Mistakes Were Made…
That Biden is Publicly Blaming Donald Trump for his Appalling Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan is the Most Conclusive Proof So Far That He is a Craven President
“Kirby said Biden was ‘proud’ of the pullout that cost 13 brave American servicemen and women their lives and left the Taliban with billions in NATO-supplied military hardware, including Black Hawk helicopters and thousands of armored vehicles. Downplaying images of Afghans clinging to military jets scrambling out of Kabul airport in the hasty withdrawal, Kirby said, “For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch.” John Ullyot, “The Disgraceful White House Defense of the Kabul Fiasco” ~ National Review
“…to willfully ignore the chaos of the Kabul evacuation is to rewrite history.” —Emma Salisbury, “If you didn’t see chaos in Kabul, where were you looking?” ~ The Atlantic
“If you’re looking for someone to blame for the chaos that ensued as American troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, the 12-page assessment released by the White House last week provides a menu of options:
The Trump administration, for mucking everything up;
Intelligence and military leaders, for completely missing the warning signs;
Congress, for too much bureaucracy;
The Afghans, for falling so quickly; and
No one, because you know what—it actually wasn’t that bad!”
— “Chaos, What Chaos?” ~ The Dispatch
“In August 2021, the Taliban freed nearly three dozen senior leaders of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and has proven unable to contain the threat posed by the Islamic State-Khorasan. That Islamic State branch is strengthening, expanding into neighboring countries, and seeks to attack the United States. The options to counter these growing threats currently available to the United States are limited at best. Not losing in Afghanistan might have been better than leaving it.” Katie Zimmerman, American Enterprise Institute Scholar, “The Cost of Ending Counterterrorism” ~ The Liberal Patriot Substack
“Sure, the Discord leak reveals significant details about the Islamic State’s growing capabilities in Afghanistan and its aspirations to launch global terror attacks. But the Biden administration’s desire to put its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in its rearview mirror is masking the greater threat posed by a Taliban-controlled state that works hand in hand with a much more deadly al Qaeda.” —Bill Roggio “Biden White House’s Deadly Afghanistan Withdrawal Symptoms Let Fresh Foes Flourish” ~ Foundation for Defense of Democracies
“The fall of Kabul in August 2021 was not President Biden’s finest hour.” — Editorial board, “Biden should share not shift blame for the Kabul debacle” ~ Washington Post
I. The Rise of the Foreign Policy of Retreat
We have come a long tragic way since noble defenders of the free world labelled Russia an “evil empire,” or that rogue states and international terrorists represented an “axis of evil.” And even since pacific visions of a “Europe whole and free,” and the prospect of a “new world order,” with America at the helm.
For the last decade we have had to endure the insufferable politics of retreat, starting with Barack Obama who crudely justified exiting Iraq for “nation building at home,” and what he described as a “pivot to Asia.” After him came Donald Trump who took this pessimism to a whole other level, pondering whether the US could leave NATO and cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsanaro, and Kim Jong Un, besides making a halfassed deal with the Taliban to offer them a whole nation state, as concessions for killing 2500 American troops.
Now we have presidential aspirants reducing the war in Ukraine—launched by a marauding, raping, torturing revanchist Russia brandishing nukes—to a “territorial dispute,” not in America’s national interest. And Joe Biden under the pretense of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” (whatever in the hell that’s supposed to mean) now claiming his withdrawal from Afghanistan was a “success,” where he chose to abandon a country we liberated, a military and a government that were our allies, men, women, and children who had become our friends like family to our armed forces—all of whom depended on us—not to mention American soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing on the way out. And to add insult to injury, we left billions of dollars of high tech equipment in the hands of religious extremists.
Victor Mancilla/ Agence France-Presse/ Getty Images
AP Photo Shekib Rahmani
II. The US Declares a War on Terror in 2001—Twenty Years of Fighting Terrorism, Later, Hands Terrorists a Free Country on the Anniversary of 9/11 as if it Were a Gift—Then Proclaims This a Success
In the week leading up to Easter weekend, the Biden administration came clean and more or less totally denied responsibility for the atrocious decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. For the last couple weeks as the Republican party opened a whole new can of worms, blaming partisanship for the Trump indictment, I guess Biden intuited that made it a good opportunity to scuttle away out from underneath the Afghanistan tragedy, and have his spokesman release a report on his behalf, laying the brunt of the blame on the last Republican administration.
Biden blames Trump for forging an agreement with the Taliban that, somehow, Biden couldn’t wiggle out of, or alter at all. Actually—though the document does not explain why— he was compelled entirely to honor what Trump set in motion, and after 20 years of fighting a war on terror, he had to realize Trump’s dream— of handing a whole nation state over to the same terrorists we spent decades fighting.
That Biden seeks to exonerate himself from his central personal role in the catastrophic failure of the pullout, is a downright unpatriotic, unpresidential, disgraceful dereliction of duty. Though he has made a lot of failures and blunders as president, this was by far his most egregious. It’s especially tragic when the public would benefit from some intellectual honesty, as Hal Brands puts it in Bloomberg,
“A humiliating withdrawal the report argues, was really a triumph of visionary statecraft. It’s an oddly defensive stance to take—not least because the administration has a decent story to tell,” — going on to note how at least the Biden administration successfully corrected for their Afghanistan blinders, in preparing Ukraine for Russia’s invasion.
That Biden would release this report while a congressional investigation looks into the withdrawal, as he looks to announcing his reelection campaign—his approval rating took such a dent since Afghanistan it never recovered—just betrays his knowledge of his own culpability, and his shame. And that is mortifying by itself. But that in attempting to overcome blame, he has sought to shift it for the sake of his political viability for 2024, is proof of an undeniable egotism about Biden, the depths of which only now I think I’m finally starting to appreciate. This Afghanistan report, where he even blames the Afghans for not fighting harder, reminds me likewise of his insistence in the beginning of his presidency, that the economy was not his fault, and that inflation was a “high class problem.”
Moreover I guess this is only to be expected, coming from someone who according to The Atlantic’s George Packer repeatedly denied that the US had any responsibility for women’s rights in Afghanistan.
“Zero. None,” Biden said on two separate occasions.
This is after he even went to Afghanistan and visited a primary school, where a little girl jumped on a desk and told him, “Don’t leave!” Not before she read books and studied to become a doctor, she pleaded.
III. Biden Consistently Bends Reality and Twists and Distorts Liberal Ideals to Serve his Narrow Political Interest
I think the way he has handled Afghanistan with this report, for his personal political interest, is quite like the way he rationalized his $500 million student loan bailout. Originally cancelling student debt he didn’t think was something he had the power to do, and he admitted as much. But then dishonoring 9/11 victims and perversely drawing an equivalence between soldiers in the war on terror and financially overburdened college students, using the 9/11 Heroes Act permitting freezing debt for servicemen—he presumes arbitrarily to pay one whiny interest group’s bills for them with the tax base. Right before the November midterms.
He claimed running for president, that to choose his leadership would unite the country. Perhaps all his “bipartisan” legislation he perpetually boasts about is a testament to that. However, regardless of how successful “unity” is on paper, it doesn’t change the reality that he is a craven, morally bankrupt president, with no principles. Even in that bipartisan legislation he has betrayed the coalitions he forged to pass it. As with the CHIPS act, he has found a way to stick in requirements for manufacturing companies that get government grants, to subsidize childcare and grant special privileges for unions—neither of which had Republicans voted for. Also scrapping Joe Manchin’s fossil fuel provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act.
When criticizing him people are prone to mocking how old and slow he is. I don’t think he’s that slow, and such criticism only obscures his villainy. I think he’s actually a supremely dishonest, deceitful, and self-serving man. He makes reckless blunders but then he recovers with alarming ability to deflect blame, evade accountability, and he’s a fiend to take credit for anything that isn’t going horribly wrong, the closest he gets to doing things right. He is much slicker and much more calculating than he appears. He’s not that dumb either, but craven. His mistakes are only so multiple as someone who considers himself above principles is liable to make. Sound familiar to someone else we know?
IV. I Don’t Care How Unpopular the War in Afghanistan Was
Since Afghanistan fell, as the Wall Street journal editorial board wrote “you can draw a straight line” from the Afghanistan withdrawal to Putin deciding to invade Ukraine—the Taliban has also made it against the law for girls to go to school, for women to work, and even to go certain places in public. The economy has crashed, because the Taliban is taxing the population too much, failing to allow enough people to work, and blocking foreign aid by not letting women work for aid groups, while the men toil in local markets. People are beginning to starve to death. According to the Journal, the World Food Program says that millions are on the brink of starvation. The Taliban has brought back public executions too.
We all knew this was coming. Afghanistan has degenerated from a stable peaceful democracy under the guidance of US forces, now into a religious fundamentalist regime state. And don’t think they’re done with waging war against the West and America. These people hate the west for reasons that go deeper than ideology. They’re religious fundamentalists, and they are also terrorists. The very existence of western civilization for as long as it endures, is an existential threat to them. Now they think they’ve won. They think they have the upper hand. According to former Afghan general Sami Sadat, 16,000 members of jihadist terrorist groups have moved into Afghanistan since Biden withdrew, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State insurgents, and 800 of them known leaders of such groups. Afghanistan is not just committing humans rights abuses en masse. It is rapidly becoming a haven for terrorists. The Washington Post even reported this past weekend that in that loser’s intelligence leak on Discord, it revealed they are actively plotting terrorist attacks against the West right now.
Our business in the Middle East, let alone Afghanistan, is unfinished. In some sense, it’s almost worse now that we left than it was when we invaded, now that every global and regional terrorist group and splinter cell is coming together, and China, aligned with Russia, has moved in to make peace between Saudia Arabia (who because of Biden grandstanding, has turned on us) and Iran. Not to mention Israel’s government (another Middle Eastern ally Biden is alienating) is teetering on the edge of civil strife. And Pakistan, historically a home base for terrorists, neck-deep in debt to China, is deeply vulnerable to insurgency. But regardless of whether China and Russia are taking our place in the region (though I have a hunch, that’s the plan), The War on Terror is far from over. We should not have left Afghanistan, not even removing some, but leaving a residual force. No. It was brainless of Trump to remove any US troops. The only reason the war in Afghanistan went on for so long was because we never committed enough troops in the first place. No one cared enough. I think rather than withdraw all forces, we should have increased our footprint and increased spending on building Afghanistan and training their military.
V. We Have No Choice But to Maintain an Activist Foreign Policy
It’s either the US is going to have to occupy these countries like Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, or, if we give them the breeding grounds, terrorists will be planning attacks on the west. That is a fact. Regardless of how you feel about intervention, unless the West, and in particular the US, pursues an activist foreign policy without apology, using the strongest military in the world to guarantee the liberal order, then bad actors will fill the void. Like it or not that’s the way the world is. You cannot promote democracy with disengaging from world affairs or maintain national security with diplomacy alone and sanctions, not without at least the threat of intervention. That’s just the way the world is. Unless the liberal West uses force to maintain order, the Putins, the Xis, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic State, and the Talibans and Al Qaedas of the world will expand and expand and grow and grow and grow.
Rahmat Gul AP
Biden says in the report that leaving the Middle East has benefited us with the opportunity to focus on Russia and China. This was a clever exit strategy for him. There is an appeal there. I’m sure many people are apt to see Russia and China—China for some reason especially—as more important US interests.
It is a very big problem people see things that way. Because the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and even more immediately Iran, are just as much threats to American and western interests as Russia and China. Those of us who aren’t such cynics and pessimists about US intervention in the Middle East, as Biden has long been, understand this. In fact, terrorists and rogue states like Iran and Syria, and former allies like Saudi Arabia, since America has sought to withdraw its footprint, are rapidly drifting into the orbit of alliances with Russia and China, that we stupidly claim to withdraw from the Middle East to deal with. It’s probably only a matter of time before Russia and China start dealing with the ISIS and Al Qaeda too.
VI. Our Leaders Are Opportunistic, Moral Relativist Scumbags
Unlike Biden or Trump or Desantis—these demagogues phonies and frauds— Putin and Xi know that one power that hates America and the west is as good as another; and that it is in the mutual interest of great powers to exploit shared grievances to forge alliances across borders. I think Biden would even agree with that, too.
VI. The Postmodern Presidency Continues
However, the reason Biden is almost totally withdrawing from the Middle East nevertheless is to appease the populists in both parties perversely, narcissistically, to grandstand for “unity,” and more recently to spend pointless, just outrageous sums of money: artificially raising worker’s wages just because they’re workers; reshoring chip manufacturing to become a “world leader” in it; overhauling the auto industry with EV tax breaks and severe carbon emissions regulation; and for all his purported hatred of rich people, guaranteeing the deposits of cryptospeculators; and as I said already but you can’t overstate it, paying Gen Z kids,’ with degrees destined for white collar jobs, their college debt for them. You couldn’t make up this kind of brazen egotism. It is bizarrely narcissistic, perfect for the digital age where EV’s and clean energy matters more than people and human rights. Where cryptocurrency lunatics and college educated millennials get preferential treatment, and the taxpayer foots the bill.
Biden is craven because in a word, he is more focussed on pressuring Americans to drive costly inefficient electric vehicles than either protecting Afghan girls’ rights to go to school or defending the free world from global terrorists. He is not just at once beholden to the democratic socialists in his own party, as well as afraid of being emasculated by MAGA unless he bloviates about jobs and pride, and continues Trump’s trade war with China. But he is a power hungry bastard. All he cares about is being reelected when he is far, far too old for the job; and at grave risk to the republic that if he dies, he could be substituted with Kamala Harris. At the end of his speeches he’s always intoning melodramatic, “God bless America” bromides.
But God save America from this betrayal of human rights, ignorance of the most obvious national security risks, and this abdication of founding American ideals and principles.
—Jay