All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing John Vaughn.
Welcome to the show.
John, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks.
Happy to have you here.
So tell us your name and rank, and you can leave out the serial number, and then tell us what the hell you're still doing in the U.S. Army.
So my name is John Vaughn, I'm a captain in the U.S. Army.
I am still doing my thing, you know, I got a little bit more time before I can get out, but I'm setting myself up, making some decisions, and getting myself set up for, you know, whatever comes after, you know, just a matter of time now.
All right, now, the reason you're here is because of this great piece you wrote for the Institute, and we're running it on antiwar.com today, I think it is, or yesterday.
Evacuation eyewitness, what I saw in Kabul.
You're just back from the evacuation at the Kabul airport, correct?
Yep, got back a couple of weeks ago, and you know, you and I had talked about it a while ago, and you know, decided I was going to write something about it, because a lot of stuff I was seeing was, you know, it was kind of lacking, I think, the, lacking the kind of intensity and the kind of the emotional content that, you know, is kind of important, and there's not a lot of first-hand stories flowing around out there, and I figured I'd throw out my experience to help round out the discussion.
Yeah, well, I mean, when it comes to emotions on this topic, there's only one allowed, and that is to be terribly upset that the war has come to an end, and that Joe Biden has cheated us out of another 20 years of war, I'm pretty sure, from watching TV.
Yeah, and you know, really, that's kind of, there's, I would say there's probably like two things that I see.
One is that, where, you know, well, you know, we weren't done, you know, there was so much we could have done still, you know, and we could have, you know, it wasn't the right timing or things like that.
And then the most extreme that you see on the other side is, well, the war was pretty bad, and you know, it needed to end eventually, but this was not the way to do it, and it just, you know, it could have been, it should have been done differently, and it's all Joe Biden's fault, and, you know, it's, I, you know, I've got my own kind of opinions on the matter, but, you know, that's one of the things I talk about in there, is that this, the range of discussion, both in the army and in the public more broadly, it just doesn't capture what the reality is, is that, you know, the war needed to end, and no matter when this was going to happen, in more or less, to a greater or lesser degree, it would have looked pretty much the same as it did all during August.
So that's, that's kind of why I wrote the piece, you know, to give people that kind of personal insight and that view on the ground of what was going on.
Well, all right, so before we get to the view on the ground of exactly, you know, what it looked like from your position there, can we talk about the alternatives there?
Because I think you're right, that that is, you know, a very powerful part of the message.
And I got to admit that, man, they could have done this better and different.
And, but I think other people aren't really recognizing the position that they were in, was that in order to, because there are two major problems, right?
The first major problem was leaving all the equipment behind with the Taliban or with the Afghan National Army that then got turned right over to the Taliban.
And then second was waiting so long to pull all the civilians out so that now, not that they all got slaughtered on the way out, but they could have been.
And they, you know, you guys ended up being dependent on the Taliban for security to get the people ushered out as the government there was completely collapsing.
But what was the alternative, right?
Would have been to just say that to admit that the Afghan government and army were a complete joke and, you know, like Citigroup cannot last without American government largesse.
And so we're taking all of their equipment away and we're getting all our civilians out before it's too late, before the Taliban take over everything.
And if they'd done that, they would have been absolutely crucified.
That would have been the right thing to do.
But politically, they would have been accused of destroying the Afghan army.
Incredibly, right.
Just completely destroying the Afghan army and completely undermining the Kabul government.
And then they would have been blamed for its fall.
They would have just been have to they would have had to have just been willing to take that on the chin and just say, fine, you can accuse us all we want, but we know that chances are so high the Taliban would have ended up with all this stuff in a matter of weeks anyway.
That's the only way to do it.
And instead they sold it like, well, it's OK to withdraw because the army that we've built and the government that we built are so good and so strong and so well-liked and so powerful that we've done our job.
We're calling it mission accomplished.
That was Biden's, you know, his first big speech on the thing was, look, we built a 300,000 man army.
And he was trying to say that, look, if they can't stand without our help, then that's just too bad.
But what he was saying was they can't stand without our help.
And so once they had boxed themselves in like that, then, you know, we saw what happened.
Right.
They ended up turning over, I don't know how many billion dollars worth of what all different kinds of equipment to the Taliban.
I mean, the most obvious thing on the in the pictures is Humvees and stuff like that.
But God knows what all they got, you know.
And then, of course, the the civilians were put in that awkward position of having to flee like that, which was the embarrassing part for them.
But anyway, so I just wonder what your opinion about that is or whether there was a way for them to construct the withdrawal in a way that would have been, you know, better for keeping those weapons out of the hands of the Taliban and safer for the withdrawal of the civilians there without getting stuck in that position of being accused of undermining the government and being the reason that it falls.
Yeah, absolutely.
So with regard, yeah, there's two there's two different problems like you were talking about.
And the first one was, I think it kind of the way the way that I always thought about it was the two different problems that were being faced by both the military and by the politicians and by the kind of the leaders.
And this is less like my opinion on it, more just kind of like building the thing.
I think it's more of a question of when and how.
Right.
So the timing was very important to how this was going to go.
And this is something that President Biden talked about himself during the, you know, I remember sitting in the operations center in Kabul, you know, at like 11 o'clock at night because of the time zone difference, watching his speech at the beginning of it when he came out of Camp David to talk about it.
And that was one of the things he talked about is he said, hey, there's two reasons that we're here right now.
One of them is that we didn't want to pull out or start the evacuation too early because it was going to undermine the Afghan government.
And, you know, I think that and, you know, they've kind of admitted as much that the speed and the completeness and the totality of the Taliban victory was totally unexpected by kind of maybe not the entire military, but definitely by the political leadership of the military.
And, you know, they had hoped that there would be and this is something you talked about on your show as well, that there would be a, you know, what was the word you use as the decent interval between the withdrawal and the withdrawal and the collapse.
And that did not happen.
The withdrawal hadn't even occurred until the collapse had already happened.
And, you know, one of the things I talk about in my piece is that.
And that was part of the consequence of delaying the withdrawal.
Right.
We had a deal for May 1st.
The Taliban seemed to have stuck to their schedule while the Americans delayed theirs by four months.
Well, so there goes your decent interval.
I mean, they were the ones who gave it away.
Yeah.
So the that's the that's the first thing, right, is like they didn't want to compromise the Afghan government and they figured they expected and a lot of people did.
And, you know, when you had Andrew Cockburn on your show a while ago, that was one of the things he suggested.
He said, well, you know, the Afghan army is pretty big, you know, and if they decided to fight, you know, they could put up a pretty stiff resistance for a while.
Well, it just turns out that they just didn't at all.
Way less than people expected.
And just the speed and the totality of the Taliban victory surprised a lot of people.
We thought we were going to have more time to do it and more time to kind of move ourselves out.
But it just ended up not occurring.
And so what they ended up having to do is just rush, rush, rush, rush, rush everything out at the very end.
And that was one of the main problems that the speed and the timeline, right, kind of sort of the ticking time bomb, right, of the clock ticking towards August 31st was always on our mind while we were out there doing all this.
It's like, how many people can we get out?
How much equipment can we get out by the 31st?
The 31st, the 31st.
And that was a huge determinant in how we were able to provide for the for the, you know, the withdrawal of everybody.
So, you know, taking care of, you know, we were able to move out in that amount of time, you know, 150,000 people, right.
And if you think about it, right, like what would you need to do to take care of 150,000 people to, you know, to feed, to clothe, to provide waste disposal and water services for all of that.
And then and then imagine having almost no time to prepare for it.
And then on top of that, not having the normal ways that you would go about doing it, like contracting somebody to do it.
Right.
So like the timeline was absolutely critical to determining how things were going to go while we were there.
It also determined the amount of equipment that we could move out, the number of people and the types of equipment that we could move out as well.
Right.
Because, you know, if you've got if you're flying everything out on planes, right, there's only so much stuff that you can put on each plane and there's only certain ways that you can arrange it so that the plane is able to fly straight.
So, you know, the guys that were doing all of the management were working really hard to try and get out as many people and equipment as possible that whole time.
And the timeline was absolutely critical to it.
And that kind of plays into and leads into the second point, right, that you were talking about, which is, you know, the equipment that got left behind the Taliban.
And so I think that personally, like looking at it, I think it's more of a that problem is more of an optics thing, right?
It's bad optics to see the Taliban running around with our machine guns and in our vehicles and stuff like that.
But in terms of like real capability that this gives the Taliban, you know, it's it's not that much.
Right.
A lot of people I've seen have talked about, oh, you know, however many billions of dollars that we that we're leaving behind.
And, you know, me and some of the other soldiers as we're cleaning stuff up back there, you know, we talk about that.
And I would just say, guys, like the stuff that we're leaving behind for the Taliban, this is this is grains of sand on the beach.
And when we're talking about the amount of money that's been spent in Afghanistan, right, the stuff that we're leaving here, they're not going to be able to support.
Right.
Because they can't buy parts for certain things.
Well, what are we even talking about?
We got Humvees.
We got big old trucks.
I don't know if there's MRAP's, too.
But, you know, I've seen like the big old, you know, a canvas covered back type truck.
Yep.
Huh.
Howitzer's.
We definitely left those behind.
Yeah.
So and that goes into the question of space.
Right.
So like, do we want to bring out one MRAP, for example, which weighs, you know, 15 tons?
Or do we want to bring out three pieces of like communications gear, which is much more sensitive?
And so like a lot of decisions were made on the ground as to what we can or can't take based on based on those sorts of considerations.
Hey, what can we fit in the back of a C-17?
And if we only have so many planes, what are we going to prioritize first?
Yeah.
You know, I saw people saying that, you know, the worst thing here is some of the electronic gear inside the Humvees, you know, anti-IED tech or anti-RPG tech and these kinds of things that that'll all get sold off to the Chinese and they'll break our codes and this kind of deal.
But anyway, I don't know what you make of that, if you could answer that one.
But also, was there anything else besides trucks and howitzers?
I know there were some helicopters.
Obviously, they can't maintain the Blackhawks, so those aren't going to fly.
And I think they sabotaged most of the Russian Heinz.
They bought them.
But what else was it that they got?
Do you know?
Yeah, so as far as the communications equipment, right, like we were and I'm a I was an infantry officer in the early part of my career, and then I transitioned over and, you know, I do communication stuff now.
So that's kind of my kind of my wheelhouse.
And we were very thorough in going through and identifying the things that held like encryption or that held, you know, secret, secret hard drives and stuff like that.
And we were very thorough going through and cleaning up through the area.
And so like for things like inside the Humvees, right, they got the computer systems that can communicate on secret networks.
Well, you can remove those those hard drives or you can push certain buttons on them and that effectively wipes the things and they become paperweights.
So as we were going through, that was definitely something that we considered.
And we went through and we're very thorough about cleaning that stuff up.
But kind of I mean, as anyone can imagine, right, like, you know, if you're moving out of your house, for example, like how much stuff is left behind every time you go back in there?
Right.
So there's just and we're talking about an entire military base here and not even the biggest one.
You know, there was also the embassy, which had loads of stuff, you know.
So we all did the best we can.
And that's one of the things that I want to emphasize in this, right, is that all the soldiers on the ground, you know, we were we were working really hard to to make sure everything was cleaned up.
But we were under the gun.
We were under the clock and kind of had to prioritize as we were going through things.
So so yeah.
And then what was the second part?
It was the communications gear.
And just what all else they got.
I mean, the obvious footage was the Humvees and trucks.
And I got to assume there were some howitzers and things like that, some helicopters.
But what am I missing as far as the equipment that fell into the hand?
I know there were some pictures of, you know, major ammunition stores and stuff like that.
And then I'm sure you saw where the Taliban special operations forces the day after y'all left the airport were parading around in American uniforms with M4 rifles.
And also this was kind of a side point, but I thought was funny.
And a lot of veterans were pointing it out on Twitter and so forth that a lot of these Taliban have clearly been trained by the Americans or by the Brits, because you can see by the way they hold their rifles and all this stuff, they're not just mimicking us.
They've been trained by us.
This is the some of these guys are the Afghan National Army, or at least they were trained long enough to take a rifle and a pair of boots and go home, you know, and learn how to point their pointy finger away from the trigger.
And if they didn't and if they didn't learn it from then, then they learned it from 20 years of watching us do it, walking around outside of our bases.
You know, a lot of these guys are really hard.
I mean, and you know this, they're hardened warriors and, you know, they know what they're doing, especially these those elite guys that everybody saw walking around.
And yeah, I mean, that pretty much, you know, identifies it all is there's a lot of hardware left on the ground, but a lot of it is stuff that is not any different from what they looted from the, you know, the hundreds of A&A checkpoints and posts and stuff like that, that they, you know, acquired and got control of, you know, and we kind of had a little bit of an advantage because we had some time and some space to dedicate to, I guess, let me put it this way, we, as opposed to a lot of the retreating A&A forces, were concerned about demilling the equipment that we were going through.
So, but when I say demilling, I mean like making it unsuitable for military use.
So, like breaking certain components or taking certain things out of them and removing them, depending on what the equipment is, or pouring sand in the fuel tanks of fighter jets, you know, stuff like that, that make them unsuitable for military use.
So, you know, we were very concerned about trying to, and we're very deliberate about going through, but the fact is, you know, it's a whole military base.
And then we were also dealing with the 150,000 folks that we were moving out of there.
So, you know, it was a little bit of split attention.
We did try really hard while we were over there to limit the amount of usable stuff the Taliban got.
Is it right or is it not right that, well, and can you tell me, you were there, you know, for how long leading up to this stuff?
So, I was in Afghanistan for a total of two weeks and that was, I tell you what, Scott, that was like the longest two weeks of my life, man.
I bet.
You know, we felt like, you know, while we were all over there, we kept looking at each other.
You hadn't been there before that?
So, I personally have not been to Afghanistan before.
So, a lot of our soldiers, especially the older, you know, veterans were, had been to Afghanistan before.
And, you know, that, but most of them had not been to this particular, to HKIA.
And when I say HKIA, I mean Hamid Karzai International Airport.
So, most of them had not been to HKIA itself before.
And then, I mean, there was, of course, Kandahar Airfield and Bagram Air Base were the two biggest air bases.
And I was going to ask you just how bad the military was dragging ass on closing those things down because I know they were trying to pressure Biden into staying and saying, oh, gee, we're not ready yet and this kind of thing.
So, I wonder, you know, how much of a role that that played in it as well.
That, you know, they've known since February of 2020 that the deadline was May.
They should have been ready by then.
And they kind of deliberately weren't, it looks like.
Well, you would think, you know, I think that a lot of that, the only thing that I know personally that I can speak on is, you know, the stuff that I witnessed there and the stuff that I read on the news.
You know, and there's a lot of people that are much more qualified to speak to that particular part of it myself.
I think, I think, too, one of the things that I saw there that was a little bit that might be illustrative of this kind of point, right, is that, you know, there's a lot of inertia as well with people doing things.
And so it was kind of surreal to me, like as we were going through, like when we got on ground for the first day or two, right, we're all kind of moving around, getting our bearings, taking a look at stuff going on.
And it just, it was, it was really astonishing to me the degree to which people were just going about their business like nothing was wrong, right?
Like we were listening to the gunfire and, you know, the explosions from the flashbangs and stuff like that.
And occasionally we'd catch a whiff of CS gas or something like that, you know, and then there's just like, you know, guys driving around, there's people sitting outside the coffee shop drinking their lattes.
And, you know, we were looking around and the civilians that are working on there, for example, you know, just going about their business like nothing is weird, right?
People not packing their bags, people not taking their equipment out.
And, you know, I think as much as there are like, you know, people that had, there were absolutely people who had vested interests in maintaining our presence in Afghanistan.
I do think also that a lot of it has to do with just the inertia of people not wanting to change.
And they're continuing to do the same things that they did over and over again for weeks and weeks.
And, you know, eventually we had to start kicking people out and we had to tell the coffee shop guy, hey, you're closing your doors tomorrow.
Like get your stuff out of here, right?
Like all the shops and stuff that are on the base, you know, you guys can't come on anymore.
You're not allowed to come on.
And, you know, all that especially changed after the after the suicide bombing, you know, it just kind of escalated.
That was when things really kicked off into high gear and people started moving.
It's just a tragedy that it took that long for people to kind of get their wits about them.
Yeah.
OK, hang on just one second.
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All right, let's get back to that in a second, because I want to ask you about the first day there.
Everybody was, you know, afraid of the Saigon helicopter moment and all that.
Instead, you got people hanging on to the sides of planes as they're taking off, trying to hide up in the landing gear somehow.
One guy got crushed up there.
Did I mean, I know that people are stupid mammals and panic and do weird things when they're in herds.
But was the word going around at that time that this is the last flight out of here?
And if you don't hold on to the landing gear, you're never going to get out.
And the Taliban are going to come and shoot you in the head any minute now.
Is that what they believed when that was all going on?
So I have no idea because I watched that happen back at the back in the United States.
Right.
But now you weren't there yet.
OK, so when that happened, that was the moment that was like that that everyone here looked around and we're like, OK, well, this is happening.
We're doing this now.
It's not just a be prepared to, you know, because we had been doing drills for a while and we were kind of, you know, we had been doing some planning and expecting stuff to happen for, you know, for a few weeks.
But then after that disaster was the moment that we all looked at each other and we're like, OK, well, this is it.
We're doing it.
And then, you know, we were getting on planes early the next morning.
So, you know, one of the things I talk about in my piece, you know, and it's like, you know, when we when we took off, there were still people on the runway.
And, you know, it takes it takes a long time to fly to the other side of the world, which is, you know, part of the reason that we ought to not be there.
But, you know, during that whole plane ride, we have no idea what we're flying into.
And, you know, we're talking about like what can like what what do we need to be ready for, you know, when we land?
And, you know, I half expected, you know, the rational part of my brain was like, you know, there if there's people all over the place down there, they're not going to let us land for the security reasons.
But then, you know, my my monkey brain was very much thinking, you know, oh, my gosh, like, what do we do when the ramp opens and a crowd of people rushes the plane?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And one of the things we talked about, you know, and kind of sort of joked as soldiers do in a morbid sense, you know, are we going to land and feel bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, you know, and and that that's the sort of thing that we were all thinking about.
And then the ramp lowered and it was just just barren, just nothing there.
Nobody on the flight line, everything had been cleared out already.
And, you know, it was just really kind of both anticlimactic and just a huge pressure relieved off of us, you know, as we exited that airplane and started moving, started moving out.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, yeah, let's talk about that suicide attack.
Where were you when that took place?
So where I worked while I was there, so I worked in one of the headquarters buildings there, and I coincidentally happened to be next door to the hospital when the sirens went off.
And so, you know, for for your audience, that's not it's never been in the military at all of these bases where where troops are stationed.
Right.
They they have installed these we call them the big voice or the voice of God, which is a system of speakers that you can press and an alarm will go out.
And so, you know, I'm out coincidentally doing my doing my duties, moving around out there.
And we hear the sirens go off and it goes and it says ground attack, ground attack, ground attack.
And so at that moment, it's like, oh, man, this is it.
This is what we've been waiting for.
Right.
So, like, we've been listening to intelligence reports coming in talking about ISIS, right, how ISIS was preparing a big attack and how that, you know, they were going to we kind of roughly knew what they were planning.
But the big question was when when are they going to do it?
And I don't think anybody expected it to be as bad as it was, because as soon as it happened, I mean, within minutes, we started receiving casualties at the at the hospital.
And I kind of ended up kind of falling in there to help with with casualties and moving people around and doing assisting at the hospital.
So it was it was pretty intense.
I mean, the the amount of casualties, the number of people, the number of Americans.
Right.
And there's just it was it was it was very intense.
Right.
That's one of the biggest attacks on Americans in the entire war, really, and right in its final closing moments.
And so, you know, it wasn't just Americans wounded either.
There was lots of there were lots of civilians that were coming in, you know, men, women, children who were critically injured or or dead.
And we were tending to those and triaging people, moving stuff around.
And it was just, you know, I don't.
It's kind of hard to express, right, like what that feels like in that moment.
And, you know, when there's when there's all of that going on and in some ways it doesn't feel real, but, you know, it is and you have a job to do and you do it.
So, you know, that that's kind of the, you know, the story of the night for me.
And so, you know, there's just one of the things I remember specifically.
Right.
And this kind of goes to maybe like the way our our world is now.
I saw I saw one Marine who had been wounded and he had most of his fingers blown off and his face and arm were bandaged.
And he was sitting there scrolling on on TikTok.
He was watching TikTok videos outside of the hospital.
And to me, that just that was very surreal seeing that like, man, this guy like what in the world is this world?
What are what are we doing here, man?
You know what I'm saying?
It was wild, the whole thing.
I bet.
All right now.
So here's the thing, though.
Initial reports said there were two blasts or then there were ISIS guys with machine guns firing on the crowd and neither of those turned out to be true.
But both of them sounded like they made sense because they said that the number of dead was one hundred and seventy or one hundred seventy five, something like this.
And that's a lot for one guy with a vest.
So then there was a BBC report and there were other reports, too.
But I saw the BBC report where he's talking to the guy at the hospital who said.
The people seem to have been shot from the top of the wall or from the towers because they were all crowded together and all the bullet holes were, you know, near their collar bones and facing down, you know, or at an angle at a steep angle down.
And then the idea was that after the attack, whoever was on the wall, whether it was American soldiers, and I think some reports said that it was CIA militiamen, you know, NDS, whoever, you know, death squad guys were on top of the wall there, you know, helping provide security and just open fire after the attack, after the bomb went off.
So I was wondering if you could verify that or debunk it or either way or anything.
So all I know is from my experience, which was that there were people that were wounded with gunshot, that had gunshot wounds.
And there were also people who were, who were injured and killed by blasts.
I don't know the story.
It's probably going to be left to some, some journalists who are able to piece together the story from different eyewitness accounts from people on the scene, though those people have kind of been scattered to the winds a little bit.
But, you know, all I can say is a suicide bomber and some gunmen don't kill 180 people and wound hundreds.
There's more to the story.
And, you know, I don't know what the rest of it is.
Somebody else is going to have to fill it in.
But I know that that's not the entire story.
So to you, even when you hear about the bomb and then even accusations that there were guys with machine guns, that number still sounds real high to you.
You think maybe the number itself is exaggerated?
I don't think the number is exaggerated.
I think that it's, I think it's probably accurate.
But I don't know how that number came to be.
I don't know if there was a broader fight outside the walls.
You know, I wasn't there.
But from the casualties that I saw and from the reports that I heard from people, that sounds accurate as far as the numbers.
You know, one of the things I talk about in my piece was we had gotten put on standby to receive a Chinook helicopter load full of casualties who were KIA.
And so about 40 people.
And so, you know, we loaded up 40 stretchers in the back of three Toyota Hiluxes.
And I tell you what, Scott, that's a lot of stretchers and that's a lot of dead people.
And so I think the number is probably accurate.
I don't think that the story is what they're saying it is.
That will probably emerge some later time.
Right.
All right.
I don't know, man.
What else can you tell us about what you know and what you saw there?
I mean, eventually you guys got, they said 100,000 people moved in and out of that airport over what, two weeks?
Is that correct?
Yeah, it was really extraordinary.
So, you know, I think that I think one of the other things I definitely wanted to highlight, right, was the personally, I think that the conditions on the base were much worse than what were being reported by the news.
And I don't think that that was necessarily the fault of the military.
You know, like I was saying earlier, it's extraordinarily difficult to take care of, you know, 10,000 people at a time, day in, day out.
But like, it was pretty horrific, especially the scenes outside the gates.
You know, watching that transpire, you know, at the headquarters through the big camera, you know, looking at the gates.
You know, it was really extraordinary watching that go through.
The, just the kind of, we're stuck in this like moral quandary, you know what I mean?
Where like, if we don't maintain order, then we're going to get overrun again, right?
Where the people are going to come over the walls and it's going to block the airfield and then we're going to be stuck and we're going to be in a really bad situation.
But in order to keep that order, there has to be brutality involved.
And so a lot of that was done by the, you know, by the Afghans.
And then kind of on the outside of the walls, it was done by the Taliban, you know, maintaining, kind of trying to maintain the order outside the walls and kind of through some extraordinary things.
You know, we did everything that we could to try and make that as fast and as, you know, and to take care of all those people.
But it just, it got way out of hand, just from the compression, you know, the time limit, again, coming back into play.
You know, we only had so much time and we started to kind of sacrifice some of the, I guess, how much we could provide for them in order to get more people through, just more people, more people, more people through and get them out.
It was just, it was really extraordinary.
And, you know, there was, it was really difficult to try and talk to our soldiers about it, right?
Because, you know, when you look at your soldiers, they look at you and they're like, what are we doing here?
Like, this is insane, you know, this is insane.
Like, this is insane, you know, and this sucks.
Like, I don't want to, like, diminish their, you know, their concerns.
But, you know, when you're a leader, you got to try and, like, encourage them.
And so what, you know, what we would do is every time, you know, if I, if one of my soldiers was complaining about it, you know, and I look at the airplane and say, hey, that's 500 people that's leaving out of here today.
That's what the mission is.
That's what we're trying to accomplish.
And despite all of the, like, horror that everybody saw and the extraordinary violence and the brutality, you know, we did manage to get out a lot of people.
And it's just, it's really difficult to square that with people, right?
Because on the one hand, you know, we shouldn't have been there in the first place.
But then also we're out here doing good things and getting people out of Afghanistan and taking them out to kind of live a better life.
It just, and the Taliban was happy to facilitate that as well, right?
So, you know, we brought out, you know, they're saying about 150,000 people, right?
So that's essentially an army's worth of people that the Taliban, of the Taliban's enemies, that the Taliban doesn't have to fight anymore.
And probably two generations worth of people that they don't have to fight anymore.
You know, the people who are adults now and their sons.
So, you know, it was just kind of like a Russian doll, you know what I mean?
Like you take off the one thing and there's something evil inside of it.
And then you take off the top of the next one, there's something good inside of it.
And then you take off the top of the next one, there's something good again.
And just, you know, it just was all mixed together in a really difficult situation.
Now, were there still giant crowds of people waiting outside when you guys left?
Sorry, we've got to draw the line here.
So part, no, there were not.
So by the last few days, partly due to the, I mean, you know, when you take 100,000 people out of anywhere, you know, that will thin out the crowds considerably.
But then also as the days kind of progressed, right, we watched the crowds grow smaller and smaller.
And part of it was, I guess, us flying people out.
And then the other part was the Taliban also slowing the inflow of people.
So they started kind of getting closer and closer to the walls and pushing people away and dispersing crowds through various means as time progressed.
And then by the end of, you know, by the last day or two, there was practically no one outside of the gates.
Maybe a thousand or a few thousand people, but nowhere near the massive crowds that we had seen kind of the, you know, the kind of the middle part of August.
All right.
Now, I think people are going to be afraid that they're terrorists, sleeper cells, suicide bombers and warlords and criminals and God knows who among the Afghans must have gotten on those planes and are headed this way.
What about that?
Oh, yeah, I think that's a totally reasonable concern to have for people.
You know, just like, you know, when we were talking earlier, right, about the, there were lots of Taliban that seemed to have been trained by Americans, right?
We couldn't keep them out of the Afghan army.
We couldn't keep them out of the Afghan civil service.
We couldn't keep them out of the Afghan government.
So, all those people that were working for the Taliban and for the Afghan government, you know, potentially could have gotten out themselves.
The thing that I'm, that kind of, and I'd like to hear your opinion on this as well.
You know, I don't know that the threat of Taliban terrorism is necessarily high.
You know, they were not the people that attacked us on 9-11 after all, and they have more of a focus on their own problems inside of Afghanistan.
So, I don't think that's necessarily what they're- No, the Afghan Taliban, the Afghan Taliban is not going to attack here, but somebody trying to get them in trouble with us could, you know.
Right.
So, now, and that's kind of the thing that we do have to worry about, is the ISIS infiltrators, the people that they got in, who either jumped the walls to try and get in, you know, every night while we were out there, we were catching dozens of people who were scaling the walls to try and get out and get into the lines.
A lot of those folks were probably ISIS members who were probing for weaknesses.
And, you know, even though we found dozens, how many did we not find?
So, you know, I think the concern about, you know, did we just export a bunch of radical people is something that we do have to contend with, and something that we have to be concerned about.
The kind of the, I think the prevailing attitude from both the State Department and from the military while we were there was, let's get them out and sort it all out later, right?
Because if we slow down the outflow of people, right, to the point where it risks the timeline, that 31st of August deadline, then, you know, we may have missed some opportunities to rescue people that were friendly to us.
So, I think that's kind of the approach that they took with it.
We'll have to see whether or not they're going to find a bunch of folks in there.
Hopefully it's not written in blood.
But, you know, at the time that we were in there, you know, it was just, let's get all these people out as fast as possible.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, it's a hell of a thing.
You got to see the very end of the war.
You know, it did end in such a...
I mean, it could have been worse, right?
It ain't like Baghdadi and ISIS taking over Western Iraq or, you know, something like that.
The Taliban are bad, but they ain't al-Qaeda.
But, you know, still to have, you know, the, you know, I don't care about this part, but for Washington, D.C., this is what matters most is the humiliation of the failure of their project in real time as they're leaving, you know, in the middle of leaving like that.
Yep.
In front of the eyes of the world.
Yeah, pretty catastrophic there.
And then, you know, leaving the weapons with the Taliban and all that is, as you say, that's also mostly just a matter of perception.
It's not going to really change their strength as the ruling party in that country in any meaningful way.
But then, you know, to have people hanging on to the sides of planes and falling off and to have a suicide attack at the gates and then this horrible reprisal or, well, I keep mixing the two up.
First of all, there was the reprisal strike in Jalalabad that killed at least two people, and I don't think we ever found out who they were.
I asked Matthew Aikens, and he didn't know who they were either.
He's in Kabul reporting on all this stuff, but the best he'd heard was, I don't know, they killed somebody.
And then this one in Kabul wasn't a reprisal.
It was meant to be a preemptive strike against an ISIS car bomb.
That turns out was no such thing at all.
It was an aid worker who'd been working for the Americans all along, and he was trying to get him and himself and his family into the United States.
He was trying to get on one of those planes, and he'd spent the day delivering water and food to hungry, starving, desperately poor people.
And then they blew him away and all of his toddlers, seven children killed, three adults in this thing.
And if you wrote a novel of the end of the Afghan war, that's pretty much how it would end, as the period on the way out the door, the end of a sentence there.
It was, yeah.
So it really was extraordinary to be there in the closing moments of that, and we all kind of felt the gravity of that kind of situation.
And just the tragedy of that final strike is just, it's really kind of a, in some ways, I think it kind of encapsulates the whole war, right?
Where we struck somebody, and we were fighting somebody that we thought was trying to hurt us, but actually, no, they're just minding their own business.
And I watched them, I wasn't there during the actual strike on that vehicle, but I was there kind of watching, because they followed him for a long time, watching him go through the city and using their unmanned drones to watch him travel around.
And I think it's one of those things where, it's just like cops driving through the city, right?
If they're looking for something, they're going to find it, right?
They say, hey, that guy's got a taillight out.
He seems to be driving a little slower than normal, too.
I wonder if he's got something going on, right?
And then he turns to his buddy, he's like, hey, what do you think about that car, right?
And they're looking for the same thing.
They're looking for somebody doing something wrong.
And so they find reasons to believe that.
And it just kind of feeds on itself.
And then as soon as you reach out across the wire, people's first instinct is not to say, hey, I don't know if that's true or not, especially following the devastation of that suicide bombing, right?
Like nobody's looking to say, hey, I don't think that's anything, right?
They see a guy loading up jugs.
They see him driving to a bunch of different places and making phone calls to people.
And they make assumptions.
And it ended up ending tragically for this man and his family.
And I can't imagine how that must be for that family.
So much of that stuff is just, you know, he's not the first innocent person to have been killed in Afghanistan.
But, you know, he may have been the last.
So I guess in a way, I don't know if that like gives any clarity to the situation or not.
But, you know, it just kind of puts a, like you said, it puts a final period at the end of the story.
Yeah, well, let's hope, right, that this isn't just someone on Twitter said to me just as soon as they were done pulling you guys out of there.
It's all right.
Well, who's getting ready to hear Horton start referring to Afghanistan?
War two coming, you know, I don't want to hear it.
That's got to be enough is enough there.
So we'll see.
And, you know, the Taliban are fighting ISIS right now.
They hate their guts.
I got every reason in the world to kill him.
They announced the other day we're not friends with Al Qaeda.
Whoever said that's lying.
We're not going to host Al Qaeda here.
And I kind of believe them with reservations, but all the accusations against them for still palling around with ISIS or things like, well, they're still, you know, Haqqani now the son has joined and he's friends with Al Qaeda.
But but then they don't prove that it's always just some guilt by association sort of thing and then remains.
Or they say things like, well, you know, he was friends with them 30 years ago and it's like, OK, well, a lot has transpired since then.
Yeah, there was one guy who was a Pashtun warlord of some description from Nangarhar and they go, oh, well, this guy was friends with bin Laden.
This guy's Al Qaeda.
And it's like, well, I mean, not really.
Right.
He's an Afghan.
So he might have been a liaison of some type or a friend of a friend.
But no, he was not a part of the Al Qaeda group, which was did not include Afghans, you know, included Chechens before included Afghans, you know.
But anyway, so, yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know.
We'll see.
But I don't think the Taliban have much of an interest in getting themselves, you know, carpet bombed for inviting al-Zawahiri back or whatever it is.
So.
Right.
And they never invited Al Qaeda there in the first place, by the way.
They were stuck with these guys.
Yeah.
But anyway.
I think, too, you know, I think I think I would say the prevailing attitude in the military, right, at least among folks that I interact with, which are a lot of, you know, combat arms guys, you know, especially the older ones, you know, who have been around for a while and they've deployed to Afghanistan before, you know, they don't want to go back.
They feel the same way where it's like, you know, this is just this is just not our business.
Like we're not doing anything over there.
You know, a few of them miss, I guess, the adventure of it, you know, because that's always a component for soldiers, especially the combat type folks, you know, but but they're not they're not they're not holy warriors for going back to war in Afghanistan.
That might be a bit of my confirmation bias coming through, you know, or maybe I tend to steer conversations in that direction anyway.
But I think that I think that the prevailing opinion among the rank and file in the American Army is like, hey, we don't want to mess with this anymore.
We don't want to mess with this country.
So, you know, fingers crossed.
I hope that I hope that it you know, I hope that we stay out of it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you writing this great article for us.
It's everybody.
Check it out.
Evacuation.
Eyewitness.
What I saw in Kabul by John Vaughn, Captain John Vaughn of the U.S. Army.
And I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Hey, thank you very much for having me on, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
