Afghan War Veteran: "I Will Never Forgive My Country For This'

matt zeller former first lieutenant during the war in afghanistan former combat adviser with afghan security forces co-founder of no one left behind a veterans organization that offers services to former afghan and iraqi interpreters who resettle here in the united states mr zeller it's uh almost ironic now to state the name of the organization you founded um given what we're watching go on though i'm curious to hear your reaction of this consequential speech by the american president didn't run from it he owned it he owned his decision he owned the fact that as he put it the buck stops with him i hope he gets to own their deaths too i i don't i feel like i watched a different speech than the rest of you guys i was appalled there was such a profound bold faith lie in that speech the idea that we planned for every contingency i have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office i've been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming we sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people nobody listened to us they didn't plan for the evacuation of our afghan wartime allies they're trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour the thing that they were most concerned about was with the optics of a chaotic evacuation well they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it we had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago and we did nothing i'm appalled that he thinks we only need to take 2 000 people there's 86 000 people who are currently left behind in afghanistan alone we've identified all of them for the government i have no idea why they they he claims that people don't want to leave afghanistan i have a list of 14 000 names right now of people who want to get out of afghanistan and the idea that the afghan military should be blamed for this do you know how many casualties the afghan military took in an average year more than the united states did in 20 when you're not getting paid on a regular basis when you're not getting fuel when no one is supplying you with ammunition and yet you're still showing up to the fight how dare us for having to blame these people for not having the audacity to be able to survive a taliban onslaught no no what we need to be doing right now and what i am appalled that the president didn't say was we need to be talking about how we're going to get every single one of these people out because let's be abundantly clear people like me looked these people in the eye and made them a promise we promised them that in their time of need we would take care of them how do you ever expect anyone to ever trust us again if we don't do that now while we can and i'm sick and tired of trying to defer the islamic emirate of afghanistan on what we're going to do we're the united states of america they're terrified of us i have afghans on the ground right now who are telling me they're going door to door in kabul and they're making lists of people who used to work with us they're telling them with smiles on their face evil smiles that they're going to be back from them once we leave so we either take them now or these people are going to die i've been trying to tell anyone who will listen this is a never again moment in the making this is an administration that seems to be a profound champion of human champion and defender of human rights well sometimes human rights have to be defended at the barrel end of a gun the taliban are a modern version of the nazis and if this was dresden do you think british or sign up dresden if this was dunkirk do you think british um you know yachting pilots the british captains that were sailing their boats heroically in dunkirk do you think they were asking on the beaches if the people they were picking up were brits or french or do you think they were just trying to get people away from the nazis every afghan we leave behind is going to be left behind to a horrible existence and if we don't take them now while we can that is as much on us as it is on the taliban who will hang or behead them matt our friend paul rykov tweeted a couple hours ago that 6 000 troops are not adequate to do what you just described which hopefully is still the mission of this administration tell me what the operation looks like if adequately staffed and funded i've been saying for a very long time we need to send the entirety of the 82nd airborne back back-end we're sending it seems to be a small fraction of it thus far we probably need to send the second marine expeditionary force these are two units that we keep on 48 hour recall we should be retaking every single airfield that we just gave up look i know that sound this sounds ridiculous and it's not politically feasible but these are our people we made these people a promise the taliban are now actively killing them and if we don't take them they're going to die and that's the thing is we have the means to do this we have just simply lacked this entire time the courage and conviction to do the right thing and i am not going to sit and listen to a president that i voted for i was happy that this man took office i'm now appalled at that at that speech i'm not going to sit here and have him lie to the american people we did not plan as a government for this contingency the american people the advocates who have been pleading with the government did plan for it you can go to our website evacuate our allies dot org it's been up for months we had a plan in writing we tried to give it to them i have receipts i put those out on social media no one got back to us no no i'm not going to let them get away with this we have to take these people if we don't take these people now they're going to die i'm sick and tired of i got an email today from a man in masri sharif the exam of the email was this he said i want to write you and thank you for all the efforts that you've tried to do to get us out of here we're going to die now and that's okay we'll resign to it but i just want to let you know that i still love the american people i'm still thankful for the service that i gave to the united states and i want to thank you for a good 20 years and for caring about us and hope that we somehow make it through this but we probably won't we're going to die i'm sick and tired of seeing receiving those messages those people are still alive we can still go and get them the taliban are not going to wipe these people out so long as we have a beachhead we should be holding that for as long as it takes to get every single one of them out and if necessary we should be doing it at the barrel end of a gun if we don't no one is ever going to trust us again and people like me are going to come home body bags the only reason i'm sitting here talking to you today is because my afghan interpreter saved my life in a battle 13 years ago he'd be the first person to tell you that if he thought we weren't honorable people he would have been standing next to me he killed two people in a firefight who were about to kill me i if that's the type of support of the people that we're now abandoning how is it that my service is any much more valuable than theirs because i won the birth lottery these people went on to the next unit and the next mission time and time and time again and how dare us to even contemplate leaving them behind to again what i consider to be a modern equivalent of the nazi party you know your richard was talking about how life is going back to normal in kabul the one thing he wasn't talking about is there aren't women anymore they don't have rights in this in the islamic emirate of afghanistan they don't have a future matt what is the response on the other end of the phone obviously you make um an extraordinarily devastating case for saving the people who saved our saved you and and all of your former colleagues what what is the response what did they say to you they forgive us for abandoning them and i can't forgive myself and i'll never forgive my country for doing this i know exactly what every vietnam veteran has been warning me about now i'm gonna live with a moral injury for the rest of my life do you know any members of my unit have called me in the last 24 hours talking to me about whether or not any of this was worth it and how they're struggling you know the one thing that's going to save us from that moral injury saving these people while we still can we can save as many of them as we can put our hands on the taliban are not going to stand in the way of us they're terrified of us they might not have been afraid of the afghan government that they're absolutely afraid of us we should be using every asset we have to save these people we're never going to get another opportunity again jason crowe has been working on this issue for a long time have you been invited to meetings at the white house or have you worked with other policy makers on this so thank god for congress you know you want to talk about bipartisan solutions on may 17th or may 18th there were 30 members of the senate 15 republicans 15 democrats people like patrick leahy and ron johnson i don't know of another issue these two people agree on but they all send a letter to the president point number seven on that letter by the way urges them to begin the immediate evacuation this was in may of our afghan wartime allies congressman's crow molten galileo kinzinger pete meyer you name it they've all said the same thing in the house that we need to start evacuating these people around the same time congress has been great we built this administration a bipartisan solution to get this done this administration however has never responded to a single request that any of us have made to meet with them you can go i just put it on social media a couple hours ago you can see as late as july once they finally had stood up a task force we were emailing that task force saying we have a list of everyone that they're now currently trying to identify in the last 48 hours they finally reached out to us they said give us everything you have we've been trying to give it to them for months we knew who all these people were we knew where they were we knew how to get in touch with them we had verified all of their service and by the way richard's right processing these visas is pointless we have a biometrics database we should be using it to verify their service if they're in the database it means that at some point they serve with the united states the taliban is certainly using that database they're using it as a hit list because they stole the database and the technology that one can use to access it and so that that airport in kabul the reason why all of those afghans who are currently inside the airport won't leave is because the taliban have a checkpoint outside at the front gate and they're identifying anyone who comes out and if you pop up in that database you're disappeared you're never seen again so we should be doing everything we possibly can to get these people out we have the means to do so we tried to communicate this to this white house for months and no one listened no one responded to our emails no responded to our phone calls our social media posts uh the various white papers you can google my name see how many op-eds i've written on this i literally wrote on the 2nd of april when collapse comes in kabul it'll happen faster than dc can respond given afghanistan's unique position in the world we are going to need to conduct the largest airlift since 1948 to save these people we have been screaming this for months no one listened

Channel: MSNBC

Views: 377,205

Keywords: MSNBC, MSNBC latest, Politics, News

Id: DztdH9DylNw

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021

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[u/First-Funnies]

The reason that they didn't return his calls is because they made decision to leave those 87,000 Afghans to die.. It's done deal. We are out. We just there to get a few remaining Americans out. We not going back in the way he wants. We are not going to spend the money and American lives. Just ask our longtime allies the Kurds who we betrayed less than a year ago when we behind their backs handed over to their historical enemies to rob, rape, torture and murder.

[u/Shitty---Photoshop]

I feel for this guy, but how could he have felt any confidence in his promise that the USA would act honorably in the end. This is just another skeleton for our ever growing closeted collection. Just look at what happened in Viet Nam for the history lesson on repeat here.

[u/HektorFromTroy]

People need to understand some things about these proxy wars.

1. There’s never a win or a winner after all those casualties.

2. Politicians ain’t your friends! Regardless of what political party they’re in or how smooth n cool they sound.

3. Having a college degree doesn’t make you a leader, for the government any type of B.S is significant of smartness and knowledge.

4. Iraq/Afghanistan, Syria are all proxy wars, these politicians have an agenda that they most follow. You’re not saving anyone, I wasn’t saving anyone there.

5. The reason we fight these wars is because we’re secretly fighting Russia.

6. Stop believing everything the government tells you about the “bad guys” They’re just manipulating you into hating someone or a group of people because of fear. Politicians use this to fuel their agendas

7. Wen I took the oath, in one part it said “the best interest to this nation”. we never fought for “freedom” it was just their best interests.

[u/TamperDeezNuts]

I thought this guy was gonna simp for endless wars, but I agree, we agreed to help them and were just going to leave them hanging. Im tired of of the US being in Afghanistan, after we get them out, we should be DONE.

[u/Pepe_silvia710]

“No one will ever trust us again” as an American I’m appalled he thinks anyone trusts us to begin with.

[u/GhostMan74]

Dude is pissed and I don't blame him

[u/rondeline]

That's rough to listen to.

Fuck. Why are we such fuck ups.

[u/[deleted]]

I don’t even have to listen to the entirety of this interview and just by the title, I know I will agree with him.