sure you've seen it. | |
| People are champing at the bit right now, Nick. | |
| They either want another war or they want Biden to resign or be impeached. | |
| And all of it has to do and the media is part of it, too. | |
| The media can't stop pushing this shit. | |
| They can't stop beating the drum of war and American empire. | |
| And so now, after this awful tragedy, you have people left and right who are rooting for it. | |
| Who are rooting for American troops to die and innocent people to die. | |
| And meanwhile, what does it add up to? | |
| More war, more empire. | |
| Some of them can't even hide it. | |
| You've heard it too. | |
| It's like, there are a lot of minerals in Afghanistan we need. | |
| Well, get on your fucking plane and go get the minerals yourself, man. | |
| Grab yourself a gun, you and your kids, and you go get those minerals. | |
| Stop sending American troops in and stop sacrificing lives in this stupid-ass quagmire. | |
| I mean, the context here is that, you know, whenever they would have begun the process of extracting people out of the country, that would be the exact day that the government falls. | |
| So if they had started May 1st to bring people out of the country like that, that was when everyone would have rushed to the airport and the government would collapse then. | |
| You know, that's I think what Biden has been trying to tell us this whole time. | |
| And I think the reasonable people who are looking at this acknowledge that this is always going to be a shit show no matter what. | |
| Do you think, okay, so let me ask your opinion on this because I've been chewing on this for a few days. | |
| So, the United States of America screws up the withdrawal from Afghanistan. | |
| I mean, nobody can deny that. | |
| This whole thing has been an absolute cluster, right? | |
| How is the country that hasn't been able to build a functioning state or democracy in 20 years, and not just build a functioning state or democracy, they haven't made any headway towards it at all. | |
| They haven't been able to build anything. | |
| How are we supposed to believe that that country in any way shape or form could carry out something Without making a giant mess of it like this. | |
| That's who we are. | |
| That's who we've become. | |
| And it's time that people open up their eyes and quit pretending that, like, it's a bad decision here or a bad decision there. | |
| That's who we are, right? | |
| But, you know, in reaction to that, we have now seen the most unprecedented airlift of people out of the country we've ever seen. | |
| 100,000 people now in less than two weeks. | |
| That's amazing. | |
| They've been able to right the ship to some degree and they're listening to the people about the bureaucracy and how to cut through some of the red table and process them in other countries so that at least they're out of harm's way with the Taliban. | |
| Who knows where they're going to end up and what that's going to be like. | |
| That could be a whole other issue with refugees. | |
| But at the very least they've been able to get a lot of people out of the country. | |
| It's hard to believe there are still more Americans left. | |
| It sounds to me like in Twitter you'll see little anecdotal stuff about maybe people are staying to make sure they can get their Afghani people out, which is the most heroic thing I've ever heard in my life. | |
| That's really why they're staying and not using their own passports to get safe patches like they're supposed to. | |
| The question that arises about all of this, because as you're giving us the context of what Afghanistan is, and let's face it, it seems like there's a DNA to certain countries, right? | |
| Like there's a certain DNA, like the Soviets and the Russians, the way they live and they exist and how it's been for centuries seems to have a through line here, Afghanistan the same way, and so What is our role here? | |
| Do we simply have to accept that the Taliban is going to run this country? | |
| And maybe the only focus that we possibly can have in this situation is that they don't provide a safe haven for terrorists who want to kill us. | |
| But as far as everything else goes, the way they want to run the country, I don't know if we have any right to get involved with that. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | |
| And so where are we supposed to go forward on this one? | |
| How much are we supposed to care about what's going to happen in this country? | |
| Well, first of all, we have no right to tell anybody else what to do. | |
| If you want to go in and you want to stop a genocide or something like that, that's one thing. | |
| We get an international group together as opposed to going into a country and saying, hey, guess what? | |
| Your minerals, your oil, your heroin, they belong to us now. | |
| And that's what we do. | |
| But here's another wake-up call. | |
| This isn't something that anybody's talking about. | |
| And all the Republicans who are making hay about this, all of the military insiders who are losing their minds... Richard Engel needs to step away from Twitter, by the way. | |
| Like, it's so bizarre watching people's minds rot. | |
| And he is not doing well. | |
| Every tweet is like, what a disgusting farce. | |
| I've never been... It's like, dude, take a time out. | |
| Go sit on the sidelines for a minute. | |
| Is Richard Engel so ridiculously out of touch and naive that he doesn't believe that once we withdraw from Afghanistan that America isn't going to be active with special forces and operations within Afghanistan? | |
| If you think that if the United States isn't in a country I guarantee you you're wrong because they're in that country. | |
| We have people all over the globe and one of the reasons is armies Don't work anymore. | |
| We don't have big giant wars anymore. | |
| Those don't exist. | |
| What we do is drone you to death, and we send special operations in to either sow a coup, assassinate you, or pay off local criminal warlords to do it for them. | |
| So note that we're not going to leave it alone, but we need to get out. | |
| Right? | |
| Right. | |
| And I have to tell you, And the Taliban and this ISIS group, they do not like each other. | |
| They are not they are not simpatico. | |
| They might end up being that way. | |
| They might find like some sort of an uneasy alliance. | |
| But what's getting ready to happen is going to happen whether we're there or not. | |
| Right. | |
| And we need to get out because it's only going to inflame things and we're only going to watch people die as we do. | |
| Well, the second the Taliban signed this agreement with Trump was when ISIS-K declared war on the Taliban because that was, you know, you could not possibly have any kind of agreement, which, by the way, they never really did honor anyway. | |
| I mean, you can argue that there wasn't any U.S. | |
| troops attacked from May 1st on, which, you know, which is God, it flies in the face of the Fox narrative. | |
| They're trying to put all this at the feet of Biden, right? | |
| As one would do. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And by the way, just to go ahead and clarify something, because they're not talking about this on the news either. | |
| We didn't just sign the agreement with the Taliban. | |
| We've been literally giving the Taliban intelligence about ISIS. | |
| Like as everybody is like, how do you trust the Taliban? | |
| And look what they're doing. | |
| We've been in league with them. | |
| That's how we work. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| And everybody right now who's like, oh my God, what about, what about the Afghan people? | |
| What about the women? | |
| What about the girls? | |
| America doesn't give a shit about that. | |
| That's all pretext. | |
| That's all emotional manipulation. | |
| And I have to tell you, it's absolutely brutal and tragic, but they've been giving these people intelligence. | |
| They've been working with them. | |
| This whole idea that it's us versus them or something like that, that's not the case. | |
| That's not how actual American foreign policy works, unless it's a leftist group. | |
| If it's a leftist group, we'll go out and we'll bomb your ass and you'll be done. | |
| But in this case, we have been working with them against ISIS. | |
| So people need to understand that. | |
| But on top of that, another layer is that we've been giving them names and probably addresses of Americans who we want to make sure can get through the checkpoints. | |
| Well, guess what? | |
| That's a potential landmine of somebody at the Taliban who's sympathetic to ISIS would say, hey, here they are. | |
| You can go get them. | |
| Now, any kind of operation that's being called for to go in there means we're not going to get out. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| Any kind of way you want to facilitate, even expanding this to get people out before August 31st, in my mind, that's five days from now. | |
| In my mind, it means That work is committing. | |
| That means more troops that we're not going to get out on the 31st. | |
| And then it's going to go on longer. | |
| That is the issue here where we cannot get wrapped up in that. | |
| But it is a concern because the Taliban doesn't have control over everybody in their group. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| It's a completely, you know, amorphous group of fighters here. | |
| And some people are and they're warlords who have different jurisdictions. | |
| And so, you know, some guy on TV who represents the Taliban, quote unquote, could say all these things that we like to hear about how people are going to get safe passage. | |
| Doesn't mean shit because some other guy might come along with a rifle and three of his buddies and start shooting people. | |
| And there's no control they have over that. | |
| There's probably only need to repercussions for that guy. | |
| That is the issue here we're dealing with, which is probably what Biden, I think, is trying to tell us. | |
| Right. | |
| On certain terms. | |
| That is the nature of why this is such a clusterfuck as well, is that there's no central command on the other side to deal with and negotiate properly with anyway. | |
| You know, it's weird, Nick, when you say it like that, it's almost like this isn't a black and white issue. | |
| It's almost like none of this is as easy as everyone pretends that it is. | |
| And to bring up Donald Trump very, very quickly, Donald Trump, like, you know this, it's like, he thought being president of the United States of America was the easiest job in the world. | |
| You just say, I want this done, and then you do it. | |
| He became president, he never got involved with it, actually, and now that he's post-president, he's basically just talking about it out of his ass and not really talking about anything. | |
| That view, that mindset, that worldview of that black and white of everything, that's childish. | |
| Like, you have somebody like a Biden, you have the President of the United States. | |
| Going back to those warlords, Nick, these people are like trafficking children. | |
| These people are harming people left and right. | |
| These people are trafficking heroin. | |
| We're talking about some real nasty criminal people that we were giving unbelievable amounts of money and power to. | |
| So it's not as simple as being like, I don't care what happens to the Afghan people. | |
| We have to leave. | |
| Let the Taliban do whatever. | |
| No, you're making bad choices everywhere. | |
| You cannot help but make bad choices when you make choices for empire. | |
| You are empowering and making rich really dangerous people because you have other really dangerous people over here. | |
| This is why we shouldn't do this in the first place. | |
| Because whatever you do is the wrong decision. | |
| And right now, every decision is the wrong decision. | |
| And America just can't stop. | |
| We can't help ourselves. | |
| Now, I'll give some kudos to Trump because he's the guy that decided that we're going to pull out and we're going to negotiate to make a date and get the hell out of there, which is fine. | |
| Well, did he plan on pulling through with that or was that an election stunt? | |
| Because we don't ever know. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| But what he did do is, because remember how he's supposed to be a really good negotiator, right? | |
| I mean, that's what I've been told over and over again. | |
| Well, he let out 5,000 Taliban fighters, one of whom now is going to be the head of the country now. | |
| That doesn't seem to be a position of strength to be negotiating anything from, because simply pulling out would have been the leverage they would have offered, and that was all they needed to do. | |
| I don't think they should have and needed to offer even more of these prisoners getting out, because you know why? | |
| They would have gotten out once the Americans pull out anyway. | |
| But now once they let him out, they were able to start doing incursions over into Afghanistan again and taking over cities during this ceasefire time. | |
| That was the whole mistake that Trump made or whatever that you want to put on the feet of them and not on Biden. | |
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