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Sept. 22, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:43
Back To Bagram? Trump Threatens To Re-Occupy Afghanistan!

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, President Trump warned that if Afghanistan did not "give back" Bagram air base to the United States, "bad things are going to happen." Twenty years wasn't enough? Also today: Trump also threatens Venezuela if it does not receive back the Venezuelans in this country. Finally: Bondi gets her marching orders from Trump in yet another Truth Social post.

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Wants Back Base 00:14:23
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Good.
Are you all set to go?
I hope so.
We're running out of time.
The clock is running.
Well, we'll see about that.
We have several things that we could talk about, but unfortunately, several.
Matter of fact, the majority are negative.
Negative in the sense it's not good news for Liberty.
But we'll find something good to say and some encouragement somewhere along the way.
But we want to start off with not a brand new subject.
I thought we had buried this subject after 20 years and how many billion dollars and lives spent doing this.
And that is that if Trump, Trump doesn't like Afghanistan, people, he wants to go back there and reform them.
He wants to take care of it.
He's demanding that our air base be returned to us.
We build it.
We pay for it.
It's our airbase.
Bagma Airport Base.
So he's laid down the law.
And he says if they don't turn it over, they're in for trouble and they had to do it now.
So that's a pretty strong statement.
Not anything new for the president, but something that annoys us who are trying to prevent conflict and always wondering why we don't win more fights when you think arguments is a better word, more arguments over what to do.
Because we argued against the case of going in there in Afghanistan in the first place.
At 20 years, and it was a total failure.
And here they are starting up again.
But you know what?
I'm afraid, maybe you can find somebody and tell us today if there are anybody really in the public arena right now saying, Mr. President, slow down.
We don't need to go to Afghanistan.
So I don't know about it.
All I know is where I stand on this position and where our liberty stands.
And there's nothing to be gained.
I cannot, I always look for what can be gained.
And you look at it and say, maybe the people will wake up if there's a failure.
But 20 years and all this killing and spending.
So it doesn't look like time did, you know, play an influence on our system because here we are looking at this and saying, we're threatening them there.
And who knows what tomorrow will bring?
But all I know is we don't need that.
Yeah.
Well, it's just the peace president can't stop threatening war, it seems like, you know, and we understood that we were going to have an unconventional president in Trump 2.0.
And the things that we saw when he was up for the election, we liked.
I mean, unconventionality is pretty good when the status quo is rotten to the core.
But unfortunately, what we're seeing here is a president who keeps threatening countries, keeps wanting, keeps, you know, certainly threatening to invade, threatening all sorts of things.
Now, here is, here is the, put up that the post that he had on, here we go.
So here's what he exactly said.
He said, Afghanistan doesn't give Bagram Air Force Base back to those that built it, the United States of America.
Bad things are going to happen.
President D. J. T. Donald J. Trump is what he says.
Now, let's listen because he was in an interview, Dr. Paul, where he discussed why he wants that air base back so badly.
If you want to grab your earpiece, Trump will let you know what he has in mind, why he wants that base.
It's that first audio clip.
You can get that queued up here.
Let's put it in and hear what he has to say.
The police went through the Afghanistan total disaster for no reason whatsoever.
We're going to leave Afghanistan, but we're going to leave it with strength and dignity.
We're going to keep Bagram, the big air base, one of the biggest air bases in the world.
We gave it to him for nothing.
We're trying to get it back, by the way.
Okay, that could be a little breaking news.
We're trying to get it back because they need things from us.
We want that base back.
But one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it's an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.
So a lot of things are happening.
So that's the cat out of the bag, Dr. Paul.
They want it back because it's an hour's drive from where China makes its nuclear weapons.
We want to occupy a base so that we can start threatening China more.
That seems to be his plan.
And you know what goes through my mind as I listen to him?
Empire, empire, empire.
You know, not only maintaining, but making sure it never shrinks and make sure that we can expand whenever possible.
So it's part of the empire, and we need it back.
And those Afghanis should know better.
And so the threats go out.
Not a good way to promote diplomacy among nations so that we have less of this war-mongering stuff.
So this cannot end well.
But it's hard to predict what's going to happen.
Maybe policies, maybe they'll listen to our program today.
Maybe they'll change the policy.
Not likely, though.
Well, here's what Dave DeCamp had to say in his write-up of the strange posts from Trump over the weekend.
This wasn't the only one.
There's another one.
There are two more that we'll talk about.
This is what Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com wrote.
Well, Trump claims the U.S. built Bagram.
The airfield was first constructed by the Soviet Union.
Bagram became the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan following the 20-year U.S. war in the country, and U.S. forces pulled out of the airfield during the withdrawal in 2021.
Trump said during his visit to the U.K. last week that one of the reasons he wants Bagram is because it's an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.
President made similar comments when he was on the campaign trail in 2024, saying if he were still president during the withdrawal, he was going to keep Bagram and leave 4,000 troops at the facility.
Well, I don't know, Dr. Paul.
Those of us who were watching just a few years ago remember the circumstances of our withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I don't think they were in the mood for us to keep anything at that point.
They were running high tail out with a tail between their legs.
Yeah, just like in Vietnam after 20 years.
Yes, it was getting to be a habit.
But they said that there was a change of it.
It was so humiliating about the end of the war, so-called war in Vietnam, that there was a Vietnam syndrome, and we would never get ourselves into this.
We're not going to start another war.
And lo and behold, George Bush took care of that.
He changed the attitude to get people engaged and support these kind of wars.
But it doesn't look like that happened.
No.
Well, here's from the same article that Dave wrote.
If you put that next to him, in response to Trump's latest comments, the Taliban-led government, and that is an important three words, the Taliban-led government.
Because as everyone says, we spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.
The Taliban-led government, known officially as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, called on the U.S. president to uphold the Doha Agreement.
Well, they should know that the U.S. doesn't uphold agreements, referring to the deal that was negotiated by the first Trump administration and led to President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Doha Agreement.
Now, this is the government spokesman from Afghanistan.
He said, Under the Doha Agreement, the United States pledged that it will not use or threaten force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan nor interfere in its internal affairs.
Therefore, it is necessary that they remain faithful to their commitments.
To which I would say, don't hold your breath.
You know, this makes me think about where the commitments we made after the Cold War ended, where we would stay and not mess around with Russia again.
And lo and behold, NATO had another idea.
Oh, it wasn't the United States, it was NATO.
Oh, okay, but they don't have enough money.
So the American people can pay for it.
Well, they don't have any money either.
Oh, I know.
We'll print up the money.
And on and on.
That's why this is a very fragile system of government.
And it will not be long lasting.
Well, you make a good point there, and it's a great transition.
Print up the money.
Because I returned to our good friends over at the Watson Institute, the costs of war project, and this is something we've gone back to over and over again over the years.
If you put that next clip up, because this is the cost in money of our Afghanistan war, and now if you take a look at it, U.S. United States costs to date of the war in Afghanistan.
Now, you can look at all the different ones, but ultimately, at the very end, you see between DOD overseas contingency, State Department, overseas Defense Department-based budget war-related veterans care for Afghan vets, estimated interest on war borrowing.
Anyway, for those 20 years, Dr. Paul, the American people were forced to cough up directly or preferably through inflation, as is how the wars are paid.
$2.313 trillion sucked out of our economy in a lost war.
Now, something I believe certainly, and I know you share that view, probably more important than money.
If you go to the next one, let's talk about lives lost in that 20-year war.
This is from the Brown University's Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute.
Now, there are all of these different categories.
I won't go through them in the interest of time.
Skip down to the bottom line: total lost lives between 238 and 241,000 souls lost in a losing war in Afghanistan.
So, going back to that is literally insane, I think.
And now, what was the lesson learned?
Zero, zero, zero, zero lessons learned.
And, but you know, you have to have to put some responsibility on the people themselves, our people, because if when the people wake up and they get enough attention and they think it's going to affect them, like after 20 years in Afghanistan, they said, enough, enough, bring them home.
And they did.
And there was a relative peace.
And actually, we get along with Vietnam better than ever because we lost the war and got out of their way.
But we don't, it seems like, you know, even with the history of Russia, the fact you know, you know, being in there, the communists being in there and making a mess out of it.
And now we go in and do the same thing.
And, you know, the Russians really laugh at us for this.
You know, they made the point.
Yeah.
You know, what are you guys doing?
I thought you learned a lesson.
And just making fun of us.
Yeah, making fun of us.
Well, watching us, watching us do what we wanted them to do as the Soviet Union when they bankrupted themselves in a stupid war in Afghanistan.
We're doing the same thing.
Now, this whole of this rewriting of history, I would not be surprised, Dr. Paul, and I say this with a little bit of lightheartedness, but remember the old quote from Dick Cheney: I believe they will, in fact, greet us as liberators.
They're probably going to twist history and put up this next photo.
They're probably going to rewrite history and say, no, this is actually the Afghanis greeting the U.S. as liberators rather than desperate to get out as we left.
So, anyway, let's have to put up with Cheney too much, but not too long ago, I read an up-to-date quote.
And if anything, he's worse than he was before.
He hasn't given up.
No, just if we'd have kept more troops in Vietnam, then we would have been secure in our empire building.
Well, it was a doozy of a weekend for Trump.
I don't know.
Maybe he had jet lag.
Maybe he got some bad food over there in the UK.
Maybe it didn't sit well with him.
Maybe he didn't get his burgers.
Whatever it was, he went pretty nutty on Truth Social.
And, you know, sometimes I get a little rude on social media and I regret it afterward, but I'm not the president of the United States, you know, and I don't want to be.
So now our next story is Trump on it on Venezuela.
He's also threatening Venezuela again.
If you go to the next one, he says on his Truth Social: We want Venezuela to immediately accept all of the prisoners and people from mental institutions, which includes the worst in the world, insane asylums that Venezuelan leadership has forced into the United States of America.
Thousands of people have been badly hurt and even killed by these monsters.
Get them the blank out of our country right now, or the price you pay will be incalculable.
Very, very angry post there.
Does that sound like he's willing to negotiate?
Not much.
Not quite.
Not quite.
But of course, what he doesn't notice is that a lot of the Venezuelan refugees are economic refugees because of our own sanctions.
You know, if we hadn't put sanctions on Venezuela, the economy would have probably been better.
Now they have an economic system that we know is not the most efficient for delivering wealth to the people.
Nevertheless, we make matters worse by sanctioning them and not allowing them to perform, particularly when they have a huge supply of oil and gems and other things.
So in a way, we sort of caused that problem.
And the other thing is, how did they force us to accept Venezuelans?
Maybe we should have protected our borders a little bit better.
Maybe it wasn't their fault.
And you know, a lot of times drugs are mixed up in here.
Causing More Friction? 00:03:40
Yeah.
And this time, it looks like they're using the excuse of drugs causing all this problem.
And probably is not high on the order of the problems we have there.
It's just our interference.
And do you think oil might have a play in this?
I wonder if that's the case because, you know, we don't have all the oil in the world, but we want to control all the oil in the world.
And that, of course, causes problems and doesn't win us many friends.
No, it doesn't.
And I do have a clip of President Trump again talking tough.
Now, this has, I think, more to do with the blowing of ships out of the water, boats out of the water.
I think they're up to three now.
But if you get your earpiece, Dr. Paul, and look at sort of the almost pleased with himself he is that he's completely disrupted peaceful maritime activities around Venezuela.
If you put that second audio clip, now let's listen to what he has to say here.
On Venezuela, you said that, let me quote your tweet here.
Well, you said additional boats, you don't even find a fishing boat.
You don't even find cruise liners anywhere.
There's nothing in the water near Venezuela.
It's actually strange.
You know what that means?
That means there are no drugs coming in.
There's nothing in the water, no fishing boats, no cruise liners.
It's kind of strange, actually, he says.
Well, it's not strange.
You've blown up three of them without proving to anyone that they are.
That makes his position look weirder.
Yeah, weirder.
Don't you think?
Weirder, weirder.
And he says, Well, that's just fine because it means no drugs are coming in.
And I was reading a piece, I think it was on Hedge this morning.
I didn't clip it.
You may have seen it, Dr. Paul, where they interviewed some.
Oh, I think it was on Politico.
They interviewed some Coast Guards anonymously, and they said this is the craziest way to interdict drugs.
It's never been done this way.
It goes against all procedures, you know, and basically, we don't know how to deal with this.
It's crazy.
You know, the point I like to make on this.
I don't like to make it, but the point is that a lot more people die from alcohol.
And we tried prohibition with alcohol.
It didn't seem to work so well.
And so they got rid of it.
And yet now, you know, it's over and over again.
We do the same thing.
So if you want to really deal with regulating people's lives and what they take into their system and make the responsibility on somebody other than the DEA and other special interests, but all you have to do is look and see that prohibition, regardless of whether it's ideology or prohibitions against whatever, it generally doesn't work if the people are opposed to it.
And if there's a debate going on, debate, but not just this innuendos and arguments and name-calling.
It doesn't seem like you'll move peace ahead.
It looks like you're going to cause more friction.
And we have enough of that.
I mean, maybe end the U.S. military empire and provide some services to people who find themselves addicted.
You know, I mean, oh, sure of that.
Well, we both like charts a lot.
And so I grabbed a couple of charts on this that I thought are interesting.
If you go to the first one now, this is U.S. military assets now near Venezuela.
And you can see this is a lot of military assets, Dr. Paul.
A lot of ships, a lot of expensive ships there, a lot of expense having to do with threatening Venezuela.
Pam Bondi's Memos 00:03:50
But let's look about what President Trump keeps saying: that the drugs are all coming from Venezuela to the United States.
Go to that next one.
Now, this has been verified by his own intelligence community.
And this is that almost no drugs end up in the U.S. coming from Venezuela.
A country with the world's largest oil reserves and other valuable minerals is not going to have a government-wide drug smuggling.
Geographically, supply through Venezuela also makes little sense.
Only the biggest idiots buy into the stories coming out of the White House.
That's Hawkeye on X.
And he has a map showing where the narcotics are coming from into the U.S.
And they're primarily coming from Colombia and also from the Pacific.
And now, here's another chart.
This is U.S. government database of drug movement and seizure events.
If you go to that next one, you'll see that 93 to 94% of all the illicit narcotics coming into the United States are coming from the Mexico-Central America corridor.
The Caribbean corridor as a whole is only responsible for about six to seven percent of the drugs.
So, if President Trump really does want to deal with the drugs entering the U.S., he seems to be barking up the wrong tree on this one.
I'm not sure what he has in mind.
Boy, I'm not sure either.
Well, another outburst, if you want to go to our third one that we wanted to mention, we do have a kind of a mini happy ending, you know, because we were kind of a downer today.
But he also, Trump also was a little weird about Pam Bondi, his attorney general.
Now, Politico picked this up.
And of course, they have their spin on the title.
There's no question about it.
They're no fans of Trump.
But he says, we can't delay any longer.
Trump urges Bondi to prosecute his rivals.
And go to the next one.
Here's what he said, Dr. Paul, in another very angry Truth Social Post.
Pam, I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that essentially, same old story as last time, all talk, no action, nothing is being done.
What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia?
They're all guilty as blank, but nothing is going to be done.
Then we almost put a Democrat-supported U.S. attorney in Virginia and a really bad Republican pass, a woke rhino.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, Dr. Paul, but basically, it reads like he's sending a memo to Pam Bondi giving her marching orders.
It's not something you should really do in public.
You know, even the headline, this Politico headline is startling.
He says, and this is in quotes, we can't delay any longer.
Trump urges Bondi to prosecute his rivals.
Does that sound legal?
When you think about it, they think this is brand new, but all they're doing is being a little bit more sophisticated in what Biden was doing.
I thought that's what he was doing, going after his political enemies and all the lying and innuendos.
So it doesn't look like these kind of problems are going to go away quickly.
The thing is, these people are bad people.
You know, Adam Schiff is a bad person.
We know the stuff he did on Russia Gate.
We know that he lied.
There probably is a good case to be made.
But the problem is the people, including Hegseth and Bondi and Kash Patel and the others, Bongino, they're so busy making these flashy statements and these big, you know, sort of reality TV sorts of things.
It doesn't seem like they want to roll up their sleeves and get down to finding out if some of these people did break the law.
So in a way, I guess he's right.
Flashy Statements Over Substance 00:06:40
What if we didn't have them doing all that stuff?
Would the country be better off or would it get worse?
No, the people that are on the receiving end and want more benefits coming from the government, they'd be letting us know how they feel.
But no, the country is not better off with, you know, to me, it's the pure democracy of the dictatorship of the majority and the willingness for our system to encourage every special interest to band together and stick it to the poor people, stick it to the minority, stick it to the middle class, and financially or whatever.
Who fights the wars?
The people who have the least to gain via it.
So it's just amazing that more people don't wake up.
And of course, that's been one of our goals.
If we're on the right track, we'll do our very best to understand it and try to get some converts to think this way, because I am still convinced that when people change their minds, they can change the government.
It just takes too long to do it.
Because I think prevention, like in medicine, prevention is much better than treating disease after you get it.
And after we get, we go along with it.
Somebody has an executive order, and then people finance it, and the people are propagandized, and they're supporting the war.
It becomes a nationalistic issue.
It's on and on.
And then after 20 years, but now this, it looks like Afghanistan.
I'll be moaning and going.
Well, you know, after four years, you'd think we'd learn.
I'm more optimistic about that because I think the whole thing, I think the money is going to run out before any 40 years.
And maybe that's exactly what's happening right now.
Well, the word optimistic is a good word because I think maybe people who aren't tuning into us six months ago, however, seven, eight months ago, will think that we're just afflicted with Trump derangement syndrome.
We were actually very optimistic early on with President Trump.
We thought a lot of good things were happening.
He said a lot of great things on the campaign trail, and we're still not opponents of him.
But we're not going to sit here silently while he does dumb things like threaten war everywhere, which is bad for our economy and our standing in the world.
Nevertheless, Dr. Paul, let's finish on an up note.
This is almost a nostalgic note because we were very excited when Elon Musk was in the White House.
There was a lot of energy.
He genuinely seemed like he wanted to cut government.
And I think he did a lot of great things.
But let's put up that last clip.
Now, this is at the Charlie Kirk funeral.
As everyone knows, Musk and Trump have been on the outs for quite some time.
Let's full screen this.
We don't need to even put our earphones in.
But, Dr. Paul, have a look at this vision, at this video right here and see and see what's happening.
There's Musk and Trump shaking hands and Charlie Kirk's going to give us a little bit of optimism.
Maybe people will say we're being foolish and nostalgic, but nevertheless, those were the good old days and they were only a few months ago.
Let's hope so.
You know, trying to figure this out, it reminded me of a book I read a long time ago.
And it was written by a person by the name of Dale Carnegie.
How to win friends and influence people.
And I don't know, a lot of people, I think, could find reasons to challenge it.
It seemed at times a little childish approach.
But then I thought there's one quote, one advice that he gave to people who are how to win friends and influence people.
The one item here is the suggestion is: don't criticize, don't condemn, and don't complain.
And you might gain more diplomatic successes with that attitude.
At least in the field when the violence, what we do is we hide that we're the initiator of violence.
And matter of fact, it's very hard for a nation to say, yes, it was our fault.
We shouldn't have done that.
But just think of the effort we made to try to prevent the Ukraine war.
And we had a lot of grief over that because, and it still will, because they still cite, you know, that, oh, well, you know, the Russians did this.
Russians did that.
They never mentioned NATO.
They never mentioned how we financed the war.
Never mentioned how many rules we broke.
And that to me is a shame.
So I think some of these other things, and I think the other thing a government shouldn't do, unless it's in true defense, is don't lie and don't cheat and don't kill people.
And we're not allowed to do as anybody.
I don't know why we allow these governments to do that and get us involved in these wars by an executive order.
And then the people roll over, send them the money, send them their kids, on and on, until it gets so bad.
And they say, well, what are you going to do about it?
Well, what have you not done?
Yeah, absolutely.
Wake up the people.
We have to get a desire to live in a free country, and you have to get an attitude that is persuasive.
And it's not going to come, guess where it's not going to come from?
Our universities.
I see more and more people agreeing with us on that.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm done, Dr. Paul.
If you want to do a closing greeting to our viewers, I'm out.
I've got nothing to add.
I want to just thank our viewers for tuning in on a regular basis.
I think all these issues that we talk about are important.
I think we all here, especially in our project here, to recognize the risk and the difficulties and the challenges that we have.
But I think that's the way it's been for 100 years, 1,000 years, or several thousand years.
It's something built into our nature, but it doesn't mean that you should give up the goal of seeking truth.
There are some, and they get a lot of press, and those are the people that say you're wasting your time.
There is no such thing that exists.
Truth doesn't exist.
Don't seek after it.
You have to just let the people who know best what's good for other people and they should rule over us, which is ridiculous.
Because I think buried deep in the soul of everybody, one time or another, has a desire to live in peace and prosperity.
And that is certainly what we would like to encourage.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Livery Report.
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