Producers' Pick | Col. Chris Douglas dismantles Biden admin for Afghanistan report

The Biden team decides they are not to blame for the worst debacle in American military history, despite being in charge for over a year and a half, making all the decisions leading up to the chosen end of a 20-year war.

The conclusion, Trump, it's all Trump's fault. We'll explain why. That will not stand, because we all have, we're smart people as a country, and we have military experts who are there, like Colonel Chris Douglas of the Marines. Is it Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel? It's Colonel. So you were, when I met you, Lieutenant Colonel? When I met you, I was a Lieutenant Colonel. I had just gotten back from Afghanistan, and then- Then you went to Iraq. And then I went to Iraq, and then I went back to Afghanistan.

Right. So retired as a Colonel. Not to vacation.

Not to vacation, no. So they, just when you're about to retire, Colonel, they say, hey, we need you. And we need you in Qatar, because that's where we're going to be evacuating those who are lucky enough to get on these cargo jets. I need you to screen people because we're leaving Afghanistan.

Could you bring us through that time? Yeah, so I was hitting 30 years mandatory service, which is required for us to retire at that point as Marine officers. My boss had asked if I would remain because of my experience with Afghanistan, and for the potential that if he went forward as a three-star headquarters, we wanted to work together.

That said, the decision was made for him to retire and not to go forward. I went forward to Qatar, although I wanted to go forward to Afghanistan. And General McKenzie had seen the chaos that was coming out of Afghanistan and made the decision to put a Marine Corps evacuation coordination center. One of the things Marines do in non-combatant evacuations is this team works to process evacuees. And so that was the team that myself and another Marine from my team in Marine Central Command went forward and worked the coordination with the joint force units that were there. So what I watched yesterday must have driven you nuts because after it was all said and done, you were part of a team, an ASEN team? Army Central Command.

I'm trying to get the names down. So you as a Marine were helping out Army to evaluate what went wrong afterwards. You guys wrote a pretty extensive report, 150 pages, borrowing some pictures, maybe a little bit more.

Right, with a number of enclosures. So you have, you know what happened as much as anybody in the country. From what you have studied and witnessed, was that anything like what was talked about yesterday and what's been released to the general public in 12 pages?

No, Brian. I mean, the unclassified report that was released and is available on the Central Command webpage that frankly Dan Lamothe and some others did some great research into that's kind of fallen off the radar. No, this is, you know, this is completely in contrary to some of the information that came out. Essentially, it's Trump's fault. They gave us a plan.

It's impossible to work with. They had a Doha meeting. They let some prisoners out of Bagram. So we had to really get at this timeline and we would have been back at war. Is that accurate?

I don't believe that, Brian. And so, you know, I'm going to paraphrase something that you had said earlier, which is, you know, you can delegate responsibility, but you can't delegate accountability. I mean, the Trump administration's, you know, gone. And so they, you know, while they had set the conditions, you know, that, you know, one may was the, you know, expected withdrawal date. As Mike Pompeo tells me, it's always conditions-based.

Conditions-based is exactly right. And so I believe it was, you know, General, four-star General, special operations commander, General Rich Clark, who testified that, hey, the Taliban are not meeting the conditions of the agreement. I mean, you know, there's a warrior who there said, hey, it's, this is not happening. You can't be any more clear than that in a conditions-based withdrawal when you have a senior leader of that magnitude who says, not happening. And General McKenzie was pretty clear in that as well. Do you think that has anything to do with why General, was it General Miller, Lieutenant General Miller left the scene? Because he was in charge, wasn't he?

He was in charge. And I mean, when you talk, you know, you know, absolute leader understanding of Afghanistan and, you know, I would love to get his perspective because of the respect I have for him and the amount of knowledge he has. We lost 13 guys, a couple dozen wounded, 170 minimum Afghans blown to smithereens at Abbey Gate because we decided we only want to have the airport. We didn't want Kabul. We were asked by the Taliban leaders who said, no, we're not going to do that. Didn't feel we had the forces. But just as a civilian, when you could put 7,000 to 10,000 people in in a few days, I imagine we could have taken the capital. But it looks like the army collapsed and Ghahani left with a lot of our money, by the way. So here's a little about what John Kirby was saying yesterday.

Cut three. And so for all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it. Not from my perch. At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes. And not one single mission was missed.

So I'm sorry, I just won't buy the whole argument of chaos. It was tough in the first few hours. You would expect it to be.

There was nobody at the airport, certainly no Americans. It took time to get in there. This is he's you're laughing, but is he serious? Is he serious? Do you see this video? It defines chaos. Brian, I'm laughing because I want to cry.

And I mean that in a manly sense. But the, you know, the reality of it is there's zero mention of Afghans falling off of C-17s or being trapped in the wheel wells. It requires the air crew to scrape them out.

Just horrific upon their landing. What about the perimeter of the airport? So the perimeter of the airport is, as we know from the investigation there, you know, the the airport was breached by evacuees.

You had there's zero mention in that as well of the the engagements with with the Taliban, and in some cases likely unknown. But ISIS fighters, until General McKenzie makes the makes the deal with the Taliban of, hey, look, you know, this isn't happening. We're, you know, you know, we're going to coordinate with the security. You're going to establish security around. We're going to clear the airfield. And so the the reality of it is, is you have a combat operations center that that has all the key leaders, the key leadership all had to vacate doing command and control to get out to assist pushing Afghans because they were overrun.

There were more evacuees than there were service members to keep them off the airfield. So, but don't worry, you're guarded by the Taliban. They provided your security. Think about that for a minute. I mean, how did that make sense?

You didn't have enough. They fell to hold Kabul because you had. So they said, let's just have the Taliban watch the airport take over Kabul.

And so that was a huge paradigm shift for me, Brian, because, you know, as you know, I had I had been an adviser in Afghanistan twice for the first. Hey, we're leaving Afghanistan in 2014. That was supported by the vice president and the president at that time, the vice president being President Biden or V.P.

Biden. And then in 2018, when we had to go back for that. And so the paradigm shift for me was how is it that we have the Taliban providing security? And the reality of it is we had to. Now, here's the problem, though, is what the what the Taliban needed was clear and concise instructions so that we can let these people through.

General McKenzie's guidance was was frankly was pretty clear. He said every everybody that comes into the airport will be screened by a member of the Taliban, you know, knowing that there was a the potential for a threat. Where was the State Department? So that's that that as we saw in the investigation. So there were members that rotated through. So you've got Marines that are providing security and they're ultimately looking for passport holders and they'd come up and they would.

And this is all from the investigation. They were members of the State Department, you know, and not the same people every time, but in small numbers would come up basically during working hours. Although Marines are working and armed soldiers with the 82nd and the airmen and sailors are working 24 hours a day, the State Department representatives would come up and they would, hey, we're taking just U.S. passport holders. Now we're taking green card and somebody else to say green cards, somebody else to say embassy personnel, somebody else would say, you know, special immigrant visas. Here's the problem. Each time that requires coordination with a member of the Taliban who's on the outside.

And so you've got somebody with, you know, with, you know, with a limited education. These are the guys you've been fighting for 20 years, right? The guys who've been fighting for 20 years that are a little frustrated right now that we're here.

And and so, you know, they the the the service members that are surrounding the airfield through the great work of, you know, I'm going to say the coordination through General McKenzie, General Donahue and others to establish this this relate this working relationship. They're getting screened by these members. But now because of the changing requirements to allow people in, you've got those same people having to go to the Taliban and say, hey, now we're going to allow these people in. And finally, they get to the point where they're like, I don't care if you're George F. Bush.

You're not we're not letting anybody in. But you were getting calls from the White House and VIPs to let certain people in. So as a course of the interview, what we found was at all levels, the the amount of pressure and significant pressure coming from the president, the first lady, in some cases, representatives of the pope, elected officials, you know, general hope, the pope, the pope, a representative for the pope called and explained the importance of getting a specific group of individuals out. And so, you know, with criteria, changing criteria like that and VIP requests pouring in, VIP requests pouring in, you know, volatile, uncertain and chaotic and ambiguous circumstances. Now you've got this and then you've got Mr. Kirby talking about, hey, force protection was the was the commander's priority. Let's be let's be perfectly clear. When you've got that much pressure and that much input and that many phone calls, you know, you it's taken up a lot of time.

And this is what I want to think. We're going to take comebacks. We have a decent side segment on the other side. Once the action has been initiated, President Biden repeatedly gave the clear direction to prioritize force protection. And basically what he keeps saying yesterday is this was the plan that was left.

We had no choice but to leave and do the Trump plan since the Doha agreement was in place. I'm going to ask President Biden to do that. I'm going to ask President Biden to do that. I'm going to ask President Biden to do that. I'm going to ask President Biden to do that. I'm going to ask President Biden to do that.

And that's I'm going to see if Colonel Douglas is investigation reveals that that was indeed the facts. This is the brain. Kill me, Joe. Don't move expanding your knowledge base. It's the Brian Kilmeade show. Hey, prime members, top Fox shows like the Brian Kilmeade with Amazon Music. You can access the largest catalog of ad free top podcast. Avoid the ads. Listen to your favorite shows ad free with the Amazon Music app or by visiting Amazon.com slash Brian Kilmeade. That's Amazon.com slash Brian Kilmeade. A talk show that's real.

This is the Brian Kilmeade show. I won't share my personal recommendation to the president, but I will give you my honest opinion and my honest opinion and view shaped my recommendation. I recommended that we maintain 2500 troops in Afghanistan. And I also recommended earlier in the fall of 2020 that we maintain 4500 at that time.

Those are my personal views. I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government. So the president was, according to his spokesperson, Admiral Kirby, was never told that. Was never told that the Afghan army would collapse if we pulled out. That, according to the 12 page summary of what's supposed to be an extensive report on everything that went wrong in Afghanistan. With me right now is a guy that studied all this. He was part of a task force of under 10 people to put together a comprehensive look at everything that took place and went wrong in the aftermath and leading up to the leaving Afghanistan.

It is Colonel Chris Douglas, now retired, who spent a lot of that time in Qatar processing people, seeing all the problems. Was Mackenzie true to his word? Was that his recommendation from your research? So that research, so our research didn't cover that. That wasn't part of the scope of the investigation. But what I can tell you is this, because that was a Marine Central Command, which is subordinate to Central Command. I know that indirectly and kind of directly from the meetings that was General Mackenzie's view. So he said the president never got advice that said that was going to happen.

That means Mackenzie, Milley and Austin are all lying in closed testimony. He's never been called to account to this. How could the president say nobody briefed him on that? From what you know, is it possible the military didn't tell him this could happen? Yeah, there's no way.

There's no way it's possible. I mean, you know, what was coming back and I mean, Brian, let's look back to 2014. I mean, where you would, you know, you'd give a report about the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces. You'd say they're effective with advisers. There's a difference between being effective. That means operate on their own, effective with advisers.

That means they need some sort of stability and support there in order to execute operations. So I got to tell you, what we left behind is so sickening. $7 billion worth of weapons and equipment. We know this, 23,825 Humvees with gun variants on them, 900 combat vehicles. We also left them, I did not know this, 250,000 automatic rifles, 95 drones and more than a million mortar rounds that require little training to use. Here's John Kirby.

He knows exactly who to blame. Cut five. Do not underestimate the effect of that Doha agreement had on the morale and the willingness to fight on the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces.

It had a very corrosive effect on their willingness to continue to fight for their country. Now, we didn't see that. We didn't see that. And part of the reason we didn't see that is because we couldn't see the plans that the previous administration allegedly worked on during the transition. No, as I said in my opening statement, none of those plans were forthcoming. And Ghani came to the White House and asked for just leave the contractors.

No, no, no. He says he didn't see it. Your thoughts on his conclusion? It just blows my mind that that's, you know, that goes back into the accountability and responsibility. Like, you know, OK, so the previous administration didn't leave you a plan. Well, DOD was doing planning and by their own admission, you know, the State Department, it's it's not like they would have just picked up planning at that point.

Like, you know, I I. And even if there was no plan, OK, well, you own it at that point, why would you leave without a plan? And so in his own in his own discussion, going back to when he was running for president, he talked about Iraq and how it would take a year to leave Iraq. You know, the U.S. forces in an earlier run in an earlier run for president and how if we left all the weapons and equipment, which, you know, our grandchildren would pay for that, that would that would take seven months.

But that would be bad because, you know, our grandkids would see those weapons. Now, that said, how is it that he forgot that this many years later? Evidently, General Keane said he knows people that they're he was the smartest one in the room. He was he was upping all the military people that were trying to tell him stuff. He never trusted the military.

And now he's saying you never even advised me how bad it would be. Thanks for your service, Colonel Douglas. I'll see you on one nation Saturday at eight. Looking forward to it. Amazon dot com slash Brian Kilmeade. Listen to this show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcast Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.