Afghanistan Comes to America
What Biden's Benghazi means for us at home.
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Conventional wisdom—correct this time—asserts that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes the world a more dangerous place. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic triumphalists everywhere are emboldened. Fuses burning over Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine and other hot spots grow shorter.
Less recognized is how our self-inflicted Afghanistan catastrophe may create or increase threats at home. Consider four, three military, one political:
*Suppose you are a general or admiral in the U.S. armed forces. You’ve just been required by your constitutionally superior civilian leaders to head the biggest American military debacle since the fall of South Vietnam. You’ve rescued more than 120,000 but abandoned somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 more Afghan partners and their family members.
You know that as U.S. ground forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese army fought on, with massive U.S. air support defeating the North’s 1972 Easter invasion. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress cut off funds, fuel, ammunition and air support. You also recall the United States, during the Carter administration, restrained the Iranian military to ease out the Shah. That helped ease in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
And now, Kabul. If you’re still in uniform the next time civilians not just override your best advice, as is their constitutional prerogative, but do so in capricious arrogance, then attempt to deflect blame onto you, how likely will you be to snap to and salute? When President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Jr. for insubordination over the latter’s conduct of the Korean War, MacArthur choose theatrically to “just fade away.” In a more ambiguous situation, fraught with national danger, will you?
*Suppose you’re not a flag officer but rather a colonel, lieutenant colonel or major. Imagine you implemented the orders to abandon Bagram air base at night and without notice to our Afghan allies, as well as to cut off air support for Kabul’s forces and even halt maintenance contracts for its planes and helicopters.
Further, assume you know about private efforts, like the Commercial Task Force of veterans, ex-diplomats and others that rescued a reported 5,000 or more Afghans from Taliban control. Private Americans, on short notice and from scratch, began doing what civilian leaders—with personnel, months of time and billions of dollars to prepare—proved either unserious or incompetent about doing.
How much will recent events cause you to reinterpret your oath to defend America and the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic because now you see domestic threats in high places?
*Finally, on the military side, suppose you are a member of the U.S. all-volunteer armed forces at any level, from private up. You served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq, perhaps on multiple tours. You supported those in combat, or experienced it yourself, saw buddies wounded—sometimes grievously—or killed, leaving families bereft at home.
From experience you know that—despite the size of the armed forces budget—the military is stretched thin. It’s unable to fight and win the two potential, simultaneous medium-sized or larger conflicts planners worried about not long ago.
In the next crisis, and there will be one, will you obey what sound like suicidal orders to charge or to cut-and-run? Will “thank you for your service” in a humiliating effort offset contempt for national leadership?
*Politically, President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan mismanagement might have opened the door to former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The reactionary left base of the Democratic Party, cosmetically labeled “progressive,” applauds Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s fantastical budget concoctions; approves the unprecedented influx of illegal migrants along the southern U.S. border; and can’t be bothered by the anti-American (and, not coincidentally, antisemitic) incitement of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Squad-mates Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayana Pressley, et. al. This brightened Republican prospects for the 2022 congressional elections.
But the shame of Afghanistan is a double-edged political sword for Trump and pro-Trump Republicans. Although the previous administration’s accomplishments included historically low unemployment, “Operation Warp-Speed” development of anti-Covid-19 vaccines and the remarkable “Abraham accords” Arab-Israeli peace agreements, it began the ill-considered withdrawal negotiations with the Taliban.
Trump now indicts Biden for botching what he started. But talking with the Taliban over the heads of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and continuing to do so though the jihadis kept up terror attacks on Afghan civilians might tarnish Trump—and potential GOP presidential candidates like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—as well as Biden.
Weakened American deterrence and further corroded U.S politics mean a more fragile world indeed.
Eric Rozenman is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and author of the forthcoming book From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling.
On 9/11, Vote No Confidence in Joe Biden
On Thursday, August 26, Joe Biden made a contribution to the terror war… against us. On that infamous day, a suicide bomber attacked the Kabul airport, killing 13 U.S. soldiers and at least 170 Afghanis. How many of the dead Afghanis were American citizens is unreported. The deaths didn’t have to happen. Joe Biden made them happen.
Subsequent to the terror attack, in a televised address, Biden brazenly declared what an “extraordinary success” his cut-and-run was from Afghanistan. Only in the morally upside-down world of progressives and jaded D.C. players can ignominy, disaster, and deaths of innocents be the stuff of a victory lap.
The Kabul airport was where our blundering, daft president chose as America’s final retreat and exit point from a 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. To call Biden’s Afghanistan endgame a total failure, strategically and tactically, is understatement.
Reports are that Biden insisted on a hasty exit from Afghanistan prior to 9/11. Biden, always the popinjay -- the chronic hack politician hunting headlines -- lusted to crow about an end to America’s “endless war” on 9/11.
Other reports claim that Biden was warned by U.S. intelligence services and the military about the calamity that would ensue if he bolted for the doors. That advice -- if advice was actually dispensed and not just spun post-debacle to cover rear-ends -- went unheeded by the president and his principal White House handlers, D.C. fixer Ron Klain and Obama lackey Susan Rice.
Biden’s milquetoast secretary of state Anthony Blinken, woke secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, and sycophantic Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley -- along with other acquiescent top brass -- fell in line publicly with their commander-in-chief.
We suppose that these men raised private objections against such foolish executive decision-making. Or maybe they were all-in. Maybe they’re just waiting for the right moment to cover their tails.
Honorable men -- leading the departments of state and defense, intelligence services, and every branch of the military -- knowing that an Afghanistan disaster was in the offing… knowing how harmful Biden’s Big Afghanistan Bust would be to U.S. national security, would have resigned their positions in protest. Harm, it was, beyond inevitable new terrorist threats to the homeland. Threats will surely arise in the months and years ahead from emboldened enemies, namely Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Iran’s mullahs, and Kim Jong-un.
Instead, post-disaster, from the most conspicuous players in Biden world -- Blinken, Austin, Milley, and Klain -- we’ve heard nothing but shameless spin. As of August 26 -- the most recent deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. soldiers, Afghani allies and innocents, and likely U.S. citizens -- America has been rendered far less safe. Mark that date. Then, Biden’s surrender and pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan crossed a red line. There’s no turning back.
As a result of the president’s unforced surrender, the 2020s promise to be fraught with growing menaces to our country, here and abroad. And have we mentioned Biden’s dissolving the U.S.-Mexican border as a compounding threat to Americans’ safety?
From the Washington Times, August 19:
In March, Axios reported that the Customs and Border Protection agency told members of Congress that since the start of the fiscal year on October 1, 2020, four individuals apprehended at the southern border matched names on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database. Three were from Yemen and one was from Serbia.
Two million illegals are expected to cross the nation’s southern border this year. That’s roughly equivalent to metro Milwaukee’s population. The probabilities that terrorists are among the itinerants: high.
Today, two great oceans are insufficient to safeguard the homeland. The Wuhan virus -- a glimpse of the evolving biowar threat -- makes it so, as do hybrid and cyber warfare. Advances in technology, applied to weaponry, equipment, transportation, and communications, make it so. Biden’s nonexistent southern border makes it so.
In modern times, our best defense has always been the might of our military, maintaining steadfast commitment to allies, keeping our pledges, and our willingness to deal swift, punishing blows to enemies. Biden’s drone strike on the purported planner of the attack on the U.S. Marines killed innocent Afghanis. If the target was killed, he remains unnamed; there’s only the Pentagon’s say-so. But mission accomplished. Narrative trumps facts. Biden demonstrated resolve. Don’t dare gainsay the narrative.
Concede this accomplishment to the president: America’s word and will are now rightly suspect around the globe.
Biden has brought into question American resolve with allies and enemies alike. The Taliban is no match for U.S. military prowess, yet Biden ceded Kabul to them. He inexplicably abandoned Bagram Airfield to them. He left a bonanza of weaponry, military equipment, and supplies to the Taliban -- estimated at a staggering $28 billion. He granted Pashtun tribesmen the right to set terms, letting them establish perimeters and checkpoints around the Kabul airport, controlling ingress and egress. A drop-dead August 31 withdrawal deadline stranded a still unknown number of U.S. citizens.
Intrinsic to the American code of honor -- to the decency and loyalty we pledge as Americans to Americans -- we don’t abandon our fellows to dreadful fates at the hands of enemies. U.S. soldiers don’t leave comrades behind. Biden has cut loose U.S. citizens in Afghanistan. May God help them. More than an unconscionable act, Biden has committed an act of betrayal.
For recklessness in duty, for misfeasance -- for pure dishonor -- Biden should be forced to resign. He won’t be. Democrats prioritize politics ahead of country. They control Congress. Biden, for the time being, is still useful to them.
Nonetheless, our voices need to be heard this 9/11. Our fellow citizens -- among them valiant first responders -- who were killed that fateful day in New York City, at the Pentagon, and at Shanksville didn’t die in vain. Our fighting men and women who were wounded or sacrificed their lives combatting our terrorist enemies did so to make us safer. They, too, didn’t sacrifice in vain.
On 9/11, call your U.S. representatives and senators and make your voice heard. Tell them that Joe Biden’s failures, in Afghanistan and on the southern border, have made America vulnerable to future attacks that could be as horrific or worse than the nation experienced on 9/11. Ask them if they’ll go on record publicly calling for Biden’s resignation, and if not, why not? Tell them that you’ll make friends and neighbors aware of where they stand on this critical matter. If you’re on social media, inform them that you’ll post their responses. Tell them that you’ll defend our nation with your voice and vote.
Tell them that with the midterm elections coming next year, you’ll remember if they stood for or against keeping in office the president who’s done so much in so short a time to greatly compromise our national security, putting all Americans at far greater risk in the years ahead.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith and occasionally on Parler, again @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover.
Biden’s own staff can’t stand to watch his press conferences
Since before he entered the Oval Office, those who dislike Joe Biden’s policies or worry about America having at his helm a man with declining mental abilities, have found his moments at the mic noteworthy, and not in a good way. Whether he’s making up words, whispering into the microphone, insulting people, imagining facts, or making obvious policy misstatements that the White House then needs to walk back, people alternately cringe, laugh, or point to Democrats and say, “You did this horrible thing to America.”
It turns out, though, that the anti-Bidenistas in America are not the only ones who dread seeing Biden in front of a live mic. His own staff can’t handle watching him off-leash either:
When Biden gives public remarks, some White House staffers will either mute him or turn off his remarks, according to White House officials.
It’s not that they’re indifferent to what their boss has to say. Indeed, their livelihoods are directly invested in it. Rather, they’re filled with anxiety that he’s going to take questions from the press and veer off the West Wing’s carefully orchestrated messaging.
“I know people who habitually don’t watch it live for that reason,” said one current official.
Biden’s advisers have urged him to answer fewer of the questions being shouted at him by reporters covering his events. While the president sometimes obliges and quickly leaves the podium after remarks, he has a tendency to buck those staffers trying to rein him in. “I’m not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead,” he said after addressing FEMA the other week.
Well, now you know: When Biden is referring to the mysterious “they” who don’t want him to take questions, he’s talking about his “advisers.” In other words, we still don’t know who is dictating his policies but it appears that everyone in Biden’s orbit is begging him to keep his mouth shut and be the good little puppet they need.
The same article from Politico has a “cute” little anecdote about Biden joking about his own gaffe-prone statements, including the fact that Biden has hinted “that his loquaciousness earns him credit from voters who appreciate his authenticity.”
That’s wishful thinking at this point. Those who oppose Biden have long known that his authenticity is limited to bad judgment, stupidity, and corruption. As for his supporters, his charm is dimming:
[L]ately, his verbal miscues have been causing headaches for him and his team. Biden has delivered several self-inflicted wounds during freewheeling Q&A sessions that required immediate clean-up. On Afghanistan, he told reporters that a Taliban takeover of the country was “highly unlikely,” said Al Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan when it wasn’t, and declared that he’d seen “no question of our credibility” from allies when there had been a lot.
Biden has even flubbed scripted remarks, such as when he said the administration had evacuated 90 percent of Americans from Afghanistan when he was supposed to say 98 percent.
In sum, Biden is a loose cannon who is all mouth and no brain—and his staff knows and fears it. The only one who doesn’t have the good sense to know this, of course, is Biden himself:
To this day, Biden seems almost delighted by the prospect of tussling with the reporters that often gather in front of him, such as when he challenged Fox News’ PETER DOOCY to contemplate alternative drawdown scenarios for Afghanistan.
Reading that you, know that Biden’s like the drunk who gets in the ring, hurling imprecations at a genuine boxer and swinging wildly, only to knock himself out.
Image: Joe Biden’s empty eyes. YouTube screen grab.
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