Peter Doocy Takes It to Kirby on Zawahiri and Afghanistan
BUCK: Peter Doocy over at Fox News. It’s such a great job to be the person in the White House press corps who’s actually doing press stuff like asking questions to get answers that the regime does not necessarily want to give or very much wants to avoid. National Security Council Spokesman Kirby, who you’ve been hearing a lot from recently… This is an exchange. You gotta hear this because the Biden administration is increasingly forced to push people to thinking about this in a way that is not rooted in objective fact, truth, and reality.
Because, if people do think about it in that way, they will realize what a failure the Biden administration has been so far, what an abject failure Democrats themselves were until they got really desperate, and they were all suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, knew that Joe Biden was too old and also not competent for the role. And so Afghanistan and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, how it was conducted was something that people just can’t… You can’t unsee it.
You can’t unsee the planes taking off from Kabul airport with people grabbing onto the fuselage. You can’t unsee those first reports of — what was it — over a dozen U.S. servicemembers killed in a suicide bombing at the airport as we were rushing for the exits. I believe it was 13 were killed, and here’s Peter Doocy just asking about the reality of Afghanistan. I know they wanted to take a victory lap on Zawahiri yesterday after he was sliced by a Ninja missile on Saturday.
And it is a good thing, just like the bin Laden justice delivered was a good thing. But it doesn’t mean that we are winning in Afghanistan. This is a very… It is possible to take a high-level enemy combatant off the “battlefield” or whatever we’re gonna call Afghanistan these days and not actually be winning on the battlefield overall, and we are certainly not winning in Afghanistan right now.
And that’s the part of this. The Biden administration, they want to do the — they want to take the victory lap and not have everyone take a look at, “Well, what are they taking a lap around? Because it looks like a country that’s run by the Taliban with the Haqqani Network in charge,” and they’re designated terrorists and, by the way, have very close ties to Al-Qaeda. Here’s how that went with Doocy.
DOOCY: “You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI Most Wanted list. What did you think was going to happen?”
KIRBY: “I take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups.”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 2, 2022
BUCK: No, we bailed, and a lot of you are gonna think and a lot of you would agree that getting out was the right move. But how we bail, on what timeline, with what left behind, with what regime in place, with what elected government? That all matters too. But they’re just not accepting reality. The Biden administration said, “We’re just getting out.” They did it on a timeline that Biden just decided upon, pulling everything out, handed it over to the Taliban. That is what happened.
They can try to say a million different ways about, “Oh, you know, it’s a sovereign, independent country.” Whatever. The Taliban is in charge of Afghanistan. It is now a terror sanctuary. We just have not seen external plotting come to horrific fruition anywhere in the world yet from Afghanistan. But it is just a matter of time. I don’t think we’re going back in the way that we’ve gone in the past. I don’t think that we’re gonna be, you know, launching a massive…
Remember, initially it wasn’t a full-scale invasion. CIA led special operations into Afghanistan right after 9/11, and that first an effective strategy with the Northern Alliance and Taliban were just heading for the hills as fast as they could, in the Kush mountains. Getting out of there as fast as they could. And then the big military showed up and the Pentagon took over the decision-making and it became a nation-building exercise that lasted 20 years and that failed.
CBS Senior Investigative Correspondent @CBS_Herridge says that recently killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was “so emboldened” by the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan last year that he was living “just a stone’s throw from the former U.S. embassy” in Kabul. pic.twitter.com/3IrgFkxXAF
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 2, 2022
The war in the beginning against the Taliban was won. It was won with minimal U.S. footprint, loss of life, and expenditure of treasure. And then it turned into something else. And we should all be honest about what happened there. This administration will not be honest about it because it doesn’t look good for them. Doesn’t look good for them. You’re noticing a pattern too. Obama pulls out of Iraq in such a way ’cause they say, “Oh, it was a status-of-forces agreement.
“We couldn’t figure it out.” They could. They didn’t want to. They just wanted to go. Pull all the plugs, get out of there, and then the Islamic State takes over, has a blitzkrieg through Mosul, and you have the largest terror sanctuary in the world operating under the Obama administration. Biden comes in, just pull out all the stops, get out of there. “Don’t worry what’s happening after we leave. Just go! Just go!” Now we have another terror sanctuary. It’s just a question of what their next moves will be and what we will do in response.
