James Hasson, an army captain and Afghanistan veteran who participated in independent evacuation efforts in the 2021 withdrawal, and Jerry Dunleavy, an investigative reporter who now continues that job as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee (although he speaks here in a private capacity), have written a tough but necessary exposé about America’s disastrous withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul, Afghanistan. Hasson and Dunleavy lay out unforgivable mistake after mistake and betrayal after betrayal by the Biden administration and top brass of the military of heroic servicemembers placed in an impossible position by their leaders. Stepman also talks to them about the damage that has been done on the global stage by the failed operation and about the so-far elusive possibility of accountability.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. I have been trying to get Jerry and James on for a while. They’re two very busy men, because the book that they have written, I think, is one of the most important books this year. It’s something that every American, I think, should read and take to heart, not only because of the specifics that it contains but also the implications about our national security and military. Jerry Dunleavy is an investigative journalist formerly of the Washington Examiner. He’s now an investigator for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, although he is talking about this book in his private capacity. I got you. Don’t worry, Jerry. And James Hasson is a former Army captain and graduate of Ranger school and Afghanistan veteran, who assisted in the veteran-led independent evacuation efforts surrounding the withdrawal from Kabul that we’re going to be talking about today. Their book is Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco. Jerry James, thank you so much for being on High Noon.
Jerry Dunleavy:
Thank you.
James Hasson:
It’s great to be here.
Inez Stepman:
I’m going to start off with a quotation from your book. You write, “The deaths of the 13 American Heroes of Abbey Gate and those of the innocent civilians they were attempting to save were neither inevitable nor the product of good faith decisions poorly executed.” So, I guess, back that up, right? Because we know that bad things happen during military operations. We know that American service members die in uniform. These are risks that we accept. And we know that American politicians make bad decisions all the time. But you’re saying something more in this book, that a lot of these consequences were completely predictable, in fact, they were predicted, and that these are not inevitable consequences of the withdrawal, nor are they merely fate, or chance, or poorly executed good faith ideas. So, back that up.
Jerry Dunleavy:
Well, let me just take one example to show why the Abbey Gate attack was not inevitable and why the deaths of those 13 service members weren’t inevitable, and why it wasn’t inevitable that we’d be expanding our Gold Star family community by 13 people. 13 families. So, we just look at the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base. So, Bagram was a massive air base that was pretty close to Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. And this was our biggest, most strategic base in all of Afghanistan, had numerous runways, would’ve been a much, much, much smarter place to try to do an evacuation from. And, the House of Foreign Affairs Committee received testimony from Command Sergeant Major Jake Smith earlier this year where he testified that State Department officials came and visited him at Bagram, when he was a top leader there and was being tasked with helping shut bases down around Afghanistan.
And he told the State Department officials, “You cannot do an evacuation through Kabul Airport. This is a tiny airport in the middle of a dense city.” And by the way, it would be an airport that would soon be completely surrounded by Taliban as they took the entire country. But Jake Smith said, “If you’re going to do an evacuation, you have to do it through Bagram.” And there’s a lot of reasons why. So Bagram has a lot of standoff distance, would’ve been a much safer place to do an evacuation from. We would not have seen the chaos that we saw at Kabul airport, people clinging to planes, falling from planes, crowds flooding the airport. You wouldn’t have seen any of that.
Bagram would’ve given us the ability to continue to project some of our power across Afghanistan because when we gave up Bagram, we pretty much gave up our ability to project power in any significant way in Afghanistan. So, if we had maintained U.S. air assets there, we would’ve been able to continue to assist the Afghan army and Afghan Air Force. We very likely would’ve been able to keep the Taliban at bay from ever being able to take Kabul in the first place.
And on top of that, at Bagram, there were pretty massive prisons filled with terrorists and Taliban fighters that the U.S., and NATO, and our Afghan allies had spent years putting behind bars. Among those prisoners were 2000 ISIS-K terrorists, including the guy who would go on to kill those 13 service members at Abbey Gate. His name is Abdul Rahman Al-Logari. The Biden administration refuses to say his name out loud, because we abandoned Bagram on July 2nd, 2021. And, as I’ve laid out, a terrible decision for so many reasons. But, among those reasons is the first thing that the Taliban did when they took over Bagram because we had abandoned it. They take it over on August 15th. They opened the doors to those prisons. They free 2000 ISIS-K terrorists, dozens of Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as thousands of their own Taliban fighters, and a number of those ISIS-K terrorists go straight back to trying to kill Americans. And one of them succeeds at Abbey Gate just a week and a half later.
So, the reality is, if we had just held on to Bagram, it would’ve been smarter from a strategic standpoint, from a standpoint of helping the Afghan military, from a standpoint of keeping the Taliban at bay, from a standpoint of evacuating Americans and Afghan allies. But, the simple fact is that, that terrorist who killed those 13 Americans would’ve still been behind bars, and that terrorist attack wouldn’t have happened.
James Hasson:
And if I can just jump in for 30 seconds to add one little point to that because everything that Jerry just said is spot on. But to your point about that, this wasn’t the product of good faith decisions poorly executed, the decision to abandon Bagram was a political one and not a military one. And I think that’s what sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill, “Oh, oops, we made a strategic error.” And that would’ve been bad enough because it’s a massive error. But, the military told President Biden that they needed at least 2200 people to be able to hold Bagram. And they asked repeatedly to be able to hold Bagram. Biden didn’t want any more than 600 people in the country, which pound-for-pound would’ve put it equivalent to defending any other embassy in… The defense we have for any other embassy. So he only wanted 600. And, you can’t hold Bagram with 600. And, it was not a military decision, it was a straight-up political decision, and it had deadly consequences.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, let’s talk about another one of these political decisions that you highlight in this book. We just celebrated… Or, I don’t know if celebrated is the right word, but we just marked the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, at the same time marking the second year anniversary since the pullout from Kabul. You point out that it was very well known that this was the height of fighting season and a bad time to execute this operation. Why was that decision made to do it in the middle of September, and what consequences did that have?
James Hasson:
Yeah. I mean, it’s hard for me to give you a logical answer for a very illogical decision. But, we have been in Afghanistan for 20 years. We know that beginning early spring, the mountain passes that have been blocked by snow throughout all winter start to thaw, people can start moving around from Pakistan back in Afghanistan. The terrain becomes easier to maneuver on. And, spring and summer is when the fighting happens. I mean, it’s called fighting season for a reason. And, it’s possible to get inside Joe Biden’s head on this. But for whatever reason, he thought that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 would be some symbolic victory to set as our time for leaving. And the Taliban at the time, of course, saw it just as an admission of defeat, “20 years after we came and we killed 3000 of you, or let Al-Qaeda do so, 20 years to the day, now you’re leaving, and we’re back in charge.”
But what it did is that we started kicking the legs out from the Afghan military in terms of contractor support, air support, and all of the different enablers that we brought to the table precisely when the Taliban offensive was really ramping up. So it was just a complete comedy of errors. And again, the military warned that this would be the case and that they couldn’t figure out why September 11th was this great date for us. And, I don’t think even Joe Biden really knew, because he ended up moving it up to August 31st.
Inez Stepman:
So, let’s then go through a number of these decisions, some of the ones that shocked me. I mean, there’s really just so many of these that you write about. It’s impossible to go through all of them. You’ll have to buy and read the book to find that list. But, can you tell me about two more of these decision points that really shocked me? One was this meeting back home of top brass that was so disconnected from what was going on in Afghanistan that they adjourned until tomorrow, right? Because they didn’t understand that the situation on the ground would change radically in the next 24 hours.
And the second one, so tell me about the service member who testified that, in fact, not only did we know who these ISIS-K terrorists were, and that they were likely to try and attack against the remaining American service members, but that actually we had an opportunity to shoot this guy, and that the top brass of the military, they decided not to go for a raid on where these guys were, or even, this particular terrorist who one of the service members says that he actually had in his sights as a sniper. Is that correct?
Jerry Dunleavy:
Let me take the first piece. So, this is this National Security Council interagency meeting on the eve of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. And so, you have a lot of the top members of the Biden administration related to Afghanistan all getting together. And, this is right before the Taliban walks into Kabul and takes the capital. This is the day before. And, they have not figured out the most basic things, the Biden administration has not, the things that they should have figured out months before. Things about, “What’s our priority in terms of who to get out? Where are we going to send people when we get them out?” These are called lily pads or third countries. There was no real plan in place about where once we got someone on a plane at Kabul Airport, “Where are we going to send them? How are we getting Americans out? What about all of the tens of thousands of Afghan allies and SIV, special immigrant visa applicants?”
They were still putting together the most basic stuff and decided to get together to meet the next day to continue to finalize things. And by the time the next day rolled around, the Taliban was in charge of Kabul. And, those thousands of Americans were stuck behind Taliban lines. Those tens of thousands of Afghan allies were stuck behind Taliban lines. And so, this evacuation that was eventually declared wasn’t even officially declared until after the Taliban had taken over the capitol of Kabul. And so, you see the Biden administration’s blindness to what was happening on the ground, then put the evacuation, these military service members who had to go back in and just hold a tiny airport with the Taliban outside the gates. It put the U.S. military and those service members in just this impossible situation where we hadn’t even started an evacuation, and now we’re starting an evacuation when the Taliban’s in charge, and we have to rely on the Taliban to provide security.
And that dovetails into some of the other stuff that we found, including the fact that then the U.S. military had to ask the Taliban to search and raid ISIS-K locations in Kabul once the Taliban had taken over and we were doing the evacuation. So, while we’re doing this evacuation, while we’re trying to get thousands of Americans out, tens of thousands of Afghan allies out, and while we have thousands of our Marines and other troops exposed, we’re relying on the Taliban to take care of the ISIS-K threat. And what we now know, I think, because of our book, the Pentagon has now admitted that… Because in our book we write about one such instance, where we asked the Taliban to raid an ISIS-K location, the Taliban refused. The Pentagon has now said that there were more than 10 instances where we had to ask the Taliban to take care of a potential ISIS-K threat, and the Taliban would often say, “No.”
And so, this is the position that all of this cascade of bad decisions had put us in. And now, we’re relying on the Taliban. And we saw how that played out. I mean, when you see the first thing that the Taliban does when they take over Bagram is open the doors to thousands of ISIS-K prisoners. It’s a pretty good sign that they’re probably not going to be a very good defense partner against ISIS-K when they’re letting them run loose. And then, when one of those guys that they freed comes and kills us. So, the entire evacuation was just this insanely stupid and dangerous situation. You saw that play out with the limitations that the U.S. military had, and perhaps the limitations that the military was placing on itself with the fear that if we anger the Taliban, the Taliban will just shut everything down and that’ll be game over and whoever’s left behind will be left behind. So, that’s the situation that President Biden’s decisions put us in.
James Hasson:
Yeah. And I think one thing to add to that is that the Biden administration has not wanted to talk about any of this. And it’s one of the reasons why we wrote Kabul is because they’re not going to hold themselves accountable and somebody needs to. But, the reason why they don’t want to talk about the fact that we asked the Taliban to raid ISIS-K locations and they didn’t, or that we decided not to conduct an airstrike against ISIS-K operative on August 24th, two days before the bombing in Nangarhar, which is ISIS-K’s stronghold due to “negative response from the Taliban.”
And, the reason why they can’t admit this is because they have been on the record telling the American people, and they were throughout the evacuation, that the Taliban was businesslike and professional. And that they were our partners in this, somehow all of a sudden, after we’d just been fighting them for 20 years. And to that point, they also didn’t want to admit that the same Taliban was beating Americans, beating Afghan allies, confiscating passports when people were trying to get through to the gates, and even executing Afghan allies in full view of U.S. troops. So, the narrative that they spun is just 180 degrees backwards from reality. And we lay that out in Kabul.
Inez Stepman:
I realize this is somewhat of a naive question, and you guys spend this book explaining how some of these decisions got made, but just from the pure American citizen, 10,000-foot view, how did the richest country in the world with the most powerful and effective military force in the world end up playing from this defensive crouch in this withdrawal against the Taliban? Why were we so reliant? And I realize what you’re saying. I mean, there was this cascade of decisions, but it seems so utterly humiliating. I mean, it’s humiliating enough after 20 years of American blood and treasure to leave the country in the same hands that it was in when we started. In many cases, you point out, the same people or their sons, right, and that brings up all…
But, it seems like the failure of Afghanistan generally has never been military. It’s been in what to do with the country and political. This was a military operation, how is it that our incredibly powerful and excellent military found itself in this defensive crouch where to make a decision to kill a known terrorist leader who is targeting Americans, we had to basically think about what the Taliban is going to say about it?
James Hasson:
Yeah, it’s a great point, because if you want to talk about all the failures in Afghanistan, obviously, there are 20 years of them. Yeah, it would take thousands of pages, probably more than anyone wants to read, to really go through all of them. But, to your point, an evacuation like this, it’s a military operation. It’s supposed to be led by the State Department under doctrine. The State Department calls the shots in terms of getting Americans out, getting allies out, and how that’s prioritized, and the military executes. But, at the end of the day, it’s a military operation. And, failure is a choice, decline is a choice. And, the administration had absolutely no desire to get in any conflict with the Taliban once they were in Kabul.
And Jerry can hop in a minute to talk about how it came to be that we agreed to let the Taliban “handle security.” But, there was no desire to confront the Taliban. And that started from the very top. And so, it used to be back in the day that a blue passport was the most valuable document in the world, an American passport because it meant that if you’re in trouble in some war zone if you’ve been taken captive, that whoever’s bothering you has to deal with the full force of the American military. And you see that even in Navy Seals killing Somali pirates to rescue a small crew of Americans on a shipping vessel.
Inez Stepman:
Right. I mean, this is a quintessential part of American foreign policy. I mean, even when we were not a global power, when we were pipsqueak on the far side of the world, the impressment of American sailors into foreign militaries on the open sea was cause for war with the United States.
James Hasson:
Sure.
Inez Stepman:
It’s the most basic American doctrine.
James Hasson:
Uh-huh. And that’s really one of the most damning things about all of this, is that the administration basically took that precedent and ripped it to shreds. And, by August 24th, they knew that they weren’t going to get every American out by the 31st. And yet, the administration was still telling everyone that they could. But it was a knowing decision to leave Americans behind. I’ll let Jerry talk about the specifics, because actually, how we came to rely on the Taliban is something that hasn’t been discussed enough in my opinion.
Jerry Dunleavy:
Well, all that I’ll add is that this idea, this Biden administration plan for Afghanistan was that they thought, that Biden thought, and the State Department thought that essentially all U.S. troops would be able to exit Afghanistan, despite the Taliban being on the march, but that we’d be able to pull all our troops out. But at the same time, we’d be able to maintain our largest embassy in the entire world with a tiny, tiny, tiny number of troops there to “guard it.” But certainly, not enough to guard it against a marching army like the Taliban. So this was just hubris. It was this idea that we could… Despite all of the warnings, that pulling all of U.S. troops, and U.S. contractors, and U.S. logistics would essentially be the death knell for an already weak Afghan military. The people in the Biden administration thought that we could do all those things, but then still just keep an embassy open, and slowly get an American out here, and get a couple few Afghan allies out there.
And it was just total hubris, because as we pulled our troops out and all of our contractors out, many of them fought and many of them died by the way, in 2021. But, the Afghan military at large collapsed, and the Taliban took the country. And the Taliban is now in charge of the country and in charge of Kabul. And the United States hasn’t done any of the things that we needed to do, in terms of getting Americans and Afghan allies out. And so, it was just pure, pure hubris. And, an interesting anecdote that set up the situation where we are now as a U.S. military relying on the Taliban outside the gates of Kabul Airport, is that Centcom Commander General Frank McKenzie flew to Doha in Qatar around August to August 14th, August 15th timeframe, and went to meet with one of the Taliban’s top leaders, their top political negotiator, whose name is Baradar, and he’s still a top member now of the new ruling Taliban government.
But, Mackenzie went to meet with Baradar, and walked in with a map of Kabul, with a perimeter circle outside the city, and told Baradar, “The Taliban’s not allowed to come inside this circle.” And Baradar said, “Well, I have bad news for you. Not only are we inside that circle, but we’re knocking on the door of Kabul itself. So, what do you want to do?” And, Baradar made an offer, this Taliban leader made an offer that the US would be able to take over security of the City of Kabul for the final two weeks of August if we wanted to. And, Mackenzie has testified that he turned that offer down.
And so, the Taliban walked into Kabul, took the city, and were sitting outside the gates. And so, the United States was then relying on the Taliban for security. And, as I like to point out, and everyone should read this in the book Kabul, this just wasn’t just any Taliban, obviously, the Taliban as a group is a very terrible, evil terrorist group, but the specific element of the Taliban that had come to power in Kabul, and that was in charge right outside Kabul Airport was called the Haqqani Taliban. And the Haqqanis are very closely allied with Al-Qaeda. The Haqqanis have a suicide squad called the Badri 313, and that suicide squad was providing “security” outside of Kabul Airport. We write in the book that one of these Haqqani leaders said the first thing that he did when he showed up at Kabul Airport was surround the airport with 1,000 suicide bombers.
So, these were the Taliban that we were relying on. And again, when a group shows up and the first thing that they do is they brag about surrounding you with 1,000 suicide bombers, not exactly what you want out of your security partner, but that’s what we were relying on. And, I think that we make a case in the book that these Haqqani Taliban, it’s very possible that they may have let this bomber slip through. But, either way, relying on these guys, guys who were responsible for the deaths of thousands of American service members over the years, relying on them to provide security for you was a dangerous, and we think, ultimately a deadly decision.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So, let me maybe take the devil’s advocate position for a moment. Obviously, the war in Afghanistan was incredibly unpopular after 20 years. Multiple presidents had already… So we have Trump and Biden both running on withdrawal from Afghanistan or wrapping up the Afghanistan war. And, what would you say to people who say basically that Biden made a series of decisions against the advice of his military advisors, because the same military advisors had been advising for 20 years that we can’t leave Afghanistan, and therefore, when they were saying, “Oh, this is impossible.” Or, “That’s impossible.” It was falling on deaf ears because they were saying it’s impossible for us to leave for the last 20 years.
James Hasson:
I think it’s a great point. And one of the things that we emphasize in the prologue to Kabul is that regardless of where you fall in terms of the debate about whether or not we should have stayed with a few thousand, or whether we should have just completely packed up is immaterial, because just the way that the withdrawal itself was handled was a complete disaster, and things didn’t have to turn out the way that they did. But it is an interesting question about… Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of generals who kept going in front of Congress for 20 years and saying, “Success is right around the corner in Afghanistan.” And there is a bit of a credibility issue, at some point. But, what they weren’t arguing for at that point was continuing to stay after the decision was made to withdraw and to leave. At that point, it was simply in our professional military opinion, based on our expertise, “This is the way we have to do it. And if you don’t, people are going to get killed.” And, they didn’t do it that way. And lo and behold, unfortunately, people died.
Inez Stepman:
So, let’s move to the part of this that in some ways the most enraging, which is accountability. How many of the people we’re discussing, whether it’s at the State Department, or among the top leaders of the military, or any diplomatic leadership, how many of those people have been fired?
James Hasson:
Precisely zero.
Jerry Dunleavy:
No accountability whatsoever. No one’s been fired. No one resigned. I mean, some people have been promoted, right? And I don’t call this accountability. But, I think that perhaps the only sense of an impact really that’s even tangentially related to accountability is that President Biden’s approval rating took an incredible hit during the debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021. And, I think that it happened because there were some people that were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Some people thought that maybe his years, and years, and decades of experience in Washington DC might make him a competent leader. But I think that the mask really came off there, and people saw he was incompetent. And this aura of empathy that he had built up over the years and over the decades was pretty much a farce because there was no empathy here in the way that he did this. And there was no competency. It was incompetent, and it was uncaring. And it was a disaster.
And so, President Biden took a still lasting hit in his approval rating. And it might be unrecoverable for him. Perhaps he eeks out a win in 2024, but his approval rating seems to be unrecoverable at this point. And it started it because of the debacle in Afghanistan. And all that I would say is that there are efforts to gain accountability. Obviously, the House of Foreign Affairs Committee is investigating this in depth. And, there needs to be accountability. Part of accountability is getting answers about what happened so that it can be properly identified. Every bad decision that was made and can be hung around their necks. And, it’s also important to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, because the fallout from the war in Afghanistan, I don’t think that anyone can deny that two years later we’re living in a more dangerous world. And at least part of it is because of the debacle that happened in Afghanistan.
So, part of why accountability is important is to make sure that something like this never happens again, to have a 20-year war end in such a debacle and such disaster with the Taliban back in charge, and Americans, and Afghan allies left behind, it’s a dereliction of duty, and it’s dangerous, and it can’t happen again in the future. We can’t afford it.
Inez Stepman:
So, let’s name names here, who needs to be called before Congress and humiliated in front of the entire nation? I mean, as a point about accountability, it’s just the perfect illustration of why this is so hard to swallow. As far as I know, and I don’t think you guys mentioned him, if you did, I missed it in this book because he wasn’t directly related to a lot of what you were writing about, but the lieutenant colonel who went viral, because he knowingly called out his superiors for making such devastating mistakes in Afghanistan, and it’s real clear in the video, he understands what he’s doing, that his career in the military is over, that he’s probably going to be court-martialed. And he was. This is Lieutenant Colonel Scheller. Okay?
As far as I know, he’s still the only person who’s been court-martialed or suffered any consequences as a result of this debacle in Afghanistan. And none of the people who made decisions that actually killed people, as you write here convincingly in a totally unnecessary way have suffered at all for that. So, what’s the list of people who need to be essentially brought before the American people and made to answer for the decisions that they’ve made here?
James Hasson:
Yeah, I think, obviously, if you’re the commander-in-chief, the buck stops there. But, that goes without saying. But, I would say, particularly Secretary of Defense Austin, and Secretary of State Blinken have a lot to answer for. Austin at one point bragged early on during the process that he didn’t think that anybody knew more about how to conduct a retrograde and get American troops, and people, and equipment out of the country better than he did. And obviously, the results speak for themselves. But Secretary Blinken as well, I mean, the State Department failed just from top to bottom, and we laid that out very convincingly in Kabul. And, he was warned as well, and we talk about this in our book, Kabul, as well, that Blinken was warned in July that this was coming down the pipeline, and he ignored those warnings as well. And, he’s never provided a satisfactory answer for that, and nobody has. What do you think, Jerry?
Jerry Dunleavy:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s absolutely right. And, Secretary Blinken has a lot to answer for because of the failures at the State Department, as does Secretary Austin, because the failures with the Pentagon. And, there are other people as well that will need to answer for this. And I would just note, because I’m trying to walk the line here, because I’m not speaking on behalf of the committee. But, the House of Foreign Affairs Committee has asked a lot of people from the Biden administration who were involved in the debacle and Afghanistan to come in and talk to the committee. And so, that’s going to be an important part of achieving accountability and getting answers. And all that I would add is that we lay this out in the book, I think, that oftentimes questions get raised about President Biden’s age and his fitness for office. And I think, a lot of the time, those are extremely fair questions to raise, whether his age is really degrading his ability to handle the job of commander in chief, and whether he is truly making all of the decisions in the Biden White House.
But, when it comes to Afghanistan, and it comes to the debacle in 2021, the condition-less withdrawal and the disastrous evacuation, this was President Biden top to bottom. This was being driven by him. This was his decision. And, it was his choice. And he was the one that picked the 20th anniversary of 9/11. He was the one that wouldn’t listen to anyone around him. He’s the one that ignored Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress who told them that this is going to end in disaster. I mean, in terms of foreign policy decisions that President Biden has made, this one has his fingerprints on it more than anything else. This was his decision, and this disaster is ultimately on him.
Inez Stepman:
And you bring up some history I didn’t know, that Joe Biden, one of the ways he first made his bones in Congress was by being vociferously opposed to taking care of our allies after the fall of Saigon in Vietnam. So, this is not a new position. I want to ask you guys a really difficult question, and I’m going to be very careful with how I’m asking it, because of course, I don’t want to imply that… And if anything, this book is full of stories of incredible heroism and competency from people who are essentially handed an impossible job. But the part that I want to ask you about is how do people feel about the sense of dishonor in this job? Because it’s a very different thing. You’re writing about U.S. troops having to stand by while allies were executed in front of them, having to rely on the Taliban.
I mean, this is a different thing to deal with psychologically, than the already difficult facts of war, of losing your friends, or watching your friends die. They were put in a position where they could not behave naturally or correctly. How are people dealing with that? Because, it seems to me like the biggest betrayal of the people above them is to put them in those positions.
James Hasson:
I’m glad you asked. We spent a lot of time talking to a lot of the Marines and the soldiers who were at the gates. And a lot of the people at the gates for these 18, 19, 20-year-old junior enlisted soldiers and Marines. And, one thing that came up over and over was this concept of moral injury. And, it’s been very, very difficult for them to reconcile, because the idea being, that you’re forced to watch or prevent it from intervening while all kinds of horrific things are happening around you. And, I think, that’s definitely, I think something that’s been tough for a lot of them. And, it’s also one of the reasons we wanted to write the book, to just be able to tell their stories. And I think we do that largely through their own words in Kabul. But, to your broader point, the position that they were placed in was incredibly immoral and unjust. And, they performed heroically. But, they never should have been there in that position in the first place.
Inez Stepman:
I don’t know if you want to add anything, Jerry.
Jerry Dunleavy:
I mean, I’ve talked to a good number of the Marines who were on the ground, including a bunch of them who were at Abbey Gate. And, yeah, I mean, this was an impossible situation. They were set up to fail. They were set up to fail primarily by President Biden, their commander in chief. They were set up to fail. But within this disastrous, impossible situation they were put in, I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that these service members did help get out thousands of Americans, many thousands of Americans. Now, look, a lot of Americans were also left behind. But that’s not on the service members, that is on the political decision making in DC, and the State Department failing to plan, and setting this entire thing up for failure. But, these marines, and these Army soldiers, and others, they did perform heroically within the insane limitations and strictures that were placed on them.
And so, I don’t want people to lose sight of the incredible things that they were able to accomplish, even as the entire situation and the entire evacuation did end ultimately in failure, because of essentially being set up for failure, because of the Biden administration, and Americans, and Afghan allies being left behind. But yeah, I mean, the concept of moral injury is something that these troops bring up, and a lot of them are still dealing with it. We hope that the book is cathartic in some ways, and some of these Marines, they have groups, they talk to each other, they’re talking through this stuff, and dealing with it. And, there’s a group called Operation Allies Refuge Foundation that’s doing very good work with veterans of the Kabul Airport evacuation, with bringing those guys together to tell their stories. But, it’s important to us that we were able to tell some of those stories in our book and encourage people to give it a read.
Inez Stepman:
Let me turn now to the larger geopolitical consequences of America. I think I said this when I did two years ago, while this was going on, I had Joey Jones on to talk about this withdrawal as it was happening. And, I asked him then, “What do you think the consequences of America essentially showing its ass to the world are going to be?” And so now, two years later, what do you think the consequences of showing this level of moral indifference from the top levels and overall just this level of complete incompetency, political weakness, inability to execute even something in your retreat, right, what consequences has that had for America’s standing in the world and our interests in the world and the way we project power?
James Hasson:
Yeah, I think, the final few chapters in our book, Kabul, really lay out how disastrous this has been and what those consequences have been in detail. So, we have one chapter talking about Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. You can draw a very direct line between what happened in Kabul and what happened in Kyiv. And, immediately after we showed this weakness and this indifference to our allies, Russia started building up their forces on the Ukrainian border. It began in September of 2021, almost right after we showed this weakness. And China, for that matter, immediately labeled this the “Kabul Moment.” And one of the last chapters of our book is called the CCP and the Kabul Moment, because that’s how they defined it. And, their propaganda mouthpieces and their ministry of foreign affairs would start saying basically to Taiwan, “Hey, look, you’re next. Because you see, America’s not going to stand by you.”
And, they’ve become increasingly belligerent towards Taiwan in these past two years. And even now, just on the second anniversary of the collapse of Kabul, the Chinese foreign ministry, again, described it as the “Kabul Moment.” And there are also a lot of practical effects, right? There’s the equipment that was left behind. A lot of that’s now in the hands of terrorist organizations. Other terrorist organizations, other than the terrorist organization that’s in charge of Afghanistan right now. And also, Iran and other countries, other adversaries have been trying to recruit and debrief former Afghan commandos who were left behind, who’d served alongside U.S. special operations units, and basically to get intelligence about how does military special operations plan their missions? What are their capabilities? How do they react in certain circumstances? So, it’s just had a whole cascade of second and third order effects.
Jerry Dunleavy:
I think, James summed that up extremely nicely. What happened in Afghanistan didn’t stay in Afghanistan. And, there’s no doubt that this debacle in Afghanistan was taken into account by Putin when he was making his calculations. Seeing the U.S. and NATO in a shambles, he’s wanted to invade Ukraine for a long time, but he had never done a full invasion until now. And, we make a very strong case that it was because he saw this as his moment, because of the debacle in Afghanistan. And, yeah, China taking advantage of it as well to threaten Taiwan. And, like I said, no one can make a plausible argument that we are not living in a more dangerous world two years later than we were, because we are. We are living in a more dangerous world than we were two years ago. We have a massive war on the European continent, and we have China inching closer to an invasion of Taiwan. And, I think that the debacle in Afghanistan contributed to that. And that’s a shame.
Inez Stepman:
I guess, I’ll wrap up with this. What is the current situation in Afghanistan? Because, even on this anniversary, right, we didn’t talk about it. We talked about 9/11, but not the anniversary of this. Are there still Americans essentially trapped in Afghanistan? Are there SIVs? Are there allies that, in many cases, fought alongside us for 20 years? What is the current situation now that we are completely withdrawn in such a terrible and un-executed way, right?
James Hasson:
Yeah. Well, there are tens of thousands of Afghan allies who were left behind. And, some of them have been killed, others have gone into hiding. But there are also Americans. We do know there are Americans being held by the Taliban right now. And, we try to talk about that with some sensitivity and care, because of the dynamics behind the scenes and to make sure that the family’s wishes are honored and so forth. But it is a fact that there are Americans there, there are Westerners being held. And also, there are a lot of allies who we promised to bring to America if they fought alongside of us, who we just abandoned, who are still there as well.
Jerry Dunleavy:
And, in terms of the Taliban itself, you have Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is a designated terrorist by the State Department and the FBI. He is in charge of important ministries in the Taliban government. And he’s also considered by many to not just be a very close ally of Al-Qaeda but to essentially be a card-carrying member of Al-Qaeda itself. There are other members of the Taliban government, the governor of Kabul Province, the deputy director of the Taliban’s Intelligence Agency, and others who are considered to be dual-handed members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as well. And so, it’s obviously a very dangerous situation. And, of course, that’s to say nothing of the human rights situation there is extremely bleak. Women have essentially no rights in Afghanistan. It’s back to what it was in the ’90s, where women aren’t able to work, they’re not able to get educated, they’re forced to stay in their homes.
And so, it’s a bleak situation for half the population, and not particularly fun for most of the other half the population either, because of massive poverty and starvation under the Taliban as well. But, look, the Taliban government is dangerous. We know that they are protecting, and funding, and there are a number of other terrorist organizations that are flourishing in Afghanistan as well. The Pakistani Taliban has become emboldened and is back to launching big attacks inside of Pakistan as the Pakistani Taliban attempts to overthrow the Pakistani government and set up an Islamic Emirate of the sort, that their friends in the Afghan Taliban have done. So, yeah, I mean, it’s not a good situation. We left behind a very dangerous situation in Afghanistan. And, it’s just a bizarre thing to go back to this, Biden picking the 20th anniversary of 9/11 for the full withdrawal date. And what that ended up meaning was that the Taliban, the group that had harbored Al-Qaeda on 9/11 was back in charge on the 20th anniversary. I mean, it’s a pretty dark situation.
Inez Stepman:
Jerry, James. Jerry Dunleavy, James Hasson, their book is Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco. I think, not only is this worth reading, because it exposes much of what has not been really investigated by the media after this. But, I think it’s really necessary for everyone. I really recommend everyone go out and buy this book, if for no other reason than to increase the number of people who have, at least, in their minds, the correct story of what happened here. Because, nothing else is worth remembering. James, Jerry, thank you so much for joining High Noon today.
Jerry Dunleavy:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Inez Stepman:
High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. You can find it in all the places where you get your podcasts from. Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, and more. Until next time, be brave. We’ll see you at High Noon.
