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[0] It's been two years since the deadly suicide attack at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan that killed 13 U .S. service members.
[1] Now, a new book hopes to shed light on what went wrong that day and in the weeks and months leading up to it.
[2] None of this would have happened if President Biden had made smart decisions.
[3] In this episode, we do a deep dive on the Afghanistan withdrawal, and we hear from the authors of that book, and investigative journalists and a decorated Afghanistan military veteran about their thoughts on the failed evacuation.
[4] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Vickley with Georgia Howe.
[5] It's August 20th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[6] Georgia did some background for this episode, speaking with investigative reporter Jerry Dunlevy and Afghanistan war veteran James Hassan.
[7] They're the co -authors of the book, Cobble the untold story of Biden's fiasco and the American Warriors who fought to the end.
[8] Georgia, first, can you give us a quick recap of what happened two years ago?
[9] Sure.
[10] So two years ago, almost exactly to the day, the U .S. was in the midst of a rushed and by most accounts extremely disorganized retreat from Afghanistan.
[11] The U .S. had been there for nearly two decades, making it the longest war in U .S. history.
[12] The seminal moment of that withdrawal came on August 26, 2021.
[13] And that's when a suicide bombing at a major gate entry to the Kabul airport in Afghanistan called Abbey Gate, claimed the lives of 13 American service members and nearly 200 civilians.
[14] In the aftermath of that bombing, many observers blamed the attack on the collapse of the U .S.-backed Afghani government and on poor planning on the part of the Biden administration.
[15] And that's the subject of this new book by Dunlevy and Hassan.
[16] Here's Dunlevy.
[17] In 2021, when President Biden made his announcement for a full withdrawal.
[18] It was very clear to me that things were going to go south very quickly, much more quickly than he was predicting.
[19] And obviously, everything descended into chaos, 13 Americans dead, hundreds, probably over, you know, in the thousands of Americans left behind, tens of thousands of Afghans left behind.
[20] Now, the war in Afghanistan, as you said, lasted almost exactly 20 years, and it was sparked by the 9 -11 attacks carried out by al -Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
[21] The war ended abruptly with that withdrawal by President Biden.
[22] Remind us what led him to pull the plug on the war.
[23] Well, at that point, it had become a political hot potato.
[24] Americans were incredibly tired of the war and everyone for the most part wanted to get out, but how to do it was another matter.
[25] Obama, Trump, and Biden had all campaigned on ending U .S. involvement in Afghanistan, but securing a peace deal with the Taliban had proven to be extremely difficult.
[26] Right.
[27] But Biden ultimately did keep his promise, and he took U .S. troops out, but that process was slammed as rushed and disorganized, even by people who actually supported the withdrawal.
[28] And in some ways, it was a lose -lose situation, but one of the major criticisms was that Biden pulled military forces out of key positions like the Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul before U .S. civilians had been evacuated.
[29] Rather than doing a multi -stage withdrawal, it was just this sudden chaotic vacuum.
[30] Right.
[31] And very quickly, without the U .S. support that it had relied on for 20, years, the Afghan government collapsed in a matter of weeks, and that left the entire country at the mercy of the Taliban.
[32] The way that President Biden withdrew set us up for total failure, set the Afghan military up for a collapse, set the Taliban up for victory, set the Americans and the Afghan allies in Afghanistan to be stuck behind enemy lines, and stuck our U .S. forces at just a tiny airport.
[33] If the United States had decided to maintain Bagram Air Base, which is close to Kabul, we would have been in a position where we would have been able to run a much safer and much more effective evacuation.
[34] We would have been able to very likely keep the Taliban from ever conquering Kabul itself, which would have made our lives much, much easier.
[35] James Hassan, a veteran of the Afghanistan War and co -author of the book, assisted with the evacuation efforts from abroad.
[36] He told Morning Wire that poor communication by the Biden administration led to massive pandemonium and ultimately deaths.
[37] Basically, word got out that the U .S. was evacuating anyone with a connection to the U .S., but it wasn't specified what the eligibility criteria would be.
[38] And so we had thousands upon thousands of people rushing the gates of the airport hoping to escape.
[39] It was almost unrestricted.
[40] It was anybody who appeared to be a family unit, anybody that even just kind of claimed by word of mouth at times to have any connection to the U .S. And what happened is they let in tens of thousands of people, none of whom were vetted, and most of whom had almost no connection at all to the U .S. government.
[41] And in the process, all of the people we were supposed to get out, including thousands of American citizens, were at the back of that crowd.
[42] We only had several hundred U .S. troops on the ground at that time, and it wasn't enough to protect the airfield from that kind of.
[43] of just wave of humanity descending upon it without using lethal force against unarmed people, which, of course, U .S. forces are never going to do.
[44] And at the same time, you're watching the Taliban who U .S. forces have fought for 20 years beat and in many cases execute former allies right in front of your eyes.
[45] So they were placed in a no -win situation.
[46] It was in the midst of that confusion that a suicide bomber from ISIS K slipped past American defenses and killed 13 American service members wounding 18 others along with almost 200 Afghans.
[47] I think none of us will forget that day.
[48] Was there any warning that this kind of attack could happen?
[49] Unfortunately, yes.
[50] So before the attack, the U .S. had received intel that suggested the airport could come under attack.
[51] It's very, very clear that the administration was aware that ISIS K was a threat.
[52] And you can even see that in the public warnings and statements that they made everyone from President Biden to the Secretary of Defense to even President Macron of France warning that there was a significant ISIS threat.
[53] According to Pentagon reports, U .S. forces had proposed a preemptive strike against ISIS targets days before the bombing, but that proposal was shot down by Central Command because an air strike might have angered the Taliban.
[54] Instead, they proposed sending the Taliban to take care of the problem.
[55] Now, ISIS and the Taliban are rival groups, and they've fought each other before.
[56] And after the Taliban seized control of the country, the U .S. had largely left security to the Taliban.
[57] Right.
[58] And this is an important point.
[59] To be clear, the Taliban was in charge of providing security for U .S. forces at Kabul Airport.
[60] Yes.
[61] And this case is just an example of the strange bedfellows that develop in war.
[62] The Taliban is at odds with ISIS -K, but both the Taliban and the ISIS K are at odds with the West.
[63] So the situation was just ripe for betrayal.
[64] But the U .S. military felt that it was the best option available at the time.
[65] And you can imagine how frustrated and unsupported U .S. troops must have felt in that situation.
[66] Here's Jerry on that.
[67] The Taliban was not doing a good job of providing security.
[68] They were doing everything that they could to make life absolute hell for the Americans and the Afghan allies trying to get to the airport and frankly trying to make life hell for the Marines and for the State Department consular officials who were trying to evacuate people.
[69] After two years of investigating, Dunleavy and Hassan believed that it's at least possible that the attack was not just a result of negligence, but that elements of the Taliban who were sympathetic to ISIS -K may have allowed that bomber to slip through.
[70] We heard a lot from President Biden about how the Taliban and ISIS -K were mortal enemies, and so that's part of why we could kind of rely on the Taliban to stop an ISIS -K attack from occurring.
[71] And it's true that the Taliban and ISIS -K are enemies and that they fight each other all the time.
[72] But it's also true that they had a common enemy in the United States.
[73] So it seems like relying on them for security was foolish, no matter what.
[74] Aside from weakening the U .S .'s position in the country, Dunleavy says the withdrawal from Bagram Air Base directly caused the suicide bombing on August 26.
[75] The suicide bomber who successfully hit Abbey Gate and killed those 13 Americans and nearly 200 Afghans as well, that suicide bomber was in prison at Bogram Air Base and was still in prison when the U .S. left that base.
[76] The Taliban took Bogram over around August 15th, and the first thing that the Taliban did is free everyone from that prison.
[77] Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews, who ended up being grievously wounded in that terrorist attack, losing two of his limbs.
[78] He has testified that he and the other Marines received intelligence ahead of the bombing about what the suicide bomber looked like, and he believed that he had spotted this suicide bomber asked permission from his commanding officer to take the shot, and his commanding officer said he didn't have permission to do that.
[79] Tyler asked his commanding officer to figure out who could give that order to shoot.
[80] And his commanding officer, he says, never got back to him.
[81] And a bomber disappeared into the crowd, and we all know what happened next.
[82] Now, the bombing occurred on August 26th, as you said, when was the withdrawal officially complete?
[83] Well, the last American plane left Kabul on August 30th of 2021, but thousands of American citizens and allies were left behind.
[84] There wasn't exactly a clear end date.
[85] For months, President Biden was peppered with questions about those left behind.
[86] I made a commitment to the American people that I bring America's military involvement in Afghanistan to an end.
[87] While it's been hard and messy, and yes, far from perfect, I've honored that commitment because it's the right one, it's the right decision for America.
[88] Thank you.
[89] May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all brave Americans serving in harm's way.
[90] Mr. President, what do you make of the Afghans flinging to the aircraft?
[91] It was time to end a 20 -year war.
[92] Thank you so much.
[93] Mr. President, there had not been a U .S. service member killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020.
[94] You said the buck stops with you.
[95] do you bear any responsibility for the way that things have unfolded in the last two weeks?
[96] I bear responsibility for fundamentally all that's happened.
[97] Do you think that people have an issue with pulling out of our things in or just a wave of things that happen?
[98] I think they have an issue that people are like to get hurt.
[99] Some, as we've seen, have gotten killed, and that it is messy.
[100] Over the next few months, there was a mad rush to resettle thousands of Afghans who came to the U .S., many of them with nothing aside from the clothes they were wearing.
[101] A lot of them had no documents.
[102] And just for perspective, people were so desperate to get on these planes that they were handing babies over fences.
[103] Yeah, the footage of that was disturbing.
[104] There was also a lot of harsh criticism about the military equipment left behind.
[105] Can you speak to that?
[106] Right.
[107] So the Taliban reportedly seized billions of dollars of U .S. military equipment.
[108] There were some viral photos showing Taliban militants attempting to use U .S. helicopters, although it's been reported that they were remotely disabled.
[109] But it's not just the loss of billions in equipment.
[110] The main concern now is that the country's become a hotbed for terror.
[111] Reports from the United Nations suggest that al -Qaeda, which remains a close ally of the Taliban, has now set up new training bases in Afghanistan and is using the country as a base for fundraising and recruitment.
[112] So in a lot of ways, it's like the dam broke and now we're back at square one, or perhaps worse.
[113] Yeah.
[114] Well, another major concern was that women in Afghanistan would bear the heaviest burden with the Taliban coming into power again.
[115] What do we know on that front?
[116] Yeah, so initially the Taliban was promising publicly not to roll back women's rights.
[117] That was kind of part of their campaign to be seen as a legitimate government on the world stage.
[118] But on the ground, that promise has been violated repeatedly.
[119] In rural areas, women had very few rights, even under U .S. occupation, but at least in the metro areas where the U .S. U .S. was propping up the official government, women were able to go to school and hold jobs, but since the withdrawal, that's largely gone away.
[120] They're also cracking down on anyone who they perceived to be a supporter of the U .S., including our left behind allies.
[121] Right, and that's been of particular concern.
[122] Now, what effect did this have globally?
[123] Well, aside from potentially leaving behind an incubation zone for global terror, the poor execution was a major blow to U .S. prestige on the world stage.
[124] The withdrawal was seen as chaotic, and some experts warns that it signaled weakness and resolve on the part of the U .S. military.
[125] Others have argued that it may have emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched his invasion of Ukraine less than six months later.
[126] The withdrawal from Afghanistan may go down in history as the worst foreign policy blunder in U .S. history, according to some experts.
[127] This did not need to happen.
[128] It was completely avoidable.
[129] And at the end of the day, the buck stops to the commander in chief.
[130] And the only reaction from the Biden administration has been to try and ignore it.
[131] Now, as we mentioned at the top, 13 American service members were killed in that attack.
[132] How was that handled and how did the Biden administration frame their legacy?
[133] Well, the president has been criticized heavily for failing to adequately express real reverence for the loss of life that day.
[134] According to James Hassan, it appeared to him as though the administration was so eager to sweep the failure under the rug that the Gold Star families even weren't given the treatment they deserved.
[135] Here's Hassan on that.
[136] President Biden never used their child's names.
[137] It was unclear that he even knew the names at all.
[138] Every single time, every single parent told us that he immediately switched the conversation to his son, Beau, without asking questions about who their sons and daughters were, without giving any indication that he took responsibility for what happened.
[139] Steve Nekui, whose son Kareem was one of the 13 killed, told Congress that he felt President Biden used his son as a pawn to meet an arbitrary deadline.
[140] My son needed a commander -in -chief who cared solely about his life.
[141] Instead, his commander -in -chief chose to use him as a pawn so we can meet his September 11th deadline and get the optics he wanted.
[142] All told, as we approach the two -year anniversary, the situation still feels very raw to a lot of Americans, and very likely it's playing into this growing isolationist sentiment that we're seeing, especially on the right.
[143] Yeah, we continue to see the repercussions from that event.
[144] Georgia, thanks so much for reporting.
[145] Again, you heard there the co -authors of the new book, Cobble the Untold Story, investigative reporter Jerry Dunleavy and Afghanistan war veteran James Hassan.
[146] And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.