All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 1, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:20
How The Afghan Attacker Could Have Been Stopped

he horrific attack over the weekend by a CIA-linked Afghan immigrant did not have to happen. The problem, however, was not a flawed immigration policy and the solution is not "reverse migration."

|

Time Text
Afghanistan's Unintended Consequences 00:13:17
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good to be back, Dr. Paul.
Back in the saddle.
Good.
Ready to go.
Yes.
Well, we want to talk about the peace that we have brought to Afghanistan and added Afghanistan quietly and peacefully to our empire.
And everybody's happy.
Now, if people just heard what I said, of course, exactly the opposite has happened.
But Afghanistan, every time we talk about it, and we have not too much until rather recently because we've had so many blunders over there.
But I first started thinking seriously about Afghanistan before I was really much into politics, but I was very much into the Air Force.
Because in the early 60s, I was a flight surgeon, and one of our stops was with Peshawar in Pakistan.
And the senior military officials and the pilots and all, they said, Ron, we want to take you over to the Khyber Pass and take a look at Afghanistan.
I said, well, that sounds interesting.
And that the Khyber Pass has been known for years.
But as we drove, they themselves had learned a lot about history.
And because it's easy to, and a lot of people have heard this already, but it's called the graveyard of empires.
Nobody conquers them, but they get invaded a lot, but nobody conquers them.
But I can remember the statement of the senior military official that was with us.
He says, Ron, he says, you look up into those mountains there.
And it didn't look like the Appalachia Mountains or our Rocky Mountains.
Not a tree, nothing.
It just looked like a rock.
He says, there are thousands of people up there living up there.
There are tribes up there.
And he says, you know, they have been independent for a long time and they've never been conquered.
And so he was rather emphatic about that.
But I keep thinking about, you know, so much people are talking about this now.
You know, even recently, you know, with the thing with Russia trying to conquer us and then our failure with it, it's just something that makes no sense.
It could be solved.
It could be prevented.
And we're so confident that a less interventionist foreign policy would be the way to go.
Daniel, we've talked a little bit about this, but it's really rounding up here about the seriousness of the extension of this.
And you might want to try to find blame, but there's blame to go around.
You can't say, oh, you know, the previous administration, it did cause a lot of trouble, but it's not like it's a couple individuals there.
It's sort of a philosophy because we heard criticism, but we really haven't heard a change in foreign policy.
I mean, we're still interventionists, strong as ever, mean as ever, killing people just like before.
So it's discouraging that our message hasn't quite reached a lot of people.
It reaches quite a bit of people, but not the people that are giving advice to the administration.
And sadly, the violence came home over the weekend with the tragic shooting of two young National Guard troops in Washington, D.C.
And it really does.
It harkens back to the Giuliani moment, where you said they're over here because we were over there.
And this is exactly the truth with what happened.
That certainly doesn't detract from the horror of what happened, nor does it reduce any blame for the shooter himself.
But the facts are the facts.
This is a person who was trained by the CIA to kill people in Afghanistan, to kill the people that we wanted killed.
So in recompense, and it's not just him, there are thousands of others like that who are trained to kill, and they kill the people we wanted killed.
We said, okay, well, we'll bring you back to the U.S. in payment for your efforts, because if we leave you here, the Taliban that took over after 20 years of fighting the Taliban will kill you.
So we will bring you over.
So they bring people like this individual over.
He's trained to kill by the CIA.
Something happens.
He has a mental break.
Who knows what it is?
And he goes on a rampage.
This is literally blowback what's happened.
Again, it doesn't detract from the horrors of it.
But the narrative that they're spinning about this being around about immigration is completely untrue.
It's about blowback.
Well, that's for sure.
And that goes on if nobody realizes it or wants to admit it because, you know, it would ruin their plans if the American people wake up and see this happening.
But then again, the cost of this is just outrageous.
You know, there's 70,000 Afghanis military personnel have been killed over these 20 years.
You know, the Soviets stayed, it was their third try in the last hundred years, but they did it again and they stayed 10 years.
They suffered the consequences.
But I think their pending bankruptcy and the failure for them to conquer Afghanistan made them smarter.
They got out after 10 years.
You know, boy, that's really a learning lesson.
But we haven't learned anything.
So we jumped in and now we took over.
And all we do now is we see an image of people being hustled and down the runways, get on airplanes.
How are you going to get out?
How are you going to get to the United States?
I mean, the whole thing is chaos.
I just wonder who's behind this orchestration of chaos coming to our streets.
And we've already seen it.
So when they can murder people, you know, right out in daylight at the White House, trying to make a point.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you happily returned to X with some commentary over the last few weeks, over the weekend, I should say.
And I think it was well received.
And you did a great comment, in my opinion, about what happened.
And of course, as usual, you hit the right note as opposed to the narrative that they want.
Put that first one up.
This is you, I forget what day it was over the weekend, but you said a National Guard member was tragically murdered near the White House by an Afghani national, formerly employed by the CIA during our war, our war to change the government of Afghanistan.
He was able to enter the U.S. due to the lenient border controls under the Biden administration and his cooperation in fighting the Taliban.
Generating a motive for this horrible deed is not simple, but we can hardly ignore our foreign policy and our presence in Afghanistan for 20 years without any evidence that it had to do with our national defense.
Now go to the next one.
I'll just read, I skipped a little bit in the middle, but we learned nothing and plunged in for 20 years, wasting an extraordinary amount of wealth, creating tremendous death, PTSD, and mountains of bills for veterans' affairs.
Like the Soviets, we ended up with less freedom, a plunging standard of living, and bankruptcy.
Our empire has created many instances of blowback throughout the years.
There's that word, Dr. Paul.
I'm glad you used it.
And yet, despite all the failure and blowback, our government refuses to give up and ditch the empire.
It chooses to set its sights on more nations to invade and or regime change.
Not good.
Not good.
Good comment.
Well, let's say I take a little credit, but sad.
Sad.
Yeah, yeah, sad.
We're not happy about it at all.
It's terrible.
That has to be the top of the news, but that really isn't brand new.
We've been doing stupid things for a long time.
And the stupid things that the human race has done.
But we've been living through it now.
You say, well, we have still a lot of people who are getting annoyed with us who are still talking about solutions and preventions of this kind of stupidity.
And they say you hate Trump, and therefore you're a bad person.
And, you know, even a certain senator has received the same type of criticism.
But, you know, the 70,000 Afghan military were killed, 46,000 civilians were killed, $2.3 trillion.
And there's a debate going on.
Some people argue it was more than $2.3 trillion when you add up everything that has to be done.
So we quickly, there was one time something was coming up and we were supporting something.
And it did get a lot of attention.
I said, yeah, I think it was in the Middle East.
We were going to spend some money and bomb some country.
I said, you know, pretty soon they're going to want us to rebuild it.
And sure enough, about three months later, the bombing quit and they were lining up for the contracts.
Of course.
So I think, you know, maybe they're not really for total destruction.
They're for the total job of accumulating money and wealth and power.
And maybe, matter of fact, peace might be their real danger.
Yeah, their real enemy, yeah.
Working for peace.
And this is one time where we actually don't blame Trump because, I mean, Trump did want to get out.
He may have done a better job getting out of Afghanistan if he had actually put it in place earlier.
Of course, he was surrounded by neocons who didn't want to hear anything about it.
But no, the fault lies with the previous presidents at least as equal as Trump.
I mean, the fault lies with Bush, who went in there into Afghanistan in the first place.
We didn't need to do that.
The Afghani government, if anyone remembers, just said, hey, we'll turn these guys over, but you got to give us a little bit of evidence.
We said, no, we'll invade.
And then, of course, it goes on through eight years of Obama, who continued the war, the good war, and what he called it.
And then it continued under Trump 1 and Biden.
Well, Biden got us out eventually, but it wasn't much of a thing.
So it's not about the presidents.
It's about the policy.
It's about the neocons and their regime change policy.
It produces chaos.
It produces destruction, as you pointed out well in your post.
And it costs us a ton of money.
And there's no evidence that anyone is learning from these mistakes.
Yeah, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who have different motivations because there are natural resources in Afghanistan.
But I think one thing that disturbs them is they probably, in a way, ended up with a system of government that is a lot of little conclave like we were intended to have.
Our state's independent that voluntarily came together for certain things.
And they get together, but there are these tribes up in these mountains, and I still visualize it up there.
That's what happened.
And, you know, the other thing is people explain is that all these tribes, let's say there's 30 major tribes up there, they're groups of people getting together.
But ordinarily, a lot of them fight each other, except when somebody, a foreigner, comes in.
It's sort of like the siblings come together when the neighbor kids take on one of them.
Absolutely.
Well, here's something from Hedge over the weekend that talks about it.
DC terror ambush forces U.S. to reckon with $14 billion Afghan evacuation program that imported chaos.
Yes, the ex-CIA-linked Afghan terrorists who gunned down one National Guard soldier and critically injured another and ambushed terror attack blocks from the White House has finally forced a long overdue reckoning over the immigration policy.
Now, that is an interesting thesis.
And here is how they came in.
If you go to the next one, they just loaded dozens and dozens.
Look at these people loaded onto this cargo.
These are all Afghanis who cooperated in one way or the other with the U.S. in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
And now we had to get them out of there because they were facing death because they collaborated with the U.S.
Now, go to the next one.
Afghans arrived to the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome and related evacuation efforts.
Migration policy analysis estimates that approximately 90,000 people from that collapsed war-torn country will have flown into the U.S. in the aftermath of the Biden-Harris regime's disastrous fall of Kabul.
It was not, I'm the first one to blame Biden, Dr. Paul for a lot of stuff.
But the disastrous fall of Kabul was not Biden's fault.
Certainly not 100% his fault.
It was the fault of those who went in in the first place.
So we bring approximately 90,000 people.
We have no idea who they are, except that we've trained a lot of them how to kill and to kill.
And they've done killing.
And I won't go into the detail of the units that these people were embedded in, but they were killers.
That's what they did.
They did terrible things.
And, you know, that scars you.
So they come over here and they have these mental scars.
Venezuela's Complex Narrative 00:12:08
You know, it is a problem with our immigration policy, but that's only a symptom of a bigger problem, which is interventionism.
You know, when they give us the statistics of how many came over, how many have been criminals and how many are criminals here as well?
And I think of the definition of the Trojan horse, you know, how they get in here.
And we open the doors to it.
And maybe there were some people very sincere in thinking that that is our duty.
And yet, look at what happened.
But, you know, there's two things that we could do if these kind of problems would happen.
First, of course, the policy, the foreign policy, mind our own business.
And, you know, and not go to war.
Now we're, now it seems like technically you could argue we're at war for a lot of times, frequently, but we never declare war.
It's just ongoing fighting, which the military industrial complex are very happy with.
But the other thing that I think brings a lot of people in that are not exactly looking for a job as it was in the early part of our history, and that is no subsidies.
But just think of how much money has been spent because they come in and they'll bump around health care and places to live for veterans that came over and to a beating and give it to the immigrants.
It makes no sense whatsoever that the treatment, yes, it's humane, but there is such a thing as humane treatment in a free society.
Matter of fact, this country is very generous, even in spite of all the problems that we have and inflation and those kind of thing.
But they say, oh, no, we have to take care of them.
Why do we have to, why do we distract and take it from the people here who are working and taking care of themselves?
Absolutely.
Well, you know, a lot of this fits into the right-wing narrative that it's all those foreigners coming over, the third world people coming over.
And absolutely, there is a problem.
But the reaction, of course, now we need reverse migration.
We need to get these people out of here.
It's easier said than done.
Now, put this next one on.
The blue apples is a pseudonym of someone who writes, and they're often picked up on Zero Hedge, and they're often very insightful.
It's a very large, very long article.
We're going to put it up on RPI tomorrow.
But he has a good article, The Fatal Flaw of Trump's Perverse Migration Policy.
Now, if you go to the next one, he underscores some of what we've pointed out here.
The systemic flaws of the U.S. immigration policy continue to be exacerbated by the decades-long neoconservative interventionist foreign policy that launched the war on terror.
For over 20 years, U.S. interventionism has displaced populations from countries like Afghanistan, not only feeding them into a broken immigration system, but also sowing resentment that is imported into this country through these programs.
And I'll go to the next one.
This is an important point that he makes.
It's not just about Afghanistan, it's about the other places we intervene.
The Trump administration's continued airstrikes in Somalia demonstrate that while the Afghanistan theater of the war on terror has concluded, the malevolent neocon influence behind it still drives the foreign policymaking of the U.S. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has doubled the amount of airstrikes in Somalia compared to 2024.
That continued bombardment of Somalia has led to an influx of immigrants from the country, to which I would say, duh, of course that happens.
The same people who are furious with immigrants are cheering the very policy that creates these immigrants in the first place.
Yes, that's it.
And I think the policy issue is the big issue.
Because if they believe that is important, they manipulate it and then they invite people in.
And then when they get into trouble, we just feed them.
You know, we feed them and take care of them.
And it makes it worse.
It's exactly the opposite of the way immigrants came to our country at one time in the early years.
That all they wanted was a place, so a place to live free.
And it still would work.
But I wonder, I just wonder why people give up on it.
The best I can come up with is that, you know, when wealth is readily apparent and you have it, that it will condition.
You can see it in families or groups and different things because they don't have to sweat it.
They don't have to create anything.
They don't have to be taking care of themselves.
And they do this, and they never, never seem to complain about the government will take care of you.
The government will take care of you.
So this is going to be with us for a long time.
But I also fear that they work deliberately in collusion with those who are looking at a bigger picture.
They understand that it is a philosophic issue, but they happen to have the opposite viewpoints that we do.
Now, now we're reading that because people call themselves socialists and they're winning elections.
And I still don't think that numbers can compare to the people that do love liberty.
But anyway, the conditions are that those who really love and defend and want fascism and an extreme form of crony capitalism, that is what they're doing.
And so if chaos at the cities is what they want, have chaos and we'll replace it with something real.
And I keep thinking, New York, chaos, total.
And so they're replacing the mayor of that city.
Maybe that's just too far exaggerating on this, but it seems like that is what's happening.
But the big thing is, is we have to challenge the support for, there was a lot of articles now.
Young people really like fascism, and they call it socialism.
They like socialism because they don't like capitalism.
But the big thing is, is what, if anybody does that to anybody, they say, define capitalism for me because we don't have, you know, I don't even like the word because it's misleading.
Capitalism is corporatism, crony capitalism.
And it's, Mises said that's a stepping stone to true fascism.
Well, the thing about this whole problem that's being created by this is that they haven't learned.
And in fact, Trump, who's the one who wants to reverse migration, he wants to stem the flow.
And we both, I think, agree that he has stemmed the flow to a degree on the border, which is a good thing.
But now he's pursuing a policy that will result in a massive influx of displaced people.
And I'm talking about his poise to invade Venezuela.
And over the weekend, he put out this post, which I think, my opinion, is pretty unhinged if you put that next one up.
Of course, a lot of all caps and a lot of weird stuff to all airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers.
Please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
President Donald J. Trump, he believes that somehow he has the authority, Dr. Paul, to close the airspace over a foreign country.
And because we have several strike groups in the area, the result has been that indeed, if you put the next clip, you can see air traffic over Venezuela is almost non-existent.
Not a single plane flying over Venezuela, a country of 30 million people with the world's largest oil reserves, rights journalist Matt Kennard.
The aerospace has been closed by a president sending in the White House 2,000 miles away, internationalized ashimra.
A world is run like the mafia and Washington is the dawn.
I think that's pretty close to that.
It's nothing brand new.
We've been known to go into Central America and South America and arrest people and bring them back to the United States and try them.
And, you know, it's almost like we already own them.
At least we own them because we have a power so much bigger than the others.
And this whole idea that they can close the airspace and it's more power than they need.
Legally, they shouldn't have it.
I think these things are immoral.
They're not part of our constitution.
It's pretty bad, not bad.
It's interesting because it's not too unusual where we'll agree with somebody who really originated comes from the left.
They're true progressives that believe in civil liberties and believe in a much different type of foreign policy.
So sometimes I read in the papers, maybe not too often, that they're running more on target than some of our very conservative friends that seem to be annoyed if you criticize a foreign policy that gives us this mess.
A mess.
And more immigrants.
The question is about Venezuela.
What is President Trump going to do?
If there is a passenger jet that is flying over Venezuela, is he going to shoot it down?
Is he going to shoot down a passenger jet?
What about the fact that there's a regular supply of Russian cargo planes coming in and out of Venezuela?
They have trade, they have relations.
Is he going to shut down one of those?
No one answers the question, and it's pretty wild.
The other thing that's related to this, we talked about this earlier, is this whole thing is about narco-terrorism.
We've got to go in there.
We've got to kill the narco-terrorists.
If you go to that next clip, Hegseth himself, there was a little bit of a controversy over the weekend.
You probably saw Dr. Paul.
He said, kill them all.
They hit a couple of boats and there were survivors.
And according to the Washington Post, he ordered them to go back and double tap and kill any survivors, which, of course, is illegal international law.
And of course, under U.S. law as well, he may face some real problem for that.
But when he's not saying kill them all, he's posting children's cartoons.
If you go to the next one, Dr. Paul, look at this one.
He's posting a cartoon of a turtle blowing up ships.
And he says, for your Christmas wish list.
I find that to be very, very sick.
Scott Ritter wrote, this is embarrassing.
You literally just disqualified yourself and may be self-indicted as a war criminal.
But the thing is, if this is all about narco-trafficking, the other thing that hit us over the weekend, if you go to the next one, our friend Kelly Vlados put out a piece on responsible statecraft.
So this whole thing is to stop narco-trafficking.
What did President Trump do over the weekend?
He pardoned one of the biggest narco-traffickers in history.
The guy brought 400 tons of cocaine into the United States onto American streets and Trump somehow pardons him.
So is this about narco-terrorism or not?
The other day we were talking about hypocrisy and hypocrisy.
People don't like hypocrisy.
I wonder how many people are going to notice that this could be classified as hypocrisy to talk one way and doing the other.
Pardoning a Narco-Trafficker 00:02:23
At least it doesn't make any sense to me.
You know, a few days ago, there was a listing of the people who were murdered in these ships, in these boats.
It was over 80.
So who knows what it is today?
They continue to do it.
Then there was a story of two survivors, but you just explained that they were instructed to go back and don't have to survive.
They were two hanging on to a boat trying to survive and they just shot them.
Yeah.
And even if they were drug truffers, that's a terrible thing.
That's an awful thing, regardless of how you feel about the drug war.
But nevertheless, even if they were, it's not a capital crime, as we continue to say here.
Why wouldn't you just arrest them and they could stand trial if they were trying to bring drugs in?
I think we should learn a lesson from Al Capone.
Al Capone was a pretty rich man.
He was pretty strong.
He knew how to buy the courts and all.
He did quite well for a long time and became very, very wealthy.
But he had something that the United States set up for him.
They made alcohol illegal.
Actually, the people did that with a constitutional amendment.
They were so attuned to this kind of stuff should need it.
A constitutional amendment, we don't even think about declaring war anymore.
But they changed the Constitution.
And what did it do?
Immediately, there was bootlegging and violence going on and people dying.
And so that didn't work.
And people woke up and they repeal it.
So I would say people ought to at least talk about it.
But right now, can you imagine telling people the best thing to do is just make fentanyl legal?
What right do we have to go and tell people what to do?
I think it's evil.
I think it's terrible, the use of drugs.
But they were all over the place.
But the fact that there's more people now still dying from alcohol, but they're not dying from bootlegging and killing and the lawlessness.
They're dying because they're not using good common sense and or they drive cars and the death rate is higher.
You know, it's higher than with fentanyl.
So I know that's a little bit much for people to accept, you know, except make it illegal.
People Accept Change 00:03:31
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of things that individuals aren't use substances and they it's sort of like you know some sometimes people commit suicide with a with a gun.
Oh, the solution is let's take the guns away from everybody.
You know, that sort of thing.
And I know that is pretty pretty radical for people to accept.
But I'll tell you what, I think I really believe it would be better.
And maybe, and, you know, when I was campaigning, I think probably in 88, there was a private group, I can't remember, it was probably out west, that had drug rehabilitation.
And it was sort of a group that was doing a fantastic job.
That's what would happen.
You know, there would be private sources that would fill in.
Because so far, all this money and rules and prisoners, it ain't going to the point.
But I think what you're suggesting is this is sometimes this is just an excuse, you know, because they have other goals about bringing more immigrants in here and manipulating our system here.
And they're doing a pretty good job of that.
Absolutely.
Well, as ever, which is the reason we exist not only this show, but the Ron Paul Institute as well, is to make the case that if we had just not had interventionism, we wouldn't be facing these problems.
We'd be out of business, I guess, which is fine.
We'll go.
We'll take up another line of work.
But the problem is interventionism and always has been.
So I want to thank everyone for tuning in today.
Please hit that like button.
Please hit the subscribe button.
If you can, please help us boost the show and we certainly do appreciate it.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to thank our viewers today very much for tuning in.
Encourage you to stay interested and spread a message.
That's very, very important because we struggle to keep our program going, but we also know that some days our numbers are very, very high.
And there's an interest, because I am convinced that if you had an honest poll done and ask people and describe in one sentence what we have and one sentence of what we could do to prevent it by approaching a system of liberty where people had a right to their own lives and the right to what they own and what they receive, And under those conditions, there'd be one rule.
You can't lie, cheat, steal, or kill.
And the world would be better off.
The big job is the governments aren't listening, even though most people believe you shouldn't lie and cheat and steal and kill.
And most people realize that you can get into big trouble.
But what about, we just talked about it today.
You know, dozens, hundreds of people.
And these foreign policy has led to the death of many.
Our bombing is atrocious on how many people have died from our bombing.
And so I think the laws that are disobeyed are much more serious when the government disobeys them because they have so much more power.
So I think non-interventionists is the answer to all these problems.
That means that we are responsible for ourselves.
And that to me means we have to promote the cause of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection