Name: Tim Kennedy on Witnessing the Fall of Afghanistan
Uploaded: 2022-06-16T17:05:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tim Kennedy on Witnessing the Fall of Afghanistan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tim Kennedy on Witnessing the Fall of Afghanistan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-16. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- So since we've talked last on the podcast,
you have been, well, let's go all the way back
to Afghanistan 'cause you were there.
- Yep.
- Oh God, indeed.
You were there during the worst of it
when the pullout was happening.
- Yep.
So yeah, with 20 something deployments overseas,
I've never seen anything like Afghanistan
during the fall of Afghanistan.
I don't know who was at a strategic level,
not anticipating that the Taliban,
every time that we moved an inch on the ground,
that the Taliban would not move an inch on the ground.
So myself and all of my peers, all my colleagues,
fully forecasted what was gonna happen.
So as soon as we started collapsing that ground,
there was no doubt in any of our minds that
every inch of ground that we gave up
was ground that the Taliban was going to take.
So when we gave up Kandahar and Bagram,
the two strategic military bases,
that means that we just gave up the rest of the country.
And we, having been at war there for 20 years,
and, you know, multiple trips over there,
we have lots of friends that deployed with us there.
You know, Afghans, the Afghans have a special operations unit
called the commandos.
We worked alongside them.
Our interpreters are obviously from Afghanistan.
So they live in Afghanistan, but they work for us.
These people have security clearances.
They love the idea of democracy and freedom.
They love the idea of a free, independent Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, they want their daughters to be educated.
And those ideals, that philosophy does not align with the Taliban.
So as Taliban start taking over Afghanistan,
our, my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends and asking me to go
contracting
companies saying, Hey, I'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy.
Um, but none of it was altruistic, you know, like none of it was, um, the right
call to action.
It was lots of people, yes, it was going to go and save life, but it was, it
was for money.
And, uh, and, and I was just waiting for, I don't know what I was waiting for.
I wasted two days trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here until
my phone rang.
I was in the middle of writing this, that book.
And I was with Nick Palmishano, who's my coauthor on this book.
He's sitting next to me.
We're, we're working.
My phone rings.
Chad Robichaux calls me and he was a Marine special operations guy that, um,
had multiple deployments there and he had a translator named Aziz and Aziz
worked specific,
specific to special missions units, like the tip of the spear type units.
And Aziz had already been told that they're coming to find him.
And Aziz was on the run with his family and they were very, very explicit about
what they're
going to do to his wife and his children in front of him before they kill him.
And, um, and then like Aziz's friends start being murdered.
And, uh, so Chad calls me and says, Hey man, I'm going to go get Aziz.
Can you help me?
And I said, yes, I'm on my way at the same moment.
Next to me, Nick is talking to a young woman named Sarah Verrado.
Sarah is this like powerhouse.
Um, she runs the independence fund, which is a vet, a military veteran
nonprofit that takes
care of severely wounded, uh, veterans and give them chairs like track
automatic track
chairs.
Her husband is one of the worst.
This is a weird title to hold, but he is one of the worst wounded veterans,
veterans from
the Afghan war.
That's her husband.
And she's the provider and care and sole care provider.
I don't know what the right word is.
She takes care of him.
And, uh, he was wounded in Afghanistan.
So her heart is like just, but she has lots of friends in the government.
So in this moment, we have the right kind of two people.
I have a good mission.
I know what I'm going to do.
It's morally right.
And somebody has to do it or, or Aziz and my, my friend's friend is going to be
murdered.
And I have a method.
Sarah can get us routes and approval from the government.
So the four of us started this NGO called save our allies.
And that literally that phone call was the beginning of what is now, you know,
what was the most
successful NGO movement, a non-government organization, a nonprofit.
So save our allies like that call initiated it.
Nick and I were on a plane into the middle East.
The next day, we flew into the UAE.
The crown prince was like the most generous host that you could imagine.
Uh, one of our friends used to ride motorcycles with the crown prince.
And he said, I will give you a C-17 plane.
If you can land it, fill it up with a perfect manifest of people and get it out,
I'll give
you another plane.
And that was the, that was the initial promise.
And 10 days later, we moved 12,000 people out of Afghanistan.
11% of everybody that left the country during the evacuation, me and three of
my friends on the
ground and 12 of us total in the middle East moved.
Um, everybody remembers, you know, people hanging on to the landing gear of
aircraft and falling
to their death.
Like that, that was peak Afghanistan withdrawal.
And that is, uh, that is when we got there.
Yeah.
So when you say that it was like nothing you had seen in 20 years of being
deployed.
Yeah.
In what, in what way?
I mean, Taliban's going to Taliban.
So they are definitely doing their thing, but it was, it was the, the
desperation of the
people trying to find a way to live.
So at each of these gates, a Neo operation, it's a non combat, non combatant
evacuation operation.
It's a, it's a military operation.
If a Neo takes place, they keep calling it a Neo, but that's if the military
ran it.
And if the military ran it, you would see, you know, a special forces unit with
a big,
like the Ranger regiment or 82nd airborne that come in, that build this huge
exterior perimeter
that control the ground strategically.
Then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are
coming in and planes
are coming out and we're building manifests.
We're confirming that everybody that goes on the plane are the right people.
This was not a Neo.
This was run by the state department.
So instead of that, think a big strategic military operation, instead of think
the airport became
an embassy.
And like in the movies where you're running the embassy and if you get in, you
know, like
you're safe and then they'll get you out.
That's how they started treating H Kaya, the, um, the airport in Kabul as an
embassy.
So the military just secured the perimeter of the embassy, the airport, and
anybody that
got on the airport was able to get out, except the military wasn't allowed to
go outside of
the airport.
So all the people in the city of Kabul were stuck.
That's where we had to come in.
So we had to go out into Kabul and grab the people and then smuggle them past
the Taliban
to get them onto planes.
And to answer your question, the, that perimeter of the base where the gates,
there's tens of
thousands of people that were lining up here and they maybe walked a few days.
So by the time they get there, they're dehydrated.
They have nothing there.
There's no food.
There's no water.
The Taliban, if there's too many people, they'll just take a magazine and just
dump it into the
crowd to move them back or to like crowd control them.
They'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people.
The women, they would, they would float babies like you're at a baseball game
with a beach
ball.
They would float the baby, baby towards the gate and then hope in the hopes
that a Marine
or a soldier would reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety.
And when that didn't work, the moms would take the babies and they'd try to
throw them
over the walls.
Well, guess what's on either side of the wall?
Constantino wire.
There's fucking Constantino wire on both sides of this wall.
So these babies would land in the, in, in the wire and we're in the middle of
moving, you
know, hundreds of people at a time, like smuggling them past the Taliban and I'm
stepping over
a baby in water or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt
alive by the
Taliban.
You know, one of the teams as they're, they went out into Kabul and they, they,
they just
missed it by seconds.
They're going to go pick up this woman that was a journalist for, um, that, the
Afghan,
uh, one of the Afghan news organizations, but the Taliban got to her first,
they pull up
the Taliban, see these guys in the car, they drop, drop her on their hood of
the car and
they execute her on the car.
As they just look at the dudes in the car, there's nothing that they can do.
Just execute her.
This was every day.
So when I said a level of desperation, I've never seen before, this is, I mean,
this is
like no American, no, no American can imagine that type of desperation.
And that was everywhere you looked.
And how long were you there for while this was happening?
The, our ground team, there's myself and three other, um, like personnel
recovery experts.
Uh, we're there total for 10 days.
And did it dissipate someone did the, no, no, no, it just got more desperate.
So everybody that was watching on television, they saw.
Curated controlled, um, information is way worse on the ground.
So what looked like this assemblance of an assembly line of planes taking off
and planes coming in,
um, what that is inside a controlled environment, you know, that was in on the
base outside.
If you, if you know, if you, if you go a thousand meters outside of the wire,
it is just chaos,
anarchy, apocalyptic level madness, you know, like really, really, really total
Taliban, uh,
experience out there.
Man.
And so when you're leaving 10 days later, what, what are you, how are you
feeling?
One of our, one of our, one of the guys with us is codenamed sea spray.
He didn't eat in those 10 days.
He lost 20 something pounds in, in the 10 days that he was there.
And, um, you know, he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just cause
he didn't
have any enzymes left in his stomach to break, break anything down.
You know, when you're running out the wire to grab a family and come, come back
in, you
don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over, but you still
see it.
And that was, that's the thing that tortures my mind is I still saw it all, but
I didn't
have the time to address it emotionally.
Think about this dead body I'm stepping over because I'm really busy trying to
get to this
family.
And then we get to this family and I confirm we had to be really judicious in
how we confirmed
who the people were.
You know, if I bring, if I brought back one person that wasn't the right person
to bring
back, I would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission.
Um, if I bring back one radical terrorist, that's not escaping, but trying to
get to the
United States and everything would be for not.
So we had a really deliberate department of state, department of defense
approved manifest
that would go officially through the government.
They would submit all of their paperwork.
They would have, you know, digital versions of it.
So I would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to
meet me.
And then once I met up with them, they would have a far recognition signal.
That would be, uh, not to like give up the trade craft, but they'd have a way
to let me
know that that is the right person.
And that then would come face to face.
And then they'd have another thing like a secret word that they had to sneak
into a sentence.
And that's a near recognition signal.
And then they have to give me their documents and the documents have to be real.
And it has to be the right person.
And the same ones that were submitted.
So cool.
I got the right person.
So come on.
I got your family.
Why are these other 40 people with you?
They're like, oh, it's, it's like, it's my cousin.
And, you know, and her family.
And it's, um, you know, my brother and his family.
And it's like,
they got to stay like you're coming with me and they're staying.
Sorry, you can get in the car.
You can't, you have five seconds.
Then, uh, by that time, usually the Taliban have spotted us and it's a foot
race to make
it back into the wire before they catch us.
And what happens to the people that get left behind?
They're murdered or used.
You know, there's pilots and their doctors and their engineers, and they run
the sewage
system.
They run the electrical plant.
So they're trying to get out, but the Taliban want them to stay because all the
infrastructure
that's built there are operated by people that were friendly to the Americans.
So they want, like, if they want their power plant to work, they have to have
all the engineers
that ran it.
So they don't want them to leave.
They don't want the pilots to leave because their airport won't work.
They don't, they don't have anybody to run their air traffic control.
They don't have anybody to, you know, make sure the water purification system
works properly.
So they're trying to keep all of those people there, but all those people know
that they'll
then be slaves to the Taliban.
So they're trying to get out.
And that's, that's the, that's the tough catch 22 position that we're in.

Tim Kennedy on Witnessing the Fall of Afghanistan

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- So since we've talked last on the podcast,
you have been, well, let's go all the way back
to Afghanistan 'cause you were there.
- Yep.
- Oh God, indeed.
You were there during the worst of it
when the pullout was happening.
- Yep.
So yeah, with 20 something deployments overseas,
I've never seen anything like Afghanistan
during the fall of Afghanistan.
I don't know who was at a strategic level,
not anticipating that the Taliban,
every time that we moved an inch on the ground,
that the Taliban would not move an inch on the ground.
So myself and all of my peers, all my colleagues,
fully forecasted what was gonna happen.
So as soon as we started collapsing that ground,
there was no doubt in any of our minds that
every inch of ground that we gave up
was ground that the Taliban was going to take.
So when we gave up Kandahar and Bagram,
the two strategic military bases,
that means that we just gave up the rest of the country.
And we, having been at war there for 20 years,
and, you know, multiple trips over there,
we have lots of friends that deployed with us there.
You know, Afghans, the Afghans have a special operations unit
called the commandos.
We worked alongside them.
Our interpreters are obviously from Afghanistan.
So they live in Afghanistan, but they work for us.
These people have security clearances.
They love the idea of democracy and freedom.
They love the idea of a free, independent Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, they want their daughters to be educated.
And those ideals, that philosophy does not align with the Taliban.
So as Taliban start taking over Afghanistan,
our, my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends and asking me to go
contracting
companies saying, Hey, I'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy.
Um, but none of it was altruistic, you know, like none of it was, um, the right
call to action.
It was lots of people, yes, it was going to go and save life, but it was, it
was for money.
And, uh, and, and I was just waiting for, I don't know what I was waiting for.
I wasted two days trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here until
my phone rang.
I was in the middle of writing this, that book.
And I was with Nick Palmishano, who's my coauthor on this book.
He's sitting next to me.
We're, we're working.
My phone rings.
Chad Robichaux calls me and he was a Marine special operations guy that, um,
had multiple deployments there and he had a translator named Aziz and Aziz
worked specific,
specific to special missions units, like the tip of the spear type units.
And Aziz had already been told that they're coming to find him.
And Aziz was on the run with his family and they were very, very explicit about
what they're
going to do to his wife and his children in front of him before they kill him.
And, um, and then like Aziz's friends start being murdered.
And, uh, so Chad calls me and says, Hey man, I'm going to go get Aziz.
Can you help me?
And I said, yes, I'm on my way at the same moment.
Next to me, Nick is talking to a young woman named Sarah Verrado.
Sarah is this like powerhouse.
Um, she runs the independence fund, which is a vet, a military veteran
nonprofit that takes
care of severely wounded, uh, veterans and give them chairs like track
automatic track
chairs.
Her husband is one of the worst.
This is a weird title to hold, but he is one of the worst wounded veterans,
veterans from
the Afghan war.
That's her husband.
And she's the provider and care and sole care provider.
I don't know what the right word is.
She takes care of him.
And, uh, he was wounded in Afghanistan.
So her heart is like just, but she has lots of friends in the government.
So in this moment, we have the right kind of two people.
I have a good mission.
I know what I'm going to do.
It's morally right.
And somebody has to do it or, or Aziz and my, my friend's friend is going to be
murdered.
And I have a method.
Sarah can get us routes and approval from the government.
So the four of us started this NGO called save our allies.
And that literally that phone call was the beginning of what is now, you know,
what was the most
successful NGO movement, a non-government organization, a nonprofit.
So save our allies like that call initiated it.
Nick and I were on a plane into the middle East.
The next day, we flew into the UAE.
The crown prince was like the most generous host that you could imagine.
Uh, one of our friends used to ride motorcycles with the crown prince.
And he said, I will give you a C-17 plane.
If you can land it, fill it up with a perfect manifest of people and get it out,
I'll give
you another plane.
And that was the, that was the initial promise.
And 10 days later, we moved 12,000 people out of Afghanistan.
11% of everybody that left the country during the evacuation, me and three of
my friends on the
ground and 12 of us total in the middle East moved.
Um, everybody remembers, you know, people hanging on to the landing gear of
aircraft and falling
to their death.
Like that, that was peak Afghanistan withdrawal.
And that is, uh, that is when we got there.
Yeah.
So when you say that it was like nothing you had seen in 20 years of being
deployed.
Yeah.
In what, in what way?
I mean, Taliban's going to Taliban.
So they are definitely doing their thing, but it was, it was the, the
desperation of the
people trying to find a way to live.
So at each of these gates, a Neo operation, it's a non combat, non combatant
evacuation operation.
It's a, it's a military operation.
If a Neo takes place, they keep calling it a Neo, but that's if the military
ran it.
And if the military ran it, you would see, you know, a special forces unit with
a big,
like the Ranger regiment or 82nd airborne that come in, that build this huge
exterior perimeter
that control the ground strategically.
Then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are
coming in and planes
are coming out and we're building manifests.
We're confirming that everybody that goes on the plane are the right people.
This was not a Neo.
This was run by the state department.
So instead of that, think a big strategic military operation, instead of think
the airport became
an embassy.
And like in the movies where you're running the embassy and if you get in, you
know, like
you're safe and then they'll get you out.
That's how they started treating H Kaya, the, um, the airport in Kabul as an
embassy.
So the military just secured the perimeter of the embassy, the airport, and
anybody that
got on the airport was able to get out, except the military wasn't allowed to
go outside of
the airport.
So all the people in the city of Kabul were stuck.
That's where we had to come in.
So we had to go out into Kabul and grab the people and then smuggle them past
the Taliban
to get them onto planes.
And to answer your question, the, that perimeter of the base where the gates,
there's tens of
thousands of people that were lining up here and they maybe walked a few days.
So by the time they get there, they're dehydrated.
They have nothing there.
There's no food.
There's no water.
The Taliban, if there's too many people, they'll just take a magazine and just
dump it into the
crowd to move them back or to like crowd control them.
They'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people.
The women, they would, they would float babies like you're at a baseball game
with a beach
ball.
They would float the baby, baby towards the gate and then hope in the hopes
that a Marine
or a soldier would reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety.
And when that didn't work, the moms would take the babies and they'd try to
throw them
over the walls.
Well, guess what's on either side of the wall?
Constantino wire.
There's fucking Constantino wire on both sides of this wall.
So these babies would land in the, in, in the wire and we're in the middle of
moving, you
know, hundreds of people at a time, like smuggling them past the Taliban and I'm
stepping over
a baby in water or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt
alive by the
Taliban.
You know, one of the teams as they're, they went out into Kabul and they, they,
they just
missed it by seconds.
They're going to go pick up this woman that was a journalist for, um, that, the
Afghan,
uh, one of the Afghan news organizations, but the Taliban got to her first,
they pull up
the Taliban, see these guys in the car, they drop, drop her on their hood of
the car and
they execute her on the car.
As they just look at the dudes in the car, there's nothing that they can do.
Just execute her.
This was every day.
So when I said a level of desperation, I've never seen before, this is, I mean,
this is
like no American, no, no American can imagine that type of desperation.
And that was everywhere you looked.
And how long were you there for while this was happening?
The, our ground team, there's myself and three other, um, like personnel
recovery experts.
Uh, we're there total for 10 days.
And did it dissipate someone did the, no, no, no, it just got more desperate.
So everybody that was watching on television, they saw.
Curated controlled, um, information is way worse on the ground.
So what looked like this assemblance of an assembly line of planes taking off
and planes coming in,
um, what that is inside a controlled environment, you know, that was in on the
base outside.
If you, if you know, if you, if you go a thousand meters outside of the wire,
it is just chaos,
anarchy, apocalyptic level madness, you know, like really, really, really total
Taliban, uh,
experience out there.
Man.
And so when you're leaving 10 days later, what, what are you, how are you
feeling?
One of our, one of our, one of the guys with us is codenamed sea spray.
He didn't eat in those 10 days.
He lost 20 something pounds in, in the 10 days that he was there.
And, um, you know, he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just cause
he didn't
have any enzymes left in his stomach to break, break anything down.
You know, when you're running out the wire to grab a family and come, come back
in, you
don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over, but you still
see it.
And that was, that's the thing that tortures my mind is I still saw it all, but
I didn't
have the time to address it emotionally.
Think about this dead body I'm stepping over because I'm really busy trying to
get to this
family.
And then we get to this family and I confirm we had to be really judicious in
how we confirmed
who the people were.
You know, if I bring, if I brought back one person that wasn't the right person
to bring
back, I would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission.
Um, if I bring back one radical terrorist, that's not escaping, but trying to
get to the
United States and everything would be for not.
So we had a really deliberate department of state, department of defense
approved manifest
that would go officially through the government.
They would submit all of their paperwork.
They would have, you know, digital versions of it.
So I would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to
meet me.
And then once I met up with them, they would have a far recognition signal.
That would be, uh, not to like give up the trade craft, but they'd have a way
to let me
know that that is the right person.
And that then would come face to face.
And then they'd have another thing like a secret word that they had to sneak
into a sentence.
And that's a near recognition signal.
And then they have to give me their documents and the documents have to be real.
And it has to be the right person.
And the same ones that were submitted.
So cool.
I got the right person.
So come on.
I got your family.
Why are these other 40 people with you?
They're like, oh, it's, it's like, it's my cousin.
And, you know, and her family.
And it's, um, you know, my brother and his family.
And it's like,
they got to stay like you're coming with me and they're staying.
Sorry, you can get in the car.
You can't