Colin Powell, Secretary of State for George W. Bush, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for George H. W. Bush, has died at age 84.
Powell, a consummate Washington insider, was fairly effective in both roles. As Secretary of State, he was much better at managing relations with American allies and various international institutions than (in increasing order of general competence) John Kerry, Madeline Albright, Warren Christopher, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton or Al Haig, but not among the very best of the modern era (George Schultz, James Baker and Mike Pompeo), and was notably better than successor Condoleezza Rice. He kept the Blair government onboard for Operation Iraq Freedom (at considerable political cost to Blair), effectively used the temporary post-9/11 period of international goodwill, maintained the sanctions regime on Iran, and effectively represented a President who was not loved by the “international community.”
As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, he effectively managed inter-service relations and empowered General Norman Schwarzkopf to produce the most overwhelmingly impressive military victory by American forces since World War II.
Powell does owe a small measure of blame in that American involvement in Iraq turned out to be a long-running, expensive distraction whose ultimate success was only cemented under the Trump Administration, but that was clearly a bipartisan quagmire, as was the long-running, expensive, disaster in Afghanistan, in which the State Department played a very baleful role.
That he was a squishy Republican who backed Obama in 2008 shouldn’t change the fact that he was fairly adept at at implementing the policies of the Presidential Administrations he worked for, no matter how mistaken some of those policies may appear in hindsight. Powell was almost universally praised for effective and dignified management in successfully filling two different demanding roles.
He once described himself in an interview with the New York Times in 2007 as a “problem-solver.” He offered this analysis of himself: “He was taught as a soldier to solve problems, So he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”
The invasion will happen in April or October. Because of the challenges posed by the strait’s weather, a transport fleet can only make it across the strait in one of these two four-week windows. The scale of the invasion will be so large that strategic surprise will not be possible, especially given the extensive mutual penetration of each side by the other’s intelligence agencies.
In some way the timing is right for Beijing to go to war. Their economy is faltering, the Biden White House has proved its weakness in Afghanistan (and may be compromised by CCP ties), and a “Great Patriotic War” to bring a “renegade province” in line may be just what the doctor ordered to distract the nation.
In another way, this is exactly the wrong time to launch an attack, with global supply chains snarled and ports clogged up, how is China supposed to transport troops across the Taiwanese Strait, especially since they need civilian transports to carry troops.
The Chinese navy now has access to 1.5 million tons of shipping that could carry an assault force across the Taiwan Strait and initiate an invasion of Taiwan.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a transport fleet equal in displacement to U.S. Military Sealift Command’s own quasi-civilian fleet.
In other words, a lot of ships.
To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as 2 million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.
That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships, together displacing around 370,000 tons. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.
The National Defense Transportation Law of 2017 mandates that all of China’s transport infrastructure, including ships, be available for military use. Naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships—in particular adding heavy-duty ramps that can support the weight of armored vehicles.
If I was of conspiratorial cast, I might suspect that the shipping snarl was designed to hide the presence of troops ships in the Taiwanese strait.
Taiwan is taking the threat seriously enough to prepare for war:
Taiwan is preparing for potential war with China following a series of increasingly aggressive military activity from Beijing, with Taipei’s foreign minister warning that should the nation attack, it would “suffer tremendously.”
China on Monday sent 52 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the largest military provocation seen yet.
In anticipation of further aggression, the self-ruled island is preparing to repel any strike and has asked Australia to increase intelligence sharing and security cooperation, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s “China Tonight.”
“The defense of Taiwan is in our own hands, and we are absolutely committed to that,” Wu told ABC’s Stan Grant in an interview to be broadcast Monday.
“I’m sure that if China is going to launch an attack against Taiwan, I think they are going to suffer tremendously as well.”
China, which claims that Taiwan is part of its territory, in the past week has stepped up its saber rattling against the island to press it to back down and accept Chinese rule. Taipei, meanwhile, maintains it is a sovereign country separate from Beijing.
Is China getting ready to invade? I have no way of reading Xi Jinping’s mind, but I think if a real war were in the offering, we’d see less saber-rattling tests of airspace and more signs of troop mobilization. I looked for any evidence that this was happening, but I haven’t seen in.
It’s been completely obvious for a long time that China has been preparing, if it so chooses, to take Taiwan by force of arms and keep us from being able to do anything about it.
It has massively increased its force of ballistic missiles, better to target a wide array of ships and hold at risk U.S. ground units. Prior to the latest, more serious iteration of the missile threat, Tom Shugart of the Center for New American Security estimated that a preemptive Chinese strike on our bases in the region “could crater every runway and runway-length taxiway at every major U.S. base in Japan, and destroy more than 200 aircraft on the ground.”
China has been churning out long-range strike aircraft and engaged in a historic naval buildup. It now has the largest navy in the world.
Nonetheless, invading and occupying Taiwan after launching a gigantic, logistically taxing amphibious operation across a 110-mile strait would be no small feat, to put it mildly.
It should be our objective to keep China at bay, toward the goal of keeping it from establishing its dominance over Asia, as former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby argues in his compelling new book The Strategy of Denial.
But the Taiwanese haven’t exhibited the urgency one would expect of an island of 24 million people coveted by a nearby nation of 1.4 billion people that makes no secret of its compulsion to try to swallow it whole.
Until a few years ago, Taiwan’s defense budget was shockingly inadequate. Its military reserves are lackluster. Its frontline units tend not to operate at full strength. It has often been seduced by the allure of so-called prestige weapons, such as top-end fighter aircraft that are irrelevant to its predicament.
We should be fortifying Taiwan and making it as difficult as possible for China to take. That means stockpiling food, energy, and munitions against a Chinese blockade. It means making its infrastructure more resilient and enhancing its cyber capabilities. It means increasing its capability to detect an early mustering of Chinese forces. It means more mines, anti-ship missiles, air-defense capabilities, and unmanned systems to frustrate a cross-strait invasion.
Speaking of arming countries against China, Japan is now testing flying F-35Bs off an aircraft carrier. If adopted, F-35s would be Japan’s first carrier aircraft since World War II.
Greetings, and welcome to the Halloween season! Manchin and Sinema are the only thing that stands in the way of a giant, economy-destroying meteor of leftwing pandering, energy crises ramp up in China and Europe, Biden nominates a commie, and more Flu Manchu shenanigans.
Inflation hits a 30 year high, yet Democrats are furious two of their own party aren’t letting them run even bigger deficits.
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin calls the giant runway Porkulus fiscal insanity.
“What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.
Manchin says that any reconciliation bill must include a Hyde Amendment to bar federal taxpayer funding of abortion. I’m pretty sure Democrats would prefer kicking Manchin out of the party than give compromise on their holy of holies.
‘What if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”
Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.
“Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.
Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.
Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.
If there’s one thing we know about the looming debt limit crunch and the warnings about the dire consequences of default, it’s this: The government is not going to default.
The recurring brinksmanship over the debt limit and the partisan refusal to get Republican fingerprints on the increase don’t say much for our political class. But the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people, and they’ve been through this drill before. Back in July 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:
The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.
You can bet they’re making similar plans today. The difference is that 10 years later the debt ceiling is $28.4 trillion, just about doubled, and we’re about to bump into it again.
Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, probably just in the nick of time. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt (more accurately, gross federal debt) yet again bursting through its statutory limit of $28.4 trillion and soaring past 120 percent of GDP, a level previously reached only during World War II.
The Cornell University law school professor [Saule Omarova]’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.
Snip.
Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.
In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?
The FBI’s annual report Monday made official what most unfortunately presumed: The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murders since the start of national record-keeping 60 years ago.
The Uniform Crime Report detailed a murder increase of nearly 30 percent.
The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase back in 1968. The national rate of murders per 100,000, however, still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.
The FBI data show around 21,500 total murders last year, which is 5,000 more murders than in 2019. More than three-fourths of reported murders in 2020 were committed with a firearm, the highest rate ever reported.
Now before you start jumping to conclusions about a correlation between the leftist fever to defund the police and a huge jump in the nation’s murder rate, you should probably be aware of the fact that the Democrats want you to know that there’s no problem at all.
That’s right, the same people who want us all to live in mortal fear of being breathed on by a stranger at Kroeger are trying to poof away a pile of bodies.
Speaking of Flu Manchu, here’s NBA player Jonathan Isaac calmly explaining why he doesn’t feel he needs the vaccine:
This is a calm, intelligent, respectful statement as to why @JJudahIsaac is hesitant about getting the Covid vaccine. Instead of screaming at those who are still figuring it out, listen to his response. pic.twitter.com/Q1xMLw8boX
The Lancet just gives up on trying to determine the origins of Flu Manchu, much like OJ has given up on finding the real killers.
China is trying the classic idiot price controls strategy for its self-inflicted energy crisis:
China is officially panicking.
Now that the global energy crisis has slammed China’s economy, leading to the first contractionary PMI since March 2020 as a result of widespread shutdowns of factory and manufacturing, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese residents suffering from periodic blackouts, Bloomberg reports that China’s central government officials “ordered the country’s top state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for this winter at all costs.”
Translation: Beijing is no longer willing to risk social anger and going forward China will be subsidizing coil and nat gas, which will lead to even higher prices, which will lead to even higher prices for other “substitute” commodities such as oil, which is why oil surged on the news.
The news follows a report on Wednesday that China will allow soaring coal prices to be passed on to factories in electricity prices. But prepare for a surge in PPI, which will likely not be allowed to be passed on to CPI due to ‘common prosperity’. Which logically means margin collapse, and shutting down – so even more structural shortages. Unless we get state subsidies of some sort, or differential pricing for the foreign and domestic market. There used to be a name for that kind of economy. Wall Street used to pretend it didn’t like it.
“We don’t want normal,” said activist Earnest Greer. “We want radical change. What if everything goes back to the way it was without us completely dismantling and rebuilding the system?”
Liberals saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get people less clingy to individual freedom and more accepting of government planning significant parts of everyone’s lives. Normal would mean relinquishing that power, which is anathema to the Left.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Chaos at the border and buying American military tech to oppose China are two of the themes this week:
8,000 illegal aliens await processing underneath the Del Rio bridge on the U.S./Mexican border.
Here’s a drone shot:
BREAKING: Our drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX. Per source, the number of migrants waiting to be processed has now swelled to approx 8,200. It was 4,000 yesterday AM. Doubled in one day. BP overwhelmed, & I’m told situation is “out of control” @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/ThJJJ0JWCT
Those illegal aliens are there because Democrats and the Biden Administration want them there, so they can turn those illegal aliens into Democratic Party voters via amnesty.
So damaging is that drone footage that the FAA has closed airspace over the bridge to prevent it:
NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”. pic.twitter.com/aJrjAPO2Pz
This effort is just one part of a new partnership between the three countries, dubbed AUKUS, which is short for Australia-United Kingdom-United States, that also includes cooperation in other areas, including long-range strike capabilities, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. President Biden said AUKUS would help all three countries work more closely together to help ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region in the long-term.
On the whole, this is probably a good move to counter China, and I hear that Canberra was the driving force behind the agreement. All that said, the United States was already in formal alliances with the UK and Australia through other treaties, so it’s not anything like a tectonic shift.
Another sign of the new alliance: The UK is going to station new vessels in the Indo-Pacific. [Senior Royal Navy admiral Tony Radakin] “said that the Taiwan Strait is clearly ‘part of the free and open Indo-Pacific.'”
Naturally France pitched a snit fit over the deal because Australia cancelled a contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,” Le Drian told franceinfo radio. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.” Cry some more, Jean-Claude. But it isn’t like France was ever going to come to Australia’s aid in a dust-up with China, so the deal makes sense as drawing Australia closer to the regions remaining nuclear naval powers. (Russia can barely keep its own navy running these days.)
Speaking of possible China opponents buying American technology, Japan is buying more F-35s.
John Durham finally files an indictment over the Russian collusion hoax investigation. “Special counsel John Durham reportedly seeks a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm closely linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.” That firm, of course, would be Perkins Coie, who you may remember from regular appearances in the Clinton corruption updates.
The Democrats of Texas have long, as in 30 years or more, believed that the Hispanic vote would eventually hand them total control of Texas forever. They believe they need not adjust their policies on faith, family, life, the Second Amendment, taxes — anything — because the party brand itself was enough. If it wasn’t, then they would resort to bullying. They could go all the way left to Wendy Davis and Karl Marx if they wanted to — and they have — and the Hispanic vote would save them.
But a funny thing happened along the way. People like state Rep. Aaron Peña switched parties on principle and others followed them. And more are following them. His daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza, is quoted in this Texas Monthly story regarding how the Democrats operate when it comes to independent-minded folks like her father and herself.
Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, “have become liberated” to vote on their long-held beliefs. “People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you got involved [in conservative politics], people said, ‘I’m not going to give you this contract; I’m not going to give you this job.’ But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous.”
When I was reporting on border issues in Hidalgo County during my first stint with PJ Media, I’d hear about the bullying she mentions but it wasn’t provable. Rampant and endemic, but hidden with no paper trails. Tejanos and Tejanas started standing up to it a decade ago, some by running for office, others by working courageously together underground and actually going after some of the political criminality. People noticed. Groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas and the Conservative Hispanic Society rose up to answer the call outside any party structure. One of the most popular and successful talk radio hosts in the Lone Star State is my friend Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino.” The conservative juggernaut is heard expounding on the joys of freedom and how Democrats would take it away on the air every day in Houston and Dallas and nationally on NewsmaxTV.
People are noticing how embarrassingly paternalistic and out-of-touch the Democrats are when it comes to South Texas. They really don’t know Texas at all and haven’t bothered to understand.
Snip.
That’s because they’re not immigrants. Treating them as immigrants cancels their ancestors and their heritage. Tejanos have been in Texas for generations, from the time when it was part of the Spanish Empire. Badly misunderstood and under-reported is the fact that Tejanos are and have been part of the culture of Texas long before we Anglos showed up. By the time my ancestors arrived in Texas in the 1850s and 1860s, Tejanos had been building Texas for more than a century. They’re not immigrants in any sense of the word. They’re Texans and American citizens. They resisted elitist dictator Santa Anna, fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto, they’ve served in every major war defending the United States, they’ve won Medals of Honor and have state veterans homes named after them — and their communities are the most directly affected by the chaos that out-of-state Democrats tend to unleash on the border. They serve in the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, and they work in the oil fields and own thriving businesses. Coyotes, cartels, drugs, and trafficking all affect Tejano communities first, while the rich Democrats who party at the Met are unaffected personally and weaponize the border as a racial cudgel. RGV citizens are not happy about that and they know whom to blame.
Gov. Greg Abbott visited Houston on Monday to sign new legislation he said would directly address lenient bail practices and rising crime in Harris County.
“Lives are being lost because the criminal justice system in Harris County is not working the way it should,” said Abbott.
Known as the Damon Allen Act, Senate Bill (SB) 6 is named after a state trooper who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop on Thanksgiving Day 2017. Despite having a history of assaulting a law enforcement officer, the shooter was out on a $15,000 felony bond at the time of the murder.
Allen’s widow, Casey Allen, who has become an advocate for the reforms implemented by SB 6, joined Abbott at the Safer Houston Emergency Summit held by a coalition of ministry groups.
Noting that her husband had been killed by a “violent, repeat offender,” Mrs. Allen added, “The murderer still went to jail, and my life and my kids’ lives were forever changed by actions that can’t be taken back.”
The new law will create an online public safety report for judges and magistrates to access more complete information about a suspect’s criminal history before setting bail. In addition, SB 6 requires additional training for judges and magistrates, and prohibits the release of certain violent suspects or repeat suspects on personal recognizance (PR) bonds.
“Same FBI That Chased Russia Collusion Hoax for Years Covered Up Sexual Abuse of USA Gymnasts.” Why did James Comey’s FBI fail to investigate charges against Larry Nassar?
Now that the Biden EPA has rolled back the conflict-of-interest standards imposed by the Trump EPA on the agency’s outside scientific peer review panels, it has gone back to its old practice of stocking its peer review boards with agency research grant-recipient cronies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever EPA wants to do. The Biden EPA most recently announced the particulate matter (PM) subpanel for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). As per below, 17 of the 22 members are current and/or former EPA grantees. The amounts associated with them as principal investigators are shown. Note the largest grantee (Lianne Sheppard, recipient of $60,032,782 in EPA grants) is, naturally, the chairman. Sheppard is also the chairman of the main CASAC panel as well as a member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a separate outside review panel. The Biden EPA needs a reliable multi-purpose rubber-stamper and that is Sheppard, an activist who sued the Trump EPA because it instituted conflict of interest rules under which she was ineligible to rubber-stamp agency wishes.
Here’s a UK funeral director who claims all the Flu Manchu deaths he’s seeing now are from vaccinations:
Take this with a grain of salt and in the interest of gathering data points.
What. The. Hell. “Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims.” What’s a little sexual slavery compared to all those likes?
Busted!
It appears as though @LanceNBCSD, the assignment editor for the San Diego NBC affiliate, forgot to switch to his anti-Trump burner account… pic.twitter.com/XfAAQX31Ex
Investigators call into hospital asking for the name of the people featured in a news broadcast only to find out they weren't admitted to the hospital!
The Democratic Media Complex would love it if Americans would just “move on” from the Biden Administration’s disasterous withdrawal debacle in Afghanistan, but there are too many sad lessons Democrats have yet to learn from the debacle. So here’s a roundup of relevant links.
Not matter how much the Biden Administration spins it, it was not a success:
Talk about a catastrophic success.
The Biden administration wants credit for the Afghanistan evacuation as measured by the sheer number of people it flew out amid a security and humanitarian crisis of its own making.
This is the arsonist bragging about how many fires he has put out.
Those with memories that stretch past a couple of weeks ago will recall the halcyon days when a mass evacuation at a civilian airport exposed to suicide bombers and other attackers wasn’t, according to Joe Biden, even conceivable.
Biden contributed to the collapse of the Afghan military by denying it air cover, gave away Bagram Air Base for no good reason, pulled out U.S. troops before our diplomats and civilians, drastically underestimated the gathering Taliban offensive, and then, caught unawares by the fall of Kabul, scrambled to jury-rig a desperate rescue that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.
That the U.S flew more than 115,000 people out of Kabul is a testament to the awesome capabilities of the United States military.
It is not in any way a vindication of President Biden’s exit.
The evacuation itself has been costly. Because we outsourced security outside the airport to the Taliban, our service members were forced to operate in dangerous conditions. A nearly inevitable attack last week killed 13 of them. That’s the loss of more Americans in one day than were killed in action most years in Afghanistan since 2015.
Then, we failed by the most important metric. We left hundreds of Americans behind who wanted to leave, a squalid betrayal that was unfathomable before the Biden team began to try to prepare the public for it a week or so ago.
President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and press secretary Jen Psaki now all suffer from a credibility gap born of obfuscation over the Afghan catastrophe. Though the State Department can count the minimum number of “Americans” — defined by me as all U.S. passport holders, whether citizens or Legal Permanent Residents with “green cards” known to its teams by text, email and phone calls — no one at State or the White House can seem to agree on what that number is.
This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told CNN there were “around 100” Americans left in Afghanistan. On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said “hundreds” are still stranded. The Post’s Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief Susannah George told my radio audience Friday morning there is simply no way to know, as some passport holders are cut off and most of the country is out of contact with anyone.
We have a right to know the scale of this crisis: the minimum number of U.S. passport holders known by our authorities to be in Afghanistan. And it is a crisis. It is America Held Hostage 2.0, and though a cohort of Americans escaped Thursday, many remain behind. Psaki, with astonishing indifference to the worries of families and friends across the country, said on Wednesday that there were a “handful” of Americans still in Afghanistan.
A “handful.” It is shocking to hear that. Americans do not come in “handfuls.” They come in ones. Each one matters. One American abandoned is a crisis. We need to know the denominator against which the “ongoing efforts” can be measured. We celebrate every American who escapes, but we cannot forget and dare not accept the minimization of Americans left behind.
Longtime high-ranking soldiers are retiring left and right:
Reason for resignation: “A lack of trust and confidence in your ability to lead”. “We the people” are making their voices heard – are their leaders on both sides of the aisle paying attention? pic.twitter.com/sv2FIYrACA
The MSM moved away from front page stories on Afghanistan as quickly as they possibly could. Never again will they run “America Held Hostage” headlines while a Democrat is in the White House…
Biden: We’re going to stay until we get every last American out. Reality: Nope.
The Biden Administration was already rewriting the history on the withdrawal while it was going on:
The real issue about this historic flight of humanity, however, is why such a gargantuan cramped effort was necessary in the first place? For months Team Biden will be trying to fog over that issue like the inside of your windshield in a rainstorm.
Here’s the narrative: Donald Trump did a deal with the Taliban last year when they were only wannabe rulers in which all U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, before the annual Afghan fighting season got underway in that godforsaken land.
In exchange, the Taliban agreed to reduce violent attacks, mainly on Americans, forbid terrorists to set up shop there again, and to negotiate in good faith with the elected central government in Kabul.
The withdrawal commitment was political cover for the United States, so the exit wasn’t an ignominious admission of defeat, like the Soviets in 1989 and every other attempted occupier for the last 33 centuries.
No one except perhaps some kindergarteners in Arkansas expected the Taliban to live up to much of that agreement. And only those toddlers were disappointed.
For some inexplicable reason, Biden delayed the withdrawal first to the anniversary of 9/11 that started this whole mess and then to Aug. 31, which is the prime-time combat season in a land that has no NFL to follow. Taliban forces were well on the move by then.
Taking the flag down at Bagram weeks early with no contingency plan for adversity was the signal for insurgents to step on the gas. So, they did.
Now, the U.S. military is an amazing collection of proud outfits whose men and women, volunteers all, thankfully train for many things you could never even imagine. Hard to believe that one scenario would be to have a commander in chief with diminished mental capacity and a notorious lifelong distrust of the military.
And that man would order woke Pentagon leaders to forget those dumbass civilians in Afghanistan, just get the last 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan. And do it now.
Then once they were out, the Taliban took over everything, and the reality of thousands of potential hostages emerged, Biden abruptly changed his mind to — No, wait, better send 6,000 troops back to re-secure the airfield. Oh, and assemble enough huge planes to fly more than 75,000 frightened people all over the Middle East.
And then send in the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to meet with the Taliban’s leader to politely request an extension of that Aug. 31 exit deadline that the American leader himself had set.
And all the time that U.S. commander in chief was on vacation refusing or incapable of telling countrymen what the hell was going on.
I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them. I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment.
I would sit in staff meetings where we would talk about, OK, this month we sent 14 armored Humvees down to Helmand Province for the Border Patrol. And 12 of those 14 Humvees along the way went missing — or, quote unquote, broke down — and were disabled. And that was a regular thing. Like the majority of shit we were adding to the inventory of these Border Patrol units, just wasn’t even making it there.
Let me give you some context on how fucked up the flow of information was. For example, a big part of my job there was tracking the number of police recruits that would complete their training cycle — you know, every month or however many times a month, I was there when there were over a dozen different police training camps throughout the country, and they would have different training cycles for different groups of police. And then I would contact those training facilities and be like, OK, how many police were expected to have graduated this month? How many actually completed training and how many recruits showed up?
And what was funny about that whole system was these training camps were not operated by the US military. They are operated by contractors like MPRI or DynCorp. And those contractors were being hired through the US State Department, even though the DoD was paying for them. But it was the State Department that was hiring them. And then what made it even more ridiculous was the nature of these contracts made it so that the number — the training figure, the number of police that made it through training this month — that number was proprietary to the contractor. So they owned that number — they didn’t actually even have to give that to us. I’m a Captain in the Air Force working for the Command, calling and asking, “How many police did you guys train this month?” And they didn’t have to actually tell me that.
When they would give me these figures, I would total them up, because I’m compiling reports that are presumably going back to be presented before Congress to justify expenditures. And I had a Marine Corps major that was part of the Command section that would come in and he’d say, “Hey, we were supposed to cycle through 300 police recruits this month. This says only 150 got through. It’s supposed to be 300.” I’m like, OK, well, it wasn’t 300, it was 150. “Well, can you massage this report so that it says 300?” Basically, can you lie on this report so that it says 300. So just the whole flow of information was not in any way remotely transparent, and it was set up so that really the only people that knew anything for certain were the contractors — the Command staff couldn’t leverage from them accurate information.
I was sitting in on Command staff meetings, where they’re going through weekly reports on distribution of materials. And there were massive discrepancies that nobody was really following up on. The response when I asked about it — because it blew my mind — was just, you know, this is what happens. A lot of this stuff goes missing, a lot of it gets broken.
“The purpose of us being here is to justify pouring mountains of cash into the pockets of contractors — the manufacturers of this equipment. The incentive structure was, “Lose shit, because then it’ll have to be replaced. We’ll have to send more out there.”
Funny how the same State Department that ran the Iran deal was running Afghan military training and equipment. Why, if I were of a more suspicious mind, I might suspect that it was all a giant scheme to kickback still more money to the Democratic Party and radical leftwing activists…
Tell us what you really think: “President Biden Called ‘Feckless, Dementia-Ridden Piece Of Crap’ By Mom Of Slain Marine.”
United States Marine Rylee McCollum, 20, was killed in Thursday’s terror attack at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The fallen Marine’s mother, Kathy, said on a radio show that Americans who voted for Joe Biden “just killed my son.”
“That feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die,” the distraught mother said. “I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to… right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin Taliban terrorists who just freakin blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”
“I never thought in a million years [my son] would die for nothing, for nothing, because that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap who decided he wanted a photo-op on September 11,” she said. “That’s what kills me. I wanted my son to represent our country, to fight for my country. But I never thought that a feckless piece of crap would send him to his death and smirk on television while he’s talking about people dying with his nasty smirk. The dementia-ridden piece of crap needs to be removed from office. It never would have happened under Trump.”
“It was just very cordial, very understanding. He was awesome. He was just talking about the finest of the finest. He said he heard and saw everything that we had said, and he offered his condolences several times, and how sorry he was.”
Said Darin Hoover, father of one of the Marines who died recently in Afghanistan, quoted in “Trump reaches out to families of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan.”
America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by ‘shortcut’ Cockburn means ‘something that takes 10 times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras’. America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.
So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.
A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.
The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.
Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.
But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.
Instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp:
Watch the video, and you can see the exact point (specifically, 31 seconds in) where the American mission in Afghanistan dies.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s Afghan debacle continues to top the news:
At least 90 people, including 13 American soldiers, were killed in in a bombing at an entrance to the Kabul airport.
Un-Fucking believable: “U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate.”
U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.
The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.
But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.
“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”
“French officials gave the Nazi occupiers a list of Parisian Jews they wanted to remain safe…”
It is becoming increasingly difficult to draw any conclusion other than that President Biden knowingly and willfully surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.
To be clear, this is different from concluding that Biden committed to a recklessly premature date for withdrawing all U.S. forces (which, practically speaking, would necessitate NATO’s departure, too) while being aware that the Taliban were capturing territory and that the Afghan security forces might be unable to hold them off over the ensuing months.
That would be bad, but not as damning as what I am deducing.
I now believe Biden long ago reasoned that the Taliban were going to take over the country inevitably and decided to treat them as the de facto government. Consistent with this — and with the progressive Democratic orientation that American military power is needlessly provocative, and that concessions are the preferred way to inspire rogues into good behavior — Biden determined back in the spring that he would set a firm deadline to pull our forces out, and then demonstrate to the Taliban that the deadline was real.
Snip.
Biden saw the Taliban as the regime in waiting, with whom his administration was energetically negotiating. If he proved to the Taliban that the U.S. really was leaving no matter what, then he figured the Taliban would allow — even facilitate — the evacuation of thousands of American civilian workers, contractors, and diplomatic personnel. Biden would pull out American troops and trust the Taliban, thus appeased, with the fate of the remaining Americans.
This is mind-boggling, but not the half of it. Biden was also effectively administering the coup de grace to the Afghan government, and not only by elevating the Taliban to the sole Afghan party with which his administration would negotiate the terms of the U.S. departure. Biden would also pull out in a manner that undermined the Afghan security forces’ capacity to fight the Taliban. After all, if U.S. troops and contractors continued providing technical and logistical support to the Afghan ground and air forces, the Taliban might interpret that as an American commitment to continue the war. Biden would make sure the jihadists had no cause for doubt.
In this, Biden had to know he would be leaving to the Taliban the fate of tens of thousands of Afghans who supported American combat, intelligence, training, and nation-building efforts over the last 20 years. Though many government officials, members of Congress, and influential commentators pleaded with the Biden administration to fast-track the visa process and evacuate the Afghans while American forces were still in control, Biden plainly rationalized that this could provoke the Taliban into retaliatory measures — potentially against Americans — that would put public pressure on him to maintain U.S. forces in the country. Biden’s priority was to withdraw them. Ergo, the Taliban — yes, that Taliban — would be trusted to deal benignly with America’s Afghan allies.
Read the piece for Andrew McCarthy’s reasoning behind this conclusion, including the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and evacuating Bagram in the dead of night. My only quibble with his analysis is that his working assumption that Biden is making the decisions of the Biden Administration. I rather doubt it…
“My phone is melting, and my inbox is jammed, from grown Afghan men pleading, crying to get out with their wives and children,” my reader begins:
All of them used to work for our company. They are engineers, electricians, lab technicians, urban planners, CAD drafters, surveyors, concrete masons, welders — all skilled technical and professional people who enjoyed what we would consider a solid middle-class life. Some went on to become lecturers at university. These aren’t herders and farmers — they are civilized, educated, middle class tradesman and professionals who trusted their government to maintain the safety and security of the nation. Their average age of the parents is late thirties. Their average family size is seven. The youngest child among them is 10 days old. Inside of a month, their lives are uprooted by bloodthirsty barbarians. They are hunted because they helped the Americans.
One of our families has been waiting in the Entry Control Point for four days straight – living in trash and filth, with no shelter, jammed among thousands of others. The parents know full well what awaits if they are fortunate to get out. They are willing to live the life of a refugee in a camp near a military installation. Essentially a one room United Nations Refugee Center shack, or group expeditionary tents, no indoor plumbing, no kitchen. They share public toilets and showers and live in a fenced compound in a sea of other shacks or tents surrounded by gravel — for at least 12-18 months while they wait for the State Department to process their visas. They are willing to walk away from their middle-class comforts and live in refugee camps for well over a year, possibly two, for the freedom and liberty of the United States. Amanullah asked me yesterday if I could get him to Mexico so he could walk to Texas so he wouldn’t have to live in a refugee camp. They know.
Don’t let anyone claim that Afghans who worked for America or international organizations will be fine.
“Here’s a kick in the gut,” my reader continues. “Fawad — not his real name — called me crying last night after midnight. His brother-in-law was killed by the Taliban earlier that day. He had worked for an American contractor in Zabul [a southern province considered part of the Taliban’s heartland]. He was beaten in the street and then shot in the head so the villagers could see.”
More of that California ballot fraud that doesn’t exist. “300 recall ballots, drugs, multiple driver’s licenses found in vehicle of passed out felon: Torrance police.” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Random X. Felon wasn’t working for Larry Elder…
“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened,” the Court majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.
“Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion continued. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
David Gilbert is the father of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He had Chesa with his then-partner Kathy Boudin.
David Gilbert was also a member of the Weather Underground, the domestic terrorist group responsible for the 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery in New York.
Gilbert and Boudin dropped off infant Chesa with a babysitter before driving to the robbery.
The terrorists, with members of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and Black Liberation Army, robbed the truck and wounded guard Joe Trombino and killed his co-worker Peter Paige. Police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady died in the shootout.
A jury convicted Gilbert of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery.
Oh: They also took his Emmy away. The one they gave to him after we all knew he was a Granny-murderer…
My modest proposal was that the 3% of Republicans who never approved of President Trump should stop pretending that they were spokesmen for the 97% of Republicans who did. In the corporate media, where 97% of that 3% were keeping a high profile on cable news, the distortions became preposterous. This seemed to me elementary logic. But for the tiny group of delusional Never Trumpers, my modest proposal fell on them like a ton of bricks.
In the end, my essay ignited a kind of public war among conservative intellectuals that helped to bring down the neocons and the Never Trumpers in the media. Not only did the Weekly Standard shut down, but the National Review kicked out Jonah Goldberg, and the neocon’s peewee prince Bill Kristol went to work for Democrats – all in six months. How did that happen? They had no base of support outside of the Beltway, and they were in willful denial about their own unpopularity. This dynamic was obvious at all levels of media, but let’s take a high visibility example: the old panel at Fox New’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Now, Bret Baier is obviously a very quiet Never Trumper but if you stacked your daily panel with Stephen Hayes, A. B. Stoddard, and Jonah Goldberg and these were the “conservative” pundits you picked to defend President Trump’s policies then it’s obvious what Bret was doing.
A week or so after my essay appeared, I got a very short and shrill phone call from one of Bret’s staffers – who was a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, no less. When I picked up the call, she was angry and breathless and did not want to do small talk. She said: “You don’t know what you’ve done, you don’t understand the damage you’ve caused to this show.” I asked her to calm down, and be specific. She hung up instead.
This bizarre exchange piqued my interest enough to watch Bret Baier’s show that night, which was an emotion I rarely felt for Special Report. Sure enough, Bret Baier ended the episode with an odd little “farewell” segment to Stephen Hayes. The gist of it was that Hayes was suddenly taking “a one year vacation to Spain” with the family. My first thought was: who does a video farewell when they take a vacation? The whole thing was pure baloney. It was now perfectly clear why Bret’s hysterical staffer had called. Apparently my essay had been a crucial factor in getting Stephen Hayes kicked off TV. Someone over at corporate had finally looked at the piss poor ratings Bret was getting and the light bulb went off: no one wants to listen to Hayes anymore. That was certainly true. (A few months later, the sour puss A. B. Stoddard also disappeared from the Special Report show – this time without a video farewell.)
Hayes getting axed left me surprised. How was I to know that Fox executives could read? How was I to know that Baier and Hayes were roommates in college? Did Hayes sail to Spain on one of those idiotic cruises that he was always pushing on his subscribers? Jonah Goldberg had been taunting me from the pages of the National Review that the Never Trumpers were all doing fine – and then suddenly none of them were doing fine. In his video farewell, Hayes wanted everyone to know that he’d be back in a year, and that he was still the chief editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. Both of these statements actually turned out to be false.
Five months later, I got a call from an insider that all the employees at the Weekly Standard were being asked to prepare for the worst. Had anyone run with this story yet? No they hadn’t. Had it somehow fallen to me to be the first to announce the end of the celebrated neocon magazine where Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes had regularly taunted the American working class? Yes it had. The Lord had delivered them into my hands
Honestly, it was less of a murder than documenting a suicide…
Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, Current Affairs is the private kingdom of one man, in this case the dandy communist Nathan Robinson. For five years, Robinson has been all over Current Affairs like a cheap suit, while a small team of deluded volunteers has labored in his salt mine, generating content for the greater glory of the revolution, and their leader, the Potemkin page-turner. But even five-year plans go awry.
Lyta Gold, who was hired to generate ‘Amusements’, is not amused. Gold claims that when the staff attempted to form a workers’ co-operative, Robinson fired them all.
In an administration that sucks, Jen Psaki stands out for really sucking hard.
Speaking of sucking, here’s Spanish-language media omitting embarrassing information in their translation:
The most vivid example to date of how U.S. Latino media shields Biden from any accountability or scrutiny regarding the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan: NO ONE watching the Biden presser heard "INSTRUCTED". pic.twitter.com/cW1pZuFmMZ
“Texas Wins Preliminary Victory Against Biden Administration in Medicaid Lawsuit. The district court’s order temporarily suspends the Biden administration’s revocation of Texas Section 1115 Medicaid waiver.” The Biden Administration retroactively denied a waiver issued by the Trump Administration in an attempt to force ObamaCare down the state’s throat.
Texas election integrity law finally passes the Texas House, meaning Democrat’s quorum-busting stunts got them Jack and Squat.
Who should you back with your Go Fund Me money, Brett Butler or Spinal Tap’s Viv Savage? (I did toss a little money Brett’s way, as I knew her a little back in my standup comedy days…)
I’ve finally had time to sit down and properly sift through all the grim news coming out of Afghanistan to generate this roundup.
And the news is very grim indeed. It’s hard to think of any president who could have botched the Afghan pullout as badly as the rudderless Biden Administration has.
Here is a roundup of news from Biden’s Afghanistan disaster.
I do know enough about the war to know that when the Taliban went toe to toe with American and NATO soldiers, the Taliban got its ass kicked basically every single time. No air force, no navy, and no artillery meant that whenever the Taliban revealed themselves on the battlefield they were guaranteed to be cut to pieces by various pieces of intimidating American hardware like A-10 Warthogs or .50-caliber rifles.
It appears the Taliban tried something different this time around. Open source reporting shows that rather than rocking up and going toe to toe with the Afghan national army, they appear to have simply called everyone in the entire country, instead, told them they were in control, and began assuming the functions of government as they went.
Evidently a lot of this communication was done via WhatsApp.
What I think has not been considered enough is the degree to which WhatsApp DMs were a strategic blind spot for the United States.
The Fog of War obviously makes it impossible to know what’s happening on the ground, right now, in Afghanistan, even for observers from the military and the D.C. political apparatus who do this for a living. Recalling, however, that the U.S.’ longtime strategy for crippling an opponent begins with decapitation strikes on radar and communications infrastructure, it is fairly obvious to anyone that as far as the Taliban were concerned, this never took place. The Taliban is setting up a government fairly expeditiously. Its propaganda circulates on Twitter in plain view.
The Taliban are thus free, and have been free for a number of years, to take their fight not to American soldiers (where they always lose) but directly to the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, all using free-to-use American internet infrastructure like Facebook and Twitter (where they have now won).
WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them.
[Hollie] McKay said corruption was largely to blame for the fall of city after city to the Taliban.
“The level of corruption within the Afghanistan military and the government, that’s how the Taliban won a lot of this, is they would pay the commanders off to surrender a city before,” she explained. “So those who genuinely do want to fight—and there are a lot of men that wanted to genuinely fight—were kept in the dark and ANA [Afghan National Army] commanders were basically paid off in advance to surrender the city and they were left with no choice but ‘you have no choice but to basically run.’”
“The level of corruption that has enabled the Taliban to come back to power is just mind-blowing,” she explained. “To see that and to see all the weapons that have gone to the Taliban’s hands when the Afghan army runs away—that we paid for.”
President Joe Biden, August 10, 2021: “I’ll insist we continue to keep the commitments we made of providing close air support, making sure that their air force functions and is operable, re- — resupplying their forces with food and equipment, and paying all their salaries. But they’ve got to want to fight. They have outnumbered the Taliban. And I’m getting daily briefings. I think there’s still a possibility — you have a significant new Secretary of Defense — our equivalent of a Secretary of Defense in Afghanistan, Bismillah Khan, who is a serious fighter (emphasis added).”
The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2021: “In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.”
President Biden, in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “The idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that the — that somehow, the 300,000 troops we had trained and equipped was gonna just collapse, they were gonna give up. I don’t think anybody anticipated that (emphasis added).”
The Wall Street Journal, today:
An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the document.
The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent, and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it. The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation, the two people said.
Biden to Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “One of the things we didn’t know is what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to keep people from getting out, what they would do. What are they doing now? They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera (emphasis added).”
So far, there are no reports of the Taliban killing an American citizen or impeding an American from getting to the airport. (They are attacking Australians.) But they have accosted and threatened American journalists, fired off shots, attacked crowds, and have made getting to the airport impossible to do safely.
Using a special ‘dissent channel’ within the State Department, the cable – sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and another top State Department official – warned of ‘rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces,’ and offered suggestions on how to speed up evacuation and mitigate the obvious crisis slated to ensue, two people told the WSJ.
In total, 23 US Embassy staffers – all Americans, signed the July 13 cable, which was given a rush status ‘given the circumstances on the ground in Kabul.’ In addition to Blinken, it was sent to the Director of Policy Planning, Salman Ahmad.
Plus a reminder that Antony Blinken sucked so bad that even John McCain called him out for it…
Did the Biden Administration pay any attention to these warnings? No.
Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration ignored the bleak assessments from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and he critiqued the U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the February 2020 deal in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban and had continued to insist wrongly the extremist group was open to a peaceful settlement rather than taking the country by force.
The IC assessments got grimmer by the briefing,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner when speaking of the time frame following President Joe Biden’s April announcement that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. “I have never heard more grim assessment on Afghanistan on these briefings, while at the same time the State Department gave this rosy picture … was giving a more rosy picture of the negotiations that special envoy Zal Khalilzad was entertaining.”
The number of lies Biden told and excuses he made for his own cretinous Afghan policy in today's address beggars the imagination. Truly stunning.
The evil that men do often outlives their time in office: “Taliban leader was freed from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 swap by Obama“:
When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.
In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.
Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile.
Eventually, they were recognized by Western diplomats as official representatives of the Taliban during recent “peace” talks.
Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.
Also this: “The mastermind of the regime change is former detainee Khairkhwa, the Taliban mullah whom Obama released from Gitmo even though the Pentagon classified him as too dangerous to release.”
More of that SuperGenius leadership from the Biden Administration: “Biden State Dept Moved to Abolish Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden State Department moved in June to cancel a program overseeing the protection and evacuation of American citizens stationed overseas in the case of an emergency, just as the Taliban was taking over Afghanistan, according to an internal State Department memo.”
Biden Administration to Americans looking to flee Afghanistan: “You pay now!”
The Biden administration continued to inform American citizens in Afghanistan as of Thursday evening they could have to pay more than $2,000 to board an evacuation flight out of the country, despite the State Department telling the press hours before that it had no intention of levying any such charges.
The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan has stated in multiple security advisories since Monday that any U.S. citizen seeking to evacuate the country must complete an online form in order to secure their repatriation flight. “This form is the only way to communicate interest in flight options,” the embassy said in a security advisory Wednesday.
And don’t forget all the weapons the Taliban captured:
The Taliban, mocking the United States military, recreates the iconic flag planting on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima. To add injury to insult, the Taliban are fully equipped with American military equipment. cc: @mchooyahpic.twitter.com/2fhAGVaKMa
Here’s another video of U.S. weapons captured by the Taliban, with music from a chase scene in a 1980s dystopian SciFi movie scored by Giorgio Moroder:
The setup is Stephanopoulos asking about a soldier who served seven combat tours and was shot twice (for accuracy’s sake, some of his tours may have been in Iraq) with that soldier’s assertion being that we didn’t leave Afghanistan with honor. Note that at no point does the soldier in question indicate we should stay in Afghanistan. Rather, his critique is with the strategy of the disastrous withdrawal that is currently playing out.
Yet, Biden apparently didn’t even comprehend what he was being asked by Stephanopoulos. Instead of speaking to the strategic failures at hand, the president brings up his deceased son Beau and things just go downhill from there.
For example, the war in Kosovo was already over when Beau got there. He was a lawyer sent to train prosecutors, not a combat soldier. Biden then goes on to not only mistake what branch his son served in and his rank, but also what other country he was deployed to later in his career, mixing up Afghanistan for Iraq.
As @politicalsock also notes, Biden’s mention of Beau having regrets is nonsensical. We still have troops in Iraq to this day, and there were a lot more of them there when Beau was still alive. So what withdrawal would Biden’s son have felt regrets about at the time? The answer to that question obviously can’t be Afghanistan either.
After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.
As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today. He is scheduled to receive the president’s daily briefing from the intelligence community and meet with his national-security team. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he is scheduled to return to his house in Delaware today.
This is a highly unusual schedule for a president during a foreign-policy crisis. Yes, a president can perform his job anywhere, whether it’s Camp David or his own private residence. But Biden is barely appearing in public, not saying much of anything when he does, not answering any questions outside of his lone scheduled interview, and sounding angry when he did face questions from Stephanopoulos.
The UN remains consistent. Consistently incompetent:
Or else you'll carpet bomb them with strongly-worded letters day and night?
Aguirre had more sway over the raft monkeys than you have over the Taliban.
There are only 4-5 days left to get these people out due to the logistics of the 8/31 deadline, and according to the cable, there are perhaps 20,000+ Americans still stranded throughout Afghanistan. Even if you take the low-end estimate that only 10,000 Americans were originally stuck, that means we are still way behind schedule, and the situation on the ground in regards to getting to the airport is only getting worse. In other words, you will likely see fewer, not more Americans making it to planes over the next few days.
There’s no magic solution in reserve to fix this situation. The only thing we can do is what Biden should have done almost two weeks ago. He should have told the Taliban to vacate Kabul or we start blowing things up. Instead, we’ve bent the knee over and over and now we have no backup plan. This evacuation is doomed to fail no matter how many misleading tweets Ronald Klain makes. Americans will be left behind. When that happens, what’s the next move? Full-scale war again? Just abandoning our citizens in hopes of paying ransoms down the road?
“Our troops promised them that the U.S. would never turn tail and have another cowardly moment like what happened in Saigon. This is worse than what happened in Saigon. What happened at the airport today is a more shameful moment than what happened in Saigon. And Biden comes out of his bunker trying to do a campaign photo-op speech where he attacks the Afghan people for coming to that airport,” he said.
Sasse charged that the Biden administration bears responsibility for the collapse of the Afghan military. Biden suggested Monday that Afghan soldiers abandoned all hope and surrendered the mission to the Taliban, without providing further context about what prompted the dissolution.
Some Republican lawmakers, such as Sasse, have rejected Biden’s assertion that the Afghan army simply lost the will to fight its own battles. Some have emphasized that the Biden administration’s move to pull air support from the country rendered the Afghan fighting force inoperative. Compounded with the fact that the U.S. also barred American contractors from staying in the country to service Afghan planes, some Republican legislators have contended that the Afghan military was positioned to fail under Biden’s direction.
While President Joe Biden cowers at Camp David, the Taliban are humiliating America. The retreat from Afghanistan is our worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation. As the Taliban marches into Kabul, they’re murdering civilians, reimposing their vicious Islamist law, and preparing to turn Afghanistan back into a bandit regime. The U.S. embassy has told Americans to shelter in place. Refugees are fleeing to the airport, begging to escape the coming bloodbath. None of this had to happen.
America is the world’s greatest superpower. We ought to act like it. But President Biden and his national-security team have failed to protect even the American embassy in Kabul. They have broken America’s promises to the men and women who long for freedom — especially those thousands of Afghans who served alongside our military and intelligence services. They are turning their backs on the women and children who are desperate for space on the remaining flights out of hell.
Gross incompetence has given the Taliban a terrible opportunity to slaughter our allies. Eighty-eight thousand of our Afghan allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far. I’ve been among a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed Biden to expedite this process, but to no avail. At this point, it’s not clear how many we’ll be able to get out. Every translator and ally who stood by us is now at risk.
This bloodshed wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. For months, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned the Biden administration that this would happen. Now the administration is acting like this is a surprise. It’s shameful, dishonest spin.
The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”
One month later, the scenario Mr. Biden deemed impossible has become a horrifying reality. In recent days, the world has watched panicked civilians cling to U.S. military aircraft in a desperate attempt to escape the chaos unleashed by Mr. Biden’s reckless retreat. American diplomats had to beg our enemies not to storm our embassy in Kabul. Taliban fighters have seized scores of American military vehicles, rifles, artillery, aircraft, helicopters and drones.
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
Ted Cruz points out that the debacle is the Biden Administration’s fault. “What we have seen is an incredibly, poorly executed exit from the theater.”
Ouch!
This is a devastating interview that nails the Biden administration to the wall. They had months to get their allies out of Afghanistan, but they did nothing.https://t.co/naAz6uZ3CG
“This is a ‘Never Again’ moment in the making!” “Those people are still alive! We should be doing everything [to hold a beachhead] and get those people out no matter what it takes!”
Biden asserted that America’s reputation on the world stage has not been damaged amid the foreign-policy snafu, despite outraged reactions from major political figures suggesting the contrary. He also falsely claimed that al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that orchestrated the attacks on September 11, 2001, has totally disappeared from Afghanistan. And despite accounts proving otherwise, Biden rejected the notion that American nationals have been struggling to make it to the tarmac at the Kabul airport.
“I have seen no questioning of our credibility from our allies around the world,” Biden asserted. “In fact I’ve seen the exact opposite.”
The president’s statement comes after a number of members of the British Parliament condemned the United States’ haphazard departure from the country as “catastrophic” and “shameful,” with members uniting to “dishonor” the foreign-policy fiasco, the Telegraph reported.
Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in Parliament, said, “The American decision to withdraw was not just a mistake — it was an avoidable mistake, from President Trump’s flawed deal with the Taliban to President Biden’s decision to proceed, and to proceed in such a disastrous way.”
I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.
Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.
These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban. Over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the world that ‘Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban’. Whew. That gave the team at our Kabul embassy time to shred or otherwise render inoperative all the sensitive information they were sitting on — that stash of Pride flags, for example, which the new masters will not have much use for, unless it is to drape over the shoulders of the gays they execute by pushing them off roofs.
Well, it turns out the embassy workers did not have quite enough time. If we still used ink, the bit used to record Kirby’s words would not have been dry before his words were replaced by headlines that Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, who now occupied the presidential palace, the president himself having fled the country, and that the country as whole was in a state of crisis.
President Biden — or, as I like to denominate him these days, due to the deference shown him by all those eager-beaver members of the press, President Ice Cream — was hors de combat when this important news came over what counts as the wire these days. He had left the White House for Camp David. Monday, I think, is when Ben and Jerry’s makes its deliveries, and all we could glean was that he would be addressing the nation ‘in a few days’.
This always happens when Democrats hold the key positions of power in the White House and in Congress — the world begins to rock, the foundations begin to shake, the stability and peace and comparative calm of better days begin to wither and disappear. But my, do the taxpayer dollars begin to flow.
It happened under Jimmy Carter, with his double-digit inflation and gas lines and government cheese programs.
It happened under Barack Obama with his red-line foreign policy that ultimately handed Russia big wins with Syria — not to mention with a watching, mocking, anti-America world.
It’s happening now under Biden.
“Jen Psaki ‘out of the office’ as Biden remains silent on Taliban takeover of Afghanistan,” one Fox News headline ran.
“Joe Biden faces calls to make public address on Afghanistan,” another headline from The Guardian stated.
“Biden’s botched Afghan exit is a disaster at home and abroad long in the making,” yet another headline from CNN read.
Where was Joe while all this chaos was cracking?
You’d have better luck finding Waldo.
Honestly, this White House shows more aggression against Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida over face mask mandates than against Taliban members who now seek to enforce Shariah Law on the poor Afghan people America promised to protect.
The incompetence is onogoing:
A former CIA officer organized a rescue of 500 Afghan interpreters and other special visa holders.
The Biden administration has been an “impediment” to a private effort to get people out of Afghanistan, Robert Stryk, who is arranging privately chartered flights to get Americans and vulnerable Afghans out of the country, exclusively told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday.
“The Brits and South Africans have been fucking awesome and heroic in getting people through the Mil Gate,” Stryk told the DCNF.
Stryk, whose Washington-based lobbying firm was in 2017 paid by the government of Afghanistan for “US Government affairs and commercial sector advice. Executive Branch and Legislative Branch Engagement; Defense consultation; strategic advice pertaining to extremism/terrorism; and promotion of democracy and foreign direct investment,” said he had reached out to the administration “dozens and dozens” of times and had yet to hear back.
After reaching out to the White House, Stryk said he received a response acknowledging the request but got no follow up. Stryk said he started reaching out to the administration on Aug. 14.
“What I am witnessing everyday is the very best and the very worst of America,” Stryk explained. “I have seen the humanity of private citizens who are contacting me and pledging their time, monies, and in some cases their lives to bring our citizens and these Afghan patriots out of harm’s way, while at the time personally experiencing the Biden administration’s abject failure to protect its citizens and those Afghans that fought and worked alongside of us.”
“It’s morally reprehensible,” Stryk said. “It’s been the U.S. private sector who has stepped in to save the blood and treasure the Biden administration is leaving behind.”
“Our State Department just called on the Taliban to form an ‘inclusive’ government ‘with the full and meaningful representation of women.’ This is not the Babylon Bee!” I’m sure that will happen right after Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah…
Indeed, instead of giving women “full and meaningful representation,” the Taliban is banning co-education, calling it “the root of all evil.”
This are just the links and news stories I caught in passing, as I could probably have put up ten times as many links covering this colossal screw-up.
Anyone remember back when the Democratic Media Complex was confidently predicting that President Trump allowing Turkey to establish a security zone in Syria would result in genocide against the Kurds? Now that the Taliban are launching an actual slaughter and Biden apologists are wailing that nobody could possibly foresee the rapid collapse in Afghanistan.
As I mentioned before, if America’s political and military leadership wasn’t willing to do what it took to win in Afghanistan, then we needed to make an orderly retreat. Biden’s retreat has been anything but orderly. It’s been an absolute debacle and thousands, probably tens of thousands of lives, American and otherwise, will be lost thanks to his administration’s astounding incompetence.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I sort of want to put all the horrible news out of Afghanistan in one blog post, but it will probably have to wait until next week.
Democrat voting fraud straight outa Compton. ”[Compton city councilman] Isaac Galvan, 34, was one of six people charged Friday with conspiracy to commit election fraud, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.”
— AR-15 (Assault Rabbit) Russian BunnyBot (@evil_bun_bun) August 16, 2021
Mathias Dopfner, CEO of German Axel Springer, flies Israeli flag for a week after antisemitic attacks. Leftwing employees: “Triggered!” Dopfner: “Then quit.” Bonus: He might buy Politico. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
Kennedy bashes Cuomo (not the one he was married to):
Instapundit: “Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you….This sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule.”
“Honolulu Immediately Folds in Face of Gun-Rights Lawsuit…Federal District Judge J. Michael Seabright, a Bush appointee, ruled the state’s requirement that pistol purchasers present their guns to police for inspection and its 10-day expiration for purchase permits were unconstitutional.”
APD says that officers responded to a urgent check welfare call on March 7 just after 8 p.m. at the First Choice Emergency Room Center on E. Riverside Drive. The caller had reported to 911 that someone had brought an unresponsive child to the ER and that they were getting mixed information as to why the child was unresponsive. CPR was in progress.
ATCEMS then transported the child, identified as six-year-old Stavian Driver, to the emergency room at Dell Children’s Medical Center. Stavian succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead just before 9 p.m.
APD says that over the next several days, homicide detectives interviewed Stavian’s mother, 27-year-old Staleigh Coleman and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Blake Jones, who were both at their home on Cromwell Circle when the incident occurred. A search warrant was also executed at the home.
Pictured are the mugshots of Staleigh B. Coleman (left) and Blake Howard Jones (right). (Austin Police Department)
Due to serious inconsistencies as to how Stavian received scalding burns over 40% of his upper body, arrest warrants were issued for both Coleman and Jones for injury to a child by omission, says APD. Their bonds were set at $100,000 dollars.
Coleman and Jones were arrested on March 10 and were transported and booked into the Travis County Jail. APD says both are currently out of jail on bond.
“Ted Cruz saved America at 3:30 AM on Wednesday morning.” By objecting to passage of the $3.5 trillion Democratic Party wish list budget.
“Madison Ave is 39% empty; Manhattan landlords, can you lower the prices now?” Also this: “$1,000 a square foot is not sustainable!” And more on the problems engendered by mortgage-backed securities.
***If*** this is true— that the Taliban has been quietly buying off Afghan officials & military members to prep its sweep across the country — then U.S. intel either knew & wildly incompetently miscalculated what it meant for reality on the ground, or it didn’t know & is useless. https://t.co/9vx5lmvLUZ
I believe Biden's perceivable weakness and the administrations inability to handle any one of our ongoing crises has given the Taliban the morale boost for the incursion
I don't believe this would happen to this degree under Trump due to his ill temper and aggressive nature https://t.co/SBMQkRoLZT
He’s right that we couldn’t stay in Afghanistan forever, but that’s not the point. The vast majority of us agree with that. It’s the recklessness, the total lack of strategy, the apparent indifference toward Americans & allies left there.
The current debacle unfolding in Afghanistan is a bipartisan disaster at least two decades in the making made much worse by the feckless incompetence of the Biden Administration.
The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan. Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. In April and May 2001 Human Rights Watch sources reported that as many as thirty trucks a day were crossing the Pakistan border; sources inside Afghanistan reported that some of these convoys were carrying artillery shells, tank rounds, and rocket-propelled grenades. Such deliveries are in direct violation of U.N. sanctions. Pakistani landmines have been found in Afghanistan; they include both antipersonnel and antivehicle mines. Pakistan’s army and intelligence services, principally the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), contribute to making the Taliban a highly effective military force. While these Pakistani agencies do not direct the policies of the IEA, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers help plan and execute major military operations. In addition, private-sector actors in Pakistan provide financial assistance to the Taliban.
As if Osama Bin Laden being caught in Abbottabad and in regular contact with the ISI and Pakistani military officials just weren’t enough of a hint. In addition to jihadist sympathies by the Muslim government, Pakistans deep state regards Afghanistan as “strategic depth” against India. But for 20 years Washington has looked the other way while Pakistan continued that support and killed our troops because we let them obtain nuclear weapons (another spectacular failure from our craptacular CIA), and confronting them would be “inconvenient.”
The United States could have declared victory and gone home after routing the Taliban in 2001, or after the first Presidential election in 2004, or the first parliamentary election in 2005. But our political elites deluded themselves into thinking that “nation building” could be accomplished in the land known as “The Grave of Empires,” that we could succeed where The British Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union all failed. Thus a great deal of lives and treasure were lost propping up various weak leaders to govern a nation that’s historically ungovernable.
This was a bipartisan disaster, and another black eye for national security agencies that made mistake after mistake in the region, from backing jihadist idiots like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over Ahmad Shah Massoud, to missing Pakistan’s nuclear program, to being unable to figure out how Pakistan is backing the Taliban despite over 20 years of evidence. One has to wonder if it’s mere incompetence, or if the ISI has one or more moles in the CIA. (It also wouldn’t surprise me if China has been financially backing the Taliban as well.),
Like Vietnam, training native armies to fight for themselves (“Vietnamization”) has been a tremendous failure, and like Vietnam, the best and the brightest among our chattering elites fought the war in a way to make us stay in and lose. The result has been the headlong rout of the Afghan national army because evidently 20 years of time, blood and money isn’t enough to mold non-Jihadist Afghans into an effective fighting force.
Yet all that said, the Biden Administration has made things immeasurably worse.
Instead of a quiet orderly withdrawal behind the scenes, Biden precipitously announced a September 11 withdrawal, presumably as an giant “Fuck You” to everyone with an American flag on their pickup truck.
Never forget: the disastrously rushed and catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal is happening because Joe Biden personally thought it would be a cool symbolic gesture and political coup to pull out on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. An artificial deadline he set for glib PR purposes. pic.twitter.com/nHkrPd8yBl
— Jeff B. tried to do his best, but he could not (@EsotericCD) August 15, 2021
Now the ostensible Afghan army is melting before the Taliban advance and leaving possibly billions of dollars of modern U.S. military equipment behind. And just as in Vietnam, we’ve had to rush to evacuate the U.S. embassy, burn secret documents and leave American allies to the tender mercies of our enemies. It’s almost as though ex-Obama Administration official wanted to see American prestige abjectly humiliated on the world stage as punishment for Americans who dared vote against them.
The fact that we’ve achieved something like successful nation building in Iraq is a topic for another time. But in Iraq and Syria, President Trump announced we were going to be withdrawing U.S. troops, and then proceeded to bomb the snot out of Jihadist enemies and whacked Qassem Suleimani. And whoever was in charge of turning the Kurds into an effective fighting forces succeeded where those training the Afghans abjectly failed.
If there’s any grim consolation in all this is the fact that the Taliban will likely have little better success in ruling Afghanistan’s various tribal factions than America has had. Funding functioning guerrilla armies is relatively easy, but turning Afghanistan into a functional country is probably impossible, and now the Taliban and their masters in Pakistani are stuck with that tar-baby.
