James Smith and Dave Smith dissect Afghanistan's collapse as a trillion-dollar honeypot for contractors like Raytheon, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. They argue the war was unwinnable from the start, criticizing Biden's political fallout while countering Taliban brutality claims with allegations against propped-up warlords. The hosts condemn the War on Terror as a misguided fight against emotion rather than specific groups, noting Republicans ignored strategic impossibility due to America's debt crisis. Ultimately, they conclude the conflict should never have started, urging admission of error over futile nation-building. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Promescent Sponsorship00:02:39
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Cheers your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am, of course, the Libertarian Tupac, the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the cocks.
What's up, my brother?
Dude, I had a great time in Nashville, and I got some action down there from the TSA.
They pulled me right out of the line, got deep in on my junk.
It was a good time.
Was it something that you did, something you said on the podcast?
No, I don't think so.
I walk through the thing, and the guy's like, I need you to stand over there.
And then I turn around and my whole crotch area is in red.
And I'm like, oh, well, that can't be good.
And then I'm starting like freaking out of my head.
Like, what did I stash in my crotch?
Like, what could be in my underwear?
Like, what is going on here?
But the saving grace, because I've never gotten the pat down before, was this was like a nice southern dude.
And you could tell he was so bothered by the fact that he had to touch my junk that I enjoyed it.
That's like going to be a new fetish for me.
I'm not gay.
But many that don't want to touch your junk, having to touch your junk is a real thrill.
I'm starting to get it, Dave.
Yeah, I was just wondering how long this is going to go before we have to revisit that I'm not gay preface that you started with.
I'm not gay, but if you're like forcing a dude against his will, I'm pretty happy.
Yeah, a government-mandated job, they have to check your junk and they don't want to.
The Iraq War Lie00:12:31
I think I could get into that.
It's a very specific genre of, I guess, sexuality.
All right.
Well, there you go.
All right.
So obviously, I think today's episode is going to be about Afghanistan.
Pretty incredible, what's been happening over the last 48 hours as the withdrawal seems to be real.
And I was one of the people I've said for a while that I was very skeptical that Biden would actually pull out.
That, you know, when he pushed back Trump's timeline from May to September, I was like, yep, this is the first sign of pushing it back.
I wouldn't be surprised if this gets pushed back more.
But then over the last month, they really have been abandoning posts.
And even though I know he just sent a couple thousand troops in there, it really does seem like their mission is just to get the evacuation done.
And so this is kind of a big moment.
You know, it's the longest war in American history, seemingly coming to an end.
Again, never count it till it's over, but it seems to be going in that direction.
We don't really end wars.
That's not something that America does very often.
It's never happened since I've been alive.
I mean, I suppose you could count Obama ending the war in Iraq, but then he went right back in after his war in Syria spilled over into Iraq and he had to go back in for what Scott Horton calls Iraq War III, which I suppose you could just look at as a continuation of all being the same war.
But I actually think it makes sense to look at it the way Horton does, as usual.
So we don't really end wars.
I mean, we have troops in Germany, you know, to this day.
We don't do this.
And this is the longest war in American history, and it feels like a big moment.
I know that some people have been, some people have been perhaps making it a bigger moment than it is.
I've seen some people, you know, declaring that this is the end of the American empire.
I would not go quite so far.
I don't think we're there.
Although I will say you never know.
Things, you know, there's that old saying, what is it I think about going bankrupt?
Like, how did you go bankrupt?
And you're like, slowly at first and then all at once.
Things happen quickly, as you see with, you know, the Taliban taking so much control of the country.
Sometimes things happen very quickly.
Or think about the whole COVID regime, right?
How quick it was in March of 2020 that it all happened.
And all of a sudden, now that is just reality.
And things can move very quickly.
And usually like the old saying, like kind of slowly for a long time and then all at once.
And then when it happens, you're like, oh, of course, the writing was on the wall that this was coming.
But it's more obvious in hindsight.
All right.
So I don't know exactly where to start here.
I will say that if you really want to know what's going on in Afghanistan and kind of understand it, you got to read Horton's book.
You got to read Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, to really understand the thing.
And if you do read that book, and it's a really fun book to read, if you read that, you'll really get it.
You'll get it better than 99.9% of people.
And if you can't do that, at least read his chapter, In Enough Already, about Afghanistan.
But you really should read Fool's Errand.
I guess I would say, just starting with the political, this is a nightmare for Biden.
I mean, this is just, whew, this is very rough politically for Biden.
And it's, of course, the Republican hawks have been out.
You know, the Republican Hawks have been pretty quiet for at least the last four or five years.
You know, because they were just so thoroughly discredited.
And even, you know, throughout all of the Obama years, the kind of Marco Rubio, like chainy wing of the Republicans, they were always criticizing Obama for being so soft on defense.
And they point to things like him making the deal in Iran or something like that.
But I mean, really, the guy, the guy started like four wars and continued the previous two.
But they'd still go, well, he's just so weak.
That's why we have this problem.
You know, the problem is he didn't invade Syria.
He just, you know, started a proxy war there, whatever.
But then I think they were really hoping.
And I mean, they ran Jeb Bush in 2016, right?
So they were really hoping the response to Obama would be, yeah, we got to go bushy.
We got to go bushier than we were in the Obama years.
But that wasn't the response.
In came this fucking real estate mogul dick from Queens who stole the whole thing by saying we never should have fought any of these wars.
And the Republicans cheered for him and fell in love with him.
And so leaving aside how Donald Trump actually governed, right?
The fact was that they really couldn't say much because they're looking out to a crowd of people who are screaming, you know, cheering the guy who's saying we never should have fought these wars to begin with.
And so they kind of had to be quiet.
There was really no audience in the Republicans.
But now that Biden's in and he's ending a war and the end of the war is ugly, now they're trying to reassert themselves.
I'll tell you a little bit.
There's a little conspiracy part of me that almost thinks they make ending these wars as sloppy as possible to, you know, be like, oh, look how terrible it is to end a war.
I think the coverage release from what I've seen has been shockingly anti-war in general.
And I think that this is going to be, I mean, who knows how forgetful people are in two or three years from now.
But I think this is almost universally looked at as, holy shit, 20 years and zero return on it.
Well, I think it's just hard to ignore.
Yeah, if you can spend 20 years in a country and some of it's been like coverage of soldiers who are pissed off, like, wait a second, why was I over there fighting?
Why did my friends die?
Like it becomes very clear.
And by the way, what can government do well if you can put this much resources in 20 years into one project and just fail miserably?
So I think people are going to be a little bit more awake to the fact of these missions can't work, right?
And they never will.
Well, I mean, look, it's very hard to ignore that reality that's staring right in your face, where you've got 20 years over a trillion dollars, which, by the way, is actually a lot more than that because this is what happened.
When you debt finance these wars, you know, you're going to be paying interest on that too.
I mean, just an unbelievable amount of money.
Somewhere between at least 100 to 200,000 civilian casualties, you know, dead, innocent people, and thousands of American military casualties.
And for it to all fall apart in a matter of a couple days, it really tells you something.
And this is something that everyone really who's paying attention has known that there was nothing.
I mean, this is what the Pentagon, I have the Pentagon papers, this is what the Afghanistan papers, which were all those documents that the Washington Post published just a couple years ago, what they all revealed is that from top to bottom, everyone knew that the war was a disaster and they were lying.
And the lying goes all the way back.
I mean, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, all of them were all claiming that, you know, this is going super well.
We're training up this army, this Afghan army, and they're doing really great.
They're going to be able to run the country.
This Afghan government's going to be able to run the country.
And look at them.
They fell.
It's not even like they lost a war to the Taliban.
They just fell.
They just collapsed.
This has to be similar to the ISIS situation where I'm sure that Al-Qaeda now probably has more U.S. military equipment than they ever could have bought anywhere else.
Well, yeah.
Well, let's not conflate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban here.
I don't know what the al-Qaeda presence there is.
But there's no question that the Taliban has already recovered a bunch of U.S. weaponry from, you know, from the abandoning bases and stuff.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So I do have a question for you along what you were saying of the right wing.
They're going to go after this and say, look at what happens when, you know, look at the disaster that we just caused, which, by the way, they tried that with Obama as well by saying him by leaving created the vacuum that allowed for ISIS, and that's why he never should have left and should have kept a military presence.
So we are for sure going to hear those stories.
We're going to see that.
The Taliban, are they actually raping women and doing things as terrible as what's starting to be portrayed?
Or is that just kind of like a, you know, hey, we got to get back there moral argument?
Right.
Okay.
So a few things on that first.
Number one, the talking point about ISIS going into Iraq is there is a kernel of truth to it.
But if you don't know anything and you don't know the whole picture and really understand what was going on in Syria, then you can draw the wrong conclusion.
So Obama did pull a bunch of troops out of Iraq.
But at the same time, he was launching a covert war in Syria.
And he was arming the al-Qaeda and ISIS rebels who were fighting against Assad.
I mean, he claimed he was arming like the moderate rebels and the free Syrian army.
But if you look at him, there really was no free Syrian army.
It was like 1,500 different militias, and none of them were moderate.
None of them.
You know, Assad was the most moderate person in Syria.
And, you know, a ton of weapons fell into the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Now, the plan was for al-Qaeda and ISIS to go either overthrow Assad or at least put enough pressure on Assad that he'd be willing to make a deal with the international community, aka the American Empire.
But then ISIS decided to turn around and go into Iraq.
And they grabbed a bunch of the stockpiled weapons that were in Iraq and invaded Iraq.
Now, so there is some truth to saying, like, if there had been U.S. troops in Iraq, they could have deterred or stopped them from invading Iraq.
However, like, obviously, you'd look at the other part of that and go, yeah, but also if you didn't arm al-Qaeda and ISIS, they wouldn't have been able to do it.
And that's probably the better way to do it.
So they leave that whole part out and just say, well, look, you created a vacuum by pulling the troops out.
So, okay, so that's that part of it.
Look, is the Taliban as bad as ISIS?
No.
Oppressive Gender Roles00:04:43
They're pretty brutal with girls and women.
I mean, they really do not, they shut down girls going to school.
They believe in no type of rights for women.
But again, when you only have little kernels of information, you can draw the wrong conclusion.
And the truth is that their opposition, many of the warlords who we've been propping up in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, they rape little boys.
I mean, just to put it bluntly.
So they have an even distribution of rape.
Well, I mean, I think debatably quite a bit worse than the Taliban.
Although I do think the Taliban does some of that stuff with little girls too.
I mean, it's really awful.
There's just awfulness on all sides, but it's not so cut and dry.
And this is one of the arguments that you hear a lot, which I always find very bizarre, because it's so looking at things through a Western lens and then a Western semi-woke lens,
or like at least this kind of the attitude that women are oppressed and men are oppressors that kind of dominates so much of the progressive West, which I think is, let's say, very flawed.
I know I've talked about this before on my show, on the show.
But even like the feminist view of history in America is such a funhouse mirror of reality.
Like, I mean, certainly there were strict gender roles in the past in America.
And you could certainly argue that they were oppressive.
And you certainly could argue that at a certain point they became unnecessary.
You know, like if you go back, you know, 200 years, the gender roles weren't just, you know, invented for no reason.
It's not just like men felt like being dicks.
It was just like to survive, they were kind of necessary.
I mean, if you go back to like, you know, let's say like 1850 or something like that, and you're like, well, what is the work that's being done?
It was pretty grueling, backbreaking agricultural work for the most part.
And, you know, men were naturally a little bit more suited to it than women.
And also, women were having many kids.
You had to have a lot of kids to try to, you know, get, to try to keep the species alive and, you know, like get more workers and, you know, everything.
And so women were going to, in their, you know, in many of their kind of prime physical years, were going to be pregnant constantly.
You know, as someone who's my wife is on her second pregnancy now, it's, you know, to imagine what being pregnant without any of the modern medicine entails is, it's tough.
You know, this is like, this is no joke.
And so what are you going to have?
Some fucking pregnant woman who doesn't have access to an OB or prenatal vitamins or modern medicine.
You know, I mean, was she going to be out in the fields with you as much, probably as much as she can, but probably her role is going to be more like taking care of the house.
You're going to be out in the fields and this is the best way for you to survive through the next winter.
It's just there's no like, oh, let's liberate the women.
You know, like it's, there's just no question.
But at a certain point, you know, the work transferred to, you know, really tough factory work.
And, you know, then before you know it, it becomes like working in an office at a cubicle.
And also there's not nearly as much work to keeping up the house because now we've invented like vacuum cleaners and washing machines and dishwashers and all of this stuff.
And so you could argue like, okay, we don't need these gender roles anymore.
But it's not as if they were always just plucked out of nowhere.
Anyway, I'm getting off track here, but there were oppressive gender roles in the past.
But to say that it's so clear-cut that women were the oppressed one and men weren't is not evident at all.
I know I've used this example before, but like my grandfather had a much tougher life than my grandmother did.
And my grandmother would have been the first one to tell you that.
I mean, oppressive gender roles for men often meant you were cannon fodder in war.
It's, you know, anyway.
So we look at it.
We Did Not Win00:06:23
So we look at it this way, and you'll hear people talk about, you know, how the Taliban treats women or how women are treated in whatever the country is, Iran or Saudi Arabia or something like that.
But, you know, the strange thing about it is that it's like, yeah, people are treated terrible in these cultures.
It's not just women or girls.
Like, how are boys treated in these cultures?
Do you really think any of these cultures are like just lovingly raising their boys while they do this to their girls?
It's like, no, these are like very brutal, primitive cultures.
And when you only look at it through a Western lens or only focus on one group, it's easy to draw these really out of touch conclusions.
Oh, we got to go in there and be against the Taliban because they're not good to girls.
It's like, well, the people you're supporting are raping boys.
So what are you doing now?
By the way, this is something, if you talk to combat vets from Afghanistan, you'll hear this a lot, that it really fucked up their head that they were like, you know, the people they were there like propping up or like walking around with these little boys and stuff and they knew what was going on.
And anyway, so the, you know, the Taliban, what I was saying before, like what the Afghan, what the Afghanistan papers revealed, which was what most people paying attention knew, was that this whole thing was a disaster.
And as soon as we ended it, this was going to happen.
It was obvious that we just couldn't stop the Taliban from taking over the country.
And that's what's happening now.
But just to make the point that we started on with the political, I mean, I don't see how this is not very bad for Joe Biden.
I mean, here you have Joe Biden.
He pushed it.
He pushed back the date from May to September so he could do it on September 11th and kind of announce this like 20 years after 9-11.
We are, you know, we've ended the longest war in American history and I was able to do that.
And now all of the optics are 20 years after 9-11.
The Taliban has taken over all of the territories that the government we supported was running and it's a huge loss to America.
You know, it's, it's, I remember Rand Paul saying at one point years ago that he was like, we should just declare victory and come home from all the wars.
Declare victory and come home.
Like, we did it.
And obviously that was a political calculation because anyone being honest would say, there's no victory there.
We're coming home, but we didn't win.
But he wanted to spin it, which I understand.
Say what you got to say to come home and save face.
But there's really no way with all these visuals and all these optics.
There's no way to call this a victory.
And so now what Joe Biden is left with is this defeat and the Republicans get to play this game, which is complete bullshit.
But they get to play this game of like, yeah, this is what happens with Biden.
You know, Trump wouldn't have let it go this way or whatever, which is just such bullshit.
Clearly, this was always going to end poorly.
Always going to end poorly.
However, I guess maybe on paper, there was some sort of a strategy that could have been utilized that the Taliban government could have supported itself.
I mean, now I'm getting confused.
The Afghani government could have supported itself and not been overrun by the Taliban.
Whatever Biden decided to do here clearly didn't work.
Maybe it's that they escalated the schedule too much.
Maybe they didn't do a good enough job negotiating with the Taliban.
Because I remember like years ago, there were talks about the negotiations and then like we were just bombing them.
So no matter what, like, yes, someone else probably would have messed it up also, but this is a pretty royal blunder.
And the optics of this are really, really bad.
And I don't think he's walking away from this one too easy.
Yeah, no, look, I agree with you on the political aspect of it.
It's bad.
And this is going to hurt him, no question.
And, you know, of course, this is politics.
So the Republicans are going to be like, yeah, we, oh, Donald Trump had peace in the Middle East, is what they claim.
And this is all a disaster.
But the truth is that Donald Trump said he was going to pull out of Afghanistan and didn't do it.
It was his negotiated timeline had us pulling out months ago.
And I mean, I suppose you could argue that there was some type of plan that could have made it less worse than what we have right now.
But this was going to happen when we pulled out.
And it kind of goes to show you, like, look, the Taliban, I think, look, we negotiated with them and they weren't doing this.
Like, they could have done this.
It's not like America had enough troops there that could have stopped them from doing this.
We only had a few thousand troops there.
And the deal was that we were going to leave in May.
And then Biden broke that deal and pushed it back to September.
And so, I mean, look, the reality of the situation is that we had over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at one point during Obama.
I think it was in 2011, 2010, around that time.
Over 100,000 troops in there.
We couldn't get the job done then.
So the idea that staying for another few months or putting in a couple thousand more or giving it another year, we've had 20 years with periods where there were over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.
And this is the result of it.
It's just like there's no, and this is what all the Afghanistan papers confirmed, that from the very top down to the bottom, everyone who was involved in the Afghanistan war knew there was no winning this.
There was no option here.
Because the war, like our military is made to kill people and blow shit up.
And they're very, very good at that.
They are the best force of killing people and blowing shit up that's ever existed.
If you need someone killed and shit blown up, the American military can do.
But when it comes to building a government, that's a very different thing.
Switch to Grove Products00:02:18
Nationbuilding is a whole different thing.
And you need to have some type of, like, there has to be something there for you to mold into what you're looking for.
And when you have no common cultural traditions or like it's just next to impossible to make it happen.
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And Rothbard wrote about this during the withdrawal from Vietnam: that, you know, governments, whether democratic or dictatorial, do rely on some, at least a tacit approval of the governed, at least the perception of legitimacy from a good percentage of the people who they govern.
Hubris and Failed Wars00:14:26
And you can kind of deduce what's going on here.
I mean, the president of Afghanistan left the country.
He's gone.
The Taliban is the government in Afghanistan.
And if there was some degree of popular support or perceived legitimacy from the government that we've propped up there over the last 20 years, then they wouldn't have collapsed in 48 hours.
But there's not.
And that's the reality.
And okay, yes, could you say I'm certainly not arguing that this was the perfect withdrawal plan?
I'm sure there could have been some X's and O's moved around a little bit to make sure that some of our people got out a little bit better.
There could have been some, but the fundamentals of this situation were going to be the same no matter who was doing it.
And so here's the situation that you're in.
And this is why we've been there for 20 years.
Situation that you're in is okay, it's unwinnable, but it's going to reveal what a waste this was as soon as we leave.
So what do you want to do?
And what everyone's been doing for the last 20 years is going, well, let's just keep it going.
Keep it going a little bit longer, spend a little bit more money, lose a few more lives.
All right, let's keep it going.
And eventually, you know, I don't know what Afghanistan looked like 20 years ago.
I was a kid, so I don't know what that country looked like, but is this certifiably going to be like another Libya or Iraq where our having been there has now left them in a much worse situation?
Well, I mean, you've had 20 years of war and, you know, well over 100,000 people killed, a lot of bombing campaigns.
I mean, so yeah, it's worse than it was.
Afghanistan was not in great shape in 2001.
But the reality of the situation, I mean, look, it's not as stark of a start and finish as Libya or as Iraq was, because Afghanistan didn't have their shit together as much, certainly as much as Iraq did, or probably Libya for that matter.
And it's not as if Afghanistan was kind of ruled in an orderly fashion by one dictator the way that Libya or Iraq were.
Afghanistan was much less of a nation in that sense.
You know, Afghanistan was a lot of local tribes and, you know, warlords and stuff like that.
So, I mean, I think there's no question that they're worse off.
But the more important thing, I think, to realize is that from the American perspective, we just never had to do this.
This was stupid from the very beginning.
And as Scott, you know, details in the book really well, that we never had to fight in Afghanistan to begin with.
And it could have been over by Christmas 2001.
I mean, we went in there, we had some bombing campaigns, we took out al-Qaeda bases, we took out some Taliban bases, and then we could have called it a wrap after that.
Then, basically, by the end of 2001, is when we transitioned into a nation-building effort, and that's been 20 years of disaster.
And there was never any justification for that.
And truthfully, I don't think there was ever a justification to go to war with the Taliban.
You know, the Taliban's great crime basically is that they rented space to Al-Qaeda.
No one, even the Cheneites, don't accuse the Taliban of being involved in the plotting of 9-11.
They let Al-Qaeda hang out there.
Now, I don't really think that makes you responsible in any meaningful way.
Any more than, like, you know, if you were to plot a murder, your landlord would be responsible for that.
It's like, I don't know.
He rented you a space.
Like, how does he know what you're doing when you're in that space?
And the reality, I mean, look, by the way, a whole bunch of the 9-11 plotting happened in Europe.
So are we arguing we should go to war with those countries?
Maybe we should go to war with ourselves because we legally let the hijackers into our country.
We housed them.
We let them come in here.
I think we gave them some flight school, right?
Wasn't it like the thing where they were going to flight school and weren't concerned with the landing part?
They were just going in there and being like, teach me about taking off.
I really want to focus on that, right?
I mean, does that make them responsible?
I don't think so.
I mean, perhaps a little bit, you know, incompetent, but anyway.
Let's say you want to fly into building.
How you doing?
Hypothetically.
So, you know, the Taliban was willing to negotiate, you know, handing over al-Qaeda after 9-11.
And George W. Bush took the hard line that there's no negotiating.
He's like, and that's it.
And so they were like, okay, no.
And then we went on a 20-year war with them.
And again, read Scott's book and you'll get all this information in a better way than I can give it to you right now.
But that's kind of the reality of the situation.
And Al-Qaeda, they were not Afghans.
Our war was never a beef with Afghanistan.
I mean, they hid out there because we had our bases and our propped-up dictatorship in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt.
But they were a bunch of Saudis and a few Egyptians.
And so they fled over to Afghanistan.
But it's not like their beef was with their home governments that we were propping up, which were not great guys, you know?
And so that's the real issue here, right?
Is that as, you know, and then if you want to read enough already to really understand this shit, it's that the fucking fighters that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan used were then radicalized against us by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
And that's the story.
It's not that this nation, if it even is a nation, of Afghanistan attacked America.
It's like, no, our own fighters that we were using then that we then radicalized against us.
They attacked us.
So, you know.
It was like, I think it was two years ago, there was that whole storyline that we have to go into Syria because otherwise Turkey or someone else was going to kill the Kurds.
Right.
Whereas that Assad was going to kill the Kurds.
Yeah.
And so, and it's our responsibility to save the Kurds.
And that was like a big propaganda piece.
And then, of course, it turned out to be not true and kind of went away.
The only reason I bring that up is because I think everyone in America doesn't like us kind of turning our backs on allies.
And what I mean is when you've got the local people who are helping us out, if those people are kind of hunted down and hung, that's something that no, like, I don't think anyone's going to want to go back in.
I think everyone's going to be like, nope, you fucked this up.
You clearly cannot do this, be helpful, or have a moral outcome.
So I really think the nation-building narrative will be lost.
But I think one of the things that Biden might potentially really get hammered for is nobody likes that storyline.
Nobody likes the storyline of the fact that there were people in the area that, you know, we kind of had an agreement with that we were going to get their backs and we abandoned and now we're met with horrible fates.
Yeah.
And there's, yeah, no question.
And there's a really strong argument there.
And so like there's a whole lot of people who probably the United States federal government had some obligation to try to get to safety.
The question becomes how practical is that?
Now, probably more of them could have been saved, but how practical is it really to get everybody who took the American side out of Afghanistan?
And I do think that there's a tremendous amount.
I was talking to Brian about this right before we started recording, but the only thing that I can think of is just that there's a tremendous amount of hubris that goes along with these things.
I don't, you know, I'm never, as you guys know, with me, I'm never opposed to like maintaining that there is, there could be a conspiracy at work here.
But I don't really see a conspiracy to a lot of this stuff.
I see it just as tremendous hubris, that it's like, look, we're America.
We can do whatever we want to.
So you make these promises to a whole bunch of people who you just are not capable of keeping.
You know, like the idea that we would tell everybody who sided with the Americans in Afghanistan, you side with us and we got your back.
Meanwhile, everybody looking at the situation knows as soon as we end this war, these people are going to be screwed.
You know, the thing that I found interesting kind of to back up what I was saying is just that, you know, so you have the, in terms of the political aspect of it, the most like self-inflicted wound has been Blinken and Biden's statements about what was going to happen.
I mean, they've been planning this for months now, you know, and you have the Secretary of State on television saying that the Taliban is not going to take over after we're gone.
And you won't see any of it.
The Biden just the other day said that you're not going to see any of these like, you know, these images like what we saw in Vietnam where people are escaping via helicopters.
You're not going to see any of that stuff.
It's not none of the experts are saying that the Taliban's going to take over and certainly not in just a couple of days.
Now, those clips are right there to be used against them.
I mean, like, just politically, it's a disaster.
So what would explain them saying that?
I don't see any grand theory here other than just this blinding hubris that they really believe it.
They believe now we're America.
We can kind of do whatever we want to do.
And Afghanistan is a big fat thorn in the side of that narrative showing that actually you can't.
You can't do whatever you want to do.
There are limitations.
And that's something that, as I've said many times, it's like something you have to like, when you get into this empire mentality, you really start to like, you know, lose sight of this.
It's like when, you know, when people would even be talking just in theory about not letting China take Taiwan.
And you're like, okay, well, first off, start by accepting the reality that you can't stop them.
Like, forget the morality of it, just the practicality.
Like, you can't stop them.
Like, the United States military cannot get to Taiwan and defeat the Chinese military.
And if it came to like really all-out war with two countries with H-bombs and shit like that, then there'd be cities all around the world that would be completely destroyed.
And then China would take Taiwan.
Like, even after all of that, you still couldn't stop them.
And the idea that we can remake Afghanistan in our image is clearly something that we are not capable of doing.
It's a weird thing that like, you know, it's like everybody kind of understands this basic truth on like an individual level.
But somehow as you like kind of, you know, as you kind of get scale it up and up and up, it's like, and it gets to the point of the U.S. military, this truth is completely lost, that there are natural limitations on one's ability, you know?
Like, it's not, you know, it's like if you saw like, you know, like a football team, a full team beating up one guy and you're like, I'm going to stop them.
You'd understand right away.
It's like, but you can't.
You physically can't stop that many people who are much bigger than you, you know?
But once you get to such a grand scale, like the American military and that you have this empire mentality, people feel like, well, they can do anything.
Anything is an option.
And it's not.
There's still limitations.
And yeah, we can beat the shit out of the Taliban in like air, you know, assault campaigns.
But if they, you know, this is their country, not ours.
And they're just going to keep coming back and coming back and coming back.
And what can we do?
And they're really good at hiding in caves.
Hopefully, they'll come over here.
They'll give us some seminars for COVID passports.
We'll cave for a couple of years, come back out, take it back over.
Yeah, really.
But look, this is not the Taliban, while they are, you know, pretty brutal to their own people and pretty backward.
They are not...
One of the major differences between al-Qaeda and ISIS and the Taliban is that the Taliban have never expressed any desire or in any way actually tried to attack the West.
They just want to do some heroin and fuck some little boys.
Let them do that.
They'll stick to themselves.
They want to rule Afghanistan.
And the caves, Martha Stewart show on the Taliban network.
But that's that.
And so it's just, this is, there's just no justification.
You know, there never was for us to be involved in a war there.
And as far as all of these kind of like post hoc justifications that are coming out now, like, look, it might be really terrible the way little girls are treated there and terrible the way little boys are treated there and terrible the way lots of adults are treated there.
But that's true in a lot of parts of the world.
That is not a justification for us to go on a 20-year war and spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on it.
No Justification for War00:15:23
And, you know, to all those people, it's like, if you think it is worth that, then you can go.
Just don't advocate forcing other people's kids to go.
That's my take on it.
I also do think, even though you are right to some degree, that the narrative is not exactly that this war was a, you know, was a great success and we just had to stay and buy, you know, it's because I think it's even that they realize is just too a bridge too far to sell to anyone paying attention.
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There is, you know, you see this from almost all ends of the corporate press, that it's just the humanitarian impulse, the humanitarian concern for people seems to only ever pop its head out when a war is being ended or troops are being pulled out.
That's when we get really concerned about, you know, well, what about the people we're leaving behind in all of this?
And again, I'm not saying there's no concern there.
Look, forget the propaganda campaign.
It was legitimate for some people to be concerned that the Kurds could be targeted by Assad, you know?
But what about the concern for the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed in that civil war that we started?
Or that the CIA and the federal government and the Saudis and the Israelis started?
What about concern for them?
I mean, what about the concern for the 200,000 innocent people who were killed in the war in Afghanistan?
I mean, like, I understand it's ugly to abandon our allies, but it's also ugly to kill innocent men, women, and children.
That concern didn't seem to be nearly as bright.
I mean, we have, it's just, there's something about it, right?
Like, when Donald Trump's talking about pulling troops out of Syria, there's all this concern for the Kurds.
And when Biden's talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan, there's all this concern for the people we're leaving behind.
But in the last 20 years, in the war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Pakistan, I mean, we've killed millions of people.
Millions.
And The corporate press demonstrates like no concern over that.
It's only when we talk about ending these campaigns that all of the sudden now we have to think with this like humanitarian part of our brain.
And that to me seems awfully convenient.
Like that really seems to line up with how like Raytheon might want you to be a humanitarian to really start being concerned as soon as one of these campaigns end.
The reality of Afghanistan is that nothing was accomplished.
This is being played out right in front of us.
And again, by the way, just to be clear about that, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a humanitarian concern for what happens to victims of the Taliban right now.
But I think there should be a concern about those millions of people who were killed as well.
And I think that, you know, the truth is that Afghanistan, like, I absolutely empathize with the position of somebody who fought in Afghanistan and now just watches that like, you know, they held their buddy's head in their lap as he bled out and died so that they could take some area in Afghanistan.
And now you just watch the Taliban march right in.
Like, it's just right in your face.
Just such a slap in the face that that was so clearly for nothing.
But the reality of the situation is that, yeah, that was for nothing.
Like, your buddy died for nothing.
And that sucks.
It's horrible.
But like, if anyone can be told the truth, if anyone's a big boy that can be told the truth, it's combat vets.
So yeah, that's the truth.
Your buddy died for nothing.
But well, I guess not for nothing, because really what it was was a 20-year-long honeypot where, you know, Raytheon and Halliburton and Lockheed Martin, their stocks went sky high.
And, you know, whatever the hell was going on in the opioid trade or any opium trade or any of that shit, right?
So like, that's what it was.
It was a 20-year gravy train at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
And, you know, over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money.
So that's the story of Afghanistan.
Now, I will say that I think Biden, the political position that he's in now, is like, I just can't explain how bad it is.
Because it's unworkable.
I mean, even if he were, and I think in some ways this is a good thing, but I don't even think it's politically viable for him to turn around at this point.
Like, isn't he kind of committed to ending the war now?
I mean, if he were to turn around and say, okay, we're going to stay, I mean, how would that work?
We're going to heal souls, man.
I got compassion.
We'll get it done.
Well, I also think at this point, if he were to turn around and say, all right, no, we're sending in more troops.
We're not ending the war in Afghanistan.
You know, we'll end it next year or something like that.
We're sending in.
I mean, how many troops do you have to send in?
I mean, at this point, the fucking, now you're at a war.
Now you're at a hot war with the Taliban, which it seems like because we've been negotiating over the last couple years, that the Taliban has at least been in check to some degree, I think, waiting for this time right now to come.
It makes sense, just strategically from the Taliban's point of view, it would make sense.
You know, there were little like squirmishes here or there where there'd be, you know, a little attack and a couple where the Taliban killed some people.
But in general, they've been pretty in check.
And you'd think like, well, look, they wouldn't want to like a year ago or two years ago, start fucking killing a whole bunch of people and give an excuse for the U.S. military to send more people in.
You'd want to kind of wait to this moment because you know you're poised to take over everything as soon as we leave.
But if we were to go back in now, now I think you'd be looking at a real hot war between our forces and the Taliban.
And I would just imagine that the side that America has been propping up must be completely disheartened at this point.
I mean, their president fled the country.
What's he going to do?
Come back and be like, yeah, I'm the president.
I mean, there's something about this, like the illusion of government that once you see through it is very hard, very hard to regain.
Also, I think everyone's going to be able to see it through it.
So we go back in, and so what?
We create a new government.
Like you just did this for 20 years.
Why?
Unless you're going to do a full-time standing army, which I don't think people are into, I don't think, then you don't have a plan.
You would have to actually go, listen, we have a responsibility to the Afghani people after having been there for 20 years.
I made a strategic error that endangered these people.
And so we're going to have to go back and leave a standing presence.
But I don't, first, I don't think he wants to do that.
And if you were to make that claim, I think you'd have to kind of step down almost.
You almost have to go, I made a terrible error that resulted in severe harm to these people.
So we're going to go make it right.
And no one in our government's taking that responsibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's, that's right.
It's, it does seem like it's, it's almost like as bad as this is politically for Biden, that he's got to just stick to this.
Another thing that I guess is worth mentioning, which has led to a lot of wild internet speculation, but I think it's a fair criticism.
Not saying I agree with all the speculation about Biden being dead or something like that.
But he hasn't addressed the nation.
And that is pretty wild.
No, they're trying to figure out how they can spin it.
And they know that he's also not the guy you just put up in front of the camera without a really good plan.
Well, that's for sure.
I mean, I think that's the most likely explanation.
Would we have died over the weekend?
No, people are fucking joking around.
I don't think there's any truth to that.
I mean, he was already dead.
They've been faking him alive.
So why would they change that now?
I said someone tweeted at me and said, do you think Joe Biden is dead?
And I said, the question with Joe Biden is how dead is he?
But, you know, yes, I agree with you.
Well, they got to figure it out.
But it's pretty incredible that they haven't figured something out.
I mean, for this to be happening, at least as of when we're recording this, he still has not come out and addressed the country.
It's a pretty major thing.
It's the longest war in American history coming to a really ugly end.
And you would think he would feel some type of obligation that like, I got to say something.
They need to somehow undo the Cuomo scandal because he's really the only one in government who can get up there and listen.
We fucked up.
Fucked up happened.
People died.
Look, I'm not a war hawk.
I'm Italian.
Okay.
This is how Italians do business.
We bomb countries.
I think that it's an interesting, like it's a really interesting moment.
I think that the effect that this has on the rest of the war on terrorism will be interesting because really, Afghanistan was always, even though it was never justified, it was the most justified war, right?
Like we were at least going after the country where the people who did this were staying.
These other wars are just like, you know, there is no justification for us to ever have been there.
And so that part's kind of interesting.
I find it dangerous, but also interesting that the Republican war hawks have come out from underground, you know, and even as bad as the optics of this are, I think there's a lot of people who are seeing through the Liz Cheney bullshit, you know, where she is like, well, this is why we never should have pulled out.
And the obvious rejoinder to that is like, but how long did you want to stay?
How long did you want to stay?
It's the longest war we've ever been in.
How much longer should it have been?
And when was this miraculously going to start working?
Yeah, if you're good at getting things done, how is 20 years and a trillion dollars not enough to take care of it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think kind of the broader picture to me, I tweeted something about this the other day, but it really shows you just how out of their minds some of these like Republican war hawks are,
that you're like, who in their right mind could look at the state of America over the last 17 months and think that we are in a position morally or practically to spread freedom around the world.
I mean, it's just bonkers.
Well, it's freedom through control and safety.
So if other countries need to outsource us coming in there and ensuring that people are wearing masks and have apparatuses on their phones to track their whereabout and health records, we're launching the beta program right now to make sure that we can actually do this population control on a large scale.
But pretty soon, I'm sure we can coordinate with the world government like the UN and bring this to every country.
Yeah, instead of spreading democracy, we're going to go around the world spreading lockdowns and vaccine passports.
I think you're going, you see, you don't get what new freedom is.
You're going with old freedom.
Yeah, it's very antiquated.
2021 freedom.
Yeah.
But I mean, really, like, who could deny, even on the pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine passport side, that we are in a major crisis in our own country.
And we're approaching $30 trillion in debt.
I mean, we can't afford the programs that they want to put into place here at home.
Who would think we're in a position right now to go around spreading on this nation-building campaign?
It's so bonkers.
It's so removed from reality.
I will say that I saw that I should mention that I believe Ron Paul is trending and still trending.
I got to go tweet some stuff.
Ron Paul was right is trending, which is pretty cool to see.
Maybe there's an opportunity there to see that people can look at this and see, oh, yeah, this guy who was kind of calling everything right over the last 20 years, now you see this whole disaster happening.
And it's like, yeah, well, that's right.
But the major thing to take away from it is not that like, and I think it's fairly obvious for everyone who listens to this show, but that the takeaway of this being a disaster is not that we never should have pulled out.
The takeaway isn't, oh, we should fight this war forever, this unwinnable war forever.
The takeaway is that we never should have fought this war to begin with and that we shouldn't be fighting these wars all throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for no reason, no justified reason.
It's not for our national security.
It's not because any of these countries attacked us.
And we have no right to do it.
And, you know, like I said, one of the oldest tricks, I tweeted this out the other day too, but one of the oldest tricks of the war machine is to focus on the humanitarian abuses of our enemies in war and completely ignore the humanitarian abuses of our allies in the war and the war itself.
Declaring War on Terror00:01:43
And so if you really care about helping people in these desperate situations, well, maybe you should also care about the millions that have been killed over the last 20 years under the banner of the war on terrorism.
And that's where we fucked up from the very beginning.
That's where George W. Bush screwed everything up, is that he's, you know, he didn't declare war on al-Qaeda.
He didn't even declare war on Al-Qaeda and the people who support al-Qaeda.
He declared war on terror, on this emotion that you're supposed to feel from acts of terrorism.
And so we've been trying to fight terror for 20 years.
Well, now we're going to fight colds, tissues.
Yeah, that's right.
Now we have the war on germs.
That's what's going on.
We're freeing up resources.
We've got to bring the military home so they can start locking down our own cities.
And we're going to stop having drug crimes so that more of the law enforcement officers are making sure no one's sneezing.
It's just a shift for resources.
Well, yeah, there you go.
All right.
So I think we'll wrap the episode on that.
And of course, we'll be following the situation and talking about it more.
What's that?
Rochester.
Oh, yeah, we're coming to you.
Let them know, Rob.
No, I think you should plug it directly from President Smith himself.
We will be in Rochester coming up in just a little over a week, the 26th through the 28th.
Me and Robbie the Fire, Bernstein, a bunch of live stand-up comedy shows.
I believe we're doing a live podcast up there as well.
So come check us out.
Comedy at the Carlson.
If you can't find the links, hit me up.
But that's going to be a fun whole weekend.
We haven't done a whole weekend in a long time.
Hell yeah, brother.
All right, man.
Thank you for listening, and we will catch you next time.