 Now, finding out what's going on in Afghanistan here on Finding Respect in the Chaos. And this is Cynthia Sinclair. She is the customary host of Finding Respect in the Chaos, so it's only appropriate that she be with us. She's also a regular contributor on America What Now and America Finding Its Way on Wednesdays and Thursdays here in Singtec. And, you know, she had set up a show for this hour, maybe later on today with a woman named Heidi Kuhn, who is an expert in appearing on national television on a regular basis to discuss the events in Afghanistan. So, Cynthia, I will use this hour or this half hour as a kind of run-up to what we can expect, not only from Heidi Kuhn, but, you know, from Afghanistan. Here we are. We're in the middle of it. I would say the middle of it. Welcome to your show, Cynthia. Well, thank you very much, Jay. I appreciate you hosting my show for me. That's very nice. Well, the reason I'm hosting is I want to, you know, get some information from you. And first, I want to, you know, talk about the scope of this. It seems, and I read an article this morning, I recommend to everybody by Heather Cox Richardson. And she writes a lot about national events and national politics. And she, you know, took a stab at trying to figure out what's going on, about what Biden said yesterday, about where it fits in the context of all the criticism he's getting from the Republicans, especially. And it seems pretty clear from the article and from my observation, I'm interested in your observation, that the decision to pull out, whether by Trump or Biden, is a correct decision. But the devil is in the detail. The devil is in how you do that. And it seems like there are a number of flaws by Trump, which Biden inherited, and by Biden, in terms of how you do this in a way that's not embarrassing or destructive or, you know, lose the American franchise to the world. And so I want to talk to you about that and ask you about that. Let me go through some of the questions that have come to my mind after reading the Heather Cox Richardson article and looking at all the news stream we are getting lately on all the channels and every single media you can think of, because this somehow affects everything. Everything, but in other ways, nothing. How relevant really is it? So the first question, Cynthia, from your observation and your reading and research and, you know, your thought process, is this the right thing? Is it the right thing to pull out of Afghanistan? Yes, I believe it is. I believe we've been there too long. I think it would have been maybe a little more successful of a retreat or a removal or withdrawal. Had Trump not done the kind of arrangements and that agreement that he made with the Taliban beforehand. And I'm still trying to figure out what it is that we got from them. We gave them 5,000 prisoners and their head guy, Ghani. And yet, what did we get? A promise? No, no, no. And we excluded the Afghan government in the process, which meant that they had, you know, less effect than they did before, which was not very great. And, you know, we also, you know, cut this very strange deal which allowed the Taliban to go and do their own diplomacy from city to town to village. And cut deals where they could bribe local officials and have the army surrender. I mean, they started doing this some time ago, and it was all about that deal with Trump, which was cockamamie. And Trump and Pompeo, in my view, lied about it. They lied about, you know, you asked what was in it for us. Well, nothing. Trump was just doing it for political purposes to try to look good. But in fact, it was the Empress' new clothes. There was nothing there there. Anyway, so that's my view. But let's talk about how flawed this decision, you know, the execution of this decision has been. Would you agree that it has been flawed and in what ways? I do agree that it has been flawed. And I'd like to actually insert a quote right now from former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who if you remember was fired in 2020 around all of this stuff because he didn't quite go along with what Trump was trying to do. And this is what he was quoted as saying in a CNN Politics article. He said on Tuesday that he was concerned that then President Donald Trump undermined the US 2020 agreement with the Taliban by pushing the US forces to leave Afghanistan without the Taliban meeting the conditions of the deal. The Trump administration's agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan outlined a series of commitments from the US and the Taliban related to troop levels, counterterrorism and intra-Afghan dialogue aimed at bringing about a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire. But, Esper told CNN, my concern was that President Trump by continuing to want to withdraw American forces out of Afghanistan undermine the agreement, which is why in the fall when he was calling for a return of US troops by Christmas, I objected and formally wrote a letter. My concerns was, oh sorry, I lost my place for a second, sorry, he wrote a letter and what it was he was saying that we should not reduce the troops below 4500 and Trump just didn't even didn't even bother to consider it, continue to just draw down to 2000. So we are thinking that this is happening really fast, but in reality when you think about when Trump first took those out, those trumps out, he completely left all those outlying places defenseless. And so it wasn't that it all happened in five seconds after Biden started to take everybody out completely, it started happening back then, right? Each post that lost soldiers defending it became, you know, vulnerable to the Taliban coming in. So it wasn't like they came in in three days, they started months ago working their way in, like you say, bribing officials doing all that. So by the time, you know, it came down to it, of course, the Afghani soldiers are going to say, forget it, I got a family at home, it's not going to go anywhere anyway, it's not going to do me any good to fight, right? Because they're being betrayed by some of the officials. And then once, you know, the Afghan Prime Minister left, that was it. There was no support for them anymore. America was gone, the Afghan government was gone, you cannot hold it against them. And I had a hard time with listening to Biden in his speech say that it's on them because they wouldn't fight. You know, that's not really fair. And I know I've heard a lot of veterans coming on and saying that, you know, those guys, they lost 6,000 of their people during this time. Or more, sorry, more, I think, we lost 6,000 people. They lost lots and lots of people, they were brave, they fought to, you know, to the bitter end. And the end unfortunately happened to be when America left, not the bitter end of saving their country, but that bitter end. Without that, this is what I keep seeing. What Trump did to the Kurds, okay, it's kind of like the same thing that he set up the Afghanis to have happen to them. He gave, you know, the Turkey free reign to come on in, and now he has given to Taliban free reign to come on in. It's like this pattern that I see, lots of people are making the pattern of Saigon and all this other stuff. And I think let's just look at the pattern of Trump and see how that affected this withdrawal. And I think that Biden was very good to not really point the finger at Trump, Trump, Trump, you know, he took the blame on himself when in reality he knows that he was sort of pigeonholed as to what he could do because of what Trump had already done. And a lot of, you know, people are coming out of the same not also. And I think that's important to listen to. Yeah, Trump, Trump set all of this up and Trump didn't give a rip about Syria. And he didn't give a rip about Afghanistan. He wasn't going to protect the people or the government or any of the institutions or structures there. He was just going to take the steps that made him look good. So that's my next point right there is that who benefits from Biden looking like he blew it? Who benefits most from that? The Republicans, sure, but Trump, right? Let's go systematically those, Cynthia. So they say, they've been saying ever since Biden spoke yesterday, that this is a flawed execution. What thoughts about that? How much of it is on Trump and Biden? You've talked about Trump, but what about Biden? What about the army? What about the intelligence services? And how, what kind of flaws did we reveal, did we suffer under in dealing with this withdrawal? Well, bottom line is the intelligence agencies gave Biden the information that it was going to go fast, that the fall was going to happen quick. And he made a bad decision in my mind to go with this whole, well, we didn't want to create a loss of confidence in the government. We didn't want to create a panic and all this other stuff, which is just, I hate to say it, typical democratic, manly, panmy kind of thinking, because it's just Biden based really in reality, because the reality is his intelligence agencies were telling him it was going to happen quick, get prepared. There's veterans agencies that have been coming out and talking a lot about how they've been warming about it. They've been trying to send Biden letter after letter after letter, please meet with us. We know from boots on the ground, we know what's happening and they didn't ever get back to him. I don't know, they're too busy trying to do the infrastructure package. I don't know. I'm not quite sure why he tried to do so many big things all at one time. I think he would have been better off to split all that up and try to do it a little slower. If he knew he was going to leave Afghanistan at this point, then he shouldn't have been wasting all that time on the infrastructure. He should have been focused, just major focused on Afghanistan. Then when that's done, okay, now let's work on Afghanistan. They like to talk about doing, we can handle more than one thing at a time. Well, yeah, but not when they're this devastatingly huge, at least that's my opinion. What about the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff who have all kinds of on the ground information, intelligence, maybe separate from the intelligence agencies, did they do a good job or was their approach flawed? I believe their approach was flawed in the sense of they didn't make a bigger stink about the deal Trump was making and the way he was pulling people out. We don't know for sure that they didn't make a stink about it. As per did, he got fired because of it. In Trump setting things up this way, and we got to remember he's all about saying how much he likes the bad guys. He likes the dictators, he cozies up to all of them. That's kind of what the Taliban is. It stands to reason that those are his people. All of his talk about for peace and I don't believe any of that. I think it was just a smoke stream to make us not really see what was happening on the ground. Well, that's reminiscent of Vietnam, isn't it? In Vietnam, they didn't tell us how dire the situation was. Maybe because they didn't actually know how dire the situation was or alternatively because whatever the truth was, they weren't going to tell us. I suggest, and I like your view of it, is that some similar process was happening here. Well, yes. Like I said, all of the intelligence agencies gave him this information. The current time. Well, that suggests that the Joint Chiefs knew about it. The Joint Chiefs knew about it. We got to remember that a lot of the military, the head people in the military were put there by who? Trump. They're not Biden's people. They're Trump's people. Okay, but in the short stroke, what we have is you announce to the world that we are leaving by a certain day. You actually put a mark on the calendar and then you pull out most of your troops leaving only really a handful and you don't try to set up a post-departure plan really of any kind, either diplomatically or militarily or intelligence wise. You don't protect the airport, which is the only way to get our diplomatic corps out. Of course, the Afghan interpreters out. You don't protect a road from Kabul where they all were congregating because they couldn't be in the hinterland anymore. They'd been chased out of the hinterland. Everybody's in Kabul. There's a road from Kabul to the airport and it wasn't protected. The airport itself was a wasteland. I mean, there was nothing there to protect it. What kind of plan is that? Can you blame Trump for that or is that on Biden? Or is that on the Chiefs of Staff? Well, I think it's not going to be like we can blame one person and say it's all their fault. Just like I can't say it's all Trump's fault or it's all Biden's fault or the Chiefs of Staff or the Intelligence Agency. It's sort of got to be a combination thing. The bottom line is, and I like that President Biden said that, I'm going to buck stops with me. I'm not going to make excuses. He made a decision. As it was, though, we got to think about this. When Trump arranged all of this, they were supposed to be all out of the country. All the troops were supposed to be out of the country by May 1. That's only three months after Biden took office. He's scrambling around trying to just get an extension so he can put together some sort of plan. Because just like they had no plan on how to roll out the vaccines, they also had no plan. Or if they did, they didn't give it to Biden. Even though you see Secretary Pompeo standing up there right next to Donnie in the same picture with the guy. That to me is sort of all of it. I'm going to lose track of where I was there for a minute because I want to focus on this. 5,000 prisoners. We worked for 20 years over there. Working hard to route out the Taliban, arrest them, imprison them, get them out of the country and out of the way where they could no longer terrorize people. 5,000 of them imprisoned. Let them all go. Now they're fighting against the Afghans. Now they're out running around town with their AR-15s. That to me, and then let this Donnie guy out too. Who is one of their leaders? Who is now one of their main leaders going forward? How can that not fall on Trump's lap? So, you know, I don't... Okay. Well, recognizing the difficulties and the lack of a plan and the legacy that Trump left, the impossible legacy that Trump left for Biden, whether Biden wants to rely on that, you know, complain about it or not. But here we are. Okay. And we left. And now we're putting 6,000 troops back in. Okay. That is kind of an admission of failure, isn't it? And by the way, I don't think the 6,000 troops are there yet or logistical issues about delivering them to Afghanistan and to the airport. They were already stationed around in the area so that they would be brought back in if they needed to be. They did try to plan for that contingency. You know, where I was going for a minute with that was that May 3rd, I mean, that May 1st deadline that Trump had set, when he got there, Biden extended it with some kind of agreement with the Taliban to August. That's how we got this extra three months as it wanted them in that ceasefire. Right? I thought it was September 11th as an iconic date. Was it not August 1st? It was August 31st. At the end, it ultimately wound up to be August 31st. But then I think what happened is that Biden changed that to this past weekend. And of course the Taliban heard and say that and they made their moods. I always wonder, back in the day of the First Gulf War, there was a CNN reporter by the name of Deborah Wang. I don't know if you remember her. She was a really good reporter and she was there at their intelligence briefings. But they would exclude her from things like deadlines. They would exclude her from the military plans they were formulating. And so the reports we were getting were valuable and interesting, but they didn't have the detail. For reasons that are not clear to me, these days we seem to give the American people and the world, including our adversaries, the detail of our plan, which allows them to plan. It's like telling the eye on the other side of the chess board what your next move is, which is, you know, it's not a recipe to win. But let me ask you this, though. So now soon enough, if not already today, which is Wednesday in Afghanistan, there will be 6,000 troops there. And presumably they'll be guarding the airport on the road and helping anyone left from the embassy to get out of the country. And hopefully they'll be doing security at the airport. So thousands of Afghanis won't be grabbing on the landing gear of our transport planes. But how long can they stay, Cynthia? And what happens at home when they stay maybe longer than people expected? When the diplomatic corps is gone and the only people left who we might care about are the interpreters, and they're still there. And the troops are still there. How long can that set of circumstances continue before we get additional criticism? And possibly, you know, another attack on them by a huge Taliban force. How much time do we have before we have to really cut and run? Not much. Not much time at all. And if you ask me the minute we leave, we should bomb every single base that we love. Easy there, girl. Easy. I think about the women and the children. And it just gets me so fired up that I want to do anything and everything that needs to be done to protect the women. The women who they knew what was coming went out and bought burkas so they would be prepared. And if you look at the streets of Kabul, there's not a woman in sight till you get to the capital. And just today, there was a small contingency of women that were holding signs we want our freedoms. Boy, I wouldn't want to be one of them. Boy, they're all dead. Well, you know, you wonder about that because the Taliban are trying to, or at least it seems like to a certain degree, they're trying to be, at least appear to be civilized. They want to be, they want to have a place at the table in the family of nations. Maybe I don't know. They, there seems like the leadership is emerging to some extent. And I think they, you know, they could have taken over the airport yesterday and they didn't. And they could be fighting with the troops or American troops who were there to evacuate people. And they really aren't. Not yet. Not that we know. And so it could be that they're holding back. And I guess the question I put to you is how, how long will they hold back? How long will the American public opinion allow President Biden to leave our troops there? And how long will the Taliban hold back before they attack whoever is there? Any thoughts on that? Well, right now they have stated, and while we've been on this show right now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the Taliban were giving their first press conference today. So I don't know what they've said, but I know a little bit of what I've heard and that is that they have said they will not stop people from getting to the airport if they have the paperwork, they have the proper paperwork, then they can go to, they will not stop them from going to the airport. So I know what does that mean for an interpreter? They better have the right paperwork. That's what it means. It means they better have the right paperwork issuing the paperwork. Well, the government, right? Just USAID and and what is it SID and we'll see what happens. It's going to be a big question exactly who gets through that. But what's interesting from what you say is that, yeah, okay, who's going to be checking the paperwork to Taliban. And if they say no, what are you going to do about it? So I, you know, really the thing is now in place in transition, they have to show maybe the press conference is a good thing in terms of them responding to international interest on what they're doing. I think if I were a woman or girl, I'd be terrified. If I were a former member of the government, I'd be terrified. And if I were an interpreter, I'd be terrified. And that's lots of people, maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which we may or may not be interested in bringing back. And that that goes to the last point in our discussion here. I know you wanted to talk about that. And I call this part of our discussion criticism and hypocrisy. We do have other issues in this country. And this all happens in the context of those issues. And the, you know, the political dynamics that are playing out following Trump. What is happening? And what are your thoughts about both the process, the issues, and of course, the hypocrisy, hypocrisy. Well, some of the process is that, you know, didn't Congress just approve a whole bunch of money, like a billion dollars or more, to go ahead and get these Afghani translators out of the country? They didn't they just get a bunch of money to do this? What happened to that? Well, I mean, maybe they're using it now. I don't know. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure it was ever passed. Oh, okay. I thought I don't know. I'm not sure either. I know that the hypocrisy of the Republicans is just making me a little sick to hear them just point all the fingers at Biden and not even for one minute, try to put some of this responsibility on Trump where it belongs. As a matter of fact, they are praising Trump. He made this great deal and then Biden screwed it all up. They're saying, and I, and that's in a nutshell, about four or five different interviews that I sort of have put down for my own, in my own words, right? But at any rate, that's basically what they're saying. And it's that part has just really got me. So one of the things that I think is important to realize here, and one of the things that is maybe a motivator for the Taliban and why they're being so measured and reserved. And it would be because of the fact that when, 20 years ago, when we got there to Afghanistan, it was a race plan. It was nothing. Soviets had burned everything and wrecked everything. And then during the battles, they had put in all these landmines. So there was no farming anymore. There was nothing really. Everybody was in, it was the poorest of poor going on. So now after 20 years, there's all these businesses, there's all this stuff. They've upgraded some of that, especially some of the housing in Kabul and some of the other outline areas, the bigger places. So it used to be that their only main source of income was their heroin trade, right? Well, now they're going to be in charge of a country that actually has an economy now. And so they don't want to ruin that, right? They don't want to do something that's going to wreck that. And I know that we're almost out of time. So I'd like to just really quickly put a little preview of a show that's going to happen later on that was supposed to happen earlier today or right now during this show. There's a woman named Heidi Kuhn, and this is her book called Breaking Ground. She has been removing landmines and replacing them with crops all around the world in about 30 different countries. For the last 20 years, she's been in Afghanistan since 2001. She has turned it from a landmine-ridden country to removing the landmines and replacing it with grapes and coffee. And I can't remember some of the other pepper, I think peppers in Vietnam. But at any rate, she has turned her small piece there into, and agriculture is 80% of their economy. She has turned it into, she's now overseeing $100 million worth of export for the grapes and the dried fruits and things and the nuts that they're sending out everywhere. And when they couldn't get meetings or people to come into the country, really still afraid to come into the country to trade, she arranged for them to go to them and, you know, establish these trade partners. And it has been a very successful non-profit for her, profit for the Afghan people. And she has done tremendous work. And right now she is in the midst of trying to get 340 of her partners and employees out of Afghanistan right now. She has been just madly signing visa things for them to be able to come so that they will have the paperwork to get out. So I'm hoping she will be on with me today at five, if not, look for us tomorrow at nine, okay? And her name is Heidi Kuhn and her book is Breaking Ground. And I recommend it to everyone. You can get it on Amazon and you can go to her website, which is rootsofpeace.org. And they are in dire need of donations at this time to try to make sure they can fund all of this evacuation. Very interesting story. I'm sure there are thousands stories like that. And the net effect is that Roots of Peace in Afghanistan is probably over. So many other improvements that were made while the U.S. was there are probably over, right? We can't forget that. We can say, well, we weren't so good at nation building and so forth. But we did, in a way, build a nation. We did, in a way, change things permanently in Afghanistan. And this is all the more tragic because of what's happening now this week. Thank you very much, Cynthia. Really appreciate your thoughts and your ardor on the subject. We'll talk about it again. Aloha. Thank you, Jay. Thanks for coming on and being the host of my show.