Rep. Waltz: Biden Is Selling a ‘Fiction’ About US Ability to Confront Terrorism in Afghanistan
(CNSNews.com) – President Biden is selling the nation a “fiction” by claiming the U.S. military can respond effectively to terror threats emerging in Afghanistan as it does elsewhere, when it has no bases or reliable allies in the region, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) charged on Wednesday.
Questioning U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie during a House Armed Services Committee hearing that also featured Defense Secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Waltz contrasted the situations in and around Iraq and Afghanistan.
Waltz, a former U.S. Army Green Beret, recalled that after al-Qaeda in Iraq morphed into ISIS, U.S. forces had to go back into Iraq three years after withdrawing, to “clean up that mess.”
When they did so, they relied on numerous military bases in the region, ocean access allowing for the use of naval assets, and effective allies on the ground.
“We had bases in the Gulf, we had bases in Kuwait, we had bases in Turkey, in Jordan, of course in Israel, allied bases in Cyprus,” he said, illustrating his point with the use of a large regional map. “We had allies on the ground in the Kurds.”
That mission was successful, but had still been costly.
“We didn’t let ISIS take over the government in Baghdad and the army and all of the functions of the state,” Waltz said. “We had all of these assets to work with, to go clean up that mess – and how many soldiers and lives did we lose from cleaning up that mistaken withdrawal, Mr. Chairman?”
(The mission to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria that began in the summer of 2014 has accounted for 108 U.S. deaths, 20 of them in combat, according to the Pentagon. A total of 269 U.S. personnel have been wounded in action.)
“But let’s transition over here to Afghanistan,” Waltz continued. “What do we see?”
McKenzie, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, confirmed in response to his questions that the U.S. has no base in Afghanistan, or in any country neighboring Afghanistan.
Asked whether the U.S. has, in the Afghanistan theater, “any local allies approaching the capability of the Kurds,” McKenzie replied, “We do not. There may be options, but we do not.”
(Waltz pointed out that anti-Taliban opposition forces had lost control of their Panjshir valley stronghold, and he said they were “being slaughtered as we speak with our weapons, with our damn equipment” now in the hands of the Taliban.)
“When, and if, you have to present options [on Afghanistan] to the president, how many soldiers are we going to lose because we have no allies on the ground, we have no bases in the region?” he asked.
‘Livid’
On the issue of “over-the-horizon” counterterror capabilities, Waltz said any drone flying from a U.S. base in the Gulf would have to fly around Iran, before turning north and crossing southern Pakistan before reaching Afghan airspace – using “70 to 80 percent of their fuel before they even get anywhere near a target.”
Measured from the U.S. airbase in Qatar, a drone taking that route would have to fly more than 1,000 miles before crossing Afghanistan’s southern border.
Citing last month’s drone strike in Kabul that unintentionally killed civilians, not terrorists, Waltz said multiple sources of intelligence were evidently needed for such operations.
“I know that drone operator would have appreciated somebody on the ground saying ‘No, that’s a civilian. Don’t pull that trigger.’”
“So I appreciate your candor in saying how difficult this is going to be,” he told McKenzie.
“But the president of the United States is selling this country a fiction that we can do over here [in Afghanistan], with nothing, what we’re doing over here [in and around Iraq] with neighboring base access, with allies on the ground, and with ocean access.”
“That is a fiction that I think you all need to own, and we need to be honest with the American people,” Waltz said. “I am just livid at the fact of the future Americans that are going to have to go back to clean up this mess.”
As he concluded his questioning, Waltz asked McKenzie if the U.S. has any evidence or intelligence confirming the presence of Pakistan troops assisting the Taliban offensive.
“I would prefer to answer that in a closed session,” he replied.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Waltz said.
“We’re not going to put words in the mouths of our witnesses,” committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Waltz. “You can’t take it as a yes if it was not in fact a yes.”
In justifying his decision to pull all troops out of Afghanistan, Biden has spoken a number of times about terrorism having “metastasized” well beyond that country, saying threats from Syria, the Arabian Peninsula or Somalia were more significant than those from Afghanistan.
“As I’ve said 100 times: Terrorism has metastasized around the world,” he said during a August 26 press briefing, following the Kabul terrorist attack. “We have greater threats coming out of other countries a heck of a lot closer to the United States.”
“We don’t have military encampments there; we don’t keep people there. We have over-the-horizon capability to keep them from going after us.”
The Saladin Paradigm: Finding the ‘Good’ in Islamic Terrorists
A “moderate” Muslim cleric and counter-terrorism advisor to the U.K. government was recently caught on film referring to Israel as a “terrorist state” and praising “martyrs”—jihadist code for suicide bombers.
During his speech, Imam Irfan Chishti told the crowd that “if they wanted to become ‘mujahideen,’ holy warriors, then they should emulate the Muslim general Saladin, who expelled the Crusaders from Palestine in 1187.” He then lamented, “Where is the modern-day Saladin?”
The choice of Saladin is interesting in that he is in many ways emblematic of Palestinian terrorism: widely seen, especially in the West, as a freedom fighter and liberator, the sultan was in fact a terrorist of the ISIS variety.
Consider some brief facts about this historical figure that is otherwise extolled both in the Muslim and Western worlds. According to his biographer, Baha’ al-Din, Saladin loved hearing Koran recitals, prayed punctually, and “hated philosophers, heretics, and materialists and all opponents of the sharia” (a fitting description of all those Western apologists who currently praise him).
After defeating the crusaders at the battle of Hattin in 1187, rather than ransoming or enslaving them, as was common then, Saladin had the warrior-monks of the military orders of the Temple and Hospital butchered before him in a scene that has long informed ISIS’s propagandistic execution videos.* He then had the True Cross, Christendom’s most precious relic, seized and paraded upside down in dirt and dung to Muslim jeers and spits.
Naturally, Saladin’s Western apologists couldn't care less about these incidents; after all, the crusaders “had it coming to them.” Besides, all wars—including Saladin’s war of “liberation”—get messy.
What, then, does one make of the fact that he severely persecuted Egypt’s indigenous Christians, the Copts—including by crucifying or hanging many thousands of them and routinely breaking the crosses off and tarring their churches—even though the Copts, who refer to Saladin as “the Oppressor of the Cross Worshippers,” had nothing to do with the Franks or the crusades? (See A Sword Over the Nile, pp. 127, 131, 141, and 142.)
In fact, Saladin had a virulent hatred for Christianity—the sort expressed by ISIS and their ilk—above and beyond his conflict with the crusaders. Saladin’s retirement wish, moreover, was, according to his Muslim biographer, to invade and wage jihad on Christian Europe, “until there shall not remain on the face of this earth one unbeliever in Allah, or I will die in the attempt.”
None of this has stopped Western historians from holding Saladin as a model of virtue—one that the West can learn from. Thus, according to an esteemed American historian, Dana Carleton Munro,
When we contrast with this [the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099] the conduct of Saladin when he captured Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, we have a striking illustration of the difference between the two civilizations and realize what the Christians might learn from contact with the Saracens [Muslims] in the Holy Land.
Note the present tense: “might learn.” Saladin—a hero for ISIS and militant terrorists the world over—is to be held up in the West as an example from whom today’s “intolerant” Christians need to learn.
In reality, the aftermath of the Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 looks, again, like something straight out of ISIS’s playbook. Although he allowed many Christians to be ransomed, Saladin also ordered some fifteen thousand Christians sold into slavery. “Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, bringing a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentation,” wrote Muhammad al-Isfahani, one of Saladin’s confidants who was present at Jerusalem’s capitulation, before he launched into a sadomasochistic tirade extolling the sexual debasement of European women at the hands of Muslim men:
How many well-guarded women were profaned, … and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty … and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered … and happy ones made to weep! How many [Muslim] noblemen took them as concubines, how many ardent men blazed for one of them, and celibates were satisfied by them, and thirsty men sated by them, and turbulent men able to give vent to their passion.
Such, then, is the true Saladin of history. As seen, however, none of these ISIS-like aspects interest those many Western historians devoted to whitewashing premodern Islam; instead, they focus on and highlight the one aspect of his career that can be made to appear positive—that he “liberated” Jerusalem from the crusader “occupiers,” that he was a Muslim defender against Christian offenders.
Interestingly, this exact pattern is duplicated by those many Western commentators devoted to whitewashing modern Islam. Thus, even though Islamic terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah share in ISIS’s worldview, their Western apologists focus on and highlight the one aspect of their actions that can be made to appear positive—that they are fighting a war of “liberation” against the “Zionist occupiers,” that they are Muslim defenders against Jewish offenders.
At any rate, from here one can understand why all Imam Irfan Chishti had to do was “apologize” to be reinstated to his high paying job as a “counter terrorist” expert in the UK: “Some of my words reflect a clear error of judgment, in the heat of the moment,” he said, “and do not reflect my sentiments or the sentiments of the audience. I now appreciate that my ill-chosen words will have caused offence and hurt to the Jewish community and I tender my most profound apologies.”
Of course, of all his “ill-chosen words,” surely those concerning Saladin are not among those he would take back; for few in the West know who the true Saladin was or what the “Saladin paradigm” is: the Western penchant to find, extrapolate, and obsess over one noble aspect of Muslims who otherwise were Islamic terrorists—a paradigm alive and well today.
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After boasting “I shall purify the land of these two impure races [Templars and Hospitallers],” Saladin “ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison,” writes eyewitness Baha’ al-Din: “With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his scimitar and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the infidels showed black despair, the troops were drawn up in their ranks, the amirs stood in double file. There were some who slashed and cut cleanly, and were thanked for it.” After saying that some of these would-be executioners did not have the stomach to continue in the ritual slaughter, Baha’ al-Din focused on one who “killed unbelief to give life to Islam”: “I saw there the man who laughed scornfully and slaughtered, who spoke and acted; how many promises he fulfilled, how much praise he won, the eternal rewards he secured with the blood he shed, the pious works added to his account with a neck severed by him” (Gabrieli, 138-139).
Raymond Ibrahim, author most recently of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center; a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum; and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
Image: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek - Austrian National Library, via Picryl / Public Domain Mark 1.0
Afghan Refugees in US Indicted on Assault Charges
Afghan refugees indicted for child molestation, spousal abuse
Chuck Ross • September 23, 2021 4:30 pmTwo Afghan refugees have been indicted on assault charges stemming from incidents at a military base in Wisconsin that houses thousands of recently evacuated Afghan nationals.
A federal grand jury indicted Bahrullah Noori, 20, on charges that he tried to molest two underage boys. The grand jury issued a separate indictment against Mohammad Haroom Imaad, 32, on charges that he strangled and suffocated his wife. Noori and Imaad were among 12,500 refugees airlifted from Afghanistan to Fort McCoy during the U.S. military withdrawal last month.
The cases are likely to stoke concerns about the government's vetting process for the 100,000 refugees brought to the United States during the airlift. Gov. Tony Evers (D., Wis.) accused conservatives last month of engaging in "dog whistle crap" for questioning the screening process. Republicans have cast doubt on the Biden administration's ability to screen for suspected terrorists and other criminals. Speaking at an event at Fort McCoy on Aug. 31, Evers said that Republicans were "vastly uninformed" about the screening process.
Days earlier, Evers welcomed the refugees to Wisconsin, saying that "a lot of families, a lot of women, a lot of kids" were being housed at Fort McCoy. "They were vetted when they were in Europe. They were vetted when they were in the U.S. So I feel very confident what's happening is the right thing," Evers said.
According to an FBI affidavit, Noori was caught molesting a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy in a bathroom at Fort McCoy. A witness caught Noori trying to have sex with the 14-year-old and later trying to kiss the younger boy.
The boys told investigators that Noori fondled them repeatedly and pressured them to have sex, according to the affidavit.
Imaad was arrested days after his wife said he beat and choked her during an incident on Sept. 7. The woman said that Imaad had abused their children, and that he had raped her and threatened to kill her while they were at Fort McCoy. She said that Imaad told her that 9 Afghan women had been killed at Fort McCoy and that she would be the 10th. She also said that Imaad threatened to send her back to Afghanistan, where she would fall into the hands of the Taliban.
It is unclear what qualified Noori and Imaad for refugee status. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for details on their qualification as refugees. Evers's office also did not respond to a request for comment about the cases.
Noori and Imaad appeared in federal court on Sept. 16 and are being held at the Dane County Jail, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
Noori faces a minimum of 30 years in prison if convicted. Imaad faces up to 10 years in prison.
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