DEEP DIVE: The History of Biden's Afghanistan Disaster

This is a transcript from my radio show. Listen live here.

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The world moves so fast we sometimes forget the history or we conveniently allow ourselves or people we like to revise history so that we don't actually have to pay attention to what happened. On September 11th, 2001, men flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and attempted to fly a plane into we think the United States Capitol. The passengers of United Flight 93 knew what was going on, knew they were going to die, and seized control of the plane and crashed it. All of them died. Eyewitnesses say at one point the plane was upside down before it nose-dived into the ground of Pennsylvania.

That began the events that led us into Afghanistan. A terrorist organization called Al-Qaeda led by a man named Osama bin Laden pledged his loyalty and his group's loyalty to a group called the Taliban. The Taliban are a militant, fascistic, fundamentalist Islamic group that is both radical and religiously deeply conservative. I don't mean that in the political sense at all. I don't mean it to be a loaded term. They blew up historic thousand-year-old statues. They believe that the visual image of women at all is bad and they scrubbed it from the streets. Women were not allowed to get an education. They were very regressive in their Islamic views and they still are.

They degraded Afghanistan. They were skeptical of anything modern and anything Western. They were essentially Amish Islam if the Amish also believed in slaughtering people. They didn't want modern instruments. They didn't want television. They didn't want music. They didn't want anything, no electronics allowed. They're skeptical of vaccines and Western medicine. They're radical and regressive and Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda pledged loyalty to them. By the way, I don't mean a slight against the Amish. I hope you mean what I'm getting after here. These people, if they could put everybody in a horse and buggy and never have electronics again, they would do so, and also murder people. They're bad news.

After Osama bin Laden pledged his loyalty to them, they allowed Al-Qaeda to prepare and plan 9/11 in Afghanistan using their resources. They funded themselves on the worldwide opium and heroin trade through the harvesting of poppies that they grew. Iran and Iraq separately, working independently of each other, helped coordinate with Al-Qaeda. Iran and Pakistan allowed Al-Qaeda to funnel into Afghanistan, and then Al-Qaeda's soldiers went into the United States, took flight lessons, and crashed the planes. We bombed Kabul with the Taliban in charge. George Bush, the President of the United States at the time, told the Taliban, "If you hand over Al-Qaeda, we'll leave you alone."

The Taliban doubled down in their defense of Al-Qaeda and prepared for war against us. So we invaded and we invaded in a variety of ways. One of the ways in which we decided to invade is we landed troops and we took as much territory as possible. We organized with something called the Northern Alliance, a group of Afghans dead set against the Taliban, and in so doing, we spread out around the country. We lost a few thousand American soldiers over 20 years and 60,000 Afghan men who stood with us and fought. In the process, we mostly drove out the Taliban. The problem is that some of the Afghans were deeply disloyal and deeply corrupt. The government was always corrupt.

So we had two goals. One of which failed spectacularly, one of which was to implement democratization. George W. Bush bought into a theory perpetuated to a degree by Barack Obama that we could democratize nations with no history of democracy. That idea should end up in the dustbin of history. If ever we go into China and somehow we're able to reform China, we should bring back the Chinese emperor, not try to implement democracy in China. The Chinese have no history of it. The Russians have no history of democracy. They go back to strong men. We should see in history, the default is actually to strong men. It is not to democracy. The same was true in Afghanistan. We failed miserably at trying to set about a new world order in Afghanistan.

But that really wasn't the primary mission. The primary mission in Afghanistan was to eradicate the presence of the Taliban and prevent them from controlling Afghanistan so that rogue terrorist regimes did not have a place on earth from which they could collaborate with the government to launch attacks with the exception of Iran. Now, the Iran situation is unique because the Iranians are Shiite Muslims. Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims do not get along typically. The Taliban are distinctly Sunni Muslim. So there isn't a lot of collaboration between Iran and Afghanistan, though, to the extent that the Taliban wanted to allow Al-Qaeda which is Sunni to attack the United States, Iran was happy to help to a degree.

But again, the Iranians even keep the Taliban at a distance because the Iranians actually believe in the education of women which the Taliban think is a sin. So we drove the Taliban out and we got peace in Afghanistan. It's a hard-fought peace, but we got there. In the last 18 months, we've held the entire country with 2,500 soldiers and not a single casualty. In 20 years, we held it and lost less than 3,000 Americans. We held a country, and in that time that we held the country, here's what happened, Kabul got skyscrapers. Kabul got entertainment and television and women in power, women air force pilots. A woman became a mayor in Afghanistan. Girls began to read and get educated. Boys went to school.

The median age in Afghanistan is 18 years. We'd been there for 20 years. Most Afghans don't actually have a memory of the Taliban being in charge. The lifespan of the average Afghani expanded. The birth rate increased. Infant mortality went down. Education went up. Literacy went up. Female literacy went up. Female lifespan went up. The ability of women to get jobs went up. Most importantly, the economic earning power per capita went up significantly.

So while we were not able to establish a democratic order in a deeply corrupt environment, we were able to keep the Taliban from setting up shop again and giving a terrorist safe haven an entire nation from which to fund international terror. We essentially were not only able to establish the peace, but we were also able to build a strategic foothold in a part of Asia where we have no footprint. For those who are unaware of where Afghanistan falls on the map, Afghanistan is in Central Asia. It is north and west of Pakistan and due east of Iran. It shares a small border with China, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It is a landlocked nation and we have no footprint there.

So if we need to deal with Iran, we have to come in from the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. If we need to deal with Pakistan, it makes it difficult, but we had Bagram Air Force Base. Bagram Air Force Base gave us a footprint in a strategic area of the world where we could deal with China, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Southern Russia, Pakistan, and now we don't. It wasn't just about establishing a democracy and it wasn't a forever war. We had fewer people in Afghanistan than we have in Spain. We have fewer people in Afghanistan than we have in South Korea. We have fewer people in Afghanistan than we have in Europe. We have fewer people in Afghanistan than we have in Turkey.

We were able to hold it and keep out the Taliban so that they did not have a country from which they could raise money through the sale of drugs and other goods to fund terrorist regimes that wanted to wage war on the West. We lost sight of that through loud voices on the left and the right. Everyone just said, "Well, it's a forever war. It's a forever war. We're never coming home. We're never coming home. It's a forever war." Actually, we were pretty much at a forever peace. To quote the British member of parliament, "We got a peace that we did not have and now we've thrown it all away." We throw it all away I'm not exactly sure for what. We had a strategic foothold in an area of the world where we desperately need one, the next great wars are going to come from that area and we've squandered it.

Joe Biden did this. Now, Donald Trump, to be fair, he began the process, but he never fully went through with it. Joe Biden not only did, he did so at the worst possible time of year. He did so at the time of year that is the fighting season. As I mentioned yesterday, Afghanistan like many medieval regimes has a fighting season. There's not perpetual war in Afghanistan because the entire country is largely agrarian. Even though it's mountainous, desert, and dry, it's also agrarian. They have valleys with snow melt-off, that it helps funnel down and makes fertile valleys. In those valleys, they plant crops including the poppy crop that fuels the drug trade.

In the early spring, when the snowmelt subsides and the rivers overflow and fertilize the fields, they plant the poppies. Then in the late spring, they go off to war. In the late fall, before the snow comes, they've got to go harvest the poppies and so war stops. Then the winter comes and the winters in Afghanistan are treacherous, rough, and miserable. A lot of the Taliban go through the mountain passes they've used for centuries back into Pakistan, where they go to the madrassas and they educate their sons. When the snow melts and the mountain pass is clear, they'd go back and plant the poppies and then they're ready to fight again.

We know this. This is well-known. The military knows this. The diplomats know this. History knows this. The only person who didn't know this was Joe Biden and they tried to tell him this, this is why you don't go on 9/11 because it's the fighting season. Joe Biden chose to ignore it all. In ignoring it all, we gave up Bagram Air Force Base, which was our footprint in Central Asia to be able to get to any part of Central Asia we needed for the next great wars. We've given it up to the Taliban who now have our helicopters. They now even have our biometric readers so they'll be able to track down those who worked for us and identify them more easily. We were supposed to get those out of the country and apparently we failed because the Taliban has them all now.

We gave up a strategic footprint and we gave up a hard-fought peace that kept a rogue regime from funding terrorists in their territory to come after us. For what exactly? So Joe Biden could have the symbolism of 9/11? You'll get the symbolism of 9/11, but it's not the symbolism he wants. That's the problem here is now we have allowed back into power a regime that still wants us dead. It's more adept at social media and technology now, but they still want us dead.

Now if reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post are to be believed from our European and Middle Eastern allies, Al-Qaeda and ISIS and the other Middle Eastern rogue terrorist groups have all decided it's time to go back to Afghanistan and start coordinating again. We went there because of 9/11 and we will be back because there will be another terrorist attack thanks to what Joe Biden has done. He signaled American weakness and lack of resolve.