Author Jack Carr on How the Afghanistan Withdrawal Should've Been Handled

You know, I've had conversations with people on this podcast that were military people, high level people that were involved in this and they said there's nothing about that extraction that was right. No. And no one held accountable. Once again, it goes back to that accountability piece, which what confidence does that give you as the taxpayer that we're going to do something right in the next theater of war? Not very much confidence there. We have proven that we are unable to take the lessons of the past and apply them to the future in a way that is meaningful. But really it's the responsibility of those leaders to do that for that E1, E2, E3, that lower enlisted person who's going to be standing in the gate guard, who's going to be going out there into these streets or out there into the mountains and taking fire and dealing with a car that's coming up that looks like, oh, maybe is it bad suspension or is there a family in there or is it packed with explosives? And they're 18 years old and they're out there looking at this thing and have to make a decision. And then it pulls up and it detonates or they shoot and guess what? It's full of a family. Like these things are so difficult. Yeah. And then they have to live with that for the rest of their lives. And they're put in that position by senior level leaders who should have known better on a few things. It's specifically to Iraq disbanding the Iraqi army. Okay. So now you have this entire trained up military that's essentially now an insurgency. Okay. We have that debathification. So anyone who had any job in Iraq was a bathist. So the person that emptied the garbage, the people that kept the lights on now, debathification, those people don't have jobs. So now we're fighting an insurgency and we're figuring out how to get the trash picked up, how to keep the power on. We're building up an entirely new government. So, and those lessons and those senior level leaders, they are responsible for making those decisions just like we would be at the tactical level. And they made the wrong decision there. And that one, those two things right there, looking back at those two things, like, I don't know, it's almost unforgivable that they would make those decisions and not correct it immediately. We created that insurgency because of those two decisions. The hindsight is always 20, 20, right? But looking back on the Afghanistan situation, what is the consensus of what would have been the correct approach? So we essentially, it's not lost on many people that we essentially spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. And well armed. And well armed. With our stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Now, why did they do that? Why did they leave behind all of our shit? I don't know. I mean, I know when we left Iraq, there were, I was at a lower level, tactical level, so you just kind of hear things. I don't know how true it is, but how much it costs to bring certain things back rather than leave it there. Like the gyms that went up all over the place. So there's all these gyms all over Iraq. And you've seen the videos on YouTube of the Iraqis trying to work out. They're pretty funny. I think there's quite a few out there. But rather than pack all that up and take it home, just leave it. And so the gyms are the least concerned. I know. I'd use that as the most basic level. But then you apply that to how much does it take to get this helicopter back and that helicopter back and this and that. And hey, do we think that we were going to turn those over to the Afghans and leave those with them? And why didn't we blow them up? Well, I think we thought they were going to remain in place as the army that we trained up for the last 20 years. But nobody on the side of the people that were over there believed that was possible. They thought that everyone was going to fold the moment the United States left. Well, you didn't even have to think that. You could see it. You can see the provinces falling from January, February, April, May, June, July into August. I mean, you could watch it if you put it on the screen and show the provinces that fall. I mean, yeah, you don't have to be no stradamus to figure out that, hey, this isn't looking so good and everything is converging here. And you could extrapolate that, oh, probably every province is going to fall. But once again- So what should they have done in that particular situation? So you have a couple options. One being, hey, maybe you could leave a small force at Bagram perhaps to try to keep this military, keep this intelligence service, keep this government running maybe after 20 years. I don't know how long you can sustain that, but you could have done that. And then if things aren't working out, they're the last people to leave. So that's one. So you could have done that, or you get everyone out and leave Bagram and it ends up being the same thing. You see watch the whole government fall, the leader left, of course, but now you're not leaving from a tactically disadvantageous position. So you had essentially those two options to draw down to something, a very small force left there, trying to keep that government going, trying to keep that military going, trying to keep that intelligence service going. And then you could see how that works out or get everybody out in a way that makes sense. What would be a way that makes sense? How do you get everybody out in a way that makes sense? So Bagram, there's a lot of standoff distance at Bagram Airfield. You can be there, you can look out, you can see people coming from a long way off. We control that whole area. You control the airfield. It's not that chaos that we saw people hanging on the side of these planes as they're taking off. We control that thing rather than the way we left at the airfield and essentially in town. So, yeah, I don't know why we did that.