DID THE UKRAINE WAR AND OCTOBER 7 BEGIN IN KABUL? 3/8: Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End Hardcover – by Jerry Dunleavy (Author), James Hasson (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Kabul-Untold-Bidens-American-Warriors/dp/1546005307/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1701296521&sr=1-1
America’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 was nothing short of a horror show. Women and children were trampled to death outside the gates of the Kabul airfield. Desperate Afghans fell from the landing gear of departing planes. Taliban fighters mercilessly whipped and humiliated U.S. civilians trying to access the few square miles still controlled by American forces. Countless Afghan interpreters were abandoned to the mercy of the Taliban after risking their lives alongside American troops for years. And thirteen U.S. service members—eleven of whom were still in preschool on 9/11—were murdered in an ISIS suicide bombing that could easily have been prevented.
Still, the full story is worse than anyone imagined. Drawing from hundreds of hours of first-person interviews, investigative reporter Jerry Dunleavy and former Army Captain and Afghanistan veteran James Hasson provide an exclusive, no-holds-barred account of the disastrous events of August 2021. Kabul is packed with shocking and infuriating exclusive details about fatal politics and bureaucracy that contributed to the catastrophe. The authors also tell, for the first time, inspiring stories of the bravery and sacrifices exhibited by countless Americans on the ground.
Kabul's original reporting includes eyewitness accounts from servicemembers of all ranks who participated the rescue effort, inside information from senior intelligence officials, interviews with high-ranking members of allied governments, harrowing stories from Americans and Afghan allies willfully abandoned by craven officials in Washington, and exclusive details about veteran-led rescue missions that continue to this day. Chapter after chapter, Kabul depicts American government at its worst and “ordinary” Americans at their best.
1940 FORT JAMRUD KHYBER PASS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bashwood, Jerry Dunleavy and James Hassan, the authors of the new book, The Untold Story of Biden's Fiasco, and the American Warriors who fought to the end. Jerry, I'll come to you because you're going to help me solve the State Department. They have acronyms. They're a challenge. The first is |
| 0:21.0 | SIV. The second is Neo. I loved it when somebody kept saying, don't say Neo. Don't say |
| 0:27.3 | Neo. I think that might have been the Secretary of State. What is it Neo? Why were they so |
| 0:31.7 | frightened about it? What does it mean this is not Saigon? We do have people who were not here then, Jerry. We've got to be careful. |
| 0:40.4 | Yeah. And what is an SIV? And why didn't they know how many SIVs they had? Yeah. Well, |
| 0:47.3 | let's let's start with the SIV problem. So SIV is a special immigrant visa. And so these are the, this is the visa program that was set up for our Afghan allies. So our interpreters, Afghan interpreters who help the U.S. military and other folks like that. And the SIV program, which was plagued by problems for many, many, many years, those problems |
| 1:12.7 | had not been solved by the time that President Biden decided to leave Afghanistan. And so, |
| 1:19.1 | as the U.S. was pulling all of our troops out and the Taliban is rapidly advancing, we have |
| 1:24.6 | tens of thousands of Afghan allies in the country that we had not come up with a plan about how to get out. |
| 1:30.9 | And that problem was never fixed and never solved by the time that August 2021 rolled around. |
| 1:39.1 | And so those tens of thousands of Afghan allies who we had made promises to because of their years |
| 1:47.3 | or sometimes their decades of help to the U.S. military in the U.S. NATO mission in Afghanistan, |
| 1:53.4 | all of those people were stuck behind Taliban lines. |
| 1:57.0 | And while thanks to the incredible efforts of the U.S. Marines and other service members at Kabul Airport during those two weeks in mid to late August 2021, thanks to their efforts, we were able to get a few 10,000, of those Afghan allies out, many more, tens of thousands more were left |
| 2:22.2 | behind. And the Biden administration just never put together a plan about what to do for them. |
| 2:28.3 | In terms of a neo, a neo is a non-combatant evacuation operation. That is what the State Department has to request from |
| 2:37.3 | the military to conduct an evacuation out of a country like Afghanistan. And the State Department |
| 2:45.0 | and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul should have known that a Neo would be necessary very early in 2021, but they were in a state of denial. |
| 2:56.9 | The Biden administration should have known that if they were going to do a NEO, |
| 3:01.2 | Bogram would be a much safer, much more orderly place to do it from. |
| 3:06.2 | But the Biden administration and President Biden, |
| 3:09.6 | because of the troop cap that he put in the country, shuddered Bagram and meant that we |
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