OP is bringing up a minor thing (Ben Affleck and Sam Harris minor dispute) that happened several years ago that is deeply irrelevant here, but his fans still bring up for some reason.
I'm still amazed how some folks are still conflicted on our withdrawal from Afghanistan. We didn't go there to nation build, we went to deliver justice towards the perpetrators of 9/11. Al Qaeda was the perpetrator not the Taliban, the Taliban is a national militia that only grew in strength due to our incompetency in Afghanistan. Victory should of been declared after the killing of OBL. We cannot enforce liberal western values on a extremely conservative country. It will just be yet another country in the middle east that has similar Islamic values that we've tolerated through trades agreements and international commerce.
The stated purpose was to deliver justice, what actually happened was a nation-building project whether the US admitted to it explicitly or not. Leaving was the correct course of action and should have happened back when Bush was president. That doesn't mean US withdrawal was done even semi-competently, but Biden will take undue blame for the catastrophe of Afghanistan because his mistakes are obvious and visceral.
People of Afghanistan are celebrating their independence day, leave them TF alone, the idea that we were there to build a nation and spread democracy is laughable, we don't even have democracy at home
They aren't all celebrating, I can assure you of that. And many that are celebrating are doing so with the same enthusiasm that many cheered for Hitler and Stalin, ie terror of what would happen if they were seen not to. Not too many Afghans are any happier now. The Taliban aren't terribly popular.
@@ptolemyauletesxii8642 they didn’t have democracy but Afghanistan used to be a tolerant country open to Westerners before the cold war came there, if only the soviets hadn’t tried to prop up their puppet and we hadn’t the brilliant idea to encourage religious extremism to stop them
Listening to left oriented intellectuals feel they have to do the pageantry of mentioning how bad Trump was anytime they criticize a Democrat. Is like listening to a Catholic do their hail Marys. Only without the humility and sanctity. Sam Harris has taught me a lot over the decades I've listened to him. But what he's teaching me now is that everyone truly is religious. It just depends on which ceremonies you find important. I
It's fascinating to hear two highly educated men wrestling with the fact that they have held a naive and stupid opinion. Cognitive Dissonance writ large.
@@AussieSingo I thought Americans had lost their minds when they voted Trump in but he delivered solid results on a number of fronts like employment, energy and jobs. I followed the last election more closely and could pretty much tell Biden was going to be a disaster. He has 3.3 years to wreck America.
@@lewisner Trump had the same economic policies as George W. Bush. If you didn't know, the economy does better under Democrats. Also Trump's economy was horrible, we went over 10% unemployment he net created negative jobs, had negative GDP growth. Before that period, the state that carried the majority of employment gains and growth was California.
The US is not going to get involved in the China Taiwan war. Here are the reasons why. Taiwan is just next to China. China enjoys superiority in the number of missiles, warplanes, warships and submarines in the region. The US is thousands of miles away from Taiwan. No country in the region other than Japan wants to join the US in a war against China. And even the Japanese people aren't very keen on fighting WWIII with China. So the Japanese government cannot count on the support of its people in such a war. China is a nuclear power with thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles that can sink US aircraft carriers and all US bases thousands of miles away deep in the ocean. No US president would be willing to sacrifice Chicago, or NY, or DC for Taiwan in a nuclear war. China holds $1.1 Trillion of US treasury bonds. If there were to be a war they would dump all of those US bonds onto the market. If there was a likelihood that there was going to be a war and thst war might turn nuclear everyone else who also owns US treasury bonds would also dump their US bonds. The US dollar and the US economy would completely collapse after that.
Still wish you'd get Col. Tim Kirk on an episode to discuss Afghanistan. He's more intimately acquainted with the Afghan people than any other military leader that I've ever worked with.
Isn't it? It definitely warms my heart ❤️ Many people have recently started expressing a new-found sense of deep care and concern for the health and well-being of the people of Afghanistan. Some of those people are also incredibly optimistic about the rights of women and other marginalized groups in the wonderful kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Bless their hearts 🙏
@@joaofarias6473 so true I am sure that some of those people who also are insisting on more war will be first to welcome Afghani refugees when they arrive to North America and EU
@@dragonofchaos7843 oh no… Harris fan boy or troll? Saying Gad Saad doesn’t know much is like saying gas stations have little fossil fuel. I think Sam is brilliant as well but veers too far now and then like everyone who’s human. You seem to have a contemptuous view of Mr. Saad that clouds your judgement.
Sam Harris is not a philosopher- he only sees himself as one. He is a commentator, interviewer, a thinker, an arrogant promoter of America's power - not a philosopher.
I really dislike this episode. As a subscriber, I had a hard time keeping my paid membership going after this one and the Dambisa Moyo episode. Although my objections really do boil down to "war bad, capitalism bad," I can at least be a little more succinct in this one. In essence, the argument Sam and his guest make here is that we aren't seeing a lot of American deaths, and the Taliban being in charge would (probably) be bad for stopping terrorism and protecting women. My response is, do the math. 2,977 people were killed in 9-11. Our response to this was to sacrifice 121,199 lives, to kill 51,191 Taliban and their allies. Basically, they could have repeated the events of 9-11 40 times in the last 20 years, and it still would not be as many people dead as there are as a result of our intervention. On the low end, estimates are that this will have cost us $6.5 trillion dollars in direct spending and interest. There are 14 million women in Afghanistan. We could buy every woman in Afghanistan a beautiful $450,000 home in the middle of the United States, and pay for their airfare, and still not spend that much. The threat of violence is stupid, ineffective, and inefficient way to solve social problems.
Sam won’t ever eat any humble pie for his hysterical and religious backing of Biden despite his decades old record of horrible judgement on domestic and foreign policy. Heck even Obama’s defence secretary Robert Gates said Biden didn’t make a single good judgement on foreign policy in the last four decades, in his memoir, and reconfirmed that when asked earlier this year on tv whether he stood by that statement.
What "religious and hysterical" backing? Where do you people who have these black-and-white opinions get them? Are the nuances in Sam's speech just gibberish to you? He doesn't seem to revere Biden, if you've payed attention to his comments on the 2020 election, he simply doesn't condemn him as harshly as Trump, which is understandable.
@@genericusername8337 about the last 5 years were hysterical quasi religious weekly episodes of how the world was to implode, and in 2020 Biden was the only fix. Many of us were warning that Biden was a dementia patient and had a long and terrible history of voting for bad policies at home and abroad.
@@domzbu ...and the other guy a narcissist corrupt down to his toes, who cares little for democracy, nor has any respect for the nation. Someone who ranted and raved about how everyone was against him like a self-absorbed teenager, while provoking people on purpose on a daily basis. Between that guy and a dementia patient, it's a tough one, I know, but the dementia patient is capable of less damage.
@@genericusername8337 well according to reality you are wrong. There’s a difference between rhetoric and hot air, and concrete disaster manifest in the real world. Even Biden’s media defenders can’t polish this disaster.
@@domzbu If trump was in charge, he would spin the narrative of this retreat to his favor, or at the very least deflect, deny and project, and you would be happy about it as well.
Many distinguished people have their podcasts available free of charge. Do you think that yours is more valuable? Also - who gave America the assignment of being superpower? Why is your country going where it is not invited? So, you want America to be military superpower, right, because in all other aspects of social life, America is lagging behind all developed, and many developing countries.
Take a look around. America is in full decline on so many fronts. Half the population is obese and impoverished, and two thirds of the population is confused about the nature of reality. Sadly, this outcome in Afghanistan could have been predicted the day after we landed in 2001.
And a record number of people think tearing out their genitalia and giving puberty blockers to children will make them happier, for which I am not allowed to criticize or some loon will go after my job
Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, now Afghanistan, possibly more that I am forgetting. Every time America abandons an occupation, it ends very badly. There was no way to execute a graceful end to this particular occupation.
@@seangarner2687 You could make the argument of the case, but everything we did was completely ass-backward. Troops were evac'd before our civilians, we didn't tell any country of our intentions, banned all contractors providing vital maintenance to Afghan Air Force, abandoned crucial airbases necessary for supplying surrounded Afghan units. If all the propaganda about the Taliban was actually true then we would have 80k NATO civilians dead and it would be on Biden's hands.
You think just the USA is in full decline? it’s the world…just following the leader, I guess. Can’t change ideology with a bomb and sure have given half the afghani population (women) the idea they could make a difference. What a mess.
@Eye of Horus I think "TDS" is a counterproductive term here. Not only because the thing we're trying to describe isn't just about Trump, but also because it triggers defensiveness in people and sounds like you're trying to convince them to be pro-Trump, which is not quite what pointing out TDS is about.
@@dgd947a15fl I guess all 3 of his wives had TDS, those 24 women he forced himself upon sexually had it too....right? And those hundreds of vendors he never paid....TDS, naturally. In fact, any who do not gushingly adore the MAGAzine spanked, porn star bribing obese 75 year old "playboy" has TDS.....right?
@@dragonofchaos7843 The generals would have stopped him, knowing that he would have screwed it so terribly as to make what's going on now look like a bunch of tourists on an outing or doing hugs and kisses.....that's what people are saying.
This is what trump is like . He's the one who negotiated with the Taliban giving them legitimacy and putting them on the war path . He conceded so much to them with essentially nothing in return . He promised to be out in april in what was essentially an unconditional surrender .
@jim 1.) How is he wrong 2.) Russia, Pakistan, the UK, India, Iran - of course - they're all there for a piece of the cake too, like they were all of the many previous incursions over the last several centuries. BTW after 9/11 the US went to Iraq as I recall, got the wrong country.
All the war mongering we see on TV never mentions the over $6 trillion that was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. The defence contractors and the pentagon have been making money off the tax payer while they knew the situation on the ground has been untenable for year. That's why every single news outlet is attacking Biden. At the same time these same people are complaining that Biden wants to spend $4.5 trillion on his country and citizens. If you want to understand why China is going to be the new world super power, just continue to watch the pro war coverage. In the last 20 years while the US was fighting stupid wars China has invested heavily in themselves and in trade relations with countries all over the world.
I just started listening, and I feel I completely disagree with Sam Harris on foreign policy. As if USA are going to these wars because of the goodness of their heart. That's why USA's top ally is Saudi-Arabia. Anyway I will continue to listen with interest.
Our "greatest ally" is Israel. Everything we do in the Middle East is in the interest of Saudi *and* Israeli regional hegemony. Just look where the majority of the Iraqi oil was sold. The US didn't get any of that, Israel did. The wealthy multinational oligarchal corporations own it and sell it to the powerful nations.
@@OQIF87NREU Right. So you mean that Saudi Arabia is not a brutal theocratic dictatorship? How many "details" are there to invest myself in? They execute people for witchcraft in the public square ffs. It´s also ironic to call something a "lazy refrain" without providing any real argument in return.
@@jirkazalabak1514 I’m not going out of my way to explain things to someone who thinks that the fact that Saudi Arabia is as you say it is means anything like what you are implying. It is not an equivalent of any other country in the region and to say so is downright stupid.
Biden was offered several options on how to exit Afgan, laid out by his advisors. As per usual, he opted for the worst possible case scenario. And as per usual, Democrat cultists will apologise for him because orange man bad. But you can never hide his blood stained hands of 12 dead Marines, and untold amounts of killed or captured civilians. In the words of your Chamelion ex-prez Barry: "Never underestimate Joe's ability to F things up".
Sam Harris, a man I used to look up to. A man of intelligence, logic and integrity. Pleasantly soft in his delivery, consistent in his thoughts. Now, a mere hysterical hypocrite trying to control the damage he had done to his own image. Went down the TDS crap hole along with mentally deteriorated Richard Dawkins, another man I used to admire. Oh dear.
he voted for one of two possibilities. its not like he gets to decide on an issue by issue basis. the only thing he can do is vote the lesser evil and then criticize and try to change things grassroots, which he is doing. trump fucked up so much and for way worse reasons than wanting to get out of a war. if this is why you dislike democrats you should reconsider your priorities.
@@kettenschlosd be specific. What exactly did trump "fuck up"? Don't just generalize. Enlighten us. You voted for a man with mid stage alzheimers. You did that out of spite yet you tell someone else to reconsider their perspective. Exactly what policy has Biden implemented which has reversed one of trumps fuck ups? This country seem better now than a year ago besides blm and antifa not running around burning shit down. The economy seem better? The border crisis seem better? You really think Biden is in charge when he is "given" a list of reporters and "instructed" who to call on? Tell me anything that's better here in america. The covid vaccine? Ha. We're gonna try and force people to take a vaccine that took the fda a whopping 8 months to approve when typical approval time is 6 years minimum? What's next? This "pandemic" is so bad you can have it, have it run its course, and never even know it was there. It's almost eery how the number of flu deaths in a year diminished the exact same amount of covid deaths. When the government tells you to go get your chip implant you gonna do that as well? This shitshow of a country is on you and every other beta male, idiot lib female, bleep, dreamer, daca, cat lady, corpse, and undocumented "worker" that voted for this several times. Now go f yourself.
@@dyerseve45 i voted for no one since i am austrian, but to say a few things: trade war with china, anti middle class tax reform, letting infrastructure decay further, defunding the environmental protecten buro (or whatever its called), and the stuff at the border. now maybe you like low taxation on the rich, destroying the planet for short term ecconomic gain and treating immigrants like shit, but i for one dont. its ok that you have different oreferences but you seem to insinuate that biden is uniquely unqualified in a way trump isnt, and thats not the case. regarding alzheimers: id rather have my grandma run your country. atleast shes not a narcissist and therefore able to listen to advice. i agree though that biden is incompetent, but my solution is technocracy and not electinh someone who is incompetent in an honest, zero decorum way.
@@dyerseve45 also trump started the negotiations with afghanistan, giving the taliban more power than necessary.40% to half of this afghanistan shit is trumps doing anyways
I hate it when they speak about "oh the women and girls!" Of my FAMILY in Iran, it's the women that are the most fundamental Islamist. My grandmother explicitly. The section of.my family that stayed in 78' were encouraged to do so by my grandmother and aunts. You are falling into the trap of thinking that these people don't believe in their religion.
@@BryWMac I suppose it depends on if you think the young man who comics suicide bombing is totally culpable, or if the people who radicalised him are accountable in anyway?
That's not true of all of them though, here is a good honest interview with an Afghani women's perspective on the U.S. leaving (recorded a couple days ago) ruclips.net/video/x1vqqHzvbHE/видео.html
@@danielm5161 Yes and there is plenty of men who collaborated to try make Afghanistan a westernised secular nation too. My point is that there is men and women who are fanatics. And so it also follows that there is men and women who are secularists too. So they need to stop it with the " oh the poor women" charade.
Total ineptitude will be America's legacy as we slowly implode from within. This is just a symptom of much larger problems with our culture, politics, institutions, etc...
Sam doesn't even realize what this says about our culture. We don't know who we are as a country anymore and have no ability to project strength at home. Therefore of course we're not going to be able to project strength abroad. People like Biden and his followers are responsible for that. They hate America as Sam admits in this podcast. But at the end of the day none of that really matters to Sam because Sam doesn't want to miss out on the cocktail parties he's invited to in Hollywood. He wants to remain in "polite" society. He's an elitist, establishment hack who's ultimately clueless about the important questions
Sam's cope here is fucking unimaginable. He's trying so hard, through unprecedented mental gymnastics, to justify the war in Afghanistan, to save the disastrous neoliberalist project of the early 2000s. He's actually defending a war that almost everyone unanimously agrees was a conceptual and strategic mistake. Sam is so out of touch and so dated with his politics that it's almost incomprehensible. He's not just a decade behind; he's TWENTY YEARS behind.
@DSUM oh got it! But tbh if I was in media, I would probably behave like him and be controversial because for me, it’s all about 💰. But we need people like Sam!
I was thinking Jordan Peterson. Not so much opposite, but analog. Both have a calm way of speaking and are quite milquetoast, but both receive undue hate from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Sam gets tons of downvotes on all his videos for saying things that really aren't that controversial (I don't watch/listen to Peterson, but that's my understanding of him).
I guess Scott Horton was too busy? I love how Sam asks on Twitter who he should talk to about Afghanistan and overwhelmingly he gets “Scott Horton” and then Sam must have thought, “naw, let’s get an ex DC think tank, CNN analyst”
@@kiwicalibre Trump signed a bs peace treaty and had an earlier date to pull out set. He signed that deal for political points, knowing full well the sham government would collapse as soon as we left.
Yep. Scott said in his recent podcast that he was willing to go on Sam's podcast, but hadn't heard from him. The problem is, Scott's knowledge on the subject is too vast that Sam's pro-interventionist arguments would start to collapse in real time. And i dont think he wants the cognitive dissonance
Sam, being more critical of a thought experiment Trump rather than Biden’s actual execution is absurd. I agree that there is still much uncertainty on whether withdrawing was the right decision, but where Trump called for the dinner table to be cleared, Biden ripped the table cloth off with everything still atop it. It doesn’t hold that Trump would have done equally poorly in the withdrawal. To say so is to not rightly criticize Biden in his massive failure of competence.
Trump was incompetent at everything he did as President. The only thing he did right was getting elected. Virtually everything else was a disaster. He wouldn't have even paid attention to the withdrawal, because he has the attention span of a gnat, and it would have been managed by exactly the same people as it was managed by. The only possible way it might have gone better could have been as a result of Trump's narcissism. If he had seen things going disastrously he might have unintentionally corrected it, but only in a desperate attempt to save face, because it affected him
@Despize Perform He certainly had the authority. He just lacked the interest. If there had been some clear easy that he could have profited off of it or gained popularity and praise he would have done it.
@@ptolemyauletesxii8642 do you realize how out of touch with reality this sounds. Trump was one of the better presidents when it came to foreign policy. As a matter of fact, pulling out of Afghanistan was one of his main presidential goals before realizing that doing so would lead to exactly what is happening now. Look up his speech on this. His words were something along the lines of "a quick and sudden withdrawal would lead to a immediate takeover of the Taliban". In fact, under Trump he indeed did lower the amount of troops we had in Afghanistan to about 2,500 with the last death being in Feb of 2020. Now under Biden everything is going to shit because of a decision even his advisors told him it was a bad move. Maybe look at the facts instead of crying orange man bad
Very disappointed with this conversation. I understand that the Taliban is bad, but neither Sam nor Peter gave a coherent plan for how staying in Afghanistan would have changed anything. Would 10 more years have made it any better? How about 20 years? Sam mentioned how nation building worked in South Korea, but that is a very different situation. That is a cohesive country that had stabilized with a DMZ between them and their enemy. Afghanistan is a country drawn up by outsiders with no consideration for the different cultural groups within the country. Where would you draw up a DMZ? There isn't a clear line between the people that back one faction and the people that back the other faction. Also, the presence in South Korea is as a deterrent. The troops in South Korea are not in imminent risk of attack. The troops in Afghanistan WOULD have been attacked if Biden stayed past August 31st. That is a fact that both Sam and Peter conveniently left out of the conversation. Sam also calls it a conspiracy theory that money is the reason for US involvement. The fact that 80-90% of the money spent on the war ended up going to a handful of companies in the US is not a conspiracy. The fact that those companies receiving that money have far more control over US politicians than the voters that they purport to represent is not a conspiracy.
The attitude of the generations changes over time. The people don't remain constant. They literally die off. NATO should stay until all the last remaining taliban from the 1990s are dead, retired etc.. Which is just a few decades away. The young generation particularly in the cities had never lived under Taliban and had little interest in doing so.
Fuck it, I willl go there, the US government along with the military was conspiring to funnel money into the coffers of their friends in the private sector and this conspiracy played a role in our lengthy occupation of Afghanistan . People are so afraid of the word 'conspiracy'. Does anyone here actually think that people in the US government, military, private sector, or intelligence communities don't conspire to achieve their goals and that those goals may be occulted from the public eye?
LOL, imagine being an IQ realist and comparing South Korea to Afghanistan. Watch the videos of US military trying to train Afghan soldiers and that delusion that we could nation-build Afghanistan should go away immediately.
@@jonathanbowen3640 What you're saying makes sense logically, but that wasn't the reality on the ground. The Taliban had about 45,000 members when the war started. They now have about 75,000 after 20 years of killing them. The numbers are going in the wrong direction for your solution to work. This makes sense given the near-miss phenomenon. In WW2 Germany was trying to demoralize the British population through heavy air raids. The air raids had the opposite effect. They strengthened the British resolve and kept them in the war longer than they would have been. I feel like this is the same phenomenon happening in Afghanistan. For every Taliban fighter they kill in a bombing raid, they foment more resentment in the Afghan community which results in a new generation of Taliban fighters.
@@TheCommonS3Nse The numbers supporting taliban even at those numbers are nothing in a population of now 20million. (double from 20 years ago) I don't believe there to be widespread support for taliban. particularly among non pashtun. The afghan people could have kept taliban In check for ever in most regions of the country, well they could if they got paid. Many hadn't get paid for months. Previously with a bit of air support they did just fine fighting the taliban. I don't think the Taliban are a demographic problem or even a military one. Just the government (not local and devolved enough) and to a lesser extent to NATO mission was not as good as it should have been and the effect was magnified by the events. Its a shame they didn't begin to fight, they would have flattened the taliban eventually. They just got spooked and this was an anomaly, a one in a million. IMHO. Taliban got lucky. Play this situation over again ten times and the other nine there would have been a civil war that they woudl have lost. It (defeat to such a weak force) was never inevitable.
Hitchens would have likely continued to deny the fact that the West clearly sucks at nation-building, and thst the destabilizing wars he was in favour of only leads to greater suffering down the line. Credit to Biden for finally getting out and standing by hos decision despite the backlash. You woupd have had these same results 5 or 10 years from now had you instead stayed there longer...
Close your eyes, take a deep breath... and try to imagine the difference of vocabulary used in this podcast if this disaster would have occured with another election result last November...
I don't know, "there couldn't have been a greater gift to our enemies" sounds like unequivocal condemnation of Biden's actions. In fact, Sam goes so far in condemning Biden's "disastrous" handling of the withdrawal that he sounds like a neocon mouthpiece.
@@alf9708 It's one thing to call an obvious disaster just that. It's quite another thing to throw tons of mud and insults, to spit venom and to degrade and ridicule endlessly. Sam Harris criticises quite briefly Biden's decision, and just that. He does not attack Biden personally in any way. Would that maybe be a tiny little different if Trump were responsible for this catastrophy? Again, close your eyes and take a deep breath - and the answer will reveal itself.
@@petermuller6359 to be clear, it was in fact 45's deal with the Taliban that Biden honored, and delayed at that. No American president since 2001 has gone without major mistakes in Afghanistan. Most of this podcast mentions neither 45 nor Biden, and instead focuses on the difficulties of the situation, the insurmountable moral and commitment between the Taliban and US/Nato/Afghan forces.
Geez Sam, you don't have to be a so-called "neo-isolationist" on the right or the left, or indeed a conspiracy theorist, to feel that the US shouldn't have been there (or in other places) to begin with. However, if they'd gone in, got Bin Laden, got out again, people would certainly be broadly in support of that. The contractors wanted a forever war. Not sure that's a highly controversial statement
Sam is clueless. People like Julian Assange, who are much smarter, more informed and astute when it comes to geopolitics, foreign affairs, and racketeering than people like Sam, actually knew what was going on.frim the beginning (2003). Here's Julian calling it in 2011. "The goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries, through Afghanistan, and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. That is the goal - i e. the goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war." - Julian Assange, 2011 ruclips.net/video/iVIHS1U6Nhs/видео.html
You're naive if you think just doing a pinprick strike on Bin Laden was all that was warranted. The Taliban sheltered this international terrorist and tried to buy time when the US came knocking so that he could flee. A regime like that should never have been allowed back in power but alas its happened. You might be indifferent to theocrats regaining ground, I'm not.
@@jonnnybfly he may not be entirely on-point, but to call Sam clueless is just disingenuous. Focusing too much on one part of the picture doesn't mean you're clueless. It means you're not seeing the bigger picture.
Stunning that Sam believes in continued occupation. Not just Afghanistan, but anywhere in the world. That's his solution? Based on what positive evidence? Amazing.
@@marcevan1141 that's what he says. He then goes on to offer a list of increasingly absurd reasons to stay and dismisses every reason to leave as the product of 'conspiracy theories' and the motivations of alt right nazis who think the jews are to blame and left wing whackos who are happy to see the taliban in power. If you can't decipher his feelings on the issue, you are even more autistic than I am.
Sam is so restrained in criticizing Biden. He would have spent half the podcast talking about the stunning incompetence and failure of leadership on all levels of the administration if orange man bad was still president.
Bro he literally said Biden's actions are DISASTROUS, you cant use much stronger language than that, besides maybe saying apocalyptic, but that's just obvious clickbait and untrue.
What is up with all these deranged conservatives who watch Sam? It's like you don't pay attention at all and just come here to twist his words. I'm tempted to think you need 6th grade language, preferrably yelled at you, to get a point. It better be a short one, too.
@@DivineBanana you are lying to yourself if you think sam wouldve reacted the same way if it were trump... But even donald trump isnt stupid enough to remove the military before civilians, i cant even comprehend the thought process behind that
You really are not thinking deeply, but you are feeling deeply. Everyone knew this was going to be a shit show. You should think about how our leaving would create chaos. We could do it quietly for a few days, but then the panic would get out. Sorry, your indignation only shows your profound ignorance of the tactically straight jacket we are in. Getting out strengthens us. We were leaders after Vietnam, we’ll be leaders after this.
@Allen Costello Odd Allen. My point is Sam is sharing his feelings, but not thinking tactically. Is your point that Sam is a liberal? I'm not sure a lot of people would agree with that.
Sam: 18:32 I don't understand why it was such a cluster F and couldn't we have stayed? a few moments later Sam: 32:00 Goes through all the horrible shit we propped up in the name of democracy for the last 20 years. Really Sam? The good thing we did in that country was leave. It was all a cluster F and a defense contractors wet dream. Our cluster F exit was the most successful thing we did.
I love how he's all about talking about the damage that Trump did (and of course, he did) but once the disasters mount on the side he supported, the language immediately shifts to 'we' and 'our' and 'us' and never names Biden in the opening about how bad it was handled apart from his disastrous messaging. Interesting 🤔
Its reasons like this why so many of us who swore by harris and his teachings have stopped listening. Wake up sam. You voted in true evil in your trump derangement.
It takes integrity to write what you did, which i applaud. I was a Trump voter solely on policy alignment, dont think his supporters cant acknowledge his large shortcomings. Id rather deal with a blunt and impulsive bully like DJT than a soft spoken automaton who actually will do more damage (like Obama). I commend you for doing your due diligence researching and recognizing
@Thrice Banned You shouldn't feel the need to defend yourself. Imperfect world, imperfect candidates. imperfect choices. The idea that there is a morally preferential choice, absent nuanced debate, is laughable.
The other thing that neither San nor Peter mention is the cost PER DAY of somewhere between $150-$300 million dollars to US taxpayers. A fairly important issue to elide, wouldn't you think?
Agreed. I found that neither one of them put forward a legitimate argument about how staying there would have been better. They only said that the Taliban would not have taken over. Fair enough, but there WOULD have been a civil war, which would have resulted in countless deaths and even more money spent by the US military, with no guarantee that the end result would have been any different.
agreed. Also Is the issue only for not having an "orderly exit" or do people think if the U.S had stayed another 10 years, the outcome would have been any different? I was expecting Sam to give us his take on how hard it is to change people's mindsets once the beliefs take shape (i.e.Talibans being anti-liberal values or people in the U.S. being anti-vax. etc.) ,how long of a time do you need to convince someone to change their beliefs!
@@connerwalsh1257 I can't comment on the accuracy of the $150-$300 million number, but the fact that it is being spent in the US is not a point in favor of staying in Afghanistan. The money that is staying in the US is going to a handful of companies. For example, they spent $43 million building a gas station in Afghanistan that was never used. That is a massive waste of taxpayer money and the only one who benefits is the company that built this gas station at an extremely inflated price. That wouldn't fly for infrastructure work within the US, it shouldn't fly for work in a foreign country.
@@Sngy9621 ...and to comment on Sam "worshipping" Biden. By worship, I of course mean that he condemns Biden on this issue and others, but uses language more complex than that used by a 4th grader, delivered in a tone too calm for it to register to them, in their fervor, if they ever even listen to it in the first place.
It's the vaccine bullshit. And now...they don't know what to do since Dear Leader admitted he got jabbed. If Trump got the vaccine, then how can it be bad? And if he just said it to appease the elites, well then I guess he's capitulating to the supposed "Deep State". Either way they can't reconcile. This was in the post for a while now and finally it's arrived. Fuck them. Let them implode.
"A truly minimal sacrifice" - That's how Sam here characterizes over 6,100 Americans killed and many more wounded during the Afghanistan War. I respect Sam's intellect and usually find his thoughts worthwhile, but this interview is ridiculous. More than ridiculous, it's downright disrespectful to brave men and women who lost their lives and to their families who sacrificed so much for so little in return. I seriously doubt that Sam would find it "a truly minimal sacrifice" if it were HIS kids that died because of an ill-conceived, pathetically mismanaged war that made $billions for defense contractors. I've never found myself offended by anything that Sam has said, but his elitism here really bothers me. Why don't you go spend some time with military families, Sam. See what it means to have a spouse or child deployed in a war zone.
Mr. Sam Harris knows exactly how to quantify things /s. He's into selling - since some time ago already - wisdom to willing customers, as clearly stated in the intro. I think you're right in questioning the merchandise.
@@adammerza5745 Yeah, it's a low cost, so long as the people dying have no immediate impact on your life. As soon as it's someone that you give a shit about who dies over a bunch of strategically and tactically unsound nonsense, then the cost is suddenly not so low any more. What Sam and, frankly, everyone should consider when backing "wars of choice," is whether you're willing to lose someone who's important to you over it. The Afghanistan War, it turns, out, was so badly mismanaged that I find it hard to imagine anyone who knew what was actually going on saying that they'd be willing to lose their brother, sister, son, daughter, best friend, father, mother, husband or wife in it.
Peter Bergen sounds like a very intelligent, experienced guy, but his assumption that you could just keep the 2,500 American troops in place (presumably forever?) with very little loss of (American) life is not well thought out. The reason that the US troops have had little to no casualties recently is precisely BECAUSE of the peace/withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. The Taliban would definitely not jut give the US troops in country a pass one moment longer if we had withdrawn from that agreement.
Exactly. What is Sam and Peter's end game? Occupation forever? Our record on nation building is, by all measures, horrific. If the justification is a moral one, there are MUCH worse places on earth that need humanitarian aid.
@@tssmith1701 Taken from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "The record of past U.S. experience in democratic nation building is daunting. The low rate of success is a sobering reminder that these are among the most difficult foreign policy ventures for the United States. Of the 16 such efforts during the past century, democracy was sustained in only 4 cases ten years after the departure of U.S. forces. Two of these followed the total defeat and surrender of Japan and Germany after WWII, and two were tiny Grenada and Panama. Unilateral nation building by the United States has had an even rougher time - perhaps because unilateralism has led to surrogate regimes and directed U.S. administration during the post conflict period. Not one American supported surrogate regime has made the transition to democracy, and only one case of American administration has done so. Importantly, many of the factors that experience shows are most crucial to success are absent in Iraq. To heed the lessons of its history and raise the odds of success, the United States should support a multilateral reconstruction strategy under U.N. auspices centered on bolstering political legitimacy and sharing economic burdens."
@@tssmith1701 How many drone strikes a year does it take to keep the Germans pacified? How many Civilian Casualties did Merkel absorb in the last year of the Trump administration? To what extent have the Bavarian revanchists co-opted Merkel's military? How dense can you be to possibly make this comparison?
I put a like because the podcast was overall good. However, isolationists are not "far" something. There is more than one type of "isolationists" within the left and within the right. The 2nd objection is that no, this wouldn't happen under Trump. The simple concept of evacuating the troops last can only evade the mind of a half senile person, or the mind of a woke person. A (partially) woke admin, headed by a half senile person, will inevitably be incompetent. The woke leave a trail of destruction wherever they go. The US government is no different. They have the reverse Midas touch. This is the kind of thing the dissident liberals were worried about. And it's only been 7 months.
This has literally nothing to do with "woke". You know the biggest problem with "woke" people is that they shove their ideologies and opinions where they don't belong. Just like you.
@@sanders555 Wrong assessment. General Milley is fascinated with "white rage" but is apparently incapable of understanding the Afghan rage that led to a disaster under his watch. If he spent his time focusing on problems that matter in the real world, maybe this disaster wouldn't be happening.
@@abstractnonsense3253 No he wasn't. You listened to one paragraph from one public statement, and it triggered you enough to believe that it somehow not only compromises but encompasses his entire psychology and decision-making abilities because you're a simpleton.
@left-wing monkeylord I didn't, but if you want to take my words out of context and share them with the world while clutching your pearls them I can't stop you.
I'm generally in alignment with most of Sam's opinions, however his general support for the war has always been foolish. I disdain Trump, but the one thing I give him credit for is trying to withdraw our troops from Syria and elsewhere. Biden finished it off, that's a good thing regardless.
@@entelin I both agree and disagree. It was good for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan in that it is best for the USA to keep its eyes on the prize. The prize is China - not a backwards Central Asian kleptocracy/theocracy. On the other hand, I think Afghanistan might have been salvageable...after another 20 years of occupation (slight sarcasm intended there)
We all voted for this. Trump started the negotiation process with the Taliban, they gained a ton of ground under Trump due to those negotiations. If the crazyness stays within the borders of Afghanistan then we will be talking about something else by Halloween. If we get major terrorist attacks all over again then we will end up right back over there and unfortunately may simply need to keep a force there.
And if you're a Trump supporter, based on your reasoning, you voted for the billions of dollars of military aid funded to Saudi for their outright, blatant genocide in Yemen. Get off your high-horse.
@@danielm5161 The Taliban actually offered the Americans to take control of Kabul until they got all the civilians out with the troops they had left, but the Americans said no, evacuated their troops and allies, from the airport before evacuating Americans civilians and then we had the terror attack. Outrageous!
Sam Harris is mistaken when he says only the far right and far left support Biden on this. His friend Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece on substack this week where he praised Biden on his actions in Afghanistan. So did Mathew Dowd.
Yeah, moral relativism is favourite tool of privileged Americans. If you can’t see difference between U.S. supported Afghan government and Taliban, you should attempt to see your moral core is almost diminished at this point
Any withdrawal would have been bad for the Afghans, but at least we could have done a better job at getting our citizens & local allies out. One thing is for sure- Trump would have gotten a lot more flack from the MSM than Biden has, even if he did a better job than Biden has
@@Razaiel If you want to be truthful, your statement needs considerable nuance. I am nearly alone in my circle of people in not being on the left, and the only media it seems the left distrust is Fox News. Everything the mainstream says is the real news according to them. I place Sam firmly on the left of the political spectrum so he is one of few in that space with a mind open sufficiently to see how slanted mainstream news reporting is. Jonathan Haidt is even more so. I have a lot of time for him.
@@samdg1234 Fair enough, but where someone is on the political spectrum is highly subjective & relative to where you're at on the spectrum. I'm quite cynical when it comes to the media, I start with the assumption that they're lying & go from there. This applies to every media outlet, since they're often just stenographers for the establishment.
@@sowmindful1501 terrorists need to be bulldozed. It’s bulldoze or be bulldozed. But China Russia are going to team up with all that is bad and try to bulldoze the US while they still can with this sorry administration calling the shots. Best time to do it.
What the fuck are you talking about mate, Biden had the balls to do what Trump was too scared to. Getting out of this disaster of a war is the best thing Biden has done, Sam is out to lunch on this
Sam is another example of how toxic is tweeter, he changed from a slow and tactful speaker, into a frothing in the mouth TDS lunatic in a very shot time span.
“Our”? Who do you mean by “our”? If Trump were in, you’d be saying “Trump’s.” So call it like it is instead of blaming the American people, which includes yourself. I’m a loyal subscriber because of your precision of speech. So please go back to that.
Trying not to be derogatory towards this podcast. Although... I find nothing within init, that enlightens me. Stop doing the talk, then start the walk. Going into Afghanistan. Understand, Why at First... I have been listening to America near nearly all my life. Stop trying to rule the world. Had enough of Your Country.
@@mickeybeavison1053 Was swimming in MAGA tears in a closed pool. lol You want me to send you links of Mango Unhinged praising the Taliban, or your head is stuck in Ben Shapiro's ass and cant listen?
Your opening statement is absolutely wrong. We were saying we would leave for 18 months. We warned people for months that we would be leaving. It was not bungled, your brain is.
21:30 - this point, which you hear a lot, requires a certain level of omniscience regarding the collapse of the Afghan army and the subsequent fall of the country. The CIA, the State Department and others have all said that the anticipation of collapse was there (as a worst case scenarioi), but that they had months after the troops had left, to sort everything out. The necessity for civilians to be removed wasn't there. They were staying put. They lived there. My view is - 2,500 US troops (mostly protecting diplomatic and embassy assets) was a token force. Leaving a country as the defeated force will always look like this in my opinion. If you make global security a shallow and partisan domestic issue (Trump & Biden), if you treat the Taliban as partners (Trump), turn a blind eye to increased Taliban violence (Trump), ignore it when the Taliban continue to disobey the terms of the Doha agreement (Trump), remove the vast majority of your troops (Trump), set arbitrary dates (Trump & Biden), underestimate or ignore the ineptitude of the Afghans (everybody), this is exactly what you get. If you're not prepared to increase the troop numbers or maintain an air presence, it will always end like it did - the only part up for debate was when and how soon. Whoever the president was - inheriting 2,500 troops and having a policy of withdrawal based on arbitrary dates, it wasn't going to end any differently.
Sam never makes sense when he talks about geopolitics.. I feel like he's getting paid, it's just hard to believe he can be this naive..Because it's really not that hard to understand...
One silver lining about this bungle in the desert jungle, is that the Left and the Right may have actually found some common ground. We agree this was a tragic debacle. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Especially when Trump was clear about an incremental withdrawal. Sam can hate Trump all he wants. No way in hell Trump and Pompeo would've screwed this up so badly. I didn't think anybody could screw up this badly.
I don’t generally leave comments on anything and I think Sam Harris is one of the clearest thinkers in the public space but on this one I think he is grossly confused about the US options here. The most disturbing idea didn’t come directly from Sam but his guest, however, it seems to have formed the basis for much of the discussion. The notion the the US would maintain the status quo simply by leaving things as they were- 2,500 us troops is infantile at best and purposefully misleading in all likelihood. If the US refused to honor the terms of the withdrawal they would find themselves in the middle of a civil war at the moment. Impossible and lethal with 2,500 troops. Any ramp up of troops in anticipation of such a situation would have triggered a war also. This is but one simple and obvious reality that neither Sam nor his guest acknowledged. Did I miss something here? Seems like I must have.
The US had been drawing down troops in afghanistan for some time. At its peak there were 100,000, but since 2015 it had been drawn down to 10,000. And then under Trump it was 5000; note that the 10,000 figure was during the last two years Obama was in office, and the peace deal was only negotiated I think for the past year, halfway through 2020. If the US was able to hold Afghanistan with such a minimal commitment of troops, with very few if any casualties considering that they acted in a supervisory and logistical support role (not to mention air support), then there was no problem staying there for an extended period, considering how long the US has been in South Korea (with 28,000 troops stationed there) and which no one seems to complain about. This was a good mission that would have kept the Taliban out of power for good, and likely made Afghanistan a powerful ally of the United States. That this wasn't worth such a minimal investment is kind of insane. I blame Biden for this. He seems to take the same quasi-religious anti-war stance many progressive leftists do, without realizing the true consequences of leaving the Taliban, one of the US' mortal enemies, in power of a major country. On one hand, I have to think the Taliban will want to leave the US alone for fear of provoking another invasion. But are we really to believe, they have no interest in revenge for two decades worth of killing their fellow fighters and leaders? Now its not just whatever remnants of Al Qaeda and ISIS remain, but the Taliban, that the US has to worry about, in orchestrating major terrorist attacks. All because Biden adopted the mindset of a progressive left wing democrat, and didn't like the optics of being in a "forever war" despite the extraordinarily low upkeep and utter hypocrisy with respect to all its other military bases around the world. Its like if Kyle Kulinski was in charge of the United States. A total failure in leadership, not that I expected better from Trump either.
@@radscorpion8 Thank you for such an informative reply. Hard to disagree. It is my understanding that the Taliban had agreed to a cease fire in exchange for troop drawdown. It was in the the context of potential territorial gains and certain increased casualties that this was negotiated and the probability for increased hostilities was almost 100%. But yes if we could have held with minimal commitment then it would be almost insane not too for obvious reasons. And yes in that case this is more sickening.
I truly regret vote for Biden. Wish I had pushed back and realized id been lied to by the news. But I think Kamala would be worse and Pelosi isn't right either. Hopefully, the military leaders resign or get fired for this utter failure.
The most interesting thing about this whole shit is that 1800 people actually liked this conversation. I guess deaf people listening to podcasts is a huge thing in 2021
@KosmikTopSekret Pulled out the military before our civilians, that's what he did right? Does that logic still follow if he shot some random person too
@@jacktenrec63 Because we have institutional structures that make public officials accountable to public opinion, and systems of information sharing namely a free press in the context of a pluralistic society.
Sam, don't be such a hypocrite. You started just criticizing just the fact thehat USA went out of Afghanistan; and you didn't over empathize the lack of morality in Biden's utterance regarding it was similar as in Vietnam, and Joe said it with a sense of suck it up, and sort of smirking; and then you come to to the fact the last admin prepared plans to leave for 2021; and you had to just imagine what Trump would say as president if he where there, while 1) he is not there 2) The assumption of what you imagined Trump would have said has nothing compared with the lack of humanity sense in what Biden said, and also the stupidity in terms of strategy of PR what Biden said in Geopolitical reach.
Please fix the title. This is not the "fall" of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has never been a country except technically by some drawn borders. It has always been a bunch of local factions that live in a local tribe mentality. Some tribes occasionally get more power than those around them, and they temporarily conquer surrounding areas and put them under subjugation. Those surrounding conquered areas don't follow our externally drawn silly country boundaries either. And we stupid westerners always scream about women's rights and their being subjugated. Yes it's bad for them. But in virtually all of these middle eastern tribal clashes, non-elite males including boys, and all males on the "wrong" side at the moment, are infinitely worse off than virtually all females. The males are routinely beaten, imprisoned, tortured and killed just for being on the wrong side at the moment, or for being a non-elite male in the right tribe but who upset an elite's fragile ego. Yes the women see bad things. But it's not even close to the scale of male mistreatment and murder. Even when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in the 70s and tried to force communism on them, they couldn't succeed after years and years of loss of life and draining treasure poured into their attempted conquest.
I was just thinking the same thing! I think his point about Americans receding from the global stage (independent of who is in office) is the key phenomenon here! Good call!
Here is the answer for those who is questioning the spirit of Afghan forces. Why the three hundred thousands soldiers relatively fall to seventy five thousands Taliban? Coward should be the last word justifying the spirit of Afghan forces. What speaks the best for the fall of the Afghan soldiers is that both government and the Taliban run by the Pashtun ethnic group - that as well have the same religious faith Sunni. The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. It's an immoral act to kill people who is brother or relatives to you specially if you don't have a good reason to do so. In this case our corrupt government wasn't worth defending by killing from your own ethnicity. That also fade the distinction line between who is Taliban and who is local residents in the Pashtun residing regions. It made even more difficult for the American to go after the Taliban in the past twenty years combating Taliban. If a Taliban hide his gun you literally can't distinguish them for the local residents again in the Pashtun residing regions. In places where there isn't any Pashtun and other ethnicity lives. Specially Hazara ethnic group, where both in their looks and religious faith differ from Taliban you see a strong resistance against the Taliban. I give an example of my hometown, Jaghori, which stood with minimum support form the central government till the fall of Kabul in the past two years without loss of any ground to The Taliban only with local residents forces with basic equipment.
Liberalization of Islamic world should happen naturally. If you are going to do it forcefully, expect to shell lot of time, money and resources. But they have badly messed up the exit strategy and turning their backs on afghan allies.
For some reason, these conspiracy theory types are always the first to show up to Sam's videos, and in decent numbers too, relative to views. Although, I doubt they listen to much, and what they hear goes in one ear, out of the other.
Yep, the US government, military, and intelligence communities would NEVER conspire to achieve their goals and they only do what they do because they LOVE the Afghan people sooooooo much.
@@genericusername8337 and you latch on to every military justification for their horseshit instead of letting it go in one ear and out the other like you should.
@@franzsperginand113 you realise that by replying to my comment in the way you did, you actually accepted that you are an anti vax Pikachu searching for conspiracy gurus. Why else would you reply?
Sam’s comments around “how little thought we’ve given…” is absolute BS! He doesn’t have the details around how much thought was given towards evacuation and shouldn’t make statements like that until he does! Amazing to me how little respect men who have never served the country show men who have/do! I can guarantee you that the senior military leaders advise President Biden on evacuation procedures with the expectation that the Afghanistan government would it be in place and the Afghanistan military would be doing its job as the evacuation steps unfolded.
it is as if these military leaders have given little thought to the reaction of the afghans & their military & how it'll collapse. weird how that means that they have given little thought to it, pathetic. before you start barking about how "no one could've expected this" here's Peter & Kenneth Pollack talking about it
@@Random-om8rq just because the outcome isn’t what was expected doesn’t mean adequate scenario planning wasn’t conducted! EVERY possible scenario can’t be factored in…especially those as unlikely as this one! But all you ‘experts’ know the facts about what happened here and, of course, feel obliged to speak on those ‘facts!’
@@derekcummings3972 except people have been saying that this was likely, as i have mentioned before, there are entire books on the matter. & if the scenario doesn't factor in for total collapse then that just adds more into the argument that the military leaders were complete idiots. as was the civilian leadership under Biden. (including him) but this is nothing new with the democratic leadership in office we've seen it with Obama before.
And what is this obsession with women and girls? When talking about the fate of the Afghanistan people post pull-out, everyone keeps mentioning women and girls almost exclusively. I got news for everyone: the fates of men under the Taliban aren't going to be great either. Yes, the fates of women will be worse but there's a reason that there were plenty of men trying to cling onto ascending aircraft. It's not going to be a picnic for anyone that isn't Taliban or pro-Taliban in ideology.
Would love to hear Ben Affleck's perspective on this. 🤭🤙
Just to hear a skewed perspective? Affleck would do well not to find himself in a room with Sam Harris ever again.
@@buckfozos5554 He was joking and using sarcasm. It is precisely because Ben Affleck's perspective is not nuanced.
OP is bringing up a minor thing (Ben Affleck and Sam Harris minor dispute) that happened several years ago that is deeply irrelevant here, but his fans still bring up for some reason.
@Atheist you think Sam Harris supports the military industrial complex? Did you listen to this podcast at all!?!?
Sam: 😏
Ben: 😤🤬
I'm still amazed how some folks are still conflicted on our withdrawal from Afghanistan. We didn't go there to nation build, we went to deliver justice towards the perpetrators of 9/11. Al Qaeda was the perpetrator not the Taliban, the Taliban is a national militia that only grew in strength due to our incompetency in Afghanistan. Victory should of been declared after the killing of OBL. We cannot enforce liberal western values on a extremely conservative country. It will just be yet another country in the middle east that has similar Islamic values that we've tolerated through trades agreements and international commerce.
Not "should of", but "should have" - though that's not the only mistake in your paragraph, it is the most obvious one.
The stated purpose was to deliver justice, what actually happened was a nation-building project whether the US admitted to it explicitly or not. Leaving was the correct course of action and should have happened back when Bush was president. That doesn't mean US withdrawal was done even semi-competently, but Biden will take undue blame for the catastrophe of Afghanistan because his mistakes are obvious and visceral.
@@vhaarr Uh oh a grammar nazi.
"The Intelligencia pay no price for being wrong". -Thomas Sowell
Does that come from "Intellectuals and Society"? Had thought about reading that book but haven't gotten around to it
People of Afghanistan are celebrating their independence day, leave them TF alone, the idea that we were there to build a nation and spread democracy is laughable, we don't even have democracy at home
They aren't all celebrating, I can assure you of that. And many that are celebrating are doing so with the same enthusiasm that many cheered for Hitler and Stalin, ie terror of what would happen if they were seen not to. Not too many Afghans are any happier now. The Taliban aren't terribly popular.
@Atheist Really? When was that?
@@ptolemyauletesxii8642 they didn’t have democracy but Afghanistan used to be a tolerant country open to Westerners before the cold war came there, if only the soviets hadn’t tried to prop up their puppet and we hadn’t the brilliant idea to encourage religious extremism to stop them
Listening to left oriented intellectuals feel they have to do the pageantry of mentioning how bad Trump was anytime they criticize a Democrat. Is like listening to a Catholic do their hail Marys. Only without the humility and sanctity.
Sam Harris has taught me a lot over the decades I've listened to him. But what he's teaching me now is that everyone truly is religious. It just depends on which ceremonies you find important.
I
Tsss.
This is like tds like ha don't understand tsss
It's fascinating to hear two highly educated men wrestling with the fact that they have held a naive and stupid opinion. Cognitive Dissonance writ large.
I concur. It takes a wise man to admit his mistakes....
And i had to google both cognitive dissonance and writ large lol
My names forest gump but u can call me forry gumnut
@@AussieSingo I thought Americans had lost their minds when they voted Trump in but he delivered solid results on a number of fronts like employment, energy and jobs. I followed the last election more closely and could pretty much tell Biden was going to be a disaster. He has 3.3 years to wreck America.
@@lewisner Trump had the same economic policies as George W. Bush. If you didn't know, the economy does better under Democrats. Also Trump's economy was horrible, we went over 10% unemployment he net created negative jobs, had negative GDP growth. Before that period, the state that carried the majority of employment gains and growth was California.
@@KyleHUNK yea sure....
The US is not going to get involved in the China Taiwan war.
Here are the reasons why.
Taiwan is just next to China. China enjoys superiority in the number of missiles, warplanes, warships and submarines in the region.
The US is thousands of miles away from Taiwan. No country in the region other than Japan wants to join the US in a war against China. And even the Japanese people aren't very keen on fighting WWIII with China.
So the Japanese government cannot count on the support of its people in such a war.
China is a nuclear power with thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles that can sink US aircraft carriers and all US bases thousands of miles away deep in the ocean.
No US president would be willing to sacrifice Chicago, or NY, or DC for Taiwan in a nuclear war.
China holds $1.1 Trillion of US treasury bonds.
If there were to be a war they would dump all of those US bonds onto the market.
If there was a likelihood that there was going to be a war and thst war might turn nuclear everyone else who also owns US treasury bonds would also dump their US bonds.
The US dollar and the US economy would completely collapse after that.
Still wish you'd get Col. Tim Kirk on an episode to discuss Afghanistan. He's more intimately acquainted with the Afghan people than any other military leader that I've ever worked with.
it is so touching and heart warming hearing Peter being so concerned about the education of Afghani women
Isn't it? It definitely warms my heart ❤️
Many people have recently started expressing a new-found sense of deep care and concern for the health and well-being of the people of Afghanistan.
Some of those people are also incredibly optimistic about the rights of women and other marginalized groups in the wonderful kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Bless their hearts 🙏
@@joaofarias6473 so true I am sure that some of those people who also are insisting on more war will be first to welcome Afghani refugees when they arrive to North America and EU
Yup, definitely worth endless blood & treasure, right?
This whole mess just highlights the futility and wastefulness of war in the modern world.
US troops supposedly were there to help the Afghanis; Afghanis aren't owed anything more because we helped them (they didn't help us).
@Atheist I agree, the government we birthed should had been secular.
@Atheist Afghans sure do want the Americans to stay, now. They'll even risk their lives to escape to the west.
US troops never had any right whatsoever being there in the first place. American Exceptionalism ..rinse and repeat.
LOL, Harris can't help bringing in Trump into every conversation. He's obsessed with the guy.
So sad and heartbroken. 9/11 happened when I was in grade 5.
Makes me want to step up and enlist in the military.
And do what? Play hero?
@@gulanhem9495 and help people that need it.
@@danielle1ashley wanna help people be a doctor or a firefighter
Easy to critique at this point. I’m here because of Gad Saad. This is your presidency Sam. How is our country more well off and less vulnerable?
Gaad Saad is an ostrich
@@dragonofchaos7843 pretty sophisticated if you’re kidding, solid Gad reference while also insulting. If you’re serious I’m bored and sleepy.
My God, I love Gad Saad.
@@bradearthman8332 no he is an ostrich an ignoramus he should stick to what he knows which is not much
@@dragonofchaos7843 oh no… Harris fan boy or troll? Saying Gad Saad doesn’t know much is like saying gas stations have little fossil fuel. I think Sam is brilliant as well but veers too far now and then like everyone who’s human. You seem to have a contemptuous view of Mr. Saad that clouds your judgement.
Love the way this philosopher daydreams about trump. Total fantasy. Sam lost the plot.
Sam Harris is not a philosopher- he only sees himself as one. He is a commentator, interviewer, a thinker, an arrogant promoter of America's power - not a philosopher.
I really dislike this episode. As a subscriber, I had a hard time keeping my paid membership going after this one and the Dambisa Moyo episode. Although my objections really do boil down to "war bad, capitalism bad," I can at least be a little more succinct in this one. In essence, the argument Sam and his guest make here is that we aren't seeing a lot of American deaths, and the Taliban being in charge would (probably) be bad for stopping terrorism and protecting women. My response is, do the math. 2,977 people were killed in 9-11. Our response to this was to sacrifice 121,199 lives, to kill 51,191 Taliban and their allies. Basically, they could have repeated the events of 9-11 40 times in the last 20 years, and it still would not be as many people dead as there are as a result of our intervention. On the low end, estimates are that this will have cost us $6.5 trillion dollars in direct spending and interest. There are 14 million women in Afghanistan. We could buy every woman in Afghanistan a beautiful $450,000 home in the middle of the United States, and pay for their airfare, and still not spend that much. The threat of violence is stupid, ineffective, and inefficient way to solve social problems.
Minimal sacrafice? Easy for you to say when its not your kid being killed out there Sam. Spoken like a true elite.
Some cringy takes on this episode for sure.
I am very curious as to what Hitch would think/say about this whole situation???
Sam won’t ever eat any humble pie for his hysterical and religious backing of Biden despite his decades old record of horrible judgement on domestic and foreign policy. Heck even Obama’s defence secretary Robert Gates said Biden didn’t make a single good judgement on foreign policy in the last four decades, in his memoir, and reconfirmed that when asked earlier this year on tv whether he stood by that statement.
What "religious and hysterical" backing? Where do you people who have these black-and-white opinions get them? Are the nuances in Sam's speech just gibberish to you? He doesn't seem to revere Biden, if you've payed attention to his comments on the 2020 election, he simply doesn't condemn him as harshly as Trump, which is understandable.
@@genericusername8337 about the last 5 years were hysterical quasi religious weekly episodes of how the world was to implode, and in 2020 Biden was the only fix. Many of us were warning that Biden was a dementia patient and had a long and terrible history of voting for bad policies at home and abroad.
@@domzbu ...and the other guy a narcissist corrupt down to his toes, who cares little for democracy, nor has any respect for the nation. Someone who ranted and raved about how everyone was against him like a self-absorbed teenager, while provoking people on purpose on a daily basis. Between that guy and a dementia patient, it's a tough one, I know, but the dementia patient is capable of less damage.
@@genericusername8337 well according to reality you are wrong. There’s a difference between rhetoric and hot air, and concrete disaster manifest in the real world. Even Biden’s media defenders can’t polish this disaster.
@@domzbu If trump was in charge, he would spin the narrative of this retreat to his favor, or at the very least deflect, deny and project, and you would be happy about it as well.
Many distinguished people have their podcasts available free of charge. Do you think that yours is more valuable?
Also - who gave America the assignment of being superpower? Why is your country going where it is not invited? So, you want America to be military superpower, right, because in all other aspects of social life, America is lagging behind all developed, and many developing countries.
There is an old Turkish proverb, "No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back."
I heard this other Turkish proverb, it was something about the Armenians I think...
That’s a good proverb.
Oh, that's a deep one.
@@SAFbikes ya i heard that alot apparently defines as 1.5 millions kids, women, intellectuals being executed. In another word, holocaust
@@bombrman1994 Churchill caused more than a million people to die of starvation in Bihar in the 1940’s.
Funny thing; he never seemed to care.
Thank god there are no more mean tweets and we finally have some adults in the room lmao
These guys hate god and trump.
@@titusthegreat7434 that's why we're all such huge fans
Take a look around. America is in full decline on so many fronts. Half the population is obese and impoverished, and two thirds of the population is confused about the nature of reality. Sadly, this outcome in Afghanistan could have been predicted the day after we landed in 2001.
And a record number of people think tearing out their genitalia and giving puberty blockers to children will make them happier, for which I am not allowed to criticize or some loon will go after my job
Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, now Afghanistan, possibly more that I am forgetting. Every time America abandons an occupation, it ends very badly. There was no way to execute a graceful end to this particular occupation.
I don't think half the population is impoverished.
@@seangarner2687 You could make the argument of the case, but everything we did was completely ass-backward. Troops were evac'd before our civilians, we didn't tell any country of our intentions, banned all contractors providing vital maintenance to Afghan Air Force, abandoned crucial airbases necessary for supplying surrounded Afghan units. If all the propaganda about the Taliban was actually true then we would have 80k NATO civilians dead and it would be on Biden's hands.
You think just the USA is in full decline? it’s the world…just following the leader, I guess. Can’t change ideology with a bomb and sure have given half the afghani population (women) the idea they could make a difference. What a mess.
This is what everyone said Trump was going to be like.
@Eye of Horus
I think "TDS" is a counterproductive term here. Not only because the thing we're trying to describe isn't just about Trump, but also because it triggers defensiveness in people and sounds like you're trying to convince them to be pro-Trump, which is not quite what pointing out TDS is about.
I don’t think most people thought trump would end the war
@@dgd947a15fl I guess all 3 of his wives had TDS, those 24 women he forced himself upon sexually had it too....right? And those hundreds of vendors he never paid....TDS, naturally. In fact, any who do not gushingly adore the MAGAzine spanked, porn star bribing obese 75 year old "playboy" has TDS.....right?
@@dragonofchaos7843 The generals would have stopped him, knowing that he would have screwed it so terribly as to make what's going on now look like a bunch of tourists on an outing or doing hugs and kisses.....that's what people are saying.
This is what trump is like . He's the one who negotiated with the Taliban giving them legitimacy and putting them on the war path . He conceded so much to them with essentially nothing in return . He promised to be out in april in what was essentially an unconditional surrender .
3 words bro:
MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
The humanitarian argument is always a post hoc justification for invasion and occupation. It is never the root motive.
@jim 1.) How is he wrong 2.) Russia, Pakistan, the UK, India, Iran - of course - they're all there for a piece of the cake too, like they were all of the many previous incursions over the last several centuries. BTW after 9/11 the US went to Iraq as I recall, got the wrong country.
@jim lol
Thats just lefty masochism talking
All the war mongering we see on TV never mentions the over $6 trillion that was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. The defence contractors and the pentagon have been making money off the tax payer while they knew the situation on the ground has been untenable for year. That's why every single news outlet is attacking Biden. At the same time these same people are complaining that Biden wants to spend $4.5 trillion on his country and citizens. If you want to understand why China is going to be the new world super power, just continue to watch the pro war coverage. In the last 20 years while the US was fighting stupid wars China has invested heavily in themselves and in trade relations with countries all over the world.
@jim They went to Iraq dufus. Blind patriotism kills brain cells
But at least orange man bad is out, amiright!?
Thank god! Now if those who liked him could just pull their heads out of their asses America could be a better place.
@@georgelux126 Ya, looking very much better now.🤡
I just started listening, and I feel I completely disagree with Sam Harris on foreign policy. As if USA are going to these wars because of the goodness of their heart. That's why USA's top ally is Saudi-Arabia. Anyway I will continue to listen with interest.
This is and has long been a very lazy refrain. It does not come from people invested in the details.
Our "greatest ally" is Israel. Everything we do in the Middle East is in the interest of Saudi *and* Israeli regional hegemony.
Just look where the majority of the Iraqi oil was sold. The US didn't get any of that, Israel did. The wealthy multinational oligarchal corporations own it and sell it to the powerful nations.
Hahaha same
@@OQIF87NREU Right. So you mean that Saudi Arabia is not a brutal theocratic dictatorship? How many "details" are there to invest myself in? They execute people for witchcraft in the public square ffs. It´s also ironic to call something a "lazy refrain" without providing any real argument in return.
@@jirkazalabak1514 I’m not going out of my way to explain things to someone who thinks that the fact that Saudi Arabia is as you say it is means anything like what you are implying. It is not an equivalent of any other country in the region and to say so is downright stupid.
I stopped taking Sam seriously years ago
And yet here you are….
"1st you get the civilians out, then the equipment, then the soldiers, then you bomb the bases"
Trump
Lol. But first, you make useless deals with the worst scum in the region.
why tf didn't he do it then? cuz he didn't wanted all the heat from the press Biden is getting
@@jacktenrec63 Biden went against all the recommendations from his own people
Biden was offered several options on how to exit Afgan, laid out by his advisors. As per usual, he opted for the worst possible case scenario.
And as per usual, Democrat cultists will apologise for him because orange man bad.
But you can never hide his blood stained hands of 12 dead Marines, and untold amounts of killed or captured civilians. In the words of your Chamelion ex-prez Barry: "Never underestimate Joe's ability to F things up".
@@papa_pt what does that even mean?? Why didn't Trump pull them out is what I am asking
Eventually I realized that Sam Harris has absolutely no clue.
Sam Harris, a man I used to look up to. A man of intelligence, logic and integrity. Pleasantly soft in his delivery, consistent in his thoughts. Now, a mere hysterical hypocrite trying to control the damage he had done to his own image. Went down the TDS crap hole along with mentally deteriorated Richard Dawkins, another man I used to admire. Oh dear.
Why do you admire grifters on the Internet?
@@sponkmcdonk3898 why do you like killing babies? 🙄
Next question please....
Sam, you voted for what is happening in Afghanistan.
Yes, he did. But at least the orange man bad can’t mean tweet anymore!
he voted for one of two possibilities. its not like he gets to decide on an issue by issue basis. the only thing he can do is vote the lesser evil and then criticize and try to change things grassroots, which he is doing. trump fucked up so much and for way worse reasons than wanting to get out of a war. if this is why you dislike democrats you should reconsider your priorities.
@@kettenschlosd be specific. What exactly did trump "fuck up"? Don't just generalize. Enlighten us. You voted for a man with mid stage alzheimers. You did that out of spite yet you tell someone else to reconsider their perspective. Exactly what policy has Biden implemented which has reversed one of trumps fuck ups? This country seem better now than a year ago besides blm and antifa not running around burning shit down. The economy seem better? The border crisis seem better? You really think Biden is in charge when he is "given" a list of reporters and "instructed" who to call on? Tell me anything that's better here in america. The covid vaccine? Ha. We're gonna try and force people to take a vaccine that took the fda a whopping 8 months to approve when typical approval time is 6 years minimum? What's next? This "pandemic" is so bad you can have it, have it run its course, and never even know it was there. It's almost eery how the number of flu deaths in a year diminished the exact same amount of covid deaths. When the government tells you to go get your chip implant you gonna do that as well? This shitshow of a country is on you and every other beta male, idiot lib female, bleep, dreamer, daca, cat lady, corpse, and undocumented "worker" that voted for this several times. Now go f yourself.
@@dyerseve45 i voted for no one since i am austrian, but to say a few things: trade war with china, anti middle class tax reform, letting infrastructure decay further, defunding the environmental protecten buro (or whatever its called), and the stuff at the border. now maybe you like low taxation on the rich, destroying the planet for short term ecconomic gain and treating immigrants like shit, but i for one dont. its ok that you have different oreferences but you seem to insinuate that biden is uniquely unqualified in a way trump isnt, and thats not the case. regarding alzheimers: id rather have my grandma run your country. atleast shes not a narcissist and therefore able to listen to advice.
i agree though that biden is incompetent, but my solution is technocracy and not electinh someone who is incompetent in an honest, zero decorum way.
@@dyerseve45 also trump started the negotiations with afghanistan, giving the taliban more power than necessary.40% to half of this afghanistan shit is trumps doing anyways
I hate it when they speak about "oh the women and girls!"
Of my FAMILY in Iran, it's the women that are the most fundamental Islamist. My grandmother explicitly.
The section of.my family that stayed in 78' were encouraged to do so by my grandmother and aunts.
You are falling into the trap of thinking that these people don't believe in their religion.
I would extend this to patriarchy too. I am from India. Women play a good role as enforcers to regressive cultural practices.
women were important in Sparta but if you know anything about Sparta it was a very flawed society.
@@BryWMac
I suppose it depends on if you think the young man who comics suicide bombing is totally culpable, or if the people who radicalised him are accountable in anyway?
That's not true of all of them though, here is a good honest interview with an Afghani women's perspective on the U.S. leaving (recorded a couple days ago) ruclips.net/video/x1vqqHzvbHE/видео.html
@@danielm5161
Yes and there is plenty of men who collaborated to try make Afghanistan a westernised secular nation too.
My point is that there is men and women who are fanatics.
And so it also follows that there is men and women who are secularists too.
So they need to stop it with the " oh the poor women" charade.
Total ineptitude will be America's legacy as we slowly implode from within. This is just a symptom of much larger problems with our culture, politics, institutions, etc...
It's not an implosion it's a controlled demolition.
Yeah i dont think its ineptitude. The donor class lined their pockets and sold their fellow country men. Its how all nations topple.
Societal thermite?
Sam doesn't even realize what this says about our culture. We don't know who we are as a country anymore and have no ability to project strength at home. Therefore of course we're not going to be able to project strength abroad. People like Biden and his followers are responsible for that. They hate America as Sam admits in this podcast. But at the end of the day none of that really matters to Sam because Sam doesn't want to miss out on the cocktail parties he's invited to in Hollywood. He wants to remain in "polite" society. He's an elitist, establishment hack who's ultimately clueless about the important questions
@@synthesizerneil “Anyone who doesn’t think like me hates America.” I wish you knew how ridiculous and childish you sound.
Sam’s core logic: when we do it, it’s an innocent mistake, but when they do it, it’s a moral & a cultural failure.
Lazy!
Sams a paid for SICKOPHANT Dem. Comparing Trump to OBL. Seriously, this B had his time in the light but like his Prez.; its fading out.
He's just a pretty dandy boy..not a serious thinker in any way shape or form.
There was no mistake. A'stan was a putrid islamic nation sheltering bin laden. 20 yrs on it's a putrid islamic cesspit.
Sam's cope here is fucking unimaginable. He's trying so hard, through unprecedented mental gymnastics, to justify the war in Afghanistan, to save the disastrous neoliberalist project of the early 2000s. He's actually defending a war that almost everyone unanimously agrees was a conceptual and strategic mistake.
Sam is so out of touch and so dated with his politics that it's almost incomprehensible. He's not just a decade behind; he's TWENTY YEARS behind.
Dude. He consciously voted for Biden.
I just realized that Stephen A. Smith is the opposite of Sam Harris.
So not a total wanker then?
I didn’t get it ?
@DSUM oh got it! But tbh if I was in media, I would probably behave like him and be controversial because for me, it’s all about 💰. But we need people like Sam!
I was thinking Jordan Peterson. Not so much opposite, but analog. Both have a calm way of speaking and are quite milquetoast, but both receive undue hate from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Sam gets tons of downvotes on all his videos for saying things that really aren't that controversial (I don't watch/listen to Peterson, but that's my understanding of him).
@@SuperLotus making excuses for the mass murder committed by U.S. empire isn't controversial?
Who knew?
I guess Scott Horton was too busy? I love how Sam asks on Twitter who he should talk to about Afghanistan and overwhelmingly he gets “Scott Horton” and then Sam must have thought, “naw, let’s get an ex DC think tank, CNN analyst”
Sam loves the establishment more than he loves the truth. He’s like a Cheney supporter from 2003
@@Bhiles92 Yes exactly... Sam will do anything to avoid the facts which are that Trump would never have allowed this to unfold the way it has.
@@kiwicalibre Trump signed a bs peace treaty and had an earlier date to pull out set. He signed that deal for political points, knowing full well the sham government would collapse as soon as we left.
@@kiwicalibre You don't remember what happened in Syria?
Yep. Scott said in his recent podcast that he was willing to go on Sam's podcast, but hadn't heard from him. The problem is, Scott's knowledge on the subject is too vast that Sam's pro-interventionist arguments would start to collapse in real time. And i dont think he wants the cognitive dissonance
Sam, being more critical of a thought experiment Trump rather than Biden’s actual execution is absurd.
I agree that there is still much uncertainty on whether withdrawing was the right decision, but where Trump called for the dinner table to be cleared, Biden ripped the table cloth off with everything still atop it.
It doesn’t hold that Trump would have done equally poorly in the withdrawal. To say so is to not rightly criticize Biden in his massive failure of competence.
Trump was incompetent at everything he did as President. The only thing he did right was getting elected. Virtually everything else was a disaster. He wouldn't have even paid attention to the withdrawal, because he has the attention span of a gnat, and it would have been managed by exactly the same people as it was managed by. The only possible way it might have gone better could have been as a result of Trump's narcissism. If he had seen things going disastrously he might have unintentionally corrected it, but only in a desperate attempt to save face, because it affected him
@Despize Perform tried, didn't have.
@Despize Perform He certainly had the authority. He just lacked the interest. If there had been some clear easy that he could have profited off of it or gained popularity and praise he would have done it.
The U.S has become a massive failure of competence when it comes to institutions.
@@ptolemyauletesxii8642 do you realize how out of touch with reality this sounds. Trump was one of the better presidents when it came to foreign policy. As a matter of fact, pulling out of Afghanistan was one of his main presidential goals before realizing that doing so would lead to exactly what is happening now. Look up his speech on this. His words were something along the lines of "a quick and sudden withdrawal would lead to a immediate takeover of the Taliban". In fact, under Trump he indeed did lower the amount of troops we had in Afghanistan to about 2,500 with the last death being in Feb of 2020. Now under Biden everything is going to shit because of a decision even his advisors told him it was a bad move. Maybe look at the facts instead of crying orange man bad
Very disappointed with this conversation. I understand that the Taliban is bad, but neither Sam nor Peter gave a coherent plan for how staying in Afghanistan would have changed anything. Would 10 more years have made it any better? How about 20 years? Sam mentioned how nation building worked in South Korea, but that is a very different situation. That is a cohesive country that had stabilized with a DMZ between them and their enemy. Afghanistan is a country drawn up by outsiders with no consideration for the different cultural groups within the country. Where would you draw up a DMZ? There isn't a clear line between the people that back one faction and the people that back the other faction. Also, the presence in South Korea is as a deterrent. The troops in South Korea are not in imminent risk of attack. The troops in Afghanistan WOULD have been attacked if Biden stayed past August 31st. That is a fact that both Sam and Peter conveniently left out of the conversation.
Sam also calls it a conspiracy theory that money is the reason for US involvement. The fact that 80-90% of the money spent on the war ended up going to a handful of companies in the US is not a conspiracy. The fact that those companies receiving that money have far more control over US politicians than the voters that they purport to represent is not a conspiracy.
The attitude of the generations changes over time. The people don't remain constant. They literally die off. NATO should stay until all the last remaining taliban from the 1990s are dead, retired etc.. Which is just a few decades away. The young generation particularly in the cities had never lived under Taliban and had little interest in doing so.
Fuck it, I willl go there, the US government along with the military was conspiring to funnel money into the coffers of their friends in the private sector and this conspiracy played a role in our lengthy occupation of Afghanistan . People are so afraid of the word 'conspiracy'. Does anyone here actually think that people in the US government, military, private sector, or intelligence communities don't conspire to achieve their goals and that those goals may be occulted from the public eye?
LOL, imagine being an IQ realist and comparing South Korea to Afghanistan. Watch the videos of US military trying to train Afghan soldiers and that delusion that we could nation-build Afghanistan should go away immediately.
@@jonathanbowen3640
What you're saying makes sense logically, but that wasn't the reality on the ground. The Taliban had about 45,000 members when the war started. They now have about 75,000 after 20 years of killing them. The numbers are going in the wrong direction for your solution to work.
This makes sense given the near-miss phenomenon. In WW2 Germany was trying to demoralize the British population through heavy air raids. The air raids had the opposite effect. They strengthened the British resolve and kept them in the war longer than they would have been. I feel like this is the same phenomenon happening in Afghanistan. For every Taliban fighter they kill in a bombing raid, they foment more resentment in the Afghan community which results in a new generation of Taliban fighters.
@@TheCommonS3Nse The numbers supporting taliban even at those numbers are nothing in a population of now 20million. (double from 20 years ago) I don't believe there to be widespread support for taliban. particularly among non pashtun. The afghan people could have kept taliban In check for ever in most regions of the country, well they could if they got paid. Many hadn't get paid for months.
Previously with a bit of air support they did just fine fighting the taliban. I don't think the Taliban are a demographic problem or even a military one. Just the government (not local and devolved enough) and to a lesser extent to NATO mission was not as good as it should have been and the effect was magnified by the events. Its a shame they didn't begin to fight, they would have flattened the taliban eventually. They just got spooked and this was an anomaly, a one in a million. IMHO. Taliban got lucky. Play this situation over again ten times and the other nine there would have been a civil war that they woudl have lost. It (defeat to such a weak force) was never inevitable.
Lol always back to Trump.....
Imagine what Hitchens would have had to say about this. And about Biden.
Hitchens would have likely continued to deny the fact that the West clearly sucks at nation-building, and thst the destabilizing wars he was in favour of only leads to greater suffering down the line.
Credit to Biden for finally getting out and standing by hos decision despite the backlash. You woupd have had these same results 5 or 10 years from now had you instead stayed there longer...
Hitchens would've supported American occupation of Afghanistan.
Imagine what he would have said Abt trump?
@@C.Chandler_May similar to what Sam Harris says about him, just much more brutal and ruthless.
@@C.Chandler_May not sure how he could have been more critical here. But yeah, poor Trump.
Close your eyes, take a deep breath... and try to imagine the difference of vocabulary used in this podcast if this disaster would have occured with another election result last November...
I don't know, "there couldn't have been a greater gift to our enemies" sounds like unequivocal condemnation of Biden's actions. In fact, Sam goes so far in condemning Biden's "disastrous" handling of the withdrawal that he sounds like a neocon mouthpiece.
@@alf9708 You can tell the people who didn't actually listen to the podcast.
@@alf9708 It's one thing to call an obvious disaster just that. It's quite another thing to throw tons of mud and insults, to spit venom and to degrade and ridicule endlessly. Sam Harris criticises quite briefly Biden's decision, and just that. He does not attack Biden personally in any way. Would that maybe be a tiny little different if Trump were responsible for this catastrophy? Again, close your eyes and take a deep breath - and the answer will reveal itself.
@@petermuller6359 They would talk more about Trump than anything else. Afghanistan might get a mention
@@petermuller6359 to be clear, it was in fact 45's deal with the Taliban that Biden honored, and delayed at that. No American president since 2001 has gone without major mistakes in Afghanistan. Most of this podcast mentions neither 45 nor Biden, and instead focuses on the difficulties of the situation, the insurmountable moral and commitment between the Taliban and US/Nato/Afghan forces.
Geez Sam, you don't have to be a so-called "neo-isolationist" on the right or the left, or indeed a conspiracy theorist, to feel that the US shouldn't have been there (or in other places) to begin with.
However, if they'd gone in, got Bin Laden, got out again, people would certainly be broadly in support of that.
The contractors wanted a forever war. Not sure that's a highly controversial statement
Sam is clueless. People like Julian Assange, who are much smarter, more informed and astute when it comes to geopolitics, foreign affairs, and racketeering than people like Sam, actually knew what was going on.frim the beginning (2003). Here's Julian calling it in 2011.
"The goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries, through Afghanistan, and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. That is the goal - i e. the goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war." - Julian Assange, 2011
ruclips.net/video/iVIHS1U6Nhs/видео.html
You're naive if you think just doing a pinprick strike on Bin Laden was all that was warranted. The Taliban sheltered this international terrorist and tried to buy time when the US came knocking so that he could flee. A regime like that should never have been allowed back in power but alas its happened. You might be indifferent to theocrats regaining ground, I'm not.
@@jonnnybfly he may not be entirely on-point, but to call Sam clueless is just disingenuous. Focusing too much on one part of the picture doesn't mean you're clueless. It means you're not seeing the bigger picture.
@@stevenhetzel6483 Sam really is clueless on foreign policy. He probably still thinks the US went to war in Iraq over WMDs.
@@zeeshawnali4078 he LITERALLY does.
Damn sam believes the propaganda on tv
Pretty sure Sam is smarter than you an I put together, where's your video?
@@ctakitimu smart people can be wrong sometimes...
@@robertreese1275 Yeah, that's true
Stunning that Sam believes in continued occupation. Not just Afghanistan, but anywhere in the world. That's his solution? Based on what positive evidence? Amazing.
Does he fully support it? I thought he said he was undecided on the issue of withdrawal.
@@marcevan1141 that's what he says. He then goes on to offer a list of increasingly absurd reasons to stay and dismisses every reason to leave as the product of 'conspiracy theories' and the motivations of alt right nazis who think the jews are to blame and left wing whackos who are happy to see the taliban in power.
If you can't decipher his feelings on the issue, you are even more autistic than I am.
@@franzsperginand113 thanks for the compliment
I thought he said take a year to plan every detail of the withdrawal. Did u listen?
He mentioned the positive evidence...Germany Japan and South Korea are 1st world allies.
Sam is so restrained in criticizing Biden. He would have spent half the podcast talking about the stunning incompetence and failure of leadership on all levels of the administration if orange man bad was still president.
Snowflake alert. People are just so mean to you 😢😢😢😢
Bro he literally said Biden's actions are DISASTROUS, you cant use much stronger language than that, besides maybe saying apocalyptic, but that's just obvious clickbait and untrue.
What is up with all these deranged conservatives who watch Sam? It's like you don't pay attention at all and just come here to twist his words. I'm tempted to think you need 6th grade language, preferrably yelled at you, to get a point. It better be a short one, too.
Oh look. Another "orange man is bad" saying r*tard. Yes the orange man is bad.
@@DivineBanana you are lying to yourself if you think sam wouldve reacted the same way if it were trump...
But even donald trump isnt stupid enough to remove the military before civilians, i cant even comprehend the thought process behind that
Joe biden is everything you were convinced Trump was going to be.
Not even close to being true.
Sam Harris isn't sure about whether the US should withdraw from Afghanistan? Maybe he needs 20 more years to think about it
What a clown
You really are not thinking deeply, but you are feeling deeply. Everyone knew this was going to be a shit show. You should think about how our leaving would create chaos. We could do it quietly for a few days, but then the panic would get out. Sorry, your indignation only shows your profound ignorance of the tactically straight jacket we are in. Getting out strengthens us. We were leaders after Vietnam, we’ll be leaders after this.
@Allen Costello Odd Allen. My point is Sam is sharing his feelings, but not thinking tactically. Is your point that Sam is a liberal? I'm not sure a lot of people would agree with that.
Sam: 18:32 I don't understand why it was such a cluster F and couldn't we have stayed?
a few moments later
Sam: 32:00 Goes through all the horrible shit we propped up in the name of democracy for the last 20 years.
Really Sam? The good thing we did in that country was leave. It was all a cluster F and a defense contractors wet dream. Our cluster F exit was the most successful thing we did.
The Middle East was, is, and will FOREVER be a cluster.
I love how he's all about talking about the damage that Trump did (and of course, he did) but once the disasters mount on the side he supported, the language immediately shifts to 'we' and 'our' and 'us' and never names Biden in the opening about how bad it was handled apart from his disastrous messaging. Interesting 🤔
Its reasons like this why so many of us who swore by harris and his teachings have stopped listening.
Wake up sam. You voted in true evil in your trump derangement.
It takes integrity to write what you did, which i applaud. I was a Trump voter solely on policy alignment, dont think his supporters cant acknowledge his large shortcomings. Id rather deal with a blunt and impulsive bully like DJT than a soft spoken automaton who actually will do more damage (like Obama). I commend you for doing your due diligence researching and recognizing
If anything else the Trump presidency revealed peoples true nature. Wtf happened to Sam?
Sam does have a hard time apply the same level of scrutiny to his own ideas as he does with everyone else.
@Thrice Banned You shouldn't feel the need to defend yourself. Imperfect world, imperfect candidates. imperfect choices. The idea that there is a morally preferential choice, absent nuanced debate, is laughable.
The other thing that neither San nor Peter mention is the cost PER DAY of somewhere between $150-$300 million dollars to US taxpayers. A fairly important issue to elide, wouldn't you think?
Agreed. I found that neither one of them put forward a legitimate argument about how staying there would have been better. They only said that the Taliban would not have taken over. Fair enough, but there WOULD have been a civil war, which would have resulted in countless deaths and even more money spent by the US military, with no guarantee that the end result would have been any different.
agreed. Also Is the issue only for not having an "orderly exit" or do people think if the U.S had stayed another 10 years, the outcome would have been any different?
I was expecting Sam to give us his take on how hard it is to change people's mindsets once the beliefs take shape (i.e.Talibans being anti-liberal values or people in the U.S. being anti-vax. etc.) ,how long of a time do you need to convince someone to change their beliefs!
That's not an accurate number at all... And most of the costs of war are spent in America. So we are paying our own country to be at war
@@connerwalsh1257
I can't comment on the accuracy of the $150-$300 million number, but the fact that it is being spent in the US is not a point in favor of staying in Afghanistan. The money that is staying in the US is going to a handful of companies. For example, they spent $43 million building a gas station in Afghanistan that was never used. That is a massive waste of taxpayer money and the only one who benefits is the company that built this gas station at an extremely inflated price. That wouldn't fly for infrastructure work within the US, it shouldn't fly for work in a foreign country.
Bingo
I would like to hear Bush, Obama, and Trump answer some of these difficult questions. After all they were in charge in those 20 years of failure.
This would have happened no matter hwat. We should have never been there. Surgical strikes, not invasions...we spent billions to swat a fly.
trillions
What’s the point of money if you can’t spend it
@@SassanMedia because it wasn't money just laying around..it was debt that we couldn't afford to pay back.
Good job Sam, you helped get Joe elected. Glad you made sense of that!
This would’ve happened under trump
@@friendlypup5650 NOPe
@@lordpain5641 one word: Syria
@@friendlypup5650 like Obama did better than trump
@@lordpain5641 yes, he did
I am intriqued and deeply confused by large portions of Sam's fan base in that none of them appear to like and/or value him.
They are Trump sycophants, only here because they like what he has to say about Islam.
@@Sngy9621 ...and to comment on Sam "worshipping" Biden. By worship, I of course mean that he condemns Biden on this issue and others, but uses language more complex than that used by a 4th grader, delivered in a tone too calm for it to register to them, in their fervor, if they ever even listen to it in the first place.
a lot of dislike are from ex fans that didnt realize immediatly how much of a reactionary ghoul sam really is
It's the vaccine bullshit. And now...they don't know what to do since Dear Leader admitted he got jabbed. If Trump got the vaccine, then how can it be bad? And if he just said it to appease the elites, well then I guess he's capitulating to the supposed "Deep State". Either way they can't reconcile. This was in the post for a while now and finally it's arrived. Fuck them. Let them implode.
Sam Harris is an international treasure.
"A truly minimal sacrifice" - That's how Sam here characterizes over 6,100 Americans killed and many more wounded during the Afghanistan War. I respect Sam's intellect and usually find his thoughts worthwhile, but this interview is ridiculous. More than ridiculous, it's downright disrespectful to brave men and women who lost their lives and to their families who sacrificed so much for so little in return. I seriously doubt that Sam would find it "a truly minimal sacrifice" if it were HIS kids that died because of an ill-conceived, pathetically mismanaged war that made $billions for defense contractors. I've never found myself offended by anything that Sam has said, but his elitism here really bothers me. Why don't you go spend some time with military families, Sam. See what it means to have a spouse or child deployed in a war zone.
I think he was referring to the low ongoing cost had we stayed. Casualties have been very low since about 2015
Mr. Sam Harris knows exactly how to quantify things /s. He's into selling - since some time ago already - wisdom to willing customers, as clearly stated in the intro. I think you're right in questioning the merchandise.
@@adammerza5745 Yeah, it's a low cost, so long as the people dying have no immediate impact on your life. As soon as it's someone that you give a shit about who dies over a bunch of strategically and tactically unsound nonsense, then the cost is suddenly not so low any more. What Sam and, frankly, everyone should consider when backing "wars of choice," is whether you're willing to lose someone who's important to you over it. The Afghanistan War, it turns, out, was so badly mismanaged that I find it hard to imagine anyone who knew what was actually going on saying that they'd be willing to lose their brother, sister, son, daughter, best friend, father, mother, husband or wife in it.
2.1 Trillion dollars for nothing.
Don’t be hysterical, 6000 is very few in terms of a 20 year war. You don’t need to fellate military personal, we get it.
Peter Bergen sounds like a very intelligent, experienced guy, but his assumption that you could just keep the 2,500 American troops in place (presumably forever?) with very little loss of (American) life is not well thought out. The reason that the US troops have had little to no casualties recently is precisely BECAUSE of the peace/withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. The Taliban would definitely not jut give the US troops in country a pass one moment longer if we had withdrawn from that agreement.
Exactly. What is Sam and Peter's end game? Occupation forever? Our record on nation building is, by all measures, horrific. If the justification is a moral one, there are MUCH worse places on earth that need humanitarian aid.
@@greggibson33 Germany and Japan?
@@tssmith1701 Taken from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "The record of past U.S. experience in democratic nation building is daunting. The low rate of success is a sobering reminder that these are among the most difficult foreign policy ventures for the United States. Of the 16 such efforts during the past century, democracy was sustained in only 4 cases ten years after the departure of U.S. forces. Two of these followed the total defeat and surrender of Japan and Germany after WWII, and two were tiny Grenada and Panama. Unilateral nation building by the United States has had an even rougher time - perhaps because unilateralism has led to surrogate regimes and directed U.S. administration during the post conflict period. Not one American supported surrogate regime has made the transition to democracy, and only one case of American administration has done so. Importantly, many of the factors that experience shows are most crucial to success are absent in Iraq. To heed the lessons of its history and raise the odds of success, the United States should support a multilateral reconstruction strategy under U.N. auspices centered on bolstering political legitimacy and sharing economic burdens."
@@tssmith1701 How many drone strikes a year does it take to keep the Germans pacified? How many Civilian Casualties did Merkel absorb in the last year of the Trump administration? To what extent have the Bavarian revanchists co-opted Merkel's military? How dense can you be to possibly make this comparison?
In gradual doses, we've justified ourselves into a 20-year occupation.
I put a like because the podcast was overall good.
However, isolationists are not "far" something. There is more than one type of "isolationists" within the left and within the right.
The 2nd objection is that no, this wouldn't happen under Trump. The simple concept of evacuating the troops last can only evade the mind of a half senile person, or the mind of a woke person. A (partially) woke admin, headed by a half senile person, will inevitably be incompetent. The woke leave a trail of destruction wherever they go. The US government is no different. They have the reverse Midas touch. This is the kind of thing the dissident liberals were worried about. And it's only been 7 months.
This has literally nothing to do with "woke". You know the biggest problem with "woke" people is that they shove their ideologies and opinions where they don't belong.
Just like you.
@@sanders555 Wrong assessment. General Milley is fascinated with "white rage" but is apparently incapable of understanding the Afghan rage that led to a disaster under his watch. If he spent his time focusing on problems that matter in the real world, maybe this disaster wouldn't be happening.
@@abstractnonsense3253 No he wasn't. You listened to one paragraph from one public statement, and it triggered you enough to believe that it somehow not only compromises but encompasses his entire psychology and decision-making abilities because you're a simpleton.
@left-wing monkeylord I don't see where I'm wrong based on your response.
@left-wing monkeylord I didn't, but if you want to take my words out of context and share them with the world while clutching your pearls them I can't stop you.
Hey Sam, this is EXACTLY what you said would happen under Trump when he got elected. 4:05
It did on 1/6.
And during covid, when we lost 600k lives
I'm generally in alignment with most of Sam's opinions, however his general support for the war has always been foolish. I disdain Trump, but the one thing I give him credit for is trying to withdraw our troops from Syria and elsewhere. Biden finished it off, that's a good thing regardless.
@@entelin I both agree and disagree. It was good for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan in that it is best for the USA to keep its eyes on the prize. The prize is China - not a backwards Central Asian kleptocracy/theocracy. On the other hand, I think Afghanistan might have been salvageable...after another 20 years of occupation (slight sarcasm intended there)
@@souljaboyisbad mostly killed by democrate governors especially Cuomo.
Sam uses words like we and our, there is no we or our. You voted for this.
We all voted for this. Trump started the negotiation process with the Taliban, they gained a ton of ground under Trump due to those negotiations. If the crazyness stays within the borders of Afghanistan then we will be talking about something else by Halloween. If we get major terrorist attacks all over again then we will end up right back over there and unfortunately may simply need to keep a force there.
@@danielm5161 🤡🤡🤡
And if you're a Trump supporter, based on your reasoning, you voted for the billions of dollars of military aid funded to Saudi for their outright, blatant genocide in Yemen. Get off your high-horse.
@@danielm5161 The Taliban actually offered the Americans to take control of Kabul until they got all the civilians out with the troops they had left, but the Americans said no, evacuated their troops and allies, from the airport before evacuating Americans civilians and then we had the terror attack. Outrageous!
@@richardwainwright1877 This intel is based on what?
Sam Harris is mistaken when he says only the far right and far left support Biden on this. His friend Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece on substack this week where he praised Biden on his actions in Afghanistan. So did Mathew Dowd.
great arguments Sam, "we are better, coz, we are better"! not very different from the colonial mindset!
Yeah, moral relativism is favourite tool of privileged Americans. If you can’t see difference between U.S. supported Afghan government and Taliban, you should attempt to see your moral core is almost diminished at this point
I don't think trump would have failed us like this.
'would' ?
Any withdrawal would have been bad for the Afghans, but at least we could have done a better job at getting our citizens & local allies out.
One thing is for sure- Trump would have gotten a lot more flack from the MSM than Biden has, even if he did a better job than Biden has
Biden's incompetence is so extreme, it really makes me wonder if it was on purpose. I don't believe that but this is worse than satire.
Uh, the Kurds in Syria? Hello?
I wouldn't have thought Trump would have failed you so catastrophically when covid descended upon us either...
At 14:35 Sam Harris speaks of 'others' completely lost trust in the media. Who in the media does he trust?
Yup & no introspection as to why no one trusts the media.
The media are liars when they talk about Sam or the things he knows well, but suddenly regain credibility when they confirm his priors.
@@sheriffbigdog9671 Gell-Mann amnesia effect combined with confirmation bias & cognitive dissonance.
@@Razaiel
If you want to be truthful, your statement needs considerable nuance.
I am nearly alone in my circle of people in not being on the left, and the only media it seems the left distrust is Fox News. Everything the mainstream says is the real news according to them. I place Sam firmly on the left of the political spectrum so he is one of few in that space with a mind open sufficiently to see how slanted mainstream news reporting is. Jonathan Haidt is even more so. I have a lot of time for him.
@@samdg1234 Fair enough, but where someone is on the political spectrum is highly subjective & relative to where you're at on the spectrum.
I'm quite cynical when it comes to the media, I start with the assumption that they're lying & go from there. This applies to every media outlet, since they're often just stenographers for the establishment.
How’s that vote for Biden working out for you?
Big improvement, hope the next one is better.
Basically the question comes down to: is the world better off with American occupation.
Or is the world better off without terrorists?
We’re better off with relearning how to work with nature, instead of bulldozing it.
Nope. It’s ‘Are the Afghans capable of supressing terrorism’?
@@sowmindful1501 terrorists need to be bulldozed. It’s bulldoze or be bulldozed. But China Russia are going to team up with all that is bad and try to bulldoze the US while they still can with this sorry administration calling the shots. Best time to do it.
Evidently, it is. Women's rights have literally disappeared and girls can't get an education.
Sam is turning into a joke, Asif anyone including trump would of handled this so badly. Stick to meditation buddy.
Well, Sam, turns out there are indeed worse things than mean tweets.
Incredible how some of the most intelligent minds are still corrupted by TDS
All doubts that Sam Harris is a ridiculous person went out the window with his discussion with Andrew Sullivan.
What the fuck are you talking about mate, Biden had the balls to do what Trump was too scared to. Getting out of this disaster of a war is the best thing Biden has done, Sam is out to lunch on this
Sam is another example of how toxic is tweeter, he changed from a slow and tactful speaker, into a frothing in the mouth TDS lunatic in a very shot time span.
@@jhonatancock2302
I was suspended from twitter a month ago, and I just told them to cram it. I don't want to use that useless site.
“Our”? Who do you mean by “our”? If Trump were in, you’d be saying “Trump’s.” So call it like it is instead of blaming the American people, which includes yourself. I’m a loyal subscriber because of your precision of speech. So please go back to that.
what do you expect from a TDS suffer?
Sam cheering on imperialism, what a surprise.... The mission was a disaster, not one more American life is worth what’s going on over there.
Trying not to be derogatory towards this podcast.
Although...
I find nothing within init, that enlightens me.
Stop doing the talk, then start the walk.
Going into Afghanistan.
Understand, Why at First...
I have been listening to America near
nearly all my life.
Stop trying to rule the world.
Had enough of Your Country.
David Milliband's remuneration at the IRC was $1Million in 2019, if that is were you want you donations to go.
This is Sam Harris. Just a note, we will see how my Trump Derangement Syndrome has escalated in this episode
#MAGA ending: My Ass Got Arrested lol
@@kalmansovari6878 Why hello there fascist.
Trump Derangement Syndrome: the mistaken belief that Donald Trump is anything other than a sociopathic conman.
@@mickeybeavison1053 Was swimming in MAGA tears in a closed pool. lol You want me to send you links of Mango Unhinged praising the Taliban, or your head is stuck in Ben Shapiro's ass and cant listen?
@@georgelux126 Mistaken? LOL
Your opening statement is absolutely wrong. We were saying we would leave for 18 months. We warned people for months that we would be leaving. It was not bungled, your brain is.
21:30 - this point, which you hear a lot, requires a certain level of omniscience regarding the collapse of the Afghan army and the subsequent fall of the country. The CIA, the State Department and others have all said that the anticipation of collapse was there (as a worst case scenarioi), but that they had months after the troops had left, to sort everything out. The necessity for civilians to be removed wasn't there. They were staying put. They lived there.
My view is - 2,500 US troops (mostly protecting diplomatic and embassy assets) was a token force. Leaving a country as the defeated force will always look like this in my opinion.
If you make global security a shallow and partisan domestic issue (Trump & Biden), if you treat the Taliban as partners (Trump), turn a blind eye to increased Taliban violence (Trump), ignore it when the Taliban continue to disobey the terms of the Doha agreement (Trump), remove the vast majority of your troops (Trump), set arbitrary dates (Trump & Biden), underestimate or ignore the ineptitude of the Afghans (everybody), this is exactly what you get.
If you're not prepared to increase the troop numbers or maintain an air presence, it will always end like it did - the only part up for debate was when and how soon. Whoever the president was - inheriting 2,500 troops and having a policy of withdrawal based on arbitrary dates, it wasn't going to end any differently.
Does Harris regret voting for Biden yet? I doubt it.
It’s interesting that Sam doesn’t seem to grasp (or he’s pretending to) that the point of the war was to enrich defense contractors. Plain and simple.
Major pretend…
Sam never makes sense when he talks about geopolitics.. I feel like he's getting paid, it's just hard to believe he can be this naive..Because it's really not that hard to understand...
This was an interesting discussion (I wish Sam had mad this a PSA), but you're correct - that was a major discussion point missed
He totally rejects that notion.....bc its a stupid masochistic conspiracy theory.
No, we clearly were just there to spread peace and democracy1!!1!!!11!
One silver lining about this bungle in the desert jungle, is that the Left and the Right may have actually found some common ground. We agree this was a tragic debacle. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah for different reasons I think but now after the debacle exit. It’s morphed in to both hating the way Bidens exited.
Both sides couldn't wait to get into Afghanistan. They're two cheeks of the same ass.
Imagine if this happened under Trump, and imagine Sam's intro then.. pathetic. Biden is a senile old man..
this was Trump's deal with the Taliban. He is the one who made promises to them we would be out by
May.
Especially when Trump was clear about an incremental withdrawal. Sam can hate Trump all he wants. No way in hell Trump and Pompeo would've screwed this up so badly. I didn't think anybody could screw up this badly.
@@Dj13e36 Imagine if Trump had been more involved, would anyone still be alive there? He would not be able to find it on a map!
Trump is a liar.
"I'm sure Trump would have done something just like this." Bullcrap. You KNOW no such thing. Sam, you've become the thing you lament
I don’t generally leave comments on anything and I think Sam Harris is one of the clearest thinkers in the public space but on this one I think he is grossly confused about the US options here. The most disturbing idea didn’t come directly from Sam but his guest, however, it seems to have formed the basis for much of the discussion. The notion the the US would maintain the status quo simply by leaving things as they were- 2,500 us troops is infantile at best and purposefully misleading in all likelihood. If the US refused to honor the terms of the withdrawal they would find themselves in the middle of a civil war at the moment. Impossible and lethal with 2,500 troops. Any ramp up of troops in anticipation of such a situation would have triggered a war also. This is but one simple and obvious reality that neither Sam nor his guest acknowledged. Did I miss something here? Seems like I must have.
The US had been drawing down troops in afghanistan for some time. At its peak there were 100,000, but since 2015 it had been drawn down to 10,000. And then under Trump it was 5000; note that the 10,000 figure was during the last two years Obama was in office, and the peace deal was only negotiated I think for the past year, halfway through 2020.
If the US was able to hold Afghanistan with such a minimal commitment of troops, with very few if any casualties considering that they acted in a supervisory and logistical support role (not to mention air support), then there was no problem staying there for an extended period, considering how long the US has been in South Korea (with 28,000 troops stationed there) and which no one seems to complain about. This was a good mission that would have kept the Taliban out of power for good, and likely made Afghanistan a powerful ally of the United States. That this wasn't worth such a minimal investment is kind of insane.
I blame Biden for this. He seems to take the same quasi-religious anti-war stance many progressive leftists do, without realizing the true consequences of leaving the Taliban, one of the US' mortal enemies, in power of a major country. On one hand, I have to think the Taliban will want to leave the US alone for fear of provoking another invasion. But are we really to believe, they have no interest in revenge for two decades worth of killing their fellow fighters and leaders? Now its not just whatever remnants of Al Qaeda and ISIS remain, but the Taliban, that the US has to worry about, in orchestrating major terrorist attacks. All because Biden adopted the mindset of a progressive left wing democrat, and didn't like the optics of being in a "forever war" despite the extraordinarily low upkeep and utter hypocrisy with respect to all its other military bases around the world. Its like if Kyle Kulinski was in charge of the United States. A total failure in leadership, not that I expected better from Trump either.
@@radscorpion8 Thank you for such an informative reply. Hard to disagree. It is my understanding that the Taliban had agreed to a cease fire in exchange for troop drawdown. It was in the the context of potential territorial gains and certain increased casualties that this was negotiated and the probability for increased hostilities was almost 100%. But yes if we could have held with minimal commitment then it would be almost insane not too for obvious reasons. And yes in that case this is more sickening.
Sam in his own bubble🙂
Sam had me until trying to speculate what Trump would have done lol. Silly stuff
TDS has no cure
I truly regret vote for Biden. Wish I had pushed back and realized id been lied to by the news. But I think Kamala would be worse and Pelosi isn't right either.
Hopefully, the military leaders resign or get fired for this utter failure.
The most interesting thing about this whole shit is that 1800 people actually liked this conversation. I guess deaf people listening to podcasts is a huge thing in 2021
more war, more war, war is peace
@KosmikTopSekret true, although ghouls are already coming out of woodwork crying for more war
@KosmikTopSekret Pulled out the military before our civilians, that's what he did right? Does that logic still follow if he shot some random person too
You would rather America was doing the wars than someone else.
@@Thisisahandle701 of course cuz we are good guys and others are bad guys
@@jacktenrec63 Because we have institutional structures that make public officials accountable to public opinion, and systems of information sharing namely a free press in the context of a pluralistic society.
Sam, don't be such a hypocrite. You started just criticizing just the fact thehat USA went out of Afghanistan; and you didn't over empathize the lack of morality in Biden's utterance regarding it was similar as in Vietnam, and Joe said it with a sense of suck it up, and sort of smirking; and then you come to to the fact the last admin prepared plans to leave for 2021; and you had to just imagine what Trump would say as president if he where there, while 1) he is not there 2) The assumption of what you imagined Trump would have said has nothing compared with the lack of humanity sense in what Biden said, and also the stupidity in terms of strategy of PR what Biden said in Geopolitical reach.
Please fix the title. This is not the "fall" of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has never been a country except technically by some drawn borders. It has always been a bunch of local factions that live in a local tribe mentality. Some tribes occasionally get more power than those around them, and they temporarily conquer surrounding areas and put them under subjugation. Those surrounding conquered areas don't follow our externally drawn silly country boundaries either. And we stupid westerners always scream about women's rights and their being subjugated. Yes it's bad for them. But in virtually all of these middle eastern tribal clashes, non-elite males including boys, and all males on the "wrong" side at the moment, are infinitely worse off than virtually all females. The males are routinely beaten, imprisoned, tortured and killed just for being on the wrong side at the moment, or for being a non-elite male in the right tribe but who upset an elite's fragile ego. Yes the women see bad things. But it's not even close to the scale of male mistreatment and murder.
Even when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in the 70s and tried to force communism on them, they couldn't succeed after years and years of loss of life and draining treasure poured into their attempted conquest.
Please get Peter Zeihan on your podcast.
I was just thinking the same thing! I think his point about Americans receding from the global stage (independent of who is in office) is the key phenomenon here! Good call!
Agreed
John Mearsheimer is the man you’re looking for. Peter Zeihan sells books - Mearsheimer has ideas.
Sam, you always sound like: "be reasonable see it my way". Your analysis, and points are increasingly sounding like propaganda.
Here is the answer for those who is questioning the spirit of Afghan forces. Why the three hundred thousands soldiers relatively fall to seventy five thousands Taliban?
Coward should be the last word justifying the spirit of Afghan forces. What speaks the best for the fall of the Afghan soldiers is that both government and the Taliban run by the Pashtun ethnic group - that as well have the same religious faith Sunni. The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. It's an immoral act to kill people who is brother or relatives to you specially if you don't have a good reason to do so. In this case our corrupt government wasn't worth defending by killing from your own ethnicity. That also fade the distinction line between who is Taliban and who is local residents in the Pashtun residing regions. It made even more difficult for the American to go after the Taliban in the past twenty years combating Taliban. If a Taliban hide his gun you literally can't distinguish them for the local residents again in the Pashtun residing regions.
In places where there isn't any Pashtun and other ethnicity lives. Specially Hazara ethnic group, where both in their looks and religious faith differ from Taliban you see a strong resistance against the Taliban. I give an example of my hometown, Jaghori, which stood with minimum support form the central government till the fall of Kabul in the past two years without loss of any ground to The Taliban only with local residents forces with basic equipment.
Liberalization of Islamic world should happen naturally. If you are going to do it forcefully, expect to shell lot of time, money and resources. But they have badly messed up the exit strategy and turning their backs on afghan allies.
All anti vaccine Pikachus in the comment section just throwing slurs at sam. Go to your conspiracy theory gurus, sam isn't one
For some reason, these conspiracy theory types are always the first to show up to Sam's videos, and in decent numbers too, relative to views. Although, I doubt they listen to much, and what they hear goes in one ear, out of the other.
Yep, the US government, military, and intelligence communities would NEVER conspire to achieve their goals and they only do what they do because they LOVE the Afghan people sooooooo much.
@@genericusername8337 and you latch on to every military justification for their horseshit instead of letting it go in one ear and out the other like you should.
@@franzsperginand113 you realise that by replying to my comment in the way you did, you actually accepted that you are an anti vax Pikachu searching for conspiracy gurus. Why else would you reply?
@@franzsperginand113 I don't think in binary, and your reaction doesn't follow from what I said, you're just venting.
Sam’s comments around “how little thought we’ve given…” is absolute BS! He doesn’t have the details around how much thought was given towards evacuation and shouldn’t make statements like that until he does! Amazing to me how little respect men who have never served the country show men who have/do!
I can guarantee you that the senior military leaders advise President Biden on evacuation procedures with the expectation that the Afghanistan government would it be in place and the Afghanistan military would be doing its job as the evacuation steps unfolded.
it is as if these military leaders have given little thought to the reaction of the afghans & their military & how it'll collapse. weird how that means that they have given little thought to it, pathetic. before you start barking about how "no one could've expected this" here's Peter & Kenneth Pollack talking about it
@@Random-om8rq just because the outcome isn’t what was expected doesn’t mean adequate scenario planning wasn’t conducted! EVERY possible scenario can’t be factored in…especially those as unlikely as this one! But all you ‘experts’ know the facts about what happened here and, of course, feel obliged to speak on those ‘facts!’
@@derekcummings3972 except people have been saying that this was likely, as i have mentioned before, there are entire books on the matter. & if the scenario doesn't factor in for total collapse then that just adds more into the argument that the military leaders were complete idiots. as was the civilian leadership under Biden. (including him) but this is nothing new with the democratic leadership in office we've seen it with Obama before.
bring back Ham Sarris
And what is this obsession with women and girls? When talking about the fate of the Afghanistan people post pull-out, everyone keeps mentioning women and girls almost exclusively. I got news for everyone: the fates of men under the Taliban aren't going to be great either. Yes, the fates of women will be worse but there's a reason that there were plenty of men trying to cling onto ascending aircraft. It's not going to be a picnic for anyone that isn't Taliban or pro-Taliban in ideology.