Rome burned and Nero fiddled. Kabul falls and Joe Biden is out to lunch and having big fun at Camp David watching it unfold on television screens while vacationing, and not once has he seen fit to address the American public on the most incredible and massive policy failure in U.S. history. This failure surpasses Carter’s failed attempt to rescue the Embassy hostages from the Iranian Guard in 1979 and Obama’s assertion that ISIS was “the JV League” of Islamists, bringing back shades of Benghazi and the destruction of Libya in its wake, especially in light of the known escalations and increasing power of the Taliban that preceded this lightning-quick conquest of the country’s provinces and major cities.
Imagine the shock felt by thousands of U.S. Armed Forces Veterans as they heard the breaking news that came across the airwaves around 12:26 PM on Sunday, August 15, 2021, that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan was being evacuated — as smoke rose from the burning top-secret files — and the U.S. flag had been lowered and removed, while panicked Embassy personnel were being flown to the nearby Hamid Karzai International Airport, now closed to all commercial flights, as the situation worsens by the second. Veterans who occupied most of the land now occupied by the Taliban are extremely troubled to see the country fall apart as the U.S. withdraws since it evokes complicated, mind-numbing thoughts and feelings on just what did they and so many others sacrifice so much for in this war, drawing stark comparisons between Saigon in 1975 and Kabul today.
Biden’s protestations and denials that the intelligence community and the Defense Department never briefed him on the dire consequences that would follow if he pulled out of Afghanistan too precipitously, just as Obama did in Iraq, are very similar to his 2012 denial that the Mission in Benghazi asked for more security, and the evidence revealing his lie is well documented and reported by Michael Gordon in the Wall Street Journal this Sunday morning:
“In contrast to the numerous Trump policies he reversed, he opted to carry out Mr. Trump’s deal with the Taliban instead of trying to renegotiate it. In so doing, he overruled his top military commanders:
Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Gen. Austin Scott Miller, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan; and Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Citing the risks of removing American forces to Afghan security and the U.S. Embassy, they recommend that the U.S. keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.”
President Trump wanted to remove our troops by May, much sooner than Biden, but with supposed safeguards for the Afghan people previously agreed to by the Taliban. Trump’s naivety in this regard would have fared no better since the Taliban never intended on honoring the agreement from the beginning; they used the newfound relief from the Trump agreement to strengthen their position in preparation for just this moment. Biden’s weakness and inability to alter course on this matter and break with Trump’s withdrawal plan speaks to his own hypocrisy.
Biden does make a bit of sense as he suggested that added time was just more waste of American lives and resources if the Afghan military still couldn’t or wouldn’t defend its own country after twenty years of U.S. training and being armed with the latest weapons. However, while nobody wants America to stay in Afghanistan forever, Biden’s logic ends there, since it is nothing but incompetence and sheer idiocy that would have any force announce their departure far in advance and then proceed to withdraw during the height of the enemies fighting season and at a time they have reinforced their own ranks and armaments.
Even more troubling, relief and final evacuation for U.S. Citizens is being directed along some of the most ineffective paths imaginable, as the Biden administration has thrown unnecessary obstacles and delays in the way of Americans seeking to leave the country swiftly. Incredibly, the security alert from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul directed Americans to shelter in place and register through a repatriation form if they wanted assistance to leave Afghanistan as if they don’t already know who in the hell is working there for U.S. contractors and NGOs. They also cautioned against trying to make one’s way to Hamid Karzai International Airport. And taken together, on the whole, this sounds more like a certain death sentence than any sort of rational plan that will get our people out of there, with more shades of Benghazi and what America witnessed at the Mission and the CIA Annex on September 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya.
With Biden’s people running this clusterfu*k, no one should place too much confidence in being rescued soon, and they shouldn’t just sit there waiting to be taken by the Taliban or recently freed Al Qaeda prisoners. Everybody should be heading for a known point of evacuation, no matter what, rather than waiting in a room somewhere in hopes that help arrives, and one can only imagine that those stuck in this jam are already thinking the same thing, as events on the ground continue to take a turn for the worse.
Shelter in place? That sounds exactly like “Fend for Yourself” to me. No, people with any sense will be getting the hell out of there as quick as they can, by any means they can find.
And in story after story, the Afghan people themselves are stunned by the speed at which the Taliban was able to sweep across Afghanistan taking 21 provinces and 24 capitols within a matter of days, but one young woman told Al Jazeera News this reversal occurred largely due to a lack of any resistance from the government forces. She is quoted in Economic Times echoing the sentiment of her countrymen:
“They literally sold us out. There was no government resistance. I never imagined that Kandahar would be taken so easily.”
Never a fan of staying in Afghanistan after we killed Bin Laden in 2011 on the never-ending somewhat opaque and ambiguous mission of exporting Western-style “democracy” and nation-building in traditionally Islamic nations that neither respected nor desired such from us, and short of a clearly stated mission statement or real purpose serving a truly vital U.S. interest, I had stated for many long years that we should extricate ourselves from the situation, just as quickly as possible, without abandoning the Afghans who helped us, before they had time to properly prepare for our departure. But without a mission of purpose and no recent leaders trustworthy enough and worth following to one’s death in “the service of America”, I wanted to see us leave Afghanistan, before we saw one more poor unfortunate young woman or man sent home maimed and minus one or more limbs or in a body-bag.
Most Americans have long lost the will to fight any longer in Afghanistan, after nearly twenty years of war, tens of thousands injured and maimed, and 2,312 Americans who died fighting it. They now see it as a “forever war”, and they know not what it is they do not know, about the Big Picture that the Pentagon has always seen and the long-term plan since 1973, to eventually have a forward position established in Afghanistan to somewhat leverage and constrain both China and Russia from the vantage point of their vulnerable southern border.
America lost sight of this mission and purpose and got placed behind the 8-ball by subsequent Marxist administrations, during the Obama years when the so-called “rules of engagement” were untenable and a damned deadly joke for our members of the U.S. Armed Forces, and we hurt ourselves by focusing on nation-building and winning the hearts and minds of an Islamic tribal people who were never going to love us, rather than fighting to win.
No, America shouldn’t be fighting “forever wars”, but Afghanistan would never have become one, if our country’s leaders had entered it with the same attitude that witnessed America nuke Nagasaki and Hiroshima and fire-bomb Dresden. Our soldiers could have and should have made quick work of the Taliban, even if it meant killing them down to the last man, and in turn, maybe someone would have soon had the epiphany that we had just created a breast-work barrier of sorts in the region that would keep China’s eastern border and Russia’s southern border exposed and vulnerable to any defensive measure America might need utilize in the future — something we will be soon wishing we had in light of China’s current saber-rattling against America and its continued aggression and belligerence in all parts of the world.
There has been little to zero discussion of the strategic importance of our bases in Afghanistan, although even many enlisted cadre full well get it. Russia is north — approximately four hours away by jet, China lies to the east, Pakistan to the South, and Iran to the West. Without any presence there, U.S. interests in Central Asia are strangled, and Biden’s regime will soon miss the added leverage this position provided our country with our enemies.
But this was never the stated mission, and now it is all but a moot topic and something that will be thrown in the ashcan by this feckless, dangerously incompetent regime and Joe Biden, who has yet to be right on anything that pertains to U.S. foreign policy.
And so, it is only natural that everybody is asking “What was it all for”, as we see Biden’s do-nothing, know-nothing appeasement policy and his grandstanding gesture aimed at officially being done in Afghanistan, on the anniversary of the worst attack on America in U.S. history on September 11, 2001, turning into a massive failure of epic proportions.
As reported by Kipp Jones on August 14th, Jeong Jangsoo, a retired Colonel of the South Korean Army and a Veteran of the Coalition Force in Afghanistan, who commanded 300 soldiers in 2007 in the fight against the Taliban, expressed his thoughts in telling fashion, stating:
“I felt disappointment … a sense that all had been in vain, and thought, ‘So this is how it ends, huh’”.
This is actually a worse moment than Saigon in 1975 because Saigon wasn’t harboring international terrorists who would pursue the war in the U.S. after its withdrawal. The Afghan Security Force in charge of Bagram Air Force Base, just abandoned it this morning [August 15th], and along with it, they abandoned the Pul-e-Charki prison that housed some 5,000 prisoners, including a maximum-security cell containing some of the worst Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists ever captured over the course of this war, now free to once again wreak havoc, mayhem, and murder at will.
And in the meantime, as I saw images across the media outlets revealing numerous Muslim groups celebrating this turn of events, such as the leaders of Jamiat Ulema-e Islam Nazryate distribute candy and cakes among the people in the markets of Quetta, Pakistan, as the Taliban rolled into Kabul, I wondered how many days would pass before cooperation between the Taliban, several thousand recently released Al Qaeda terrorists, and the terrorists of Pakistan’s Jaamat el-Islami and other Islamic terrorist groups results in renewed and exponentially increased terrorist attacks against the Western world and across the globe, especially here on U.S. soil and against U.S. interests abroad.
For many Americans, there was never any doubt that we must leave Afghanistan at some point, but they did want the departure to be orderly and honorable, and something far different from what we are receiving under the Biden regime and from the man, Joe Biden, who has been wrong on every major policy issue of the day over his forty some odd years in politics, from the Persian Gulf War to the surge in Iraq and on to opposing the raid that killed Bin Laden.
This morning America witnessed one military helicopter after another leaving the Embassy compound, which makes it impossible not to draw comparisons with the iconic scene of people fleeing the North Vietnamese Army from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam in 1975. Although it was only a month ago that Biden denied this sort of scenario and a Taliban takeover was possible, anyone paying attention knew he was wrong, and now we see Biden’s administration rush thousands of U.S. Marines and U.S. Soldiers to Afghanistan to try to stave off the inevitable, as translators and other Afghan allies and civilians wait for flights that may never arrive for them.
Many older Americans have never forgotten the genocides that occurred as millions of people from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were murdered by the Communists of the North Vietnam Regulars and the Vietcong, the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, as the Soviet and Chinese Communists rolled in with them in support. Approximately five million men, women, and children were murdered in a four-year period in these countries by the Communists who rose to power after America’s retreat from Southeast Asia, the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and anyone even remotely associated with these countries’ infrastructures or previous government.
Many of us also remember the Taliban’s rise to power between 1994 and 1996, when they destroyed all sculptures and art and any writings deemed “against Islam”, as they destroyed the centuries-old massive Bamiyan Buddhas in central Afghanistan and beheaded or otherwise executed infidels and non-believers, or those deemed insufficiently “Muslim”, in Kabul’s stadium, in 1996. These days will be a walk in Disneyland compared to what is coming.
The last days of Kabul are going to be every bit as ugly and chaotic as the last days of Saigon, because too many of the thousands of newly freed Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and terrorists are on the prowl, vicious as ever, and seeking revenge. And as the hour grows late for Afghanistan, all doubt has been removed that this recent Afghan fiasco is Biden’s Taliban Baby and Kabul is most definitely his administration’s fall of Saigon.
As I write this, I’m thinking of a conversation I had with a dear friend this very morning, who asked that we pray for the safety of all these fine young American men and women, as she told me her nephew had just flown a mission to Afghanistan in a USAF-KC-10 a few days ago. He was just sent back to Afghanistan, flying out with jets on Saturday morning, in what was described as a “sudden” and “immediate” event.
This is where the hearts and minds of the good and decent Americans lie today, with America’s warriors who served Her in unquestioning fashion and all too often gave their lives in the process, to ensure another attack like September 11, 2001, would never be possible again from a force similar to Al Qaeda that was given sanctuary by their Taliban allies and hosts in Afghanistan. And in praying for all our dead and their families and all the soldiers still serving in Afghanistan, we also pray for the Afghan people who opposed the monsters of their own country, those Afghans siding with America and the millions of Afghan women and men who sought a future for their families without oppression.
Image by Amber Clay from Pixabay
Content syndicated from TheBlueStateConservative.com with permission.
