Name: Author Jack Carr on How the Afghanistan Withdrawal Should've Been Handled
Uploaded: 2022-05-18T17:27:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Jack Carr on How the Afghanistan Withdrawal Should've Been Handled' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-05-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Jack Carr on How the Afghanistan Withdrawal Should've Been Handled' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-05-18. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience. You know I've had conversations with people on this
podcast that were military people, high-level people that were involved in
this and they said there's nothing about that extraction that was right. No and
no
one held accountable. Once again goes back to that accountability piece which
what confidence does that give you as the taxpayer that we're going to do
something right in in the next theater of war. Not very much confidence there.
We
have proven that we are unable to take the lessons of the past and apply them
to the future in a way that is is meaningful. But really it's the
responsibility of those leaders to do that for that E1, E2, E3, that lower
enlisted person who's gonna be standing the gate guard, who's gonna be going
out
there into these streets or out there into the mountains and and taking fire
and
dealing with a car that's coming up that looks like oh maybe is it bad
suspension
or is there a family in there or is it packed with explosives. Right. And they're
18 years old and they're out there looking at this thing and have to make a
decision and then it pulls up and it detonates or they shoot and guess what it's
full of a family. Like these things are so difficult. Yeah. And they have to
live with
that for the rest of their lives and they're put in that position by senior
level leaders who should have known better on a few things. It's specifically
to
Iraq disbanding the Iraqi army. Okay. So now you have this entirely trained up
military that's essentially now an insurgency. Okay. We have that de-bathification.
So
anyone who had any job in Iraq was a bathist. So the person that emptied the
garbage, the people that kept the lights on, now de-bathification, those people
don't have jobs. So now we're fighting an insurgency and we're figuring out how
to
get the trash picked up, how to keep the power on. We're building up an
entirely new
government. So and those lessons and those senior level leaders, they are
responsible for making those decisions just like we would be at the tactical
level and they made the wrong decision there. And that one, those two things
right there, looking back at those two things, like, I don't know, it's, it's
almost unforgivable that they would make those decisions and not correct it
immediately. Now we created that insurgency because of those two, two
decisions. The hindsight is always 20, 20, but we're looking back on the
Afghanistan situation. What is the consensus of what would have been the
correct approach? So we essentially, it's not lost on many people that we
essentially spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.
And well armed.
And well armed.
Yeah, with our stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now why did they do that? Why did they leave behind all of our shit?
I don't know. I mean, I know when we left Iraq, there were, I was at a lower
level,
tactical level. So you just kind of hear things. I don't know how true it is,
but
how much it costs to bring certain things back rather than leave it there. Like
the
gyms that went up all over the place. So there's all these gyms all over Iraq
and
you've seen the videos on YouTube of the Iraqis trying to work out. They're
pretty funny. I
think there's quite a few out there. But you know, rather than pack all that up
and
take it home, just leave it. And-
Well, the gyms are the least concerned.
I know I'd use that as the most basic level, but then you apply that to how
much does it
take to get this helicopter back and that helicopter back and this and that.
And hey,
did we think that we were going to turn those over to the Afghans and leave
those with them?
And why didn't we blow them up?
Well, I think we thought they were going to remain in place as the army that we
trained
up for the last 20 years.
But that- but nobody on the side of the people that were over there believed
that was possible.
They thought that everyone was going to fold the moment the United States left.
Well, you didn't even have to think that. You could see it. You can see the
provinces
falling from January, February, March, April, May, June, July into August. I
mean, you could watch it.
If you put it on the screen and show the provinces that fall, I mean, yeah, you
don't have to be Nostradamus
to figure out that, hey, this isn't looking so good and everything is converging
here.
And you could extrapolate that, oh, probably every province is going to fall.
But once again-
So what should they have done?
In that particular situation?
Yes.
So you have a couple options.
One being, hey, maybe you could leave a small force at Bagram perhaps to try to
keep this military,
keep this intelligence service, keep this government running, maybe after 20
years.
I don't know how long you can sustain that, but you could have done that.
And then if things aren't working out, they're the last people to leave.
So that's one.
So you could have done that.
Or you get everyone out and leave Bagram and it ends up being the same thing.
You see, watch the whole government fall, the leader left, of course.
But now you're not leaving from a tactically disadvantageous position.
So you had essentially those two options to draw down to something, a very
small force left
there, trying to keep that government going, trying to keep that military going,
trying to
keep that intelligence service going.
And then you could see how that works out or get everybody out in a way that
makes sense.
What would be a way that makes sense?
How do you get everybody out in a way that makes sense?
So Bagram, there's a lot of standoff distance at Bagram Airfield.
You can be there, you can look out, you can see people coming from a long way
off.
We control that whole area.
You control the airfield.
It's not that chaos that we saw people hanging on the side of these planes as
they're taking off.
You control that thing rather than the way we left at the airfield and
essentially in town.
So, yeah, I don't know why we did that.
I don't know why we did that.