WTH is going on with the Taliban takeover? Frederick Kagan on the fall of Kabul, the Afghan a the Taliban

Episode #114 | August 18, 2021 | , Marc Thiessen, and Frederick W. Kagan

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? Marc, what the bloody hell is going on?

Marc Thiessen: The Taliban are back in charge of . We are in the middle of our August hiatus that we told you all about, that we were going to take a month off because nothing ever happens in August. Apparently the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan happens in August. So we have come out of hiatus to do an emergency episode of this podcast, because what is unfolding before our eyes in Afghanistan right now is, honestly, I said this on Fox the other day, and I will repeat it here, it's the worst thing I've seen in three decades in Washington and the most horrifying thing I've seen in three decades in Washington. The betrayal of our allies, the abdication of American leadership on the world stage, the humanitarian catastrophe that was unleashed by a decision made in the Oval Office. And I'm almost at a loss for words to explain how awful the situation is.

Danielle Pletka: First of all, I guess we've seen this coming. The president signaled that he wanted this to happen. I think everybody was not fooled by his, well, what can I call them? Lies, about what was going to happen. It was obvious to anybody who's been paying attention in Afghanistan that this was a moment of strength for the Taliban, that the United States had been doing things that would weaken both the Afghan government and the Afghan military, not providing the necessary support that we had been negotiating with the Taliban behind the back of the Afghan government. And yet Joe Biden went before the American people, and this has obviously been unbelievably well-documented, and said the place isn't going to collapse, but even if it does, that's not my problem because we got to go. And the one additional thing I would note here is, Marc, you and I have both said this repeatedly, where was the parade demanding we get out of Afghanistan? Did I miss it?

Marc Thiessen: You missed it because it didn't happen. There was no groundswell of public support demanding our withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the reason for that is quite simple, which is that the war in Afghanistan, as we know it ended in 2015. In January of 2015, the United States handed responsibility for the combat

2 mission in Afghanistan to the Afghan army. And we moved into a train, equip and support role. And so what we were doing in Afghanistan, we were not nation building. Everybody keeps bringing up that tired phrase. We were not policing. We were not even fighting a war. We were training the Afghans and providing them with mission planning, intelligence and air support, while they took the fight to our enemies, to the people who had harbored the terrorists that carried out the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Marc Thiessen: We were doing it with, at the height of that mission, less than 10,000 people at the end of that mission, about 2,500 people on the ground. The Americans were not dying in large numbers. But you know who was dying in the large numbers? The Afghans. I went back and dug up the numbers. And from January 2015 until this year, somewhere between 53,000 and 57,000 Afghans were killed in battle fighting the Taliban, including 2,600 through August of this year. And for the Biden administration to go out and say that the Afghans were unwilling to fight is libelous. And the victim blaming that's being taken place from this administration, Biden blaming Trump, he blamed the Afghan army, he blamed Afghans for not leaving the country when they were told to. The people who are now hiding for fear of the Taliban death squads, he's blaming them. It's victim shaming. I've just never seen anything like it.

Danielle Pletka: And you have to ask yourself what the consistency is, right? Because I can see what gets this administration excited. What gets them excited? Women's rights. The rights of minorities in the United States. Those are the kinds of things that they're very excited about. But weirdly they're not excited about those things when it's foreigners. They're excited about allies when they're NATO, but they're not excited about allies when they're Muslims. I don't really get the sort of the messaging issue. This is a government full of people who were outraged by the fact that the United States would continue a relationship with Saudi Arabia after the Saudi Government had a journalist murdered in their consulate in Istanbul. I'm sorry, how many people are being murdered now in Afghanistan? A government that negotiated with the Biden administration about coming into power. How many women are being raped? How many minorities are being killed? I don't understand the inconsistencies here. I don't understand how anyone in the Biden administration with a de minimis IQ doesn't see these inconsistencies.

Marc Thiessen: I mean, look, the Biden administration is making a lot of arguments that I think we need to address. The first one is that we've been there for 20 years. If the Afghans can't defend their own country by themselves after 20 years, why should Americans be in there fighting their civil war? As I started at the outset, we were not fighting their civil war. But second of all, I'm sorry, which U.S. ally anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of the British or the French, and the French history is not exactly glorious in this, could defend themselves against a massive assault like this without U.S. help?

Marc Thiessen: I mean, there's a reason why we have troops in Germany. There's a reason why we have troops in Japan. There's a reason why we have troops in South Korea. And by the way, if those countries can all defend themselves without any U.S. help, we should pull our troops out. Right? The idea that it's the Afghans' fault because they can't defend themselves without U.S. intelligence and air support

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3 and mission planning, it's somehow that that's proof that we needed to pull out is just absolutely appalling.

Danielle Pletka: Well, it's dribble. Come on. It doesn't stand up to even the most basic of scrutiny. And when you are in a position where MSNBC, CNN, , , , The Financial Times and are condemning you up one side and down the other, perhaps it should become obvious to you that you've screwed something up royally and that you shouldn't go out to the American people, pretend that the buck stops with you and then blame anybody and everybody for the debacle that is going on in Afghanistan right now.

Marc Thiessen: And then the other argument that absolutely drives me batty is, well, signed the agreement with the Taliban and we had no choice, our hands were tied. I mean, first of all, the Taliban violated that agreement. The agreement did not involve them marching into Kabul and overthrowing the regime. And second of all, I'm sorry, Joe Biden has spent the last eight months of his presidency reversing every Trump policy on everything you could possibly find. I mean, he's reversed Trump's policies in the Southern border, and the Keystone Pipeline, the Paris Climate Agreement, Nord Stream Two, the Iran Nuclear Deal, but his hands were tied in Afghanistan? That was the one place he had no choice but to carry out the Trump policy, is he kidding me?

Danielle Pletka: Yeah. Well, I think he is kidding. And I think the only people who are standing with him are people who would stand at any moment. You and I both excoriated Donald Trump for, if you recall, the negotiations with the Taliban, the desire to bring the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. But this is worse than that in so many ways.

Marc Thiessen: I agree with you. And two quick points before we get to our guest. Which is one, is that for all his flaws, Trump promised to withdraw based on conditions on the ground. That was repeated over and over again. The Biden administration, Joe Biden explicitly said that our withdrawal would not be conditions based. He sent a message to the Taliban that no matter what the Taliban did, they had a green light to carry out this offensive because we were leaving no matter what. The final issue that gets raised is that, oh God, we spent all these years nation building and it was right to go in and whack the terrorists after 9/11, but then we got distracted by this nation building exercise and it was time to pull the plug on that.

Marc Thiessen: Look, the mission in Afghanistan was never to turn it into a Jeffersonian democracy. The mission in Afghanistan was to make sure that it had a government that didn't think that America was the source of evil in the world and didn't harbor terrorists who wanted to come and bring that destruction to our shores. And that mission was succeeding at a very low cost and we pulled the plug on it. And we handed Afghanistan back to the people who harbored the terrorists, who attacked us on September 11th in time for the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. It is a betrayal of America from the Oval Office that I think is unseen in my lifetime.

Danielle Pletka: So our guest today is somebody familiar to all of our listeners and someone who knows Afghanistan from the ground on up having worked there when the United

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4 States was operating there, militarily in combat under a variety of different generals. Fred Kagan has been a colleague of ours at AEI for many years. He runs our renowned Critical Threats Project that studies terrorism, that devised the surge in that led us to victory there, and who has been watching things unravel in Afghanistan with some horror. It's wonderful that he was able to spare the time for us today.

Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.

Danielle Pletka: So Fred, there are so many things to say here, but I think the most important thing for us to do is provide a foundation for our listeners to understand a little bit better why people like you and Marc and me and so many of the people who we've known and worked with over the last 20 years, are horrified by this. One of the first arguments that we are hearing is we've been there 20 years, if in 20 years we couldn't do what we needed to do, who was to say that we were ever going to be able to do what we needed to do. Take that on in a way that really helps people understand what we were doing in Afghanistan.

Frederick Kagan: Well, it's become easier to answer this question because one can actually point at what is currently going on in Afghanistan and say, "We were preventing this." And it will become easier to make that point as it becomes more apparent the full scale of the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, of the ISIS presence in Afghanistan, of the Taliban's continued enthusiasm for working with and supporting those groups, and of the threat that will manifest to say nothing of the humanitarian horrors that are going on and will get worse. So the short answer is we were preventing all of this from happening at the price of, let's say, 3,500 U.S. troops, and a budgetary figure that is not even a rounding error in the, what do we up to $5, $6 trillion worth of spending that the Biden administration is calling for domestically.

Frederick Kagan: So when people say, "We had to stop this, we had to end this." I say, "Why?" I say. "Which is actually preferable? That expenditure." And by the way, President Biden is rightly concerned about loss of U.S lives, I am too. I taught for ten years at West Point. A lot of the people that were talking about putting their lives on the line are my friends. And I'm no more eager to have American service members killed than he is. But we were down to an average of 20 deaths per year from 2015 on, and a force level of under 10,000, from 2015 on, and that had gotten as low as 3,500 year. So when you look at that, you look at that commitment and you ask the question, could the United States sustain this indefinitely? The answer is, of course, of course we could. Should we have? Well, if that's what was required to prevent this from happening and the sequels that will follow, then yes.

Marc Thiessen: Here's the thing that I don't understand. And I agree with you a hundred percent. But our mission in Afghanistan, as you point out, since 2015 when we handed the combat mission over to the Afghans, our troops were not nation building, our troops were not policing, our troops weren't leading the fight. They were providing support for indigenous forces who were fighting and dying to defeat our enemies. That sounds like a pretty good deal for America. And what was the mission in Afghanistan? It wasn't a stone-age country into a Jeffersonian democracy. It was to make sure that that country did not have a

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5 government who woke up every morning, saying that America must be destroyed and give a safe Haven to terrorists who wanted to bring that destruction to our homeland. Is that a fair description of the situation Biden inherited?

Frederick Kagan: Yeah. You're exactly right, Marc. You're exactly right. Of the many horrible arguments now being advanced in defense of the indefensible decision the p resident made, the most offensive in many respects is that the Afghans weren't doing anything for themselves and we were doing it all for them. No one secures a country of more than 30 million people with 2,500 troops. And we weren't doing that. There were several hundred thousand Afghan volunteers who were doing that. It is an important fact to keep in mind that something very like 70,000 Afghans died as members of the Afghan National Security Forces over the 20 years of this war, 70,000. I suspect it is significantly higher than that. But at least 70,000 died and I have no idea how many were wounded. Afghans have bled for their country. They have bled fighting against the Taliban. They have bled fighting against al Qaeda. They have bled fighting against ISIS, along with our soldiers. And they have died in numbers, orders of magnitude larger than we have. And they were still doing it this year until we pulled the rug out from under them.

Marc Thiessen: This is the argument that the Biden administration is making to justify it. They say as soon as we pulled out that small number of forces, the Afghans collapsed, they didn't want to fight. They weren't capable of fighting. They fled and handed the country over to the Taliban. And if that was going to happen, then a few thousand Americans weren't going to stop that from happening. Take that on. Why did the Afghan forces collapse?

Frederick Kagan: It's so self-evidently a self-canceling argument, I don't even know where to begin. Because at this force level, as long as we were there, the Afghans were fighting. It's not as if this was a sudden Taliban invasion. The Taliban have been attacking every year. And at these very, very low force levels, the Afghans were fighting. The removal of these forces led them to collapse.

Marc Thiessen: Why?

Frederick Kagan: So it's self-evidently the case that these forces where the difference. So now I will calm down and answer your question. Look, the reason is because we built the Afghan army the way that we build and encourage the construction of any army that we partner with or ally with. That is to say, making it dependent on certain niche high-end capabilities that we alone have. They were dependent on our incredibly extensive and unmatched intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that allowed us to warn them, tell them when the enemy were coming, where they were coming from, on our phenomenally precise air power that could hit targets in the immediate vicinity of Afghan troops without harming them and without harming civilians, acting on that, our drone capabilities, lots of other capabilities. Our abilities to help them plan our abilities, to help them fuse intelligence makes sense of what they were seeing and what was going on.

Frederick Kagan: These are niche capabilities that the United States has. All of our allies rely on

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6 these capabilities. Even when the French went into conduct counter-terrorism activities in Africa, they requested our assistance along these lines. I think probably the French and the British could on the margins conduct independent operations with no American support on a small scale. They're the only American allies of whom that is really true. So we built the Afghans on the assumption that we would support them the way we support all of our partners. Then we took that support away, right as the Taliban were attacking. So all of a sudden the Afghan security forces found themselves in a fair fight, that they were not designed to fight and win. They were designed to fight the unfair fight that comes from the unfair advantage that America can provide. And instead, they had to fight the Taliban on the Taliban's terms, and they were not ready for that.

Frederick Kagan: Could we have gotten them ready? Possibly. If the president had said, "I want us out of here as fast as possible. General Milley, give me a plan for that, but you can't have more than a couple of years," or something like that. We could've taken a shot at figuring out how to make it so that they would hang on even if they had to do a fair fight. I don't know what would have happened. I don't know whether they would have been able to do that or not. But that would not have been a crazy undertaking, this was. This was setting them up for psychological devastation, exactly of the sort that the French army faced in 1940 one might note, which very well documented what the effects of this kind of psychological trauma right in the midst of an enemy attack can bring on. We saw the very similar phenomenon here.

Marc Thiessen: You mentioned that Jake Sullivan said there are plenty of countries out there where we don't have a permanent presence, where we go and whack terrorists on a daily basis. And Biden says we've got this great over the horizon capability that we can take out on any terrorists that show their ugly faces in Afghanistan or mount a threat. One, is that true? Can we, in fact, mount a counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan without anyone on the ground? And also, where was this over the horizon capability during the Taliban offensive?

Frederick Kagan: Look, can we mount a counter-terrorism operation? Sure. We can. We could do what President Clinton did in the 1990s and fire volleys of Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles at training camps, which was absolutely ineffective, as we know.

Marc Thiessen: As George Bush said, fire a million dollar missile into an empty tent and hit a camel on the butt, right?

Frederick Kagan: Exactly. That option remains.

Marc Thiessen: Camel-butt-option.

Frederick Kagan: We can conduct precision airstrikes if we can either get permission from Pakistan to overfly for the purpose of conducting such a flight. And if we have actual intelligence somehow obtained, that is going to be good enough that the target will still be there by the time the plane takes off from Doha or a carrier and gets there and then drops the ordinance. By the way, I'm not counting on the Pakistanis greenlighting a whole lot of those, given where I suspect they're going to be in their attitude toward the Taliban government. Afghanistan does have other neighbors, but I'm guessing the Iranians are not going to give us overflight

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7 rights. So our options continue to be kind of limited there. And of course, as you know, and if we're really crazy, we could even imagine that we're going to do some kind of Special Forces raid.

Frederick Kagan: But when you do that into a landlocked country where you have no military bases at all, surrounded by hostile states, any human being that you fly over or let alone land into that country, you have to be prepared to have that human being captured, tortured, and killed on television, and not be able to do anything meaningful about it. So, yeah, we could do lots of things. Most of them would be likely ineffective or insane. So in reality, no, we don't have a meaningful over the horizon capability. Because you see, Marc, you want to take just a look at a map sometime, because I want to help you with this, I know you're confused, but I just want to help you. If you take a look at the map of Afghanistan, you'll see that it is landlocked, right?

Marc Thiessen: Yeah.

Frederick Kagan: Unlike all of the other countries that we're talking about. Syria has a nice coast. Iraq even has a coastline. It's small, but it's a coastline. And Somalia has a nice long coastline. Yemen has a nice long coastline. And so we have free access from the sea, put a lot of capabilities over it. That's not true of Afghanistan. And if you look at a relief map, that'll help even more. Because we're talking here about the Hindu Kush. And so we're talking about the problem of finding terrorists needles in 15,000 foot haystacks, which was hard to do even when we had troops in country. But the notion that we're somehow going to be able to pick up these guys and get some kind of ordinance onto their target reliably and know that we actually hit them and killed them often enough to be meaningful is absurd. It's just absurd and it always was.

Danielle Pletka: So Fred, I want to ask you about sort of a little bit of the recent history here. Because there's obviously a political history as well as a military history. Now, without going too far back. One of the things that the Biden administration has said is that this was a Trump administration plan. Now, before I allow Marc the very correct note that weirdly this is the only Trump administration plan that the Biden administration seemed to feel the need to adhere to. I still want to recognize that there was a dialogue going on that was endorsed by, overseen by, and pushed by the Trump administration through the very self-same negotiator that the Biden administration kept on, , and that set in motion a lot of these sort of political betrayal to my mind that we see going on. Where am I getting this wrong and how much blame belongs on previous presidents?

Frederick Kagan: Well, I don't think you are fundamental to getting it wrong. The Trump administration did a deal with the Taliban that was horrible in every possible way. It made very, very few demands of the Taliban, it made enormous concessions to them and it was accompanied by unilateral troop reductions, although not to zero, for which there was no justification. It was an absolutely terrible deal. And it did establish a deadline that President Biden had to cope with. So there's no question that the Trump administration left the Biden team in a bad place. When you find yourself in a bad place, you have a couple of options. One is you can take the very, very bad strategy that got to that bad place and triple down on it,

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8 which is what they did. Or you can look at that and say, "Actually, I think maybe we ought to do something sensible," which is what they didn't do.

Frederick Kagan: There are a number of issues circulating around the question of what options did Biden have, and wasn't he bound by this deal? The answer to that is, well, he should not have regarded himself bound by the deal since the Taliban had clearly violated their very limited commitments that they made in the deal, which included not allowing Al-Qaeda to operate in areas they controlled. Whereas, we had been killing Al-Qaeda operatives in areas that the Taliban was controlling. So from a diplomatic standpoint, it would and should have been very straight forward to say, "We're not going to be bound by a deal if the Taliban is not adhering to, so that deal is done and now we're going to craft a new policy." So the argument that he had no choice because of the agreement is invalid in that respect. There are other arguments that we can go into about how many forces would have been required to deal with that. But let me pause before we get into that conversation.

Marc Thiessen: I'm on the record as having been extremely critical of President Trump's deal with the Taliban and negotiations with the Taliban, but Biden actually didn't just follow through on the deal, he made it worse. Because Trump's withdrawal, for all its flaws was based on conditions on the ground and Biden explicitly said when he announced the deal that it was not based on conditions in the ground, didn't that there's give the Taliban a green light to do whatever they wanted to do?

Frederick Kagan: Yes.

Danielle Pletka: There's nothing else to say there, unfortunately.

Marc Thiessen: Literally, the Biden policy was, no matter what you do, we are leaving by September 11th, 2001 and if you want to launch an offensive, go ahead. I mean, that's basically what he said.

Frederick Kagan: I think in many respects, this is much worse than what we saw in Saigon in particular because there was no constraint on President Biden here, Congress hadn't revoked the authorization to be operating there, let alone voted to order him to end the conflict. This was a free choice and he made a very poor one.

Danielle Pletka: Fred, one of the things that that you and I have talked about and that you have wrote in your very fine New York Times piece, which we'll link in our transcript is that all is not lost. That yes obviously what's happened is tragic, disgraceful, heartbreaking, and a betrayal, all of that, but that there are still things that that can be done. What are those things?

Frederick Kagan: It's getting harder, Dany, in the short term to see what we can do other than to set the conditions for the inevitable collapse of the Taliban regime, which will occur, and the opportunity which will come again for the Afghan people, hopefully with U.S. and other support to throw off the yoke of these vicious people and begin to rebuild their society. Hopefully that will come before America suffers another devastating terrorist attack from Afghanistan. But I think that it's very likely that we will see various kinds of opposition forming to Taliban

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9 rule in Afghanistan. I think it's going to be very complicated to interact with that opposition because of where Afghanistan is and because of various regional state attitudes toward it. But that is something that we should be thinking about how we're going to deal with.

Frederick Kagan: In addition to that, there are some things that we have to prevent from happening in order to, buy space and time, to hope to be able to turn the situation around faster, by which I mean in years closer to 10, rather than years closer to 20 or more. And that involves ensuring that certainly we do not recognize any Taliban government or any government which the Taliban plays a significant role and trying to prevent other states from recognizing such a government.

Frederick Kagan: And I think that that's actually going to be pretty dicey proposition because I think there are a number of countries that are poised, given half an excuse to recognize it, either the Taliban government or possibly some weird amalgam of a Taliban government with some non-Taliban face on it, which I think is being negotiated. And that would be very, very, very, very bad because giving a group like a Taliban full access to all of the benefits come with being recognized state would infuse power, money, capability into that movement, allow them to consolidate. And of course, some of that money and resources would end up being siphoned off to groups like Al-Qaeda and the IMU and ISIS that would be devastating for us to have that kind of capability to go to them.

Frederick Kagan: So I think fighting on that diplomatic front right now is incredibly important, fighting to prevent the Taliban from getting any kind of access to Afghan Central Bank assets and so on. These are things that should be going on, I hope are going on. But that could help preserve some space to make it easier to end this horror once again in the future.

Marc Thiessen: Hey, so I picked here the worst case scenario here, because like we keep hearing that they're only 200 Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, I don't know whether that's true or not. What I do know is that according to then CIA Director, John Brennan, they're only about 700 ISIS fighters in Iraq when Joe Biden presided over the withdrawal of us forces in Iraq and in very short order, they built a caliphate the size of Great Britain and spread their tentacles around the world and carried out 149 attacks in 29 countries that killed 2,000 people. So it would seem to me that this, that at the Islamic Emirate, that the Taliban is creating is going to be the new magnet for jihadist from all over the world to come to Afghanistan and train and go out and reek terror around the world. I mean is that something that we should expect?

Frederick Kagan: It's a possibility. I'd like to start by saying I would be very surprised if there were only 200 Al-Qaeda guys in Afghanistan right now. We don't have anything like, even before we pulled out, we didn't have anything like the intelligence coverage in that country that I think we would have needed to have any confidence in any numbers like that honestly. I think there's a significantly higher ISIS presence than is generally acknowledged. By the way, I think there's been a very significant Iranian Quds Force presence that we never talk about, and Iranian proxies also being drawn from Afghanistan and being used to fight around the world. So I think it's very likely that in fact, the numbers are much higher than

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10 what is being reported.

Frederick Kagan: And the analogy to 2011 of course is incredibly apt. And yes, of course, I've had the same thoughts. It took a very small node of ISIS fighters, a remarkably short period of time, in a chaotic environment to build itself quite a significant military capability and then take down the forces that we had left in Iraq. And then it took us a lot of effort to partially undo that which it's still only partial, the dismantling of that. In terms of whether there will be a global sort of sucking sound of jihadies going to Afghanistan, it's not clear whether that is the way that things will go. Certainly, I think there will be some who will feel the need to go and touch the soil that is increasingly sacred to them. Now, those who are there will have a lot of opportunities to work and do their thing.

Frederick Kagan: Of course, Biden is right about one thing. There are lots of Salafi Jihadi safe havens around the world and Afghanistan is only one. So why do I think it's so important if I don't think that they're necessarily all going to flow back there? Because some of them will, and that's a disaster it's the hardest one to get to of all that we could identify it's the most difficult for us to interact with if we're not there. But also because the morale boost for the global movement is unbelievable. And I'm much more concerned about the enthusiasm and zeal and belief in ultimate triumph that this self-inflicted defeat of ourselves will infuse into the entire global Salafi Jihadi movement.

Frederick Kagan: And also because although the President keeps talking about all of the other terrorist groups around the world that we need to deal with, he's yet to explain anything that he intends to do with the forces that he has harvested with Afghanistan to get after any of them. And so, since it looks like what he actually needs to do is to either bring them home or to send them to China. I'm sorry. Send them to Taiwan to deal with China. Actually, I'm sorry, send them to somewhere to deal with China. I don't actually hear any plan for getting after the global Salafi Jihadi movement into which we've just delivered such a powerful shot in the arm. And that's the thing that distresses me even more than the fear that these guys go streaming back to Afghanistan, although I'm sure that some of that will go.

Danielle Pletka: Fred. I want to end with a very Washington question and I think it's important to talk about some of the dramatis personae that I hear. I actually, very strangely, came across a video of John McCain opposing the nomination of Tony Blinken to be Deputy Secretary of State. And there was an absolutely poignant part of his floor speech in which he talked about what it was that Tony was advocating, Tony, our Secretary of State now under the Biden administration was advocating for Afghanistan. It was beyond prophetic. But for those of us who think of Joe Biden as a not necessarily terribly bright, not necessarily terribly in touch president, nobody says that about his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, or his Secretary of State Tony Blinken. What is it in your view that these people were thinking as they egged the president on for this disastrous policy choice?

Frederick Kagan: Well, Dany, look, I don't know the ins and outs of who was trying to persuade the president of one or the other. I think this was Biden's choice. I think this was Biden's policy. I think he has wanted to do this since he was vice-president.

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11 Frederick Kagan: And I think he seized of the moment of gaining power to do it. And I don't ever want to speculate about what's going on with people's minds, but I think it's clear enough that this is where he has been for a long time. And when he had the opportunity he gave the order. And I just wished that he had thought about it a little bit more and allowed or required the responsible officials to give him the actual serious plans for executing the order and mitigating the predictable, indeed predicted consequences that professional diplomats and military personnel should have been providing. And that he should have been insisting home before giving the executed order for any such thing.

Danielle Pletka: Give me one second here. I mean, yes, of course. You're right. The president is the president and he is the commander in chief and he bears all responsibility for these decisions. And I agree with you that he is somebody who has wanted to do this for a very long time. But when previous presidents, let's not name them, wanted to do things that were demonstrably terrible, insane, dangerous. There were people around them, even over the last four years that tried to lay out what the dangers were. This apparently has not happened, including from the intelligence community. And so that's why I wondered whether you had insight, because I know you've provided advice over the years to many of the people who have served in both democratic and Republican administrations about the passport and Afghanistan. I'll mark you down as I am, entirely perplexed as to how something so obviously loony could have happened.

Frederick Kagan: I am indeed perplexed.

Marc Thiessen: So I mean, Fred, we're talking about proud Democrats here, right? And the Democratic legacy, I always thought was the Truman legacy, right? Harry Truman, who left US forces in Germany after World War II, who left Japan after World War II, who fought the Korean War and then left U.S. forces in Korea. So for 70, 80 years, we've had American troops stationed in these countries because those countries could not defend themselves without U.S. forces. And this is one of the greatest legacies of Democratic foreign policy. I mean, if Harry Truman had followed the Biden doctorate and pulled our troops out of those countries, what would the world look like? And why are these Democrats today so willing to betray the legacy of one of their greatest foreign policy presidents that has supposedly defined Democratic foreign policy for 70, 80 years?

Frederick Kagan: First of all, I don't think that all Democrats are interested in doing that and I think there have been people who've spoken out against this choice.

Marc Thiessen: But the ones in power are.

Frederick Kagan: Well, the president is and his cabinet has supported him. But I don't want to make a blanket judgment about all Democrats. I mean, come on Marc we could have a fair conversation about in Republicans turning isolation as to turning our backs on Reagan.

Marc Thiessen: I didn't say all Democrats. I'm talking about this administration.

Frederick Kagan: No, I understand. And I'm accepting your point, but I'm making a larger one, which is, unfortunately for reasons that I don't understand what we're seeing

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12 here is the triumph of liberal isolationism and a rejection of a long tradition in the Democratic party of internationalism and of concern about human rights in particular. After all, it was a Democratic president who sent U.S. forces into the Balkans to end those horrific genocidal wars, waited too long, allowed more to happen then should've, made a bunch of mistakes, but ended the genocides at the end of the day. And ended up keeping a lot of U.S. forces there for a long time. And that was an incredibly noble and worthwhile activity. He was attacked by some Republicans at the time, as you may recall.

Frederick Kagan: So as recently as Bill Clinton we've had Democratic internationalists still believing that it was America's role to lead and America's role to be willing to use its force for moral and ethical good as well as geo-strategic purpose. And the tragedy for me here is that Joe Biden is emphatically turning his back on that legacy, on Truman's legacy and on Clinton's legacy, although I'm sure that doesn't distress him at all, and really leading toward a Democratic isolationism that is terribly damaging. And from my perch, it's just as bad if it's Republican isolationism as if it's Democrat isolationism. And I am just as eager to work with Democrat internationalists as with Republican internationalists because that's the divide that matters right now in the world.

Frederick Kagan: There are people who think that the United States can and must be a leader of the free world and a force for good, and can and must be willing to spend its blood and treasure and engage in the world in order to do that. And all of those people are my brothers and sisters. And then there are people who think that we should retreat back to fortress America with variations of rhetoric justifying it and explaining what we're doing. And those people I think, are going to lead us down a very dark path. And that's the path, unfortunately, we seem to be on right now.

Danielle Pletka: Well, Fred, you promised that this was not going to be uplifting and you kept your promise.

Marc Thiessen: Fred always delivers.

Danielle Pletka: I just wish that we wouldn't have had to have had this conversation. I feel like we've spent an awful lot of time betraying our friends and our allies over recent years to very little benefit to ourselves. And certainly not to our reputation in the world as supporters of freedom, human rights, women's rights, religious freedom, political freedom. I can go on here for a while, but thank you for taking the time. I know how busy you've been and Marc and I are really grateful.

Frederick Kagan: Thanks so much for the opportunity. Hopefully we'll find an occasion for happier topics sometime.

Marc Thiessen: Absolutely.

Danielle Pletka: Inshallah.

Danielle Pletka: Thanks Fred.

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13 Marc Thiessen: So Da ny, I thought your question about where are the advisors restraining Biden and all the rest of it was very pressing. And it reminded me of a conversation that we had with our dear friend General , who was on the podcast talking about the Biden foreign policy and one of the things he said was that he didn't expect Biden to do this. Because the Biden team was essentially the Obama team and they were the same people who had presided over the disaster in Iraq when the US withdrew in 2011 and the rise of ISIS and all the rest of it. And having been burned by that experience they were not eager to repeat it in an Afghanistan. I mean, a normal person would have responded to that experience by exactly the way Jack did, which is to say, I don't want to do that again. But apparently they're doubling down and doing it again.

Danielle Pletka: So what's interesting to me is that a lot of us, a lot of us, and when I say us I mean liberal internationalists, a lot of us didn't like the Obama administration. Didn't like the choices they made. Didn't like the things they did, not just in Iraq but frankly the betrayal of Syria, everybody remembers the red line, opening the door to the Russians. We could go on for a while here. But part of the reason that we thought that the Obama administration was so bad was the presence in particular of a man named Ben Rhodes, who was the president's amanuensis, his sidekick, a guy who didn't know anything about foreign policy, but didn't know the limits of his own abilities and apparently neither did the president. And we let all those other guys off the hook, the guys who we're now seeing in the Biden administration, we said, they're the grownups in the room. These are the people who believe in the things that we believe in. These are the people who would never let down our allies. These are the people who would do the right thing.

Danielle Pletka: And I think that we were lying to ourselves then because these guys are ideologues. They believed that we should abandoned Afghanistan a decade ago with Joe Biden and even though Fred is a gentleman, I got to say, especially because I went out on a limb as a conservative and supported Tony Blinken and signed a letter to Republicans in support of him that they let this happen-

Marc Thiessen: You let this happen.

Danielle Pletka: Yes. But that is, I think something that we need to realize is that these people are extremists just as the Obama administration was full of extremists and we need to stop giving them a pass for lying about caring about human freedom, about women's rights, about religious freedom, about allies. These are the people who betrayed every single man, woman, and child in Afghanistan and every single American soldier, man, or woman who fought for the freedom of the Afghan people and the security of the American people after 9/11.

Marc Thiessen: It's just funny how the left was, during the Trump era, always celebrating the adults in the room, the people who restrained Trump from his worst instincts and where the adults in the room today? For all of his many flaws and we've talked about them on this podcast, especially when it comes to Afghanistan, I railed against his wanting to invite the Taliban to Camp David and all the rest of it. There were people who talked him out of it and he was willing to be talked out of it. And he didn't withdraw to zero, he left 2,500 troops, even though he wanted to get out. He listened sometimes to the adults in the room who pushed back on him.

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14 Marc Thiessen: Here you've got a president who A, won't listen or B, is not getting anybody who's pushing back on his worst instincts and telling him to back down and laying out the consequences. So it's far worse situation national security wise.

Danielle Pletka: I couldn't agree with you more. Look, this is not one where you're going to get a whole bunch of different sides because I don't think there are different sides in this fight. There's a right and a wrong, and I think Fred did an extraordinarily good job in knocking back the unbelievably specious arguments about our allies in Afghanistan and how weak they are. And how they themselves, if they won't stand up for their country why should we stand up for them? That kind of a statement is just un-American, it really is. I said this on Twitter, I've said this elsewhere, shame on every single one of these people.

Marc Thiessen: Look considering what's happening right now this is not going to be our last podcast on Afghanistan. I think we've got a lot of issues to delve into, I want to really drive down on this whole liberal isolationism. I want to dive down on to how we prevent this country from becoming what Iraq and Syria became under the ISIS caliphate, which was a new safe haven for terrorism and what quite frankly Afghanistan was before the 9/11 attacks. There's a lot to tackle on this. I think we're going to be talking about Afghanistan a lot in the coming weeks.

Danielle Pletka: Absolutely. So, thanks folks for joining us. Thank you for listening. Thank you to all the people who wrote and suggested that we do this podcast. We really appreciate your reaching out, and thank you for the excellent suggestion. We will see you back in September, and hopefully we'll have some better news at that point.

Marc Thiessen: Amen.

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