The Taliban Taking Over Afghanistan

I watched Restrepo last night because of what's going on in Afghanistan. Do you know Restrepo Sebastian Junger's film on Afghanistan? Yeah. Just sort of just put it in perspective, like what's going on over there now. And it's, you know, I mean, books are amazing for putting things into perspective, but there's something about a documentary, especially a boots on the ground documentary by a journalist like Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan while Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban. So it feels so, it's so intense when you're watching it and you see, you know, guys in the beginning of the film that wind up dying. It's first of all, I forgot, like I think you have a sense of what they mean when they talk about these mountainous areas, this mountainous terrain that's impossible really to control because it's very difficult to traverse, very difficult to get around. I don't think you really understand it until you watch that film, until you really see the mountains and you look, oh God, like how is anybody ever going to control this area? Like no wonder why the Soviets failed. No wonder why we failed. No wonder why, you know, the people that live there. They just, they're living in an incredibly difficult environment in terms of like just getting around. Yeah. I remember some statistics about like 99% of people in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, now it sounds like Brian Callan. Afghanistan. I ran Iran. Yeah. I never know how to say it. I remember like 99% of them didn't know 9-11 happened. So like they're completely disconnected from the world. Even that's so crazy. That like even things that seem relevant to. Did you watch the videos today of people trying to climb aboard planes and falling to their deaths? The planes are taken off because they're hanging on to the landing gear and as landing gear pulls up, they're falling to their death. Trying to save themselves? Yes. Trying to leave with the Americans. That's fucking crazy. Just the chaos at the airport is crazy. You haven't seen any of this stuff? No, I haven't seen it. I actually have not been paying attention to what's happening in Afghanistan. Jamie, show him some of the videos because it's heartbreaking. There's one. These are people just literally climbing all over these ladders doing whatever they can trying to force themselves onto these planes. But the really fucked one is like, look, these guys hanging on the landing gear. Watch this, like falling to his death. It's fucked. Yeah, and look at this. I mean, it's fucking crazy. All these guys trying to stop the plane so they can get on board. I mean, this is just a tremendous failure. It's so heartbreaking. Yeah, but what do you do? What could be done differently, right? That's the real question. Could they have designed a better withdrawal plan that scaled over time where they gave particularly the people that helped the American military over there that they're very vulnerable right now and they're in a lot of trouble? Could they have protected them better? Could they have done something? Could they have designed a plan? That's what most people who are criticizing this believe, the people that actually understand what's going on over there. They think this idea of pulling out immediately. Yeah, but half the world is living under authoritarian regimes. So the question is, how do you help those people? How do you help? You had a nice sophisticated, deep historical conversation with Andrew Schultz about North Korea. Are you being sarcastic? Yeah, there's a little bit of sarcasm there. I love him. He's hilarious. I'm just joking. He is hilarious, but he was going hard in the paint. A little bit. He's having fun. But how do you help? Well, the one sort of sophisticated criticism there was, well, what the hell do you do about it? Right, what do you do about North Korea? Well, what ... Yeah. There's a lot of places like that. North Korea is probably the worst or one of the worst, but there's a lot of places where the leader of the government is abusing its people. What do you do about it? The whole cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, people say, maybe you can change the money. You can give people power by ... One of the ways government controls its people is the monetary system. So you can swap out, try to give people power through the money. That's one way. That's interesting. Obviously, the old school way is military, or also maybe economic pressures. Then it becomes difficult, because you take it on that project, and then you get the money. It's the thing that you get in Afghanistan. It's a project that takes 10 years, it takes 20 years, and then ultimately it's not successful. The Afghanistan situation is so crazy, because Biden was on television just a little while ago talking about how there's 300,000 armed Afghanistan soldiers that were trained by the United States, and there's only 75,000 Taliban. There's no way that they're going to fall ... But they never fought. They just gave up instantly. The whole situation is very confusing to someone who doesn't understand it. If you're a guy who fought over there too, it's got to be insanely frustrating. People spilled blood over there, people lost limbs over there, and then they're seeing how quickly we just pulled out in an abandoned ship. What was that for? We got into that war under false pretenses. We stayed without much transparency about why we're staying. How many ... 20 fucking years. Without a clear plan for the future, and then we pulled out without a clear, transparent plan. I don't know what lesson to draw from that, except that we should never have gone in in the first place. That's the only solid set of arguments you can have. Why that place? It's the people that argue it's all about oil and all those kinds of things. And minerals. All sorts of natural resources, natural gas. Like Afghanistan is a rich suppository of lithium, I believe, too. Yeah, natural. But then what about Iraq? What does that have to do with anything? You start questioning the whole operation, the whole process of making decisions about foreign policy and the military conflicts. What lesson do you draw from that when there's places like North Korea, when there's many people in Africa suffering, there's many regimes that are abusing its people there, then there's people that criticize Russia for certain things in terms of from an authoritarian regime perspective, and then the big one is China. And then what do you do about that? And then I do find the libertarian argument here the most sophisticated and convincing is we should stay out of other people's business until we have a really clear, good plan. And the majority of Americans, given the transparent communication of what is going on and what we're going to do, the majority of Americans are behind this plan. Otherwise stay out of it. Unless you have... When you have something like Nazi Germany, where there's obvious atrocities happening, where there's an obvious war on the horizon, then that's different. But everything else... Well, if that's the case, then why aren't we invading North Korea? If Wainomik Park and all these different people that have escaped from North Korea are telling the truth, there's a Holocaust going on there right now. I mean, they're literally starving their people. They're putting their people in concentration camps. They're having children born in concentration camps for the crimes of their grandparents. And their children will also be born in these camps, in these prison camps. They're starving their people. They execute them for almost no reason. They do whatever they want to them. They have full and total complete control over them. With the dark answer and the reason is because there's no way to do anything about North Korea without also doing something about China. And that's why we turn a blind eye to North Korea. Because a war with North Korea or invasion of North Korea is an invasion of China.