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Pete Hegseth: “Most folks don't know Afghanistan was thriving at least and…”

Featuring: Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense | National

From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story

Published October 16, 2024 | Video Starts at 36:16

But that's not what Afghanistan is right now. And the Taliban may have run into Pakistan, but they're re establishing underground and they're the real power base. But yeah, that was. Most folks don't know Afghanistan was thriving at least and open for Westerners not that long ago. Yeah, it's incredible. It would have been really cool to see it back then in the 686970 time frame, somewhere along, along that. Along that timeframe. (36:16–36:23)

CLAIM

Asserts that Afghanistan was thriving and open to Westerners in the recent past.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Hegseth

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“There was a lot of spill trade work going on under the surface inside America, domestically that had changed our country.”
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“I went into Afghanistan pretty optimistic and I left very pessimistic.”
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“I have mailed my Harvard degree back.”
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“Harvard was just horrible. I got dumber.”
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“I did ROTC at Princeton. There were three of us in the Mighty Tiger Battalion.”
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“There were 700 guys in 04 and 05 who've been pulled off the battlefield at Gitmo.”
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“We thought military tribunals and commissions were coming.”
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“These commissions never got off the ground because of left wing lawyers and all this other nonsense.”
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“Bear Stearns, May it Rest in peace. Great firm, May it Rest in Peace act. They actually cared only about making money.”
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“The war wasn't going well, at least from the view of what we were getting domestically.”
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“They did a 20-month tour.”
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“We made a great deal of local progress in stemming the insurgency, creating local partnerships, standing up the Iraqi police, an army.”
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“More troops and Petraeus's surge strategy probably could be effective in bringing down the sectarian violence.”
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“I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was published in I think October of 2006 called more troops please.”
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“Obama took a trip to Iraq in the middle of the campaign because he was getting so much criticism for being out of touch with the war.”
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“I came back from Afghanistan and ran for the US Senate against Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, which is my home state.”
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“The Star Tribune, which is our liberal rag in Minnesota, dubbed me a front runner. Day one, I announced I raised a bunch of money.”
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“We were front and center on the Phoenix VA scandal.”
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“Obama did kind of a surge [in Afghanistan].”
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“We were already touting this hallow force, saying things that we knew were not true.”
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“We really are advancing a shell game here that's going to collapse when we leave.”
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“Afghanistan just didn't exist [in terms of infrastructure and modernity compared to Iraq].”
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“The Taliban may have run into Pakistan, but they're re-establishing underground and they're the real power base.”
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“The Taliban is stronger, has deeper tentacles, has totally infiltrated the military services and police.”
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“Once you start to signal that we're out of here with a date certain which is exactly what happened.”
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“They moved it up to, I think, August 25th, and they moved it up because things were going sideways so quickly.”
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“It took 10 days. That's all it took.”
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“Once we made the decision to abandon Bagram and we had consolidated, it was just. It made no sense.”
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“The only guy that was fired was Stu Scheller, the colonel who stood up and said what everybody was thinking.”
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“We fought Afghanistan and Iraq basically one year at a time. 20 years for 20 years, all on PowerPoint.”
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“We didn't have enough ammo. We didn't have enough [resources].”
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“The ANA was by the end of your deployment that a unit better be green.”
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“Everybody's lying. Everybody's making up. Or if they're not lying, they're just naive.”
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“Governor Cuomo was not going to have Pete Hegseth, the Fox News [personality], in his National Guard.”
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“We didn't have enough guys and they didn't have enough people on the streets.”
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“Generals again and leaders who kowtow to the political moment, even though they know what they're peddling about their own service is not…”
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“There were 25,000 of them sleeping in the parking lot of the Capitol.”
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“Someone identified a Jerusalem Cross tattoo you have on your chest right here as an extremist tattoo.”
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“Certain people are being targeted, purged from our ranks and, and they're not the kind of guys you want kicked out.”
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“I don't want my kids fighting some long insurgency in Donbas.”
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“When I joined ROTC, we weren't talking about gender and race.”
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“You see a battalion commander who got promoted... because he checked a few boxes.”
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“Standards always evolve over time.”
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“The vaccine mandate pushes.”
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“I know for sure that this book was well read inside the Pentagon.”
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“Parents have allowed, you know, we've coddled and we've pretended and we've, we've been led by our own kids as opposed to leading them.”
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“Even your conventional infantry units are dealing with a lot of this nonsense.”
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“We just screens and dumbed down schools and vapid media have created men without chests in a time when we need them more than ever.”
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“There are a lot of utopians out there on the left who think we can tinker our way into human perfection.”
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