“NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE”
Video transcript
Ready, set, don't fire. That's the focus of tonight's angle. Thanks to House Republicans and Gold Star families who refused to take silence for an answer, former Biden officials were forced to sit and answer questions today on that disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Now, without naming names, the generals denied they were at fault. - If there is culpability in this attack, it lies in policy decisions that created the environment of August 2021 in Kabul. - Do you believe that if State and DOD were on the same page that Bagram could have remained a viable option? - Once you go below 2.5K for US forces, you can't hold Bagram. At 2.5, I was enthusiastic about holding Bagram. - Presidents make decisions, and once that decision's made, we execute. - The refusal to abide by the recommendations that both of you made would have preserved the option to maintain Bagram. Would Bagram have been a preferable strategic exit? - All things being equal, you'd prefer to have Bagram at 2.5K. - What the generals are saying is that the resources and troop levels were not sufficient for a safe withdrawal from both Abigail and Bagram. How strenuously, though, did they argue that point? Did they warn of the potential for a significant number of US casualties? Now, some of this is just common sense. You don't announce your withdrawing your military presence as Biden did in a hostile country, only to then drag your feet on the actual removal of personnel and equipment. The term sitting ducks come into mind? Again, Milley blamed Blinken and Biden without using their names. - On 14 April '21, President Biden made the formal announcement of his decision to honor the Doha Agreement with a military withdrawal while maintaining a continued diplomatic presence. The Department of Defense understood that our mission was to conduct a retrograde of the remaining US military forces and equipment while leaving a small contingent to defend the American embassy while diplomatic outcomes were negotiated. On 14 August, the non-combatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the US military alerted, marshaled, mobilized, and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do. It is my assessment that that decision came too late. - Well, the Department of State is not a person, of course. And, of course, this all begs the question. Why on earth did we stay in Afghanistan for 20 years? The money wasted, the wonderful, incredible brave people we lost, for what? - At the end of 20 years, we, the military, helped build an army, a state, but we could not forge a nation. The enemy occupied Kabul, the overthrow of the government occurred, and the military we supported for two decades faded away. That is a strategic failure. - Well, don't forget, we spent billions upon billions training Afghan troops. We were told it was gonna work. Yet the military, the Afghan military, so it's called, as soon as the Taliban began making resurgence, it dissolved. It's a tribal society, and always will be. We had no business being there, and despite our spending $800 billion annually on defense, you can't buy pragmatic thinking. The generals, heck, even low-level enlisted men stationed there, knew full well what a ragtag group the Afghan security forces were. Without American money and our own military propping them up, they couldn't stand on their own. What role did the sudden, just almost instantaneous, collapse of the Afghan government play in the events following the continuing evacuation and withdrawal? - They melted away, and that was probably the most significant, immediate operational effect of the collapse of the Afghan government. We thought, so it is a possibility, but that's why we had to put in almost 6,000 US forces to replace those Afghans that had melted away. We would have been able to hold HKEA with a far smaller number of US forces had the Afghans remain. But when the government collapsed, they went away. So that had a profound and immediate effect on everything else that followed. - Right, right. But aren't our generals generals because they have the ability to game out scenarios better than anyone else? They knew that President Afghanistan was a puppet with no real support among the people. Thus, they should have known that he and all his top staff would plan to save themselves first by bugging out of the country. But they admitted their projections were off. - We estimated that the earliest time of complete collapse could be in the fall, maybe around Thanksgiving, something like that. Nothing indicated August, per se. President Ghani's entire cabinet, less one, one went up into the Panjure Valley. The rest of them got on airplanes and took off out of their country. As soon as the ANSF saw that, they literally took their uniforms off, put their weapons down and it collapsed. - But no kidding, I mean, this is obvious stuff. And this was predicted by people who were critics of this conflict from almost the beginning. And at one point today, General Milley seemed to indicate that real accountability may be long, long off. Lots of documents need to be produced and other military personnel need to testify. - If you're gonna get an accurate picture, there's lots of people along the line that will need to be discussed. There is a lot of documents. The vast majority of them are classified and many very highly classified. And how that would work between say the Department of Defense, Department of State, CIA, et cetera, and the various committees, but to get a full comprehensive holistic picture, you're gonna have to get documents and all that. That's gonna take a long time. And there's rules that govern all that. - Okay, of course, some key questions do remain that only the commanding officers on the ground know the answers to. - When the team on the ground was seeking authority to take out the prospective bomber and they saw somebody that matched the description, they were told, quote, "Leadership did not have engagement authority for us. Do not engage." Did we ever figure out what happened in the chain of command there? - I don't have personal knowledge of that set of asks or denials. - Wait, wait, wait, he doesn't have knowledge about that set of asks or denies? That's kind of strange, as that's a pretty important thing for him to have inquired about in the aftermath of Americans dying, don't you think? Now, right after that exchange, Chairman McCall said that the committee has asked DOD for documents to be produced and for the testimony of the commanding officers who were on the ground. But no luck so far getting any of that information. So the obvious question after years have gone by, what is the Biden administration hiding and why? If such a do not engage order had been in effect, it was insane and that individual should be fired. But then again, no one's ever fired in this administration for anything. Secretary Austin wasn't fired after being missing for three days and failing to disclose his hospitalization. Janet Yellen wasn't fired despite spectacularly missing inflation. Mayor Pete kept his job after East Palestine, Ohio, that derailment and various FAA screw-ups. Alejandro Mayorkas, he wasn't fired when the border situation exploded, but then again, he is executing his orders perfectly, flood the country with as many illegals as possible and who knows how many of them could actually end up voting for their benefactors. But in Biden world, firing Blinken or Austin would just mean admitting to failure. And remember, to them, everything is a PR problem. The economy, the border, crime, Ukraine, all of it. They will never, ever change their policies. They'll just rebrand the old policies. And the same refusal to cut your losses and change course infects our Pentagon. No matter how much and for how long American voters wanted to see an end to the Afghanistan war, the Pentagon never wanted to take its fingers out of the dike. No matter how unpopular the war became. And now, all these years later, we still see no one take responsibility for major policy failures that resulted in an incalculable destruction to our country and the loss of life. And at the same time, we see our government unfairly target President Trump, the chief political rival of Joe Biden. They're gonna hold Trump accountable for no wrongdoing and let real wrongdoers skate, including in Biden's own family. In November, voters finally have their chance to do something the president refused to do, fire the idiots responsible for the mess we're in. And that's the angle.
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.
