Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane gives his take on the collapse of Afghanistan and bringing Americans home on 'The Story'
As the U.S. military and State Department rush to evacuate American citizens and Afghan allies from Kabul’s airport, Taliban checkpoints are cutting off many from freedom and safety – and reports on the ground indicate the militants are summarily executing people who helped U.S. forces over the years.
Ryan Rogers, a retired Marine sergeant, told Fox News Thursday that the interpreter he worked with during the bloody 2010 battle of Marjah in Helmand province is currently trapped in Kabul, prevented from reaching the airport as Taliban fighters seek out and murder former Afghan commandoes and interpreters.
"He told me yesterday they hung three [Afghan National Army] commanders that they had found," he said. "And that close to the place that he’s hiding, they’re going house-to-house and that they sent a transmission out saying they had plans for the people that operated with America."
The interpreter, who is not being identified due to concerns about his safety, was OK as of Thursday afternoon.
Afghans take selfie wit Taliban fighters during patrol in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
"I said, hey, did you see any of this stuff with your eyes? He said yes," Rogers said. "They're not showing this stuff because the people are cheering, but they're scared to death, and they're hanging these people. And he said they're going house to house and their priorities are Afghan National Army Special Forces, the police special forces and the interpreters."
The Biden administration on Thursday finally acknowledged reports that evacuees were having trouble reaching the international airport and Kabul, which is surrounded by Taliban checkpoints.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said during a Thursday news briefing that the government had received a "small handful of reports" of American citizens who were unable to reach the airport. But he also said that though U.S. officials were aware of reports that interpreters and former Afghan military officers were being hunted and killed by the Taliban forces, he could not confirm their veracity.
"I'm just not in a position to confirm those details," he said. "Every time we see a detail like this, we take it extraordinarily seriously, and we do what we can."
In this photo provided by the U.S. Marine Corps, a boy is processed through an Evacuee Control Checkpoint during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps via AP)
Over the past two weeks, as Taliban forces swept across the country, there were reports of the militants executing surrendering Afghan soldiers. And Fox News has received video showing gunmen in pickup trucks, firing bullets in the streets of Kabul.
"In a bipartisan fashion, there's extreme disappointment, especially by those that have served," Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican and Army Reserve officer, told Fox News. "And we have lost on this our moral standing in the world, and it’s a sign of weakness rather than strength."Wenstrup pointed to bipartisan legislation passed months ago designed to lessen the red tape U.S. allies would need to get through to safely leave the country as the American military withdrew. But the rushed withdrawal left thousands of people stranded anyway.
"I find it hard to believe that our military and intelligence community would have recommended it this way," he said, faulting the Biden administration’s leadership. "But those are some of the questions that we need to have answered."
Wenstrup, who served in the Army in Iraq, said he helped more than one interpreter relocate from there. One of them, now an American citizen and physician at Ohio State, called the Afghanistan situation "disheartening," the congressman said.
But despite the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, Wenstrup had a message for veterans of the War on Terror.
"We have not had another attack in 20 years," he said. "We must praise all those that have sacrificed so much in the last 20 years because they did keep us safe, and they should be applauded for that."
And so did their coalition partners.
"I hope and pray that that interpreter, we find a way to get them out," Wenstrup said. "My experience is if we get them here, they do everything right to become good U.S. citizens."
The Pentagon sent thousands of additional troops to the airport this week to help with the evacuations, but defense officials stopped short of saying they would leave the base to rescue Americans or Afghan allies – even as UK paratroopers have been doing so to secure their own people.
Fox News also learned from a credible source Thursday that the State Department is looking into non-military ways to stage and move Americans and others who are in Kabul, as an alternative to sending troops into the city.
But Rogers worries that his interpreter friend could have just hours left if things go south.
Taliban fighters pose for a photograph in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Rogers, who is originally from Ohio and now lives in North Carolina, was medically retired from the Marine Corps due to injuries sustained in Marjah. In April, he published a book on his experiences there – which featured the same interpreter trapped in Kabul today.
The interpreter told Rogers he tried to make it to the airport’s fortified east gate Wednesday – along with thousands of other people seeking to escape Taliban control. But he encountered Taliban checkpoints, heard gunshots and turned back.
"It was desperate," Rogers said. "He said, ‘I have my pistol, and they're never going to take me. There's no way it can end like this. It can only end one way -- glory be to God.’ I mean, he was scared."In response to President Biden’s claim in an ABC News interview that there was no way to leave Afghanistan without "chaos ensuing," Rogers said the government could have come up with a plan to secure Americans and allies before the Taliban took Kabul.
"If somebody is going to help us for 20 years, and we're going to make a bunch of promises to them, we need to fulfill those promises," Rogers said. "And yesterday, it sounded like they weren't going to go outside the airport. And that's where a lot of those promises are hiding right now."
Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
Michael Ruiz is a U.S. and World Reporter for Fox News.
So much for the Taliban promised 'peaceful transition'
Billions of dollars of U.S. weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban following the quick collapse of Afghan security forces that were trained to use the military equipment.
Among the items seized by the Taliban are Black Hawk helicopters and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft.
Photos have also circulated of Taliban fighters clutching U.S.-made M4 carbines and M16 rifles instead of their iconic AK-47s. And the militants have been spotted with U.S. Humvees and mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles.
While it's virtually impossible to operate advanced aircraft without training, seizing the hardware gives the militants a propaganda boost and underscores the amount of wasted funds on U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
"When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it's sort of a status symbol. It's a psychological win," said Elias Yousif, deputy director of the Center for International Policy's Security Assistance Monitor.
"Clearly, this is an indictment of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise broadly," he added. "It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that's in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia."
The United States spent an estimated $83 billion training and equipping Afghan security forces over the last two decades.
Between 2003 and 2016, the United States transferred 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons, 162,643 pieces of communications equipment, 208 aircraft, and 16,191 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment to Afghan forces, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report.
From 2017 to 2019, the United States also gave Afghan forces 7,035 machine guns, 4,702 Humvees, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers, among other equipment, according to a report last year from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
As of June 30, Afghan forces had 211 U.S.-supplied aircraft in their inventory, a separate SIGAR report said.
At least 46 of those aircraft are now in Uzbekistan after more than 500 Afghan troops used them to flee as the government in Kabul collapsed over the weekend.
Video: Violence escalates as Afghan Taliban carries out revenge killings (CNBC)
Violence escalates as Afghan Taliban carries out revenge killings
It is unclear exactly how many weapons have fallen into the hands of the Taliban, but the Biden administration has acknowledged it's a "fair amount."
"We don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban," White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday. "And obviously, we don't have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport."
Still, Sullivan defended President Biden's decisionmaking in leaving the Afghan forces with high-end equipment.
Even as the U.S. military was withdrawing from Afghanistan, the United States kept aircraft flowing to the Afghans, in July touting plans to send 35 Black Hawk helicopters and three A-29s.
"Those Black Hawks were not given to the Taliban. They were given to the Afghan National Security Forces to be able to defend themselves at the specific request of [Afghan] President [Ashraf] Ghani, who came to the Oval Office and asked for additional air capability, among other things," Sullivan said.
"So the president had a choice. He could not give it to them with the risk that it would fall into the Taliban's hands eventually, or he could give it to them with the hope that they could deploy it in service of defending their country," Sullivan continued. "Both of those options had risks. He had to choose. And he made a choice."
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby on Wednesday also held there was a "very deliberate" process as U.S. forces withdrew in deciding what equipment to destroy, give to Afghan forces or redeploy elsewhere in the Middle East.
While the Taliban may be "keen" to use some of the more advanced U.S. weaponry, including the aircraft, the militants likely would not be able to keep them in the air for long even if they could coax former Afghan pilots into flying for them, said Yousif of the Center for International Policy.
"They may be able to manage a flight or two or to operate them in some really limited capacity in the short term, but without long-term sustainment, maintenance, servicing, that sort of thing, it wouldn't turn into a robust or useful military capability," he said. "It took the Afghans and the United States a long time to develop an indigenous air capability, and even then, they were reliant on the United States to keep those planes in the sky."
A more immediate concern, Yousif said, is that so many small arms were left behind.
"They are easy to maintain, easy to learn how to use, easy to transport," he said. "The concern for all small arms is that they are durable goods and they can be transferred, sold. We've seen this before where a conflict ends and the arms that stay there make their way to all parts of the world."
On Wednesday, more than two dozen Republican senators demanded a "full accounting" of U.S. military equipment given to Afghan forces over the past 12 months, what's been seized by the Taliban and what plans there are to either recapture or destroy the equipment.
"As we watched the images coming out of Afghanistan as the Taliban retook the country, we were horrified to see U.S. equipment - including UH-60 Black Hawks - in the hands of the Taliban," the 25 senators, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
"It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies," they added. "Securing U.S. assets should have been among the top priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan."
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday declined to comment on the possibility of destroying equipment, saying the military's focus right now is on evacuation operations. Still, Milley told reporters that "we obviously have capabilities."
"We don't obviously want to see our equipment in the hands of those who would act against our interest or the interest of the Afghan people and increase violence and insecurity inside Afghanistan," Kirby said in his own briefing. "There are numerous policy choices that can be made, up to and including destruction, and what I would tell you at this point is those decisions about disposition of that level of equipment in Afghanistan haven't been made yet."
In essence the American taxpayer picked up the tab to provide weapons to the Taliban... talk about adding insult to injury!
Why didn't we take advantage of a bad situation?
These are all the high-ranking Taliban leaders in the Afghan president's office.
We should have dropped a MOAB on the son of a bitches. Then they'll kill the Afghan people you say? They're toast anyway!
This is just a prelude of things to come.
Taliban gunmen opened fire on crowds late Tuesday, with images showing a bloodied child being carried by a man while a woman lay wounded in the road
Only CNN could call this a peaceful transition!
One more thing. Every time I turned around they tried to impeach Trump. Remember when they try to impeach him over a phone call? After this catastrophic debacle why hasn't anybody brought articles of impeachment against Bribem? Everybody and their brother knew for decades Bribem is an idiotic moron but yet he sits in the oval office!
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.
“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”
By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.
“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.
“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”
Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.
Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.
In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.
“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.
Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban
If you said he was one of the 5 for 1 swap Barry perpetrated to get POS deserter Bergdahl back you would be right.
Khairullah Khairkhwa in the Afghan president's office (Ashraf Ghani) who by the way skipped town with a boatload of cash which more than likely belongs to the American taxpayer.
Common sense dictates if the Chinese were truly intent in getting to the bottom of this with nothing to hide why are they dodging, laying down road blocks, to every facet of the investigation?
The only question for me is was it released accidentally or intentionally. Intentionally you say? Yes, I wouldn't put it past them to experiment on their own people and it got out of control. Who believes only 4,636 Chinese died of Covid? What bullshit! In my opinion I believe this whole episode is going to get swept under the rug which proves the Chinese have the whole world by the balls. This is what Chang had to say. I pray he's right and I'm wrong.
"The Chinese state can convince Biden that the origin of the disease is not important. Beijing can even intimidate the Embareks of the world and the World Health Organization, but there are brave Chinese souls willing to risk everything to tell us what they know.
And because of them, everyone will eventually find out. Beijing cannot hide the greatest crime of this century for much longer."
Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization's (WHO) last mission to Wuhan, is now saying that COVID-19 could have been caused by a lab accident.
"A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave—such a scenario belongs both as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human," he told Danish state-owned television station TV2 in a documentary that aired last Thursday. "We've seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis."
Now he tells us. Embarek sang a very different tune in an interview with Sciencein February. More important, his mission's final report listed a lab leak as "an extremely unlikely pathway" and as the least probable scenario, even less likely than transmission by frozen food.
How did the report come to this startling conclusion? As Embarek explained in the Danish documentary, a Chinese colleague would allow a mention of the possibility of a lab leak "on the condition we didn't recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis."
Embarek has done himself no credit by explaining the politics behind the drafting of the WHO report, clearly revealing that it was a heavily negotiated document and that China wielded an effective veto. The report, by Embarek's admission, did not state what mission members believed to be true.
He and other mission members had an obligation to state their findings—not to propagate what their Chinese interlocutors wanted them to report.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on Embarek or the WHO. There are the Chinese people, who have already taken great risks to tell us what they have observed and what they believe.
There was, for instance, the Wuhan Eight: Li Wenliang and seven other doctors in that city who were detained beginning late December 2019 for spreading rumors, specifically, "issuing false information on the internet regarding the seven SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market." Li, an ophthalmologist, contracted the disease, apparently treating patients, and died in February of last year.
Especially fearless was Chen Qiushi and other "citizen journalists" who traveled to Wuhan and reported on the disease in its first days. Chen was taken into indefinite custody in early February 2020 by authorities, and others were also disappeared. Chen's gripping videos, made from a bare room, were some of the first reports to the Chinese people—and the world.
Chinese officials, eager to counter the charge that they were slow to warn, bragged that they quickly shared the underlying coronavirus genome with the public. In fact, they sat on their findings. The Wuhan Institute of Virology identified the new coronavirus and mapped its genetic sequence by January 2 of last year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping waves as he attends the art performance celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China on June 28, 2021 in Beijing, China. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Professor Zhang Yongzhen's team at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, defying orders from higher-ups, posted the world's first genome sequence on two public platforms on January 11. The day after the posting, the Shanghai Health Commission shuttered Zhang's lab for "rectification." No reason was given for the action. The Level 3 facility had passed its annual inspection on January 5.
And then there is Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist. While working at a WHO reference lab at the University of Hong Kong, she countered, at great personal risk, what she thought was a cover-up by the Chinese regime and the WHO. On January 19 of last year, Yan provided YouTube's LUDE Media channel with information showing there was human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, that there were no wild animal intermediate hosts and that the Wuhan seafood market was not the origin of the outbreak. She also noted that the virus could cause a global pandemic and mutate quickly.
After threats on her life, Yan left her husband and fled Hong Kong for the United States, where she has continued coronavirus research and warned the American public that China's biological research labs are connected to the Chinese military. She also has been making the case that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, was engineered in a lab.
Yan's contentions—especially regarding the circumstances relating to release of the disease—are controversial, but no one can deny that she epitomizes bravery and self-sacrifice.
Her work has had an impact. It looks like her warnings prompted Beijing to become far more forthcoming. China's first public admission of human-to-human transmissibility came only a few hours after the posting of the LUDE Media video.
What happens next? On May 26, President Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to report back in 90 days on the origins of COVID-19. He does not appear particularly interested in the topic, however. After all, he spent two hours on the phone with Chinese ruler Xi Jinping in February and did not raise the subject even once.
In fact, Biden ordered the intelligence community to look into the matter only after an uproar triggered by a CNN report that his State Department spiked a similar Trump-era investigation.
Do not expect the intelligence community later this month—90 days from May 26 brings us to August 24—to come to the conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. Leaks suggest its report will be inconclusive.
The Chinese state can convince Biden that the origin of the disease is not important. Beijing can even intimidate the Embareks of the world and the World Health Organization, but there are brave Chinese souls willing to risk everything to tell us what they know.
And because of them, everyone will eventually find out. Beijing cannot hide the greatest crime of this century for much longer.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter: @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
China's People Will Tell the World the Truth About COVID-19
