Jerry Dunleavy & The Shocking New Details Of The Afghanistan Withdrawal
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. And you will, I hope, rate, review, and subscribe to this one and share it with a friend if you find it of interest. Today, I have an interview that I've been looking forward to a lot.

Investigative reporter Jerry Dunleavy is the co-author, along with a former Army captain and Afghanistan veteran, James Hassan, of the book Kabul, the untold story of Biden's fiasco and the American warriors who fought to the end.

It's an investigative look at the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which obviously cost many American soldiers their lives and really put into perspective the incompetence at the heart of the Joe Biden foreign policy in so many different respects.

It really was a signature political moment, a historical moment in terms of the loss that many Americans felt. And it also revealed a lot of things that were very difficult to grasp about Joe Biden personally. Jerry is someone who I've known for many years. He's a great reporter. And this book is a must read in terms of understanding what went on in those days and in the days leading up to that withdrawal. Jerry Dunleavy coming up next.

Pull up a chair and join me, Rachel Campos Duffy, and me, former U.S. Congressman Sean Duffy, as we share our perspective on the discussions happening at kitchen tables across America. Download From the Kitchen Table, The Duffys, at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you download podcasts. Jerry Dunleavy, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it.

I know that you've been doing a lot of interviews around your book, and I'd like to sort of take a larger perspective on some of the things that you learned in writing it. But first, I want to begin with this. The most recent Republican debate happened just the night before we were recording this. And one of the things that really was not talked about a lot was the Biden record as it relates to Afghanistan.

If you look back in the Real Clear Politics average for Joe Biden, he is actually a popular president all the way up until the debacle in Afghanistan. And that begins a slide that really hasn't ended, hasn't stopped really ever since in terms of his unpopularity. He's incredibly unpopular today, obviously, but it really seems like that Afghanistan moment is

was the point where people changed their minds about him and what his administration was going to be like when it came to our foreign policy. Given that over the years we've seen so many high polling levels for people saying that they wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, that it was an unpopular war, that people wanted it to be over, why do you think that the particular way that that debacle played out

was met with such backlash from the American people? Because on the surface, if you were a Democrat spin person at the White House, you would say Joe Biden gave the American people what they wanted, or at least he tried to, or what they claimed to want. How did it play out in such a way that it ended up blowing up in their face? Yeah. So, look, I mean...

first Republican debate and passing mentions by Doug Burgum and Mike Pence, and that was pretty much it. And like you said, this debacle, I think, did permanent damage to President Biden's approval rating, just something that he has not recovered from. I think that people that were willing to give him a chance, people that were willing to perhaps buy into the idea that maybe he was competent or the idea that

He was this empathetic person. I think a lot of that was blown up by the way that Afghanistan went down. And so it did surprise me that Republicans didn't talk about this more, because I think it's an important issue, 20 years of war ending with the Taliban back in charge. And then the after effects, I think, flowing from it, which we make the case in the book that

This was very likely this debacle in Afghanistan, the US and NATO being in shambles was very likely a factor in Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine. And so we currently live in a more dangerous world than we did before this debacle in Afghanistan. In terms of why I think the American people were so upset with the way that the withdrawal happened is

You know, we say in the book, we're not weighing in one way or the other on what the ultimate solution was in Afghanistan. I think people of good faith

Thought that we should stay to defeat the Taliban, defeat al Qaeda. Some people thought a small footprint could do that. And some people wanted to get out altogether. But what we lay out in granular detail is that the way that this withdrawal happened was a complete disaster and did not have to be done this way. There were specific conditions.

decisions like pulling all U.S. troops before coming up with the plan about what to do about Afghan allies, Americans left behind, shuttering Bagram, doing all of this

Right.

But President Biden's cascade of bad decisions made it about as bad as it could be. And, of course, ending with that suicide attack that killed 13 Americans with ISIS-K, you know, successfully attacking us as the Taliban, who we were relying on for security, kind of guarded the airport outside. So, you know, everything went down about as bad as it could have because of the decisions that President Biden made in 2021.

So let's run through some of the details associated with what you just outlined. First, the fighting season thing is something that I think not enough people talk about. Can you explain for our listeners who might not be entirely familiar how that season works and when it runs? Absolutely. So President Biden...

made his withdrawal announcement April 14, 2021. He set the deadline for every U.S. troop to be gone outside of a tiny, tiny, tiny number just in Kabul at the embassy and the airport. He set that deadline for September 11, 2021. The problem with that is that we've been fighting in Afghanistan for 20 years at that point, two decades. And we know that in Afghanistan,

The winters are brutal. There's not very much fighting. The Afghan fighting season kicks off in the spring and the summer because the snow melts and

It becomes much easier to transit from Pakistan into Afghanistan, which is where a lot of the Taliban would hide out. And then they emerge for the fighting season. And so the way that Biden timed all of this was that he pulled all of those U.S. troops. And keep in mind, that also meant pulling U.S. logistics, U.S. ISR, U.S. advisors, U.S. contractors, everything that we had designed the Afghan military around.

And so as the Taliban launches its major assault, they start to attack the Taliban.

the U.S. is completely retrograding, pulling everything that the Afghan military has been relying on. And you see very predictably the Afghan military, although some of them fought heroically and a lot of Afghans died in 2021, but you saw very predictably the Afghan military writ large collapse. And then the U.S. find itself in a position where we hadn't evacuated essentially any of the Afghan allies we needed to get out.

All of the Americans stuck behind Taliban lines. And we found ourselves stuck at a tiny airport in the middle of the city controlled by the Taliban because of the way that Biden ordered the retrograde to happen. And I think because of the closure of Bagram Air Base, which was terrible for many, many, many, many reasons, which I could get into further if you're interested. Yeah, I want to get to that. But before we do, when Joe Biden set that

date, uh, you know, arbitrarily, was there any discussion internally within his administration about the danger inherent in choosing that moment as opposed to waiting until after the fighting season, you know, uh, setting, setting a date that was further out, um, that may not have any, you know, historical resonance, but one that would certainly be, have been more practical. Look, the, the U S military leadership, um,

The generals all told Biden that if he did what he was doing, a rapid U.S. troop retrograde in the middle of Afghan fighting season, then it would be a disaster. Now, I don't think that even most of these generals or the State Department especially

properly understood just how big of a disaster it would be and just how quickly things would fall apart, although I think that they should have because all of the evidence was there. But Biden was warned that this would be a disaster. And of course, him setting that as the deadline, the 20th anniversary of 9-11, what he kind of perversely did was ensure that the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda in the 90s,

and harbored al Qaeda before 9/11 and harbored al Qaeda after 9/11, he ensured that the Taliban would be back in charge in Afghanistan on that 20th anniversary. So it's pretty outside of this being a strategic failure. The symbolism was also pretty gross. I don't want to spend too much time on what the Trump administration did or didn't do on this front.

But, you know, obviously there were internal pressures. You know, the president was often at odds with his own Pentagon and his own State Department leadership on a number of different questions. Certainly, you know, that's well in evidence, you know, but that was an issue where he had promised the American people, you know, the same thing that he was going to wind down our presence in Afghanistan. Were there any things I know that there was a kind of slapdash attempt to

at the end of his term, were there any things that could have been done, particularly in his, you know, last year in office or even earlier that could have done a better job of setting the stage for leaving, whether that was getting equipment out or, you know, in, in particular, I'm thinking getting out a lot of the people who we thought would be targeted once there were no longer, you know, the American presence that had been there for so long.

Yeah. Well, look, you know, the Trump administration struck that deal with the Taliban, the Doha agreement in early 2020. And we were very clear in the book that this was a flawed agreement. I mean, this was not a particularly good deal at all, but it did have some conditions to it. Most

I think dramatic is the fact that the Taliban's alliance with Al Qaeda remained unbroken despite claims from the Taliban. The Taliban was never going to break its alliance with Al Qaeda and they made that very clear. And so the Doha agreement itself was kind of a dead letter from the second that it was signed because the Taliban was never going to follow through on any of its promises in the agreement.

In terms of things that we could have done better, well, I think that treating the Doha Agreement as something that we had to follow was a mistake. And Biden now pointing to the Doha Agreement as why he had to do what he did, I think is ridiculous because again, the Taliban wasn't following any of it. If we wanted to get people out more quickly,

the SIV process, the process for which getting these Afghan allies, especially these interpreters and these other people that served alongside us for two decades, the SIV process was basically broken from the start for many, many, many years. And the Trump administration knew that it was broken and the Biden administration knew that it was broken. And if you're going to decide to truly withdraw from Afghanistan,

One of the things that you have to do is you have to, I mean, of course, if you want to fulfill the promises that you've made to your allies and show that you're a good ally, one of the things you have to do is fix that process before...

you let the Taliban take over the country. And the Biden administration never fixed that SIV process. The SIV process remained broken when Biden made his announcement. There was no plan about what to do about those Afghan allies. And as a result,

tens of thousands of them were left behind. And so there were all of these things that if you wanted to leave Afghanistan, which I think a very good argument can be made for leaving, but if you wanted to leave, there were a number of things that you needed to do first that the U.S. just never did. The Biden administration never did. And you could just see that play out. I want in particular to highlight something in your book that just

is astounding to me, which is the application of COVID rules on our, our Marines in Afghanistan from the state department, including, you know, just, you know,

this ludicrous demands about wearing, wearing masks whenever leaving their barracks. Tell us what rules were in place in the, in the run-up and how much kind of time was wasted on something like COVID versus preparing for, for exiting Afghanistan. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, Afghanistan is falling apart in 2021, but as we all remember 2021, the Biden administration, this, this,

over obsession with COVID and COVID cases. And so this didn't just affect us here in the United States, but it affected our foreign operations as well. And so there were Marines who were key to these response units, especially in the lead up and during the evacuation in August 2021. There were Marines that were not allowed to deploy to Afghanistan because

because they hadn't received the coronavirus vaccine. There were mask rules about having to wear masks. And this, of course, gets in the way of being able to communicate, being able to train properly. The U.S. embassy in Kabul shut down for a substantial period of time, essentially shut down a lot of their operations in 2021, including their operations related to

interviewing and processing Afghan allies and SIVs to get them out of the country. They did that.

as the Taliban is on the march and we're worried about COVID cases. So this hurt our Marines. This hurt our response. This hurt our ability to get Afghan allies out. And it's just, it's crazy to think. Why won't the Taliban cooperate with lockdown and just work from home? I mean, no. Exactly, exactly right. I mean, it's crazy to think about, but like COVID-19 was still, it was so dominant that

And I don't want to downplay that COVID was bad, but COVID was so dominant that it was even dominating our operations in a place like Afghanistan, where you have ISIS-K running around and the Taliban on the march and 20 years of war about to end in disaster. And we're worried about COVID cases. I mean, it's complete insanity. The...

To return to sort of your list of run-up, let's talk about the plan to the degree that it existed about securing the airfield using the actual kind of logistics of what was planned, what went into that, and why we chose what we did and why we didn't choose some of the other options that were on the table. Yeah. Well,

For a very long time in Afghanistan, everybody knew that if you had to do an evacuation, you should do it through Bagram Air Base and not through that tiny airport in the middle of Kabul. And this was known during the Obama administration. In 2021, the State Department came to visit Bagram and the command sergeant major at Bagram

told the State Department doing an evacuation through Kabul airport rather than through Bagram would be insane. And the Biden administration just didn't care. And they pressed forward with closing Bagram. And here's why closing Bagram was such a disaster. And there's a lot of reasons for it. If we had chose to do an evacuation through Bagram,

It would have been much more safely and orderly. You never would have seen that chaos and the devastation that you saw at the airport. Maintaining Bagram and especially maintaining some of our air assets there could have meant keeping the Taliban at bay, stopping them from taking Kabul as well, which would have made this evacuation incredibly easier as well.

Obviously, Bagram is a very strategic air base and giving it up was insane. Also, if you care about the U.S. ability to project our power in Asia generally and to maintain surveillance on a country like China. But just think about this. The Abbey Gate attack that killed 13 Americans and 200 Afghan allies, that suicide bomber was.

was in prison at Bagram, at a prison called Parwan Prison. He was in prison at Bagram in July 2021 when the U.S. abandoned Bagram. He was still in prison until August 15th when the Taliban took over Bagram. And the first thing that the Taliban did was open the doors to that prison, knowing full well that they were freeing thousands of ISIS-K terrorists, as well as dozens of members of Al Qaeda and their fellow Taliban fighters. And

Among those ISIS-K fighters, many of whom went out to attempt to attack Kabul airport and hit the Americans, one of them was, his name is Abdulrahman Al-Aghari, and he was freed from Bagram by the Taliban and killed those 13 Americans. And so keeping Bagram would have been smart strategically. It would have been smart for an evacuation. But also just the simple fact is that if we had held Bagram,

that suicide bomber and all of those other members of ISIS-K, they would have been sitting behind bars rather than threatening and ultimately killing Americans. In terms of the day that that attack played out, you obviously have done enormous work here to tell that story. What are some of the key points that you would draw listeners to as kind of points where things could have happened?

been prepared for, could have been handled better. And instead, things went worse, you know, ultimately leading to this horrific and terrible murderous disaster. Yeah. Well, part of the problem here was that there was enormous pressure that the Biden administration was putting on everybody at the gates to get as many people in and evacuated as possible, because the Biden administration knew full well that they were not going to be able to get

get all Americans out and that they were certainly not going to be able to get all of our Afghan allies out. But they needed then to be able to point to this at least as a historically large number of people. And so that was sort of part of the problem, the massive pressure to get numbers of people out and to get bodies out rather than a focus on making sure we get all Americans out and all of our Afghan allies out.

That was part of the problem. The other major problem that we were facing here was that because of the position that the Biden administration had put us in,

The U.S. was relying on the Taliban to provide security at Kabul airport because all that we controlled was that airport. And every single everything else in Kabul and everything else in Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban. So the Taliban is turning Americans away, sometimes beating Americans, sometimes turning your Afghan allies away, sometimes killing Afghans, executing Afghans in full view.

So this is like the strategic position that we're put in is there's massive pressure to get the numbers, the numbers up. We're having to deal with the Taliban, who's obviously our enemy. And then you have ISIS-K threatening the airport. And there is a ton of intelligence for days and days and days ahead of the Abugate attack that ISIS-K was targeting the airport and was going to carry out an attack.

We on Earth, during our investigation, sworn testimony that was given to the Pentagon that U.S. intelligence knew that ISIS-K was staging at a hotel about a mile and a half away from Kabul airport and that the U.S. asked the Taliban to raid that location, but that the Taliban never did. We also uncovered Pentagon testimony.

where U.S. officers were asking to conduct a strike against an ISIS-K location in Afghanistan before the Abbey Gate attack, but that that request to hit ISIS-K before the Abbey Gate bombing was declined, at least in part due to a negative response from the Taliban. And then, of course, you had Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews testify that he was a Marine sniper and he testified he had received information

detailed warnings about the impending attack on August 26th and a detailed description of the bomber, but was not given permission from his commanding officer to take the shot when he and his sniper team and the Army PSYOPs team believed that they had identified the suicide bomber in the crowd. And so you look at all of those factors combined and you just kind of shake your head because it's very clear that if better decisions had been made,

This attack at Abbey Gate was very likely preventable. Who are the key figures in the Biden administration who were making these decisions and how many of them are still in senior positions today? It's a it's an excellent question because there has been no accountability. There have been no one's been fired. No one has resigned.

Look, I think a lot of questions get raised about President Biden's age, his fitness, whether he is in control of everything at the White House. And I sometimes think those questions are completely legitimate. But when it came to Afghanistan, this was Biden top to bottom. I mean, this was his decision. This is what he wanted. And this is this is this is these were his orders in terms of the biggest players, you

Secretary Antony Blinken did quite a terrible job with this. The State Department did not plan to get those Americans and Afghan allies out. And you saw that throughout 2021, and you certainly saw it during the evacuation in August 2021 when

outside groups, private groups, veteran-led groups had to step in and try to fill the void to get some of these Americans and Afghan allies out because the State Department was completely overwhelmed and had no ability to get the job done. So Blinken shares a lot of the blame here. Jake Sullivan was a very key decision maker throughout all of this as well. And the interagency

That's sort of the buzzword. But the interagency that Jake Sullivan plays a major role in completely failed to plan for this. And you can see some heavily redacted National Security Council meeting minutes, even from the eve of the Taliban takeover in Kabul, August 14th. And you can see the interagency still trying to decide the most basic things, things that

Things that should have been decided months and months and months ahead of time. And they're trying to cobble something together, throw something together as the Taliban is knocking on the door of Afghanistan's capital. And so those are sort of the main players there that I think deserve the brunt of the blame. Let me ask a question that's a little bit of a devil's advocate position. One of the things that we see time and again when the military or the State Department doesn't want to do something.

and believes that the president, whoever is in charge, is making a bad decision, is that they'll basically drag their feet on handling the logistical side of getting it done. They'll say, this is impossible. And then they'll sort of come up with various excuses for why it's going to take so much longer or we're not going to be able to do the thing that you want us to do.

And we see this across government, but we particularly see it when it comes to that type of relationship between the military and the state side of things and the White House. That's something that actually Joe Biden has complained about in the past when he was vice president and he's done it. He's made comments about it in some interviews. Barack Obama complained about it. Trump complained about it to a degree, though he was always blaming it more on the personalities. He never really got that level of sophistication to understand like

that these people are dragging their feet because they don't want to do the thing that I want them to do. Maybe it's different now. But from my perspective, I always sort of thought Biden is doing this in a way that sort of says, well, if you're not going to do it the right way, you're still going to do it. You're just going to do it badly. And that that was such a – that's a decision that –

It's one thing when you're talking about launching the Obamacare website, which people forget how much of a disaster that was. But that's another example of sort of the bureaucrats didn't want to get this done and they didn't want to meet the deadlines. And so it launches and it launches horribly.

It's another thing when there's life and death issues in the immediate. One of the things that I hate so much about this in terms of accountability is –

I don't want the blame to only fall on Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan because there were a lot of people, it seems like to me on the Pentagon side of things who had dragged their feet under Trump and basically we're taking the same kind of attitude again. Like we don't think we want to do this thing. And so we're not really going to be prepared to,

That's been my own suspicion, but it's one that since I'm not reporting, I've never reported about this story. You know, I've, I've, uh, never, you know, sort of dug into it the way that you have.

Is it a suspicion that you found borne out in what you learned during the course of reporting this book? It's a great question. The dynamics here are interesting. So the military was the group that was most vociferously opposed to what President Biden was ordering. Basically, he wanted to just rapidly pull all U.S. troops and just be done with it. And the military was...

the strongest opponent of that. But once Biden gave the order, the military executed that order in rapid fashion, actually, because he gave his order on April 14th, and every existing U.S. base that was still under U.S. control was closed, ending with Bagram by July 1st, 2021. So

The military opposed this decision, but once the decision was made, they actually executed it in rapid fashion. And by the way, in so doing, the military never really even attempted to do things like

well, we've built the entire Afghan military around U.S. intelligence and contractor and military support, and now we're pulling all of those things. How do we keep the Afghan military on the field to at least keep the Taliban at bay for a while? The military didn't try to do that. They said, well, our orders are to leave. And so we are gone. And we were gone. And you saw that impact the

the Afghan military immediately because it was a shaky military. And by the way, the Biden administration lied about its size and strength repeatedly throughout 2021, trying to claim that this was a 300,000 strong Afghan military, which it was not. But, you know, so that's how the military acted. Now, the

Biden had a much stronger ally in somebody like Antony Blinken in doing this. Now, he kind of equivocated for a while once he heard from NATO because NATO was telling Blinken, like, if you do this, it will end in disaster. We don't want to do this. But Blinken eventually got on board with what Biden wanted to do. You would think that Blinken's, Biden's very close ally, you would think that he would try to

execute this properly, but that didn't bear out at all. And you just saw how the State Department was completely overwhelmed. I mean, they just did not have a plan to deal with this. So the dynamics there were interesting because you actually saw the military execute very rapidly. And I think that swift retrograde really had an impact on the Afghan fighting force. Whereas the State Department, which I think was

more aligned with what Biden wanted to do. The State Department was just in total denial about the reality on the ground, and they just were not planning for what a Taliban takeover would look like. The after action elements of this have obviously become more known to the American people over the past year or so, you know, particularly, you

the statements from the families of those lost about their interactions with the president. When you had this suicide bombing, you had this disaster, what were the immediate ripple effects policy-wise in terms of the reaction of the White House, the reaction of those involved in the decisions that led up to this point? Was it just kind of

Because at least paying attention to the DC conversation, I don't think that people in Washington understood that.

how America would receive this, uh, to the degree that they, uh, that it, that it did. I think that a lot of them were sort of feeling like, well, it was going to be disastrous. However, we did it. Uh, and you know, as much as, as you know, it's, it's sad that it was inevitable that something like this was going to happen. I don't believe that. Um, I, you know, I, I think that that's something that absolutely could have been avoided. Uh, certainly with the loss of American life. Um,

You know, what was sort of the immediate ripple effect in the aftermath? Yeah. Well, look, I think that the Abbey Gate attack...

had an immediate effect of, I think it was, it directly led to that botched airstrike in Kabul that killed those Afghan civilians because there was such a fear of a follow-on attack that, you know, there was a lot of pressure to conduct a strike. And, you know, this is kind of what we raised in the book is why weren't we hitting ISIS-K in

before the Abbey Gate attack rather than after, because it's much better to prevent something than to try to scramble to stop it from happening again or to scramble to try to get revenge. Look, I mean, President Biden's response to the bombing was...

I've talked to a lot of the Gold Star families, and a lot of them are pretty upset with how he responded. Obviously, he infamously kept checking his watch at Dover Air Base during the dignified transfer ceremony, and when he met with a bunch of the families in private...

All their family stories are very similar that he didn't really seem to know their child's name. And he wanted to say, well, I know what you're going through because, you know, of my son, Bo. And like, yeah.

president biden's son beau dying of brain cancer in 2015 of course is a tragedy but he he didn't die in i'm actually not not not not not to downplay it yeah but but when we say tragedy you know people die of cancer every day yes uh beau beau had quite a life you know and you know up to the point of you know he was not the kind of young man and so is it sad

Yes. You know, is it you know, Joe Biden has obviously had to deal with with tragedy like, you know, the infamous, you know, car accident, everything like that in his life. But Bo lived a full life, you know, and it's also none of these guys got to live full lives. And it's for him to sort of come in and say the things that he said to these families. You know, I think it just laid bare that this this kind of public impression of him as being the empathizer in chief is.

had run its course. If he ever really was that guy, you know, and we can debate whether he was or not, he certainly is not that guy anymore and he's not been that guy as president. And that's another reason why I think it was such a shock to the system where people who had voted for him, you know, as recently as, you know, nine, ten months earlier, sort of were like, wait a minute, I did not think I was voting for this. And

It just anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Please, please continue. But it just I mean, we can't underestimate how much of a jolt that was when those stories started to come out. It was a jolt because keep in mind that as President Biden is trying to make this bombing somehow about himself, a lot of these families were

blaming President Biden for the bombing because of everything that we've talked about, you know, in the past few minutes. I mean, that

A series of terrible decisions made by President Biden put their kids in a position where we're relying on the Taliban to provide security. The Taliban that had just freed thousands of ISIS-K prisoners from Bagram, which we had abandoned. And one of those ISIS-K prisoners gets loose and kills 13 Americans. And so, yeah, I mean, him trying to make the tragedy about himself when he bore responsibility for the tragedy.

really hit people the wrong way. And yeah, I mean, it's not empathy. That's not empathy. It's self-centeredness and it's deflection. And he's never taken responsibility, true responsibility for any of the events in 2021 that

And he especially has not taken responsibility for that bombing. Have any of these families that you spoke to had any contact from the White House or from the president?

since the days when they were having those interactions with him? In other words, has there been any attempt to kind of make up for what happened? I believe that at least one of the family members has met with President Biden another time. That might be a story for them to tell. But for the most part, no interaction with the president since then. And

Look, some of the things that the families have said that they're upset about, I mean, President Biden has never in public said the names of the 13 service members out loud before. He just hasn't done it. People thought maybe he would do it at the State of the Union after this. Maybe he would do it at the

Memorial Day after this. He never has. And, you know, there's a lot of, I think, questions that a lot of people have about how this attack was allowed to happen. The Biden administration also refuses to

say the name of the bomber who killed these 13 Americans as well. His name is Abdul Rahman al-Agri, and he was the ISIS-K terrorist freed by the Taliban out of Bagram. And so, yeah, I mean, the biggest problem I think that they have outside of the lack of answers is what we talked about a little bit earlier, the lack of accountability of any kind. I mean, perhaps the only accountability that there's been is Biden taking that hit in his approval rating. But

Nobody's been fired. No one's been resigned. You know, nothing has actually happened to anyone who are responsible for all of these terrible decisions. We saw the we saw the follow on hearings about Benghazi, you know, play out on Capitol Hill. And to me, you know, those hearings were worthwhile and good because there were so many bad decisions made that led up to that disaster.

But Benghazi was a pretty quickly unfolding disaster. It was not something where you had this kind of long lead time on it to figure out what was going on and to prepare for it in the way that Afghanistan's departure is. Don't we deserve to have just a full-on inquiry into this that unveils a lot of the things that

We deserve to know about, you know, those redacted documents that you're talking about, about the internal discussions that were happening, who was participating in them, who made the wrong decisions. Because if we don't have that, a lot of these people, not only will they keep their careers going, but they'll be right back in that job again the next time, you know, if certainly if Joe Biden's reelected, but the next time the Democrats are in power again. And we don't want that to happen with someone who,

made such an unholy botch of the situation. Yeah. I mean, look, I completely agree with you. And I recently was hired by the house foreign affairs committee to help lead the Afghanistan investigation, withdrawal investigation that they're carrying out. And I'll just disclaimer, I'm just talking in my personal capacity here as the book author, not as like a committee spokesman or anything, but you know, the, the committee, uh,

The testimony from Tyler Vargas Andrews about having the likely suicide bomber in his sights, that was testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And later this month, August 29th, the committee is...

We're doing a roundtable with the Gold Star families, actually, here on Capitol Hill that I highly encourage everybody to check out. The dissent cable that was signed by dozens of members of the embassy Kabul in July 2021, trying to tell the State Department that the Taliban is taking over this country and we are not prepared for it.

That dissent cable was forced out and forced to be handed over to Congress by the committee. So all of this is to say, I think that the

that Republicans in Congress are serious about investigating this. I wouldn't have taken the job if I didn't think that they were serious. And but a lot needs to be answered for. And there's been no accountability. And so just for me personally, taking the job, that is that is the big goal for me.

Well, I wish you luck. Um, I know that, you know, with whenever you're dealing with one of these things, the state and the Pentagon are, are places that are very good at playing, uh, Lucy with the football. And, uh, and you know, it's very, you have to work very hard to, to drill down and actually get answers on these things. It takes time. It takes effort, you know, um,

People know, you know, sort of the folks who are good at doing it are really some of the best and hardest working staffers. And so I'm sure that you've got a lot, a long task list ahead of you. I want to thank you, Jerry, for taking the time to join me and to talk about this book and this topic. Just one last thing for people who want to do anything to support the

the families of those Americans who died in this assault. Is there one place you would direct them to or any anything in particular you would direct them to in order for them to express that support?

It's such a great question. A bunch of the Gold Star families each have sort of their individual charitable efforts and foundations. So I wouldn't want to single any one out in particular. But if you look up the different family members, you will see that there are a bunch of good organizations that have been started by the family members. So I encourage everyone to check it out.

check out what the Gold Star families are doing. And if you're interested in helping support the other U.S. service members and Marines who served during the evacuation because they went through some stuff, the

the things that they had to see and deal with. There's a very good organization called Operation Allies Refuge that's doing a lot of Operation Allies Refuge Foundation that's doing a lot of good work there as well. So I just encourage everybody to check all those different groups out because there's a lot of good work being done by the Gold Star families and by some of the veterans of the Afghanistan evacuation. Jerry, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today.

More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. I do want to give you a little bit of reflection, I think, on this particular moment of a real series of strife within the labor forces in America, particularly, obviously, in the realm of Hollywood.

We've had some conversation about that when it comes to the writer's strike and everything else that's going on there. But one of the things that I think is so interesting about this strike happening at this moment is how all of these different entities are kind of clawing over a shrinking pie. We've seen kind of the end of the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We've seen a shift in terms of legacy TV. A lot of people feel like we're past the point

of peak TV, a golden age that, you know, whether you want to say it ended with the end of Succession or you want to say it ended with the end of Better Call Saul, it's something that I think is indicative of a shift that is happening where people are no longer really appreciating, you know, how

how much TV and particularly these big prominent shows have been watched by fewer and fewer people. The great cord cutting that has led us to this point in terms of the different streaming services where people are siloed is really unprecedented in terms of taking the shared media that Americans used to have together

and turning it into media that is not shared or viewed by all that many people at all. One of the points that Chuck Klosterman makes in his book about the 90s is that virtually every episode of Seinfeld was watched by more people than saw the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. And that, to me, puts in perspective how much we used to have a shared, common pop culture where people really did come together around different TV shows and the like to a degree that now...

They really only come together around essentially sports. Live sports is the most dominant thing on TV, right?

It doesn't look to be changing anytime soon, and it's one of the reasons why everybody's trying to get into that business. One of the things that I think is going to be interesting to see coming out of this strike is that the last strike laid the path toward a real resurgence of reality TV, something that was both real reality, quote-unquote, but scripted reality as well. And we'll see whether that's the kind of turn that has made it once again

in an aftermath of this strike where there's going to be a lot of movies delayed, a lot of TV shows delayed, a lot of people, frankly, who are going to be coming back to work on things where perhaps there's been too long of a window between one season of a show and the next.

And that's something that I think is going to allow for the growth of other and innovative new approaches to content. We don't necessarily have the kind of shared experience anymore when it comes to these streaming services, but we did just get to see what happens when you do have a shared element of content when it came to the Barbie movie and the Oppenheimer movie, something that really drove a lot of ticket sales, certainly helped Oppenheimer in terms of driving a lot of people to see it who might not have otherwise.

And of course, Barbie is now set to become the biggest Warner Brothers movie ever made, which is pretty astounding considering the long history of their studio. So we'll see where things go from here. But frankly, I think that the sad part of this is

The lesson studios may take away from this is not that you need to have some kind of well-written, biting social commentary in the way that Greta Gerwig approached things with Barbie, but instead that they just need to double down on nostalgia and toys as being the origin point for their next level of intellectual property.

And so before we get to find out what they're going to do or how they're going to possibly make a Boggle movie, I think that hopefully we'll find some new avenues for intellectual property that perhaps...

is off the beaten path and maybe has lessons other than, you know, just buy more content, consume more content, buy more toys associated with said content and the like. Maybe they can actually look at the success of something like Sound of Freedom and start making movies that appeal to a different audience to maybe then maybe the ones that they typically appeal to when they go down the woke path toward content creation. But here's hoping.

I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We'll be back soon with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

Hey, it's Clay Travis. Join me for Outkick the show as we dive deep into a mix of topics. New episodes available Monday to Friday on your favorite podcast platform and watch directly on outkick.com forward slash watch.