After his blog post went viral, the Combat Flip Flops founder stresses Americans to reach out to their elected officials and beg them to listen to veterans about what’s happening in Afghanistan.

With the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul, and social media spiraling out of control with insensitive garbage, military veterans and those brave women and men who have fought for our country are also having a difficult time. 

On Wednesday, President Biden said that he didn’t think the current crisis unfolding in Afghanistan was a failure, and that he believed the ongoing chaos was inevitable after US troops departed:

“I don’t think it was a failure,” the President responded, adding, “look it was a simple choice.” “When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government getting into a plane and taking off and going to another country. When you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained,” he said, “that was — you know I’m not — that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.”

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with President Biden’s statement, believing that our current government institutions are to blame here – not our U.S. troops. 

Earlier this week, a blog post entitled “Written in Taliban” went viral, urging readers that if “this made you angry, cry, or contemplative – then [their] goal is achieved.”

In an exclusive interview with its author, Matthew Griffin, PopWrapped went behind the scenes of what the media isn’t talking about, what most Veterans have been saying, but have been censored because of its veracity.

Griffin, an Army Ranger and a 2001 United States Military Academy Graduate, was also a Combat Veteran with the 75th Ranger Regiment (3x Afghanistan, 1x Iraq), and currently serves as the CEO of Combat Flip Flops –  a $1 million seller of shoes and accessories manufactured in conflict and post conflict zones. 

Pulling Out of Afghanistan: “We’re All Missing the Point Here“

If you were to ask any Veteran how Afghanistan fell so quickly to the Taliban, almost all will tell you that this wasn’t a surprise – but a global disaster that has been in the making for years. 

Since 2002, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has served as an independent oversight on the billions of dollars the U.S. appropriated for Afghanistan’s reconstruction. If you were to take a look at every report filed by SIGAR, every sign was there that the Taliban would immediately take over the moment U.S. troops were withdrawn. Its most recent report, released August 16, discusses the past failures in Afghanistan. 

“All the signs have been there,” said John Sopko, the head of SIGAR. In a recent statement, Sopko said he and his agency have released multiple reports and testified more than 50 times to warn Congress and lawmakers about what is now happening.

“I mean, we’ve been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started [in] 2012 about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn’t exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn’t sustain what we were giving them,” he said. “So these reports have come out.”

Despite the quick nature for individuals to blame the current administration, what is going on now is attributable to after U.S. special operators and CIA operatives toppled the Taliban in 2001, under former U.S. President George W. Bush. Backed by airstrikes and sympathetic Afghans, Bush ordered the invasion after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda planned the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Centers – from Afghanistan. 

“President Biden shouldn’t be missing the point here,” Griffin told PopWrapped. “I encourage you to go to SIGAR, and read about the past failures in Afghanistan. They’ve appointed [Sopko], and have been giving these reports to the President, Vice-President, and to Congress for over a decade now. There are clear, blaring failures that our military, diplomatic aid organizations have been failing for over a decade. It’s written down and presented to everyone – and they have done nothing about it. There is no valid talking point that they can give that they underestimated the time it would take to get out. It’s a bold faced lie.”

20th Anniversary of the 9/11 Terror Attacks

With the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks right around the corner, one has to wonder whether the U.S. decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan right now was purposeful. 

Griffin, a 2001 West Point graduate, went to school in New York, just an hour north of New York City, spending a lot of weekends down there up until the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Centers.

“We graduated as the leadership class into the army when the 9/11 attacks happened,” Griffin explained. “We were the platoon leaders that led all of the soldiers into combat. I think 20 years is too much; it just happened to align. I don’t think they did it on purpose. I just think they did it the fastest they could with Biden getting into the Administration. It’s unfortunate that it aligns with that timing, for so many families, U.S. citizens, and first responders and military service members who we want to honor those who fell – and they’re just blunishing it with such tragedy on a global human scale.”

Supporting Education in War-Torn Regions

Griffin is also the founder of Combat Flip Flops, which launched in 2013, only to grow even more in 2016 after appearing on ABC’s Shark Tank, earning individual investments of $100,000 from Mark Cuban and two other investors. 

The company created sturdy military-themed flip flops and footwear, using the profits to support education in war-torn regions like Afghanistan and Iraq. And given what is happening in Afghanistan right now, Combat Flip Flops seems to be perfectly positioned to help bring what’s happening abroad to light, while helping protect young girls and women in these war-torn regions.

“I think that Americans are now going to understand that the way we have been waging war doesn’t work. This article I wrote made it to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – to all the generals that sat at the table, and they were all quiet about it, because they knew it was correct. Strategists at the Pentagon read it and they stated that they ‘clearly had the incorrect strategy, because we clearly didn’t understand our enemy.”

The emotionally charged “Written in Taliban” was certainly anything but easy for Griffin and his co-founder, Scott Chapman to write. Chapman, is also a 2000 Murray State University Graduate, Army Ranger Fire Team Leader from Alpha Company 2/75th Rangers (‘01 – ‘05), OGA Blackwater Alumni, entrepreneur, and author; Combat Veteran ( 21x Afghanistan, 1x Iraq).

Written in Taliban: Twisting the Knife

So, what went into writing the letter? After two hours of going back and forth in a Google Doc, Griffin and Chapman channeled all that frustration and rage they had into this letter for our benefit.

“It was exceptionally difficult to write,” Griffin told PopWrapped. 

“We have been successful commercially in the face of everybody in the government, state, and Department of Justice laughing at us, because we’re doing it in flip flops and telling people to be nice. When we write critical pieces about our U.S. government, unfortunately, our country puts us into the box of ‘angry veteran.’ They listen to the generals and the State Department guys behind the podium because they think they know more – but they don’t. We walked that dirt. We climbed those mountains. We shook hands with those people. We carried the bodies of our friends, you know? We’ve personally invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into making this vision work, and we were stable and effective. All the government programs are not effective. And as much experience and success as we’ve had, people laugh at us. They don’t take us seriously. I’ve been struggling for the last few weeks because we predicted this. 

We knew it was coming. When the dominoes started to fall late last week, I wanted to write a scathing piece, but I didn’t know how to do it in a way that would wake up Americans. We fell asleep at the wheel; we fell asleep at the shopping mall. And we allowed our congressmen, senators, and elected officials to put our sons and daughters lives on the line – for trillions of dollars. Can you imagine how angry as a veteran you would be, behind that? 

But you can’t write that way, because you’ll just be put in that box – so I thought what would be a way that we could really insert the knife, and twist it? And so, whether you want to call it divine inspiration, or whatever, but I woke up Saturday morning and said that Americans don’t know our enemy. 

I have to make Americans understand the futility of this fight from the viewpoint of our enemy. I have to write in such a concise, aggressive way that people can’t not read it or can’t not think once they read it. People never remember what you said; they remember what you made them feel. And we wanted you to feel it when we wrote that article.”

And to Griffin’s point, Sopkin also pointed out in an interview with USA Today that our country has an overall lack of appreciation for Afghani culture:

“We didn’t understand Afghanistan, we didn’t appreciate their culture,” Sopko said. “We didn’t appreciate the nuances of working there and also the history of working there, their views toward foreigners and foreign invasions over centuries.”

Speaking to Big Tech Directly

The reality, unfortunately, is that Griffin and Combat Flip Flops have been continuously censored by our media and social media platforms, strictly because of an extremely poor algorithm that just sees “Written in Taliban,” excluding it from all search engines. For this reason, Griffin and his team have to live-stream all of their on-air interviews with networks like Ticker News, BBC World News, among others just to be seen.

“I would like the senior leadership of these platforms to read what I wrote,” Griffin stressed. “And then tell me their thoughts, because I believe we want the same thing. If they tell me they want something different, then we will know where the fault lies.”

Griffin revealed that he and his team are working with Congresswoman Moscow’s office out of Arizona on fighting censorship. “We’re sending her office all the screenshots of everything. We have all the information.”

The problem, according to the Combat Flip Flops founder, is that the majority of social media platforms are leftward leaning, and don’t want the Administration to look bad. “We are receiving thousands of messages from people all over the world, from multiple countries, just as you are articulating what I’ve thought and felt, but couldn’t state it for the past 20 years.”

“Written in Taliban” concludes with the following for readers:

“…our hope is that it inspires you to take action with your elected officials. They’ve been repeating the same failing playbook since World War II with your sons, daughters, and tax dollars. If you want this to keep happening, do nothing. If you don’t, then do something. If we all do a little, together we do a lot.”

Photo courtesy of Combar Flip Flops / Puget Sound Business Journal.

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