Former CIA Officer Mike Baker on Afghanistan Withdrawal

Again, I keep going back to that one point, which is it doesn't really matter what the facts are anymore. It does. As an example, today was, now I'm kind of bouncing around a little bit, but today was hearings up on the Hill. The Senate Armed Services Committee was holding hearings. So who did they have? They had Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. They had CENTCOM Commander General McKenzie, great guy. They had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley. So they all, to the last one, said, yes, we were advising the President that our advice is to maintain a small troop presence, minimum of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. And our belief was, not that it would collapse as quickly as it did, but that it would collapse. If you took those advisors, those troops out, that it would collapse maybe by fall, this fall. And yet you've got the President saying, I don't recall being told any of that. And that's okay now because nobody's questioning it, right? Nobody's saying, well, hold on. How about some pushback? How about saying, what do you mean you don't recall? This is one of the most important decisions you've made or will be making, and you don't recall whether your senior top military advisors were telling you that in their advice, keep the troops in there for a period of time. And he's saying, I don't remember. And there's really no serious pushback. This whole hearing, if anybody wants to know what Washington, D.C. is like and how that city runs, I'd recommend maybe on Thursday watching some more of these hearings on the Afghanistan process because it's just, on one hand, it's very depressing. It's just a shit show. You've got the senators on the Armed Services Committee who have been there, who have been privy to all sorts of intelligence over the past few years, right? Now sitting in a hearing to understand what happened, what went wrong with the Afghan withdrawal, and they're all acting as if they could be surprised by this. When these politicians have been sitting up on Capitol Hill being briefed on this shit, having the opportunity to ask questions, doing all the things they should be doing, but now because it's all theater, now they get to sit in a hearing in front of some of the senior military commanders and act as if they're a little bit surprised by all of this. And oh my God, how did it happen? How could we prevent it from happening again? Senator Jean Chihin actually asked that. I think it was of Milley saying, well, how do we prevent this from happening again? Are you fucking kidding me? Happening again? Yeah. That's your question? Jesus Christ. Anyway, I tell you what. It's been a fascinating period of time. Let me ask you this. The president has the ability to say whatever the ... If someone advises him to leave 2,500 troops, he has the ability to say, I don't think so. No troops. Yes, yes, he does. So he can take all that advice, and the military leaders are saying, look, we provided this advice. Right. I think it does surprise people sometimes when they see the extent, and if they were watching these hearings and understanding the information flow about Afghanistan. Look, there was a lot of talk in the aftermath of this withdrawal clown show that what happened? Who was advising who? How did we miss certain pieces of intelligence? And there's a lot to figure out there. But the idea that the president would sit there in his office with all these senior advisors around, and they would say, sir, here are your options, because that's always basically what they're doing. And theoretically, they are supposed to be strong enough to argue their point as strongly as possible. They're not there to just go along. So they all come in, they say, we think you should be keeping troops in there. And the president then steps away. And now, Millie, Mackenzie, the others, they all said that Biden listened very seriously to them. But there was a political decision here. That political decision was, we're getting the hell out. Now the interesting thing is that Biden, he kind of wants to have it both ways. He wants to take credit for being brave and saying we're getting the hell out. But then he also wants to blame the previous administration for the reason why he had to be getting the hell out. So he wants to blame the Doha agreement that Trump signed in February of 2020. What was that? Well, that was when the Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, and basically had conditions within that. And General Millie and Mackenzie talked about those conditions, I think, today, and they're in the hearings, actually. There were seven conditions placed on the Taliban for this agreement to go forward. And there was a May withdrawal date. Now the administration, the previous administration, people don't want to hear this shit, right? Because they're so entrenched in their own camp. So people who are on the hard left, they're not going to want to hear the fact that the Doha agreement was based on conditions. But the most senior military commanders today reaffirmed that, yes, there were seven conditions for that agreement to follow through, for us to follow through. We had eight conditions for the US. And now during the course of the discussions and the negotiations, and this whole agreement was based on a power sharing. The idea was we want to create an opportunity for the Taliban and the Afghan government. We want them all to come together and create a power sharing agreement. Well, on one hand, you could argue and say, that's never going to happen. Sounds crazy. Yeah, it sounds crazy. But that's where they were. And you could also argue, and again, because people are so entrenched, no one's want to give any credit to whether they want to give credit to Biden, or they want to give credit to Trump, or any Republican president or Democrat president. The Trump administration did kind of broker the hard, heavy lift of saying, we're getting the hell out. There had been talk around the edges in previous administrations about how long would it be there. But the Trump administration did finally actually say, fuck it, let's get a negotiation, let's go and let's set a time to get the fuck out after 20 years. Right or wrong? So they put that on the table. They set the table for that hard line withdrawal. The Taliban never met those conditions. The only thing they did was not attack US troops directly. But as Millie and Kenzie said today, they never met any of the other conditions. So it had been explained to the Taliban that if that was the case, and you don't meet these conditions, we're not going to leave in May. We're going to just keep pushing the withdrawal date further to the right. So why was the decision made to withdraw then? Look, in part, I think because I think everybody got behind the idea that we can't stay there forever because I think everybody understood that it just wasn't happening. They weren't buying what we were selling. They never have. Right? I mean, and you don't want to be completely fatalistic all the time, but with Afghanistan, it's not a bad frame of reference to remember all the other times that things like this have failed. The idea that somehow we were going to build a stable pseudo-democratic government in Afghanistan was always flawed. There was never really any evidence to show that that was going to happen. It was propped up, and I think nobody really wanted to tell the truth in positions of leadership, whether it was military or government or intel community. So I think there was general agreement that, yeah, we got to get the fuck out. And then it came down to, well, how do we do that? And we faced some of the same problems that the old Soviets faced getting the hell out of Afghanistan. But I think with this case, part of it was we had pulled advisors off the Afghan units two, three years ago. That had been a process. So the withdrawal process had been going on for a number of years over the past decade or so, in a sense. We'd been drawing back, pulling out some resource, pulling out troops, lowering the troop numbers, putting more responsibility on contractors. And once you take the advisors out of the Afghan units, in a sense, you don't have really eyes and ears inside the Afghan military. So you can have President Ghani or some bullshit Afghan commander just telling you whatever you want to hear. But you didn't have a lot of folks at ground level working with the troops saying, all right, this shit's not going to hold, particularly after the Doha Agreement. Once I think that the Doha Agreement was made, I think the writing's on the wall, and even the Afghan military could see it, and they could read it. And they could say, OK, this shit's not going to happen. We're not going to keep getting money. We're not going to keep getting advisors. And we're not going to get the air support that is really the only thing that keeps us in power. So at some point over a period of a few years, we were degrading our own ability to actually understand just how bad it was getting. And so then it became a logistical exercise. You got to move personnel, and you got to move material out of the country. And that's where you could argue it all kind of went sideways. Well they left behind how much shit? A lot of shit. A lot of shit. Crazy shit, right? No, we left. Black Hawks. Yes. Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars as a conservative estimate. Why? That's a conservative estimate. Well, partly because you could argue that some of the material was decommissioned. Some of the heavier platforms were made non-functioning. OK, fine. I don't know, to answer the question, I don't know why the military wouldn't have moved more of the gear, the light gear out there. In other words, the night vision devices, the weaponry, the small arms, ammunition. Why not spend three or four months getting that gear the hell out? You don't have the troops that require them. So now you've got all this shit stored. Now the thought could have been that this is for the Afghan military, they're going to hold. But here's the thing, the interesting point that came out from General Billy and General McKenzie during these hearings is that they claim, they're stating, and I have no reason not to believe them, they're stating that the general consensus by the fall of 2020 was that without the troops in there, once you take the US troops out and the money, then the government's going to collapse probably by fall of this year. It took like three hours. Yeah, it took 11 days. Now in a classic piece of Washington speak, I think it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in answering a question said, no, we never saw any assessment that said that the government would collapse in 11 days. He's very specific, right? He's not saying in shorter. He's just saying 11. I didn't see one for 11 days. We had one for like two weeks. So that's just the shit that happens on the side. So they assumed the Afghan army eventually was not going to fight the Taliban. Yes. What they're saying is we all, and look, the intel community, we've been talking about that for years. We knew all you had to do was study the Soviet papers during their time, their occupation in Afghanistan to understand how we were likely going to replay that scenario. And we did. So you could argue that what should have happened was years ago, we should have looked around and thought, this is a bullshit exercise. And I think the military today, the senior commanders today, and during this week, I think you'll see them make a huge effort to say, first and foremost, the veterans and everyone who fought there and all the hardship, it wasn't in vain. I think they're going to focus on that. And they're going to say, because for two decades, we haven't been attacked on our home soil. And in a narrow definition, yes, that's why we went in. And then it kind of got blown up into this idea that we were going to create this bastion of democracy in Afghanistan. But it's been widely known forever that Afghanistan is insane. It's impossible to manage. The Soviets couldn't handle it. The whole area is incredibly mountainous. It's very remote. It consists of these little clans that are run by warlords. It's not. Kabul is essentially the only real city, right? Yeah. Are there other cities there? Are there real cities? There are, but there are still run like little fiefdoms. Fiefdom is a good word. I know, right? I like how you pulled that out. I'm just going to write that down. Write that one down. Fiefdom. Well, no, I can't because I don't know how to spell it. It's like something from The Hobbit. What is a fiefdom? Do you know what a fiefdom is, Jamie? I think. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.