On Friday, Rob Schmitt addressed the UN report on the cataclysmic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was, in truth, a surrender. It resulted in the deaths of 13 soldiers and hundreds of Afghan civilians. We abandoned our allies and our munitions. Biden could have destroyed the Taliban but ignored the opportunity.
The report found that the evacuation was hindered by the chaos unfolding. Biden promised a safe withdrawal and claimed it was doubtful that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan.
It was bizarre in his presentation and lies. The Taliban did take over, and many in power in Afghanistan are al Qaeda. That’s not debatable.
SCHMITT: “Sir … you saw what the president said there. Your assessment of what the state department released today and what was the most damaging thing that the state department did?”
WILKIE: Well, I’m shocked that the state department did that. But you know, for those of us who’ve been military professionals, this is one that a blind man could see. It was a catastrophe from the first minute.
“You had the president of the United States [a lunatic] making decisions that should have been left to professionals, and you had no resistance from the senior leadership at the Pentagon. I was actually a neo-planner in non-combatant evacuation, [a] planner in my young days, and it’s a very simple concept in that you take it like a bag, and you collapse the bag slowly until you get to the end state.
“In this, in part, we abandoned our allies. We abandoned our munitions. You and I talked many months ago actually a couple of years ago, and we were laughing that the major media was saying that we don’t have to worry. That the professionals were in charge…and that crowd, well, these are the folks who have given you Afghans falling out of the wheel wells of C-17s.
“A president of the United States who didn’t even have the decency to tell Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom — a country that had lost 450 soldiers and Royal Marines — that we were leaving.
“Didn’t tell the president of France and the Chancellor of Germany.
SCHMITT: “So many, so many failures. … they didn’t know who was in charge…reminds me of that House hearing when you had Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews describing he had the suicide bomber in the sight of his gun, but he could not get permission to fire. And then, not long after that, that suicide bomber blew himself up. Killed thirteen of our own and close to 200 people in total. And we had him. We had him in the gunsight …we had him right there. And he couldn’t figure out a way to get approval for that because nobody knew what to do in that moment. That speaks volumes.”
WILKIE: “Well, it does, and this is a fundamental difference between the Trump national security team and the Biden. The Biden one is filled with people like Sullivan and Blinken, who have absolutely no real-world experience other than creating Russian collusion stories. They’ve never served in the military. The Trump team, we were all people who had been in the armed forces or around It our entire lives.
“Had we pulled something like this off, the president would have, of course, we would have done it, but we would have been fired on the spot.
“That’s the great tragedy here and the cascading effects, Rob. You talked about it last week. I think it’s caused a great deal of the recruiting problems. American parents see the feckless waste of life by this administration of their sons and daughters. This was not; this was not a hard thing to do.
“Another thing I’ll mention that’s in the report. We knew the Taliban was coming out of the mountains in violation of the agreement that they made with President Trump. It would have taken a couple of runs of B-52s, and there would have been no Taliban left. But this president refused to act, and his generals refused to stand up to him. They refused to take responsibility, and as I said to you a couple of years ago… an ROTC student could have pulled this thing off, but this crowd didn’t.”
[As an aside, the UN also noted that Trump didn’t understand the effects of an Afghanistan withdrawal and drew equivalence with Biden. There was no equivalence. Trump’s team would have had him bomb the Taliban and he would have kept Bagram.]
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