On Monday’s Mark Levin show, President Biden has just reversed 20 years of enormous progress in Afghanistan, which was not a 20-year war. The US has been supplying air power and intelligence to the Afghan forces since 2014. The Taliban is not known to be one of the world’s strongest armies, but when Biden makes the mistake to end all of that abruptly you get an emboldened enemy who didn’t have an air force but might certainly have one now, given the number of helicopters and equipment left behind by Biden’s rapid troop withdrawal. Biden’s response was dishonest, he blamed Donald Trump, and it was outrageously political. The disastrous scene caused by Biden’s petulance is something we’d never seen during Trump’s tenure. Allies around the world are watching and surely this does not inspire confidence. Then, Sen. Tom Cotton, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, joins the show to explain why Biden made such a strategic blunder leaving Americans behind enemy lines. Cotton added that irrespective of your thoughts on the withdrawal we must recognize that it was gravely incompetent to do it this haphazardly and against the advice of all military leaders. Later, Col. Richard Kemp (Ret.) commander of the United Kingdom’s military forces in Afghanistan, calls in to articulate that the execution of this US withdrawal is a disaster. The morale of the brave men of the fledgling Afghan military has collapsed more devastatingly than the country itself; what Biden’s done is a disgrace. Afterward, Sean Parnell, a retired Army infantry captain, and veteran of Afghanistan calls in to highlight how Biden hasn’t even spoken with the Prime minister of Pakistan about the exfiltration and this blame falls squarely on the ‘suits, not the boots.’
THIS IS FROM:
Wall St Journal
Taliban Take Over Kabul as Afghan President Flees Country
Twitter
Chaos at Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
Washington Examiner
Number of white people declines for first time — and other census data takeaways
Jerusalem Post
Hamas congratulates Taliban for ‘defeating’ US
The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Rewind page.
Image used with permission of Getty Images / Anadolu Agency
Rough transcript of Hour 1
Hour 1 Segment 1
Today’s program will be focused on Afghanistan. And the consequences. Of what’s been done. And how it relates, yes, to what might happen to our own country. You know, I just have to take exception to some of my friends on TV and radio. I just do. We were not at war in Afghanistan for 20 years. We had troops in Afghanistan, our combat forces were removed in 2014. We were in a backup role for the most part. To the Afghan military intelligence. Air power. And we trained, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Afghan military to basically fight, as the American military does. A coordination of troops with airpower, obviously no naval power necessary. And with intelligence. That’s a relatively big country with all kinds of very difficult mountainous areas and so forth. So intelligence is crucial. When you pull out the air support and you don’t even tell. The forces you’re aligned with that you’re doing that. When in the dark of night, you remove your forces from the major air base there, that was actually quite protected. And you pull out your Intel officials, your intel people. And when Biden says the the Afghan army doesn’t know how to fight in general, Keane says what they’ve lost between 50 and 70,000 of their own men. We’re not getting all the truth here, ladies and gentlemen, including from libertarians and never Trumpers. Isolationists and so forth, the goal isn’t to relitigate this, my goal is just to be honest about this. This obviously is not a strong army. But when you pull air support and you pull Intel and you pull our contractors. And much of you do, without coordinating with them, are telling them anything. It certainly contributes to their collapse. We only had 2,500 troops there. Most of whom were special forces and Intel. And for the most part, they were able to keep it neutral. Neutra. Because of our air power, the Taliban doesn’t have an air force right now, but it didn’t. So the Afghan military, as it’s been pointed out, lost its eyes, lost its its Chercover. And then lost its way. I think it’s a mistake. For some of our friends to keep pushing Lindsey Graham out there on even on my favorite cable channel, FOX, with the various news programs, Lindsey Graham is. All hawk all the time. Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong, but he’s not a good. Advocate, in my view, certainly in this case, for the sorts of things that need to be done. This is a personal with me. I’m just making the point. But the idea that we shouldn’t have troops in parts of the world. As some of the libertarians in isolation and others would argue is not. Because what happens is our enemies build up their forces, take out our allies, and then ultimately take aim at us. And there’s been a lot of men and women who’ve died in these these various parts of the world. So we could protect ourselves. It’s not go in and do something and get out. Because that’s not the way our enemies view us, our enemies would love us to leave South Korea and Japan and NATO, Germany, and they would be thrilled if we did that or we moved our special forces out of Africa, particularly North Africa. They would think that’s fantastic. It would also be ultimately suicide and it would ultimately cost us an enormous number of lives. We troops and bases throughout the world for a purpose. And I really get tired of some people who claim to be with us and pro-American like the hard left. No, I’m not a neocon and I don’t believe we should fight every war and so forth and so on. But the language, the. The bumper sticker to. Twenty years of war in Afghanistan is enough. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a little secret. It’s not over. In fact, it could get much, much uglier. Without our 2,500 troops and air power and intel in Afghanistan, it could get much, much uglier. And I mean for us. In the United States. Now, that debate aside, I just wanted you to know where I stand. That debate aside. I listened attentively. To Joe Biden’s speech. There was obviously written for him, it was mostly about Joe Biden. It was mostly defensive and it was outrageously political. Outrageously political. Plus, he lied. Donald Trump said May 1st, and here I am, I’m elected, what should I do, first of all? Knowing Donald Trump, Donald Trump would adjust to events on the ground. Moreover, Donald Trump’s plan has, as was told to me. Was to secure the various province and province capitals, one after another before full withdrawal. Does anybody think the scene you saw? And still see at that Kabul airport what happened under Donald Trump. Anybody? I think they were to bomb the hell out of the Taliban by now. I think that’s what they would have done on the way out. Diplomacy, oh, please, please don’t harm us, please, please. Take out a few thousand, are there men who are, by the way, in the wide open now all over that country? Oddly enough, ironically enough, would be easier to hammer them. As the cockroaches come out from their caves and under their rocks. That would have at least settled things for a period of time. Defending America is not a matter of supporting war. It’s a matter of defending America. If I were Taiwan right now and Ukraine. And yes, even Israel. I’d be very careful about alliances with this administration. I’d be very, very careful about bending to the demands of this administration. This administration is not going to help support you. Taiwan is in grave. Is a grave situation now. Ukraine is in a grave situation now. As is Israel, it has to now watch Hezbollah, Hamas and, of course, Iran. And let’s hope the weak government in Israel. Which topple Benjamin Netanyahu is up for this has the stomach for this because it’s going to need it. And what should our House of Representatives and Senate be doing right now? Eleven days on Hannity show on Fox, I said it was time to at least argue. The Republicans in the House to start pushing for. The impeachment of Joe Biden, and that was before the collapse of Afghanistan. This guy, Andy Biggs, comes out and calls for the impeachment of the secretary of Department of Homeland Security, OK, fine, why won’t they call for the impeachment of Biden? Biden has defied a Supreme Court ruling. Biden has opened a southern border to diseases and violent criminals and all the rest. He’s destroying this country from within. I know he is because I came under attack by some of the most radical kooks. Because of my Sunday show. We’re going to have on this program people who can speak to these things militarily better than I. And that would include Tom Cotton at the bottom of the hour. Retired Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded the British forces in Afghanistan. He’ll be here the second hour. And of course, our friend Sean Parnell, who fought in Afghanistan, is running for the United States Senate, the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, all three of them are my friends. All three of them have seen a lot of combat. I’ve had family members who saw combat, that’s for sure, as hell I have not. But I know what they be saying today. I know what they be saying today. All these generals were involved in these decisions, starting with, no, he should go, they’re not going to. They’re not going to. We’ve had generals in our history that we have had this. It is amazing how we don’t hear from General Mattis today, we don’t hear from General Kelly today, you might remember in USA Today, Biden was endorsed by 500 retired top military and national security officials. It was September 24, 2020. Are they proud today? Where are they today? Are they going to sign a letter condemning Joe Biden and condemning Secretary of Defense Hosten, who’s been. In the witness protection program. How about General Milley, they’re going to do that. 500 generals, admirals, former national security officials from both parties. Endorsed Joe Biden against Donald Trump. Let me be as clear as I know how. Joe Biden has just reversed 20 years of enormous progress in fighting the enemy. We have many enemies. With communist China, who I believe is bought off the Biden family, we have Russia, despite the Russia file clowns in our own party, the Republican Party in this country. Islam, Nazi regime in Tehran. We already got them tens of billions of dollars. We are in. Much, much. More serious and exposed. Situation militarily and in the form of terrorism. I believe, than we were 20 years ago, because now the Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than it did on 9/11. And the communist Chinese are going to align with the Taliban and Russia aligns with the communist Chinese and they aligned with the Iranians. There is an excess of. Of terrorism and militarism now. Since this man was elected president, that may have existed quietly or was sort of subterranean, but now it’s out in the open. Because this was an enormously provocative thing that Biden did. Because our enemies don’t fear us now. They do not fear us. And that leads to big trouble. So for your isolationists and you neo leftists. And all the rest of you. This is a disaster. And you 500 generals, admirals and former national security officials from both parties who endorsed Joe Biden, you can all go to hell. You’re a disgrace to. I’ll be right back.
Hour 1 Segment 2
He listened to Biden. He says at the core of his foreign policy is human rights. Well, what about the human beings in Afghanistan? I have to be honest with you folks, just person to person here, this has been turning my stomach for days, hasn’t it? Yours? Isn’t this enormously upsetting watching this? Watching the complete collapse of Afghanistan. And the slow collapse of the United States of America. This is this is shocking and. Tell me who in the Democrat Party is criticizing Joe Biden tonight? Which elected official? In the Senate or the House as criticizing Joe Biden tonight, not one. Not a single one. This is going to spur. Terrorist movements and breathe life into other terrorist movements at a time with our southern borders wide open. When we are overwhelmed and our enemies know it well, Biden is importing people with viruses, criminal records are our men and women are overwhelmed on the southern border and they’re not going to catch everybody didn’t take many to it. So 9/11, we’ve taken so many steps back. It’s not funny. It’s sickening.
Hour 1 Segment 3
Senator Tom Cotton, I want to thank you for coming on the program. I know you’re in great demand. And one of the reasons you’re in great demand is because you’re a man of the military. You actually won overseas. You’ve been concerned about this for some time. And you’re a very careful man in terms of what kind of military actions you think we should take and so forth. But, you know, I guess I disagree with a lot of people because I didn’t see why having 2,500 noncombat soldiers, federal contractors, Intel and a massive base so we could keep an eye on things and also work with our friends and their military was such a bad thing. Where do you stand on this and then I want to get into, obviously this this disaster that’s taken place here. You know, Mark, thanks for having me on this very sad day for America and for our power and prestige in the world. I think that the point you make, a lot of Americans are wondering right now, you heard a lot of criticism from the left and the right, frankly, about the duration of the Afghan war. And I understand why some Americans might grow weary of it. But what we never heard from the Biden administration and certainly from Joe Biden when he announced this withdrawal in April is how they would control the likely consequences of the withdrawal of that small force, one of which being the exact kind of chaos that we see in Afghanistan now. Our failure to get American citizens out of Afghanistan to say nothing of Afghans who aided us a second is how we can possibly prevent the Taliban from turning Afghanistan into a terrorist safe haven again. I’ve never heard a briefing on the Intelligence Committee, the Armed Services Committee, from a Biden administration official about how they will conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan without a presence there. And you heard Joe Biden today say that, don’t worry, we have plans for it. They called it over the horizon. Counterterrorism strikes from hundreds and hundreds of miles away with no intelligence presence on the ground at all, which I suspect will be executed about as well as Joe Biden has executed a fairly routine non combatant evacuation operation in Afghanistan in the last few days. Are you concerned we have a commander in chief literally, who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing and whether it’s whether it’s his brain power or otherwise? I mean, I don’t. How reckless and outrageous is this? Mark, I want to remind all of your listeners of something that Bob Gates, a very accomplished public servant at CIA and at the Department of the Arts, who serves as secretary of defense for both George Bush and Barack Obama, said about Joe Biden 10 years ago that Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue of the last four decades. Well, now you can add a fifth decade to it. But here’s the difference, Mark. Back then, he was just a senator. He was just the vice president. He was never in charge. So there were not many consequences to his terrible judgment. Now he is in charge. And after 50 years of hot air and poor judgment, we see the consequences of that poor judgment coming home to roost. I think he is totally overmatched by events. He’s been hiding out in Camp David for five days. The speech you saw today is a speech of a president who is dangerously detached from reality and now he’s retreated back to Camp David once again. I’m sitting here and he talks about the last four presidents. I’m no Obama fan, of course, but I can speak to some of these presidents. We made tremendous headway in fighting these terrorists in so many respects. He just handed it back to them. Now, the Taliban control more of Afghanistan. That is all of it than they did before 9/11. Am I right? Yeah. Mark, I think you make an important point. I’ve heard some people say, well, we’re back to where we were before 9/11. No, we are in a much worse position now than we were then. As you mentioned, the Taliban never conquered the northern part of the country. That’s where you had the so-called Northern Alliance, the group of various tribal militias that are CIA paramilitaries and military special operations forces helps unite into a coherent fighting force after 9/11. They’re the ones who primarily with our assistance, toppled the Taliban in 2001. But now the Taliban controls all of Afghanistan. They also have the thousands and thousands of weapons and ammunition and equipment that we left behind. And they have the prestige of have the perception of having driven America out of Afghanistan. So we are in a much worse position than we were before the 9/11 attacks. And, you know, I love the way they point to Trump. I was listening to General Keane and among other things, Trump apparently had you know, it was supposed to be a pull out that had red lines, red lines, red lines. But they have no idea what Donald Trump would have done up to this point. And so for him, they keep pointing to Donald Trump is amazing to me. For him to say he he was really stuck because of Donald Trump. Senator, does he ever seem stuck because of Donald Trump, whether it’s sending billions of dollars to the Iranians through allies or anything else? Yeah. So if only Joe Biden had his hands tied by the Trump administration’s policies and of course, they had said our border would still be closed, Mark. But Joe Biden conceives himself as tied to Donald Trump’s policies. No other place in the world except for Afghanistan. And in fact, the president, the former president has said things would have been very different had he remained in office because he would have held the Taliban to their end of the deal. Obviously, the Taliban started violating the agreement they had with President Trump last year. They continue to do so this year. Whether you supported that agreement, whether you didn’t support that agreement under President Trump and for that matter, whether you agree or disagree with President Biden’s decision to withdraw our troops, the execution and that decision has been catastrophically incompetent and impotent. If you’re Taiwan right now, if you’re Ukraine right now, if you’re Israel right now, what are you thinking? You are not sleeping very well. I would suggest any partner around the world, which is, say, almost every partner who counts on American credibility, who counts on the credibility and the word and the judgment of the American president right now is worried about whether or not this president will answer the bell when it’s time to get in the ring. And in particular, that first one you said in Taiwan. I mean, Taiwan’s autonomy and the status quo between Taiwan and mainland China is almost entirely dependent on whether Xi Jinping thinks Donald Trump will come to Taiwan, to Phoenix if he goes for the jugular. I mean, by now. Yes, whether Biden will come to Taiwan’s defense if she decides to go for the jugular in Taiwan. Something tells me that over the last 72 hours, Xi Jinping is grinning like the cat to bury what he thinks about Joe Biden’s willingness to support Taiwan. Should the Chinese communist invaders. You know, I hear people say, why do we have troops overseas? And I’m thinking what we have in South Korea, that war has been over a long time, more than half a century. We have him in Europe, including Germany. That war has been over even a longer period of time. China would love us to withdraw our troops from everywhere, wouldn’t they? Senator said that China and Russia both would love us to have all of our troops out of the old world and back in the new world, that there’s a lot of different reasons. There’s always different histories about how we ended up and where we ended up, whether it’s Japan or South Korea or Germany or Italy or Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, whatever, whatever you have, Mark. But the core reason why we have any troops forward deployed is that the central interest of America from the very beginning has always been to prevent an attack on our homeland, the kind of attack that happened on 9/11. And it’s happened very rarely throughout the rest of our history. One way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to go on the offense. Forward deployed, so we’re not on defense on the last line of defense, which is our own homeland, and in particular since World War Two, we have decided as a nation that we will never allow a foreign power in the old world to combine its vast resources and territory and population and wealth and capabilities and marshal those against us in a way that could threaten our security here. Unfortunately, I think the Taliban is going to be able to do that once again in Afghanistan, the same way they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, in this withdrawal, we pulled our air support, we pulled our intelligence, we shut down our main base. We pulled out the contractors. And General Kayna said, you know, when you do that, after you’re teaching this army or have taught this army as weak as it is, that you need the fusion of these various activities in order to fight, and then you pull all those out and you leave our main base without even telling them. He said that insignificant part completely undermined them. Do you agree with that? Yes, I do. Mark, I mean, the Afghan army is not 101st Airborne, let’s be clear, but President Biden kneecapped them in every way. They weren’t even really all that reliant on American airpower in recent years, Mark. They had their own air force that we had helped stand up, primarily helicopters for close air support. But we pulled out so many of the civilian contractors who just do the basic maintenance and logistics work for them over the last few months that those helicopters couldn’t fly anymore. And if you train an army to be reliant on and to conduct operations in conjunction with close air support and all of a sudden that air support is not available, guess what? They’re not going to be nearly as well trained and not going to operate as effectively as it could have. I mean, it’d be like taking American Marines or soldiers who have been trained for decades to rely on highly networked operations with support from artillery and air power and to say, OK, now you have no radios, you have no Satcom, you have no artillery, you have no air support. We’d be better than the Afghan National Army, of course, but it is not the way they were trained to fight. I’m very concerned about a lot of this, Senator, because now we have communist China and fascistic Russia can’t wait to work with the Taliban. The Taliban obviously is is close with al-Qaida and all these other terrorist organizations in Iran, even though they hate that form of Islam, they are aligned with these various terrorist movements. We have the the traditional enemy situation. Aligned with the nontraditional enemies, situated more modern situations, we have terrorists and now a terrorist nation in addition to Iran, Afghanistan and and the US and China, which has obvious intentions of becoming a superpower, and Russia, which has obvious intentions of of expanding its its power to they’re all working together either directly or in a passive way. I mean, I have never seen anything like this have you know, we are in a perilous moment, Mark, and you are correct, identifies you have both our traditional nation state adversaries like China, like Russia, now working in concert with enemies like the Taliban and associated terrorist groups in Iran. Now, Russia and China do have their own threat from Islamic radicals inside their countries or on their borders. But one simple way for them to deal with that threat is to make it clear what a punitive retaliation they were like if there are any attacks on their own soil. If, however, you want to attack the Americans, well, not only will we look the other way, will applaud you in much the same way that all of these cyber hacks and ransomware attacks come from Russian soil. Yet they never seem to target Russian institutions. It’s only American institutions. I suspect you’ll see the similar kind of tacit support for the Taliban or explicit support for the Taliban and tacit support for the terrorist groups that operate under the Taliban’s umbrella in Afghanistan, from China and from Russia. Before we leave, Senator, I know you’re going to say this is kind of old hat. Remind people of your service background, would you? Sure, Mark. I was in my last year of law school when the 9/11 attacks were launched, and that made me want to serve. I finished up school and paid off my loans, but I enlisted a couple of years after I graduated law school and served five years long stint at Fort Benning for beginning four boys, as they used to call it. And then I was in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. I was up in northeast Afghanistan in 2009 with a reconstruction team. At between those tours, I served at Arlington National Cemetery. He wrote a beautiful book about that. You’re going to lose some of your friends maybe that you met in Afghanistan, do you think? I’m afraid that many of them in my old area of operations are probably already lost if they have not in recent months been able to get out of the country, maybe into Pakistan or elsewhere. And I’m fearful for so many Afghans who supported us over the last 20 years, but also want to stress, Mark, that we have hundreds, if not thousands of Americans, American citizens with American passports behind enemy lines. My office has been running a hotline for the last 24 plus hours, and we’ve heard directly from so many Americans who cannot contact the embassy, who have no guidance beyond shelter in place and wait to hear from us. That’s the kind of incompetence that we’ve seen from the Biden administration in executing what should be a fairly straightforward non-combatant evacuation operation. Well, we’re going to have to go. But, you know, for Biden to be silent for six days, give this really self-serving speech and then go back to Camp David for the secretary of defense to be hiding out right now, I just think this is all so damn appalling. It’s really it’s really it’s humiliating and it’s enormously dangerous. Senator, I want to thank you for your leadership. Please keep it up. Sir, thank you very much. Mark, it’s good to be with you. All right. Take care of yourself. We’ll be right back.
Hour 1 Segment 4
The idea that Donald Trump would have done it exactly the way Joe Biden did and Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Joe Biden is a coward, how many times do I have to say this? He’s a very stupid man. Eleven days ago, I called for his impeachment on Hanadi. We have almost no Republican House members supporting it. What is it going to take? The southern border is wide open and all that involves. Law enforcement and undermine the murder rate in this country is through the roof. He’s weakened our military, the economy is on a slide as he draws trillions of dollars out of the private sector and private property rights into big government and a Bernie Sanders world. Inflation is through the roof, our finances are a disaster. He defies a Supreme Court decision. What’s it going to take a letter to the president of Ukraine? Maybe, maybe that’ll do it right, Rich? Maybe that’ll be the the straw that breaks the camel’s back. What do you think, folks? And I’m calling on leading Democrats, come on out, tell us you support the Biden policy. The great internationalist Joe Biden, the great internationalist, throws one ally after another. Under the bus, what a great internationalist and globalist this guy is, America’s Back says. Frightening. My advice to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine do not do anything this president asks you to do. Are you will pay a price for it, period? Is there anything in America or outside America? That is going our way since the Biden presidency. Anything. Nothing, he has embraced this radical American Marxist agenda. He’s imposing it on us by hook or by crook, and I want to remind you of something, it was Obama Biden under whom ISIS formed their caliphate in all the horrors related to that, they did it.