Army Veteran Checks His Phone For News About Family and Friends Still in Afghanistan While He’s Live on MSNBC

Matt Zeller, an Army veteran and former CIA analyst, was distracted for a very understandable reason during a live appearance on The Week with MSNBC’s Joshua Johnson to discuss the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan: he was waiting for news about several family members and friends who had not yet been able to leave the country.

As Johnson introduced him at the beginning of the segment, Zeller could be seen glancing downwards. He would later explain that he had been checking his phone for news of his loved ones.

“I wanted this war to end too,” Zeller acknowledged, because he had a 9-year-old daughter and if the war had gone on much longer, she could have fought in it too, “and shame on us for that.”

However, he noted, the U.S. military had been protecting the status quo in Afghanistan, and sometimes defending human rights requires doing so at the barrel end of a gun. “The people who have just taken over Afghanistan are as evil as the Nazis,” Zeller said, with the Taliban conducting mass executions and making people come to the stadiums and watch.

“I can’t help but think that what has transpired is truly awful,” Zeller continued, saying that he was most concerned about was “not just the 10,000 American citizens who are still currently trapped in Afghanistan — some of whom are my own family — I’m also worried about the over 90,000 Afghan wartime allies and their family members, the interpreters, truck drivers, the engineers, the IT Workers, the people who picked up our trash. All of those people now are going to be sentenced to death, because the Taliban –”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Matt,” Johnson broke in. “You mentioned people who are trapped in Afghanistan, including your family? Have you been able to make contact with them at all? Do you know what condition they’re in?”

Zeller mentioned how he had looked down at his phone at the beginning of the segment, to check on news about his relatives. “They’re alive,” he said, mentioning a cousin who was at the airport and “another relative trapped in the city.”

“And I’m trying to get them out,” he continued. “This is personal for a lot of us.”

Zeller added that he had just spoken with a friend named Chuck who had served in Afghanistan with him, and Chuck had called the veterans’ hotline earlier tonight. “Not because he was feeling suicidal. He just needed to talk to somebody. I might call later, too. This is triggering a lot of things.”

He expressed empathy for the Afghans who had helped him and his fellow soldiers. “These are our people,” said Zeller, describing how he had had “the luxury of coming back to the best country on the planet” after his deployment ended, but the Afghanis “went on to the next mission and the next,” and “for that, the Taliban will kill them.”

Zeller also expressed concern about how much more dangerous the Taliban had become during the past twenty years. At the beginning of 2021, he explained, the U.S. had 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, controlled every major city, and had not suffered a casualty in a “very long time.”

Now, all that was over. The Afghan government is gone, which he described as “frightening,” and for women and girls in Afghanistan, “their futures are over.”

“This is not the Taliban of 1990s,” said Zeller, which took over after Afghanistan was “devastated by a civil war” and “had a couple of tanks.” But the Taliban of 2021 “now have more helicopters than 166 other nations on the planet, to include Australia,” an air force, armed drones, and other sophisticated military equipment.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.