BIDEN AND THE TALIBIN

 

Biden Builds the Taliban Back Better: Weapons, Military Equipment Fuel Resurgent Islamists

ZAKERIA HASHIMI/AFP via Getty Images

KRISTINA WONG

7 Sep 20210

7:07

President Joe Biden has dubbed his presidential agenda “Build Back Better,” but instead of rebuilding America, he has so far only succeeded in building back the Taliban better with billions of dollars in American weaponry.

The billions of dollars in American taxpayer-funded military equipment are now in the hands of the Taliban, to use against Afghans who until last month were partnered with the U.S. government.

The Taliban is also using that equipment to quell the last bit of anti-Taliban resistance in the country.

And the equipment is somehow also falling into the hands of Iran, America’s top adversary in the region. An Iranian Telegram channel recently released images of U.S. military vehicles in Iran, according to the BBC.

According to the British-based Times, the vehicles included American tanks, Humvees and “MRAPs,” or Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected light armored vehicles that are resistant to roadside bombs.

The U.S. has spent nearly $84 billion dollars on training, equipping, and otherwise building the Afghan security forces between 2002 and 2018, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published on January 27, 2021.

That figure tracks closely with figures published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on July 30, 2021, which said cumulative appropriations for the Afghan Security Forces Fund stood at nearly $82.90 billion, with more than $76.19 billion having been obligated and more than $75.20 billion disbursed.

The U.S. also turned over at least 10 military facilities worth billions of dollars to the previous Afghan government, which are also now in the hands of the Taliban. Bagram Airfield, which was turned over to the now-defunct Afghan Ministry of Defense on July 1, 2021, was valued at $565,840,912, according to SIGAR.

A recent Sunday Times article graphic showed how much U.S. military equipment had been supplied to Afghan security forces, citing the GAO.

Oryx, a military equipment blog, has tried to do an accounting of all the U.S. military equipment that is known to have been captured by the Taliban.

According to Oryx, the Taliban have captured at least 12 tanks; 51 armored fighting vehicles; 61 artillery and mortars; eight anti-aircraft guns; and 1,980 military trucks, vehicles, and Jeeps.

Also according to Oryx, the Taliban have also captured at least a dozen American-supplied fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft — including a A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft; a Cessna 208; UH-60A Blackhawk transport helicopters; MD-530F attack helicopters; and Boeing Insitu ScanEagle drones. They have also captured Russian-made Mi-17 transport and Mi-35 attack helicopters.

This list does not even include small arms, including M4 and M16 rifles, M24 sniper rifles, and M2 .50 caliber machine guns, nor does it include ammunition, communications equipment, night-vision goggles, or biometric devices used to identify Afghans who assisted Americans.

And the blog’s authors say their counts of equipment are based on photographic evidence only and not all Taliban members have high-end cell phones.

The White House has been vague about how much U.S. military equipment may have fallen into Taliban hands. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said at a White House briefing on August 17:

We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone. But certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and, obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki became defensive when asked about leaving the Taliban with military equipment at a briefing on August 30. “Certainly our objective was not to leave them with any equipment but that is not always an option when you are looking to retrograde and move out of a war zone,” she said.

However, Democrats have resisted Republican efforts to find out how much equipment was left for the Taliban.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) proposed an amendment during a September 1 House Oversight Committee business meeting that would ask the Pentagon inspector general to figure out what and how much military equipment has been seized by the Taliban.

“The Taliban is now armed with significant resources, equipment, arms, artillery, helicopters, drones, weapons, ammunitions from the United States. You name it, they have it. We even gave the Taliban an air force in recent weeks,” she said, adding that reports of Iran buying equipment from the Taliban is “enormously problematic” and “does impact our national security.”

Retired Lt. Col. Oliver North said in a recent interview on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily that the Taliban, Islamic State-Khorasan, and the Haqqani Network, would collectively become the “best armed criminal enterprise in the history of mankind” due to the haul left behind by the U.S.

He also predicted some of it will be sold to China and Russia and be reverse-engineered and used against the United States in other campaigns.

“What’s happening to a lot of it is that they’re being dragged across the border in Conex boxes and on trucks [to Pakistan],” he said.

“They’re going to be heading to the port where they will be loaded aboard a ship and taken to communist China for exploitation. That’s what’s happening to anywhere between five and ten of every piece of equipment. The Taliban, by the way, are getting rich on this. They’re selling them,” he said.

Even now, the equipment is being used to snuff out the anti-Taliban resistance in the Panjshir Valley — which had not even been overcome during the Russian occupation.

Times reporter Anthony Loyd reported that the Taliban — apart from using rifles, Humvees, and machine guns — are also using American handcuffs against resistance fighters. He wrote, after observing one prisoner:

I noticed too that his hands were secured behind his back with American handcuffs. The fact that his wrists were bonded by steel etched with the words Peerless Handcuff Company Springfield MA seemed somehow more grotesque than any other detail beneath the angry blue of the late summer sky as the last pocket of defiance to Taliban rule in Afghanistan was extinguished.

Donald Trump Jr. quipped in a tweet on Tuesday, “The only thing Joe Biden ‘Built back better’ was the Taliban.”

 

Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook. 

Complete the wall...around Biden

By Edward R. Zuckerbrod

Let's hope Joe Biden has finally gone a fib too far, taking to the airways with false indignation to harangue us for daring to question his execution of the lethally inept Afghanistan "retrograde" action he engineered along with his Team of Trivials.  Biden's purpose was to obscure the fact that he'd blithely and needlessly thrust fine, dedicated troops into a tactical straitjacket that could logically have had no other result than multiple casualties — perhaps in the process causing some heretofore tightly shut eyes to be pried open concerning the character and abilities of our overmatched chief executive.

If there is any degree of justice in the world, across this nation, many self-anointed sophisticates are staring at the yellowing diplomas hanging on their walls, contemplating how people so demonstrably smart and accomplished could have been so utterly misguided in their 2020 assessment of presidential fitness.

It's unfortunate that we don't have the voter equivalent of a remedial safe driving course.

Somehow, some way, over his many years of feeding at the public trough (and multi-national deals), Mr. Biden has succeeded in cultivating the image of an amiable, even-tempered spinner of yarns, whose repertoire of self-aggrandizing tales served — at least in his mind — as parables illustrating deeper truths.  And if, in pursuit of his overarching message, the factual bases of these stories were suspect, then what of it?  Underneath it all, Joe's a good egg, don't you know, so why don't we just let it slide?

That protective aura, of a good-natured, basically decent guy despite his obvious intellectual shortcomings and weird personal peccadilloes, made — along with COVID-19 and its concomitant voting irregularities — Biden the un-Trump and his presidency possible.  But it's also catapulted one of the biggest liars in American public life into a position he can't successfully navigate through the copious shoveling of BS.

To the vast majority of readers who frequent this site, Mr. Biden's disastrous incompetence is by no means a surprise.  Indeed, we've all pretty much known from his first day in office that one way or another, a nightmare was in the offing, and national humiliation would likely ensue.  But as in all bad dreams, warning cries were — with the suffocating pillow of Big Tech and corporate media — effectively muffled.  Usually, with little effect, our families, friends, and co-workers were issued warnings that in both temperament and judgment, Joe Biden was wholly unsuited for the presidency — and one needn't be an unabashed Trump-admirer to know it.

Well, that's all water under the bridge now.  A more relevant question is, what aspect of Biden's uniformly miserable presidential performance will produce disillusionment in sufficient measure to cause his abandonment while there's still time to spare the country the permanent harm we're barreling toward?

The pile of lies as destructive to Biden's credibility, as if it were a mound of dynamite, ever grows.  Things big and small — reflexive lying even when there is no discernible benefit and certainly no need.  Lying so transparent that it doesn't even require pointing out, and so frequent it sometimes seems he isn't even aware of it.  A man who is — as frightening as it sounds — programmed to lie, as he did time and again in his clearly rehearsed late August display of arrogance and ill temper.

The public's reaction to Biden's serial lies will be as much a test of America's moral condition as it is his.  The party he leads shares his state of decrepitude, so the obvious constitutional remedies of impeachment and removal, or the never really tried invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, are probably not presently viable.

So what is to be done?  How can we rescue the country without running roughshod over our laws, traditions, and moral constraints?

I believe that the Founders have built into our system, with its various layers of government, the flexibility to put the protective wall around Biden and Harris that they refuse to erect on our southern border.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people immediately surrounding them must be placed in a kind of governmental quarantine, causing problematic but still necessary federal gridlock for a time.  It will require many acts of principled insubordination of the type we recently saw from Marine Lt. Colonel Scheller.  Patriots of good faith across the nation must be willing to put careers, even perhaps their very freedom, at risk.  Acts of refusal must emerge from across the spectrum of government and bureaucracy; compelling the Deep State to recognize that alas, Donald Trump was not quite the worst thing that could have befallen us.

The release of the transcript of the egregious Biden/Ghani phone call may have been the first step in this crucial epiphany.

There are enough remaining centers of competence and authority in our state and local governments and federal agencies to provide for the nation's minimal needs during this "time out" on presidential authority until the political landscape is such that constitutional removal or subsequent rejection by the electorate is possible.

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans must declare that the Afghan debacle has put the country in deep, imminent peril, and until such time as the president agrees to finally secure our borders, no cooperation — on infrastructure or anything else — is possible.  Biden won't accept this, but most loyal Americans will see its clear wisdom.  And if Mr. McConnell makes his argument cogently, and gets the "bi-partisans" in line, he'll start the ball rolling to send Biden to his room.

Naturally, this course of action is fraught with risks.  There will be charges of sedition, even treason bandied about, and in some quarters, sporadic violence of the kind we saw in 2020 may erupt as the Democrats call their minions into the streets.  Foreign enemies may — if they don't already — see this as a propitious moment to move against our interests or allies.  Therefore, strong, responsible new military leadership must emerge to stand guard over the nation's security while we sort out the political mess we've made for ourselves.  This will not be an easy task, but is there really any alternative?

Joe Biden is not a well man, both physically and emotionally.  The genuine tragedies he's encountered in his life have not imparted upon him the quiet empathy and understanding for which many had hoped, but instead rendered him scarred, damaged, and wholly unable to adequately meet his presidential obligations.  For some reason, he's embarking us upon a national suicide mission, with the eager assistance of those both foreign and domestic who wish this country harm, even destruction.

It is up to Americans of good faith — of any political stripe — to put this self-destructive chapter to an end, while it can still be done by relatively peaceful and lawful means.  Time is quickly running out.

Caricature by Donkey Hotey, CC BY 2.0 license.