Johnny “Joey” Jones on the Real Failure in Afghanistan

BUCK: Our friend Joey Jones with us now. He is a Marine Corps veteran. He was wounded as an EOD tech, Purple Heart recipient, and he’s a Fox News contributor, Fox Nation as well. Joey, great to have you, man. Thanks for being with us.

JOHNNY: How’s it going, guys? Thanks for having me on. I was taking a call from James Mattis for a minute, so I didn’t have a chance to call in right away. I apologize.

BUCK: What did he have to say? Tell us what your buddy, the former four-star general —

JOHNNY: (laughing)

BUCK: — James Mattis, had to say about the circumstance.

JOHNNY: You know, for him… You know, he’s not gonna call and give strategy updates, but he wanted to make sure that the men he served with who sacrificed knew that their sacrifice wasn’t for nothing. And that’s really important to him. And so he took the time to call me, and I would really respect him for that.

You know, he’s a Marine Corps general, and nobody needs to read too far to know what he thinks about it. I think he would have probably been the one that says, “Let’s leave a contingent of, you know, 4,000 U.S. troops,” and I think we had 8,000 allied forces on the ground there with us. So when we report that number, we don’t really give the whole number. And that’s his perspective. I can’t tell you I fully agree with it, but I think it’s honest and genuine and for the right reasons.

BUCK: Joey, what do you think about what’s going on right now? Just give us your overview as somebody who was out there as up close and personal with this enemy as one could possibly be?

JOHNNY: Yeah. I think (chuckles) you couldn’t mess this up any more, and it wasn’t… It didn’t it need to be this way, and I know everyone says that and it’s almost cliche now. But it really infuriates me. You know, I know what it’s like to go in and take a town. I know what it took to take Bagram, to take some of these cities that we evacuated, to build an embassy.

I know the blood it took to do that, and to evacuate it in a way that literally… I mean, I think really… Look, here’s a semantics problem for you. You’re calling the withdrawal an evacuation but not acknowledging why it’s an evacuation. I mean, think about that word. What do you evacuate? You evacuate hurricanes, you evacuate natural disasters, you evacuate a building that is on fire.

If you’re quitting a war, you withdraw, and so I think even when White House comes out and they use that term, and then they act like they’re proud of the fact they’ve been able to airlift tens of thousands of people out in an evacuation circumstance, without acknowledging the fact they created that circumstance is beyond infuriating. It makes me wonder, those men and women serving now, like, how they must feel if something like this happens anywhere else? If they have to go in and calm a situation, you know, how are they gonna be taken care of just to get home?

CLAY: Joey, I think that’s a fantastic question and it leads… First of all, thanks for coming on with us. Second, it leads on to what I was gonna ask you. Having been there, what do you think the soldiers still in Afghanistan are thinking as they are there at Kabul airport trying to enforce a perimeter, seeing the chaos, the insanity that is around them, what are going through the minds of those soldiers right now?

JOHNNY: They’re probably looking over the wall going, “Man, I hope that’s not a mortar I see in the air. Oh, that was a bird. Thank God.” I mean, there’s probably… Many of them are probably having that exact experience multiple times a day. Now, the one thing I will tell you as a Marine and probably soldiers feel very much the same way. When you’re in chaos and danger all the time, it does become very normal.

And you’re not worried; you’re waiting. You’re anxious; you’re ready. And really a lot of those guys and gals there are probably thinking, “Are we really just gonna sit here on this flight line and leave? Are we really gonna get Americans and bring ’em back? Does our commander…? Is he in line with the general? Is the general in line with the president?” That’s what I struggle with, is knowing these men and women are having to guess at what their chain of command is at any point on something. That’s a lack of leadership — and, man, I tell you what. It makes it real hard to go and bleed for something.

BUCK: Joey, I want to know what you think of these images that we’re seeing of just people packed — by the hundreds, by the thousands — up against these various checkpoints at cabal International Airport, a place that both you and I know from having spent time there. The reality of this seems to be it’s impossible that the Biden administration can really claim with a straight face — as they have, so I guess they’ve already said this, but it’s not true — that there was planning for all contingencies here. To your eye, when you look at this, doesn’t this seem like they just had to throw something together in all-out emergency, or is there more than meets the eye to what’s actually happening?

JOHNNY: You know, if I told you I was gonna burn your house down (chuckles) and there was nothing you could do to stop it, you might spend a day or two getting your stuff out of it so that you’re not just grabbing your valuables and running. Right now, we’re grabbing our valuables and running, which tells me they were woken up in the middle of the night with the house burning down.

If not Biden, then everyone under him that’s listening to what he has to say. I think there was a pretty strong contingent that saw something of this nature as a plausibility, if not a probability. But I think if you really understand Joe Biden, he has a way of believing what he wants to be true to be true. I mean, read Bob Gates’ book and just hear his reaction to military operations and steps we had to take.

He (chuckles) was against the troop surge in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were probably the only successful operations, bookended, that we did. I mean, just to paint the scene for you, I went to Afghanistan in 2010. In 2009 and 2010, we surged then I think it was 40,000 troops, most of them combat element Marines, and we took the Helmand province, which is the Pashtun region, and it’s where all the poppy is grown.

That is the money pot for the Taliban. We abruptly gave that entire region back to the Taliban because we had an election coming up in 2021 and somebody wanted to claim victory, and a that’s the problem with American politics meeting a war strategy that takes time to develop. And now we have a place where generals follow the politics more than the strategy because probably they got tired of not being listened to on the strategy.

And so now we have a problem where we didn’t fight a 20-year war. We fought 10 two-year wars between presidential elections and midterms. And unfortunately, the American people are complicit in this ’cause we reward the people that say the right thing besides maybe the honest thing or the truthful thing or the necessary thing. When we have decided to go after the Taliban, we have kicked their tail twice.

But it’s an idea, and an idea can grow and live in anyone. So you can kill everyone and if the idea survives, the effort survives. That’s why we got people taking Kabul now that didn’t even understand the original fight the Taliban had, but they’ve been in these madrasahs in Pakistan and they’ve been recruited through the mountains and they just come every spring and they have that many more people to fight — which plays into, why is this bad timing?

CLAY: Joey, we know that the average soldier was a big fan of Donald Trump, right? We see the reactions at the military academies, for instance, whenever he would speak. It was one of the most stirring moments I can remember from last year’s sports season when they had to play Army, Navy, and West Point, and Trump walked in there to see the way the cadets and the midshipmen responded to him. What are the young guys and girls in the service — in your mind and based on the people you interact with — thinking of Joe Biden and his administration and his leadership right now?

JOHNNY: You know, I had the distinct pleasure of not being a very political person when I was serving. I remember the John McCain-Barack Obama election was the first election I ever paid attention to, and I only cared because that was when I learned about John McCain’s prisoner of war experience and I was just incredibly impacted by that. Here’s a man running for president who’s, in my world, done the toughest thing to do other than die on the backfield.

But it wasn’t the politics of it that made me interested. And I think that in today’s world, you don’t get that anymore because we all have these cell phones and they’re all intimately connected. But if you’re serving under a commander-in-chief that doesn’t seem to understand which direction he’s going from one day to the other, or that can stand on a pulpit — and I call it that, ’cause they preach from it — who can stand on a pulpit and tell us, “There’s no way this is gonna be that bad,” and then days or weeks later, it’s that bad and worse, then you don’t have any faith in him.

And at the end of my term, he was vice president, Barack Obama was president, the narrative wasn’t specifically against them. But it was, “They won’t let us kill the enemy. They won’t let us use air support so that maybe we don’t die today. They are more worried about the optics and the headlines than the battle lines,” and that was 100% true. They sent us to Afghanistan to die to try to claim victory before a presential election.

it is not to win a war, and that’s the honest to gosh truth of it. And there’s no way that 18-, 19-, 25-year-olds don’t have all of that fresh in their mind. I was lucky enough that I didn’t really have to do it until I reflected on it, but they’ve joined the service and serving now in conflict with that fresh in their mind and there’s no way they have… I mean, who has a lot of faith in Joe Biden right now? There’s no way our men and women in uniform do.

BUCK: Joey, thanks so much. But before we let you go, I just gotta ask you, man, you were an EOD tech. Of all the jobs one could have, the roles one could have in the military, diffusing active bombs, IEDs, it seems like to say it requires nerves of steel is an understatement. How do you do that, man? How did you actually do it? I honestly am in awe of people in the service who could do that job.

JOHNNY: I appreciate it. And that’s how I felt about the other men and women doing the job, and that’s I wanted to see if I could raise myself to their level of just human beings. At the end for me, I felt like if I was gonna keep going to war and be around these bombs, I would learn about ’em and make ’em safe. Real quick, the adage I used is it’s kind of walking through the woods with the snake handler. The snake is gonna kill both of you if it bites you, but the snake handler has a better chance of not getting bit. And I felt like being an EOD tech, I could do that. I could stop other people from getting bit.

BUCK: Johnny, really appreciate it. Johnny “Joey” Jones here, folks. Go check him out on Fox News. Great analysis from him on this crucial issue. And, man, we appreciate your service, and we appreciate you joining us here on the show. Thanks so much.

JOHNNY: Thank you both.