President Biden owns the Afghanistan debacle, and history will blame him for it

 

I’m too sick for words to see the images streaming out of Afghanistan as the Taliban complete their conquest of that country, and complete America’s humiliation there.  It need not have happened.  All it needed was a modicum of spine in our President, to withdraw the right way and ensure that he left behind the conditions for a peaceful transition – but no, that was too much trouble, and he (or, rather, his handlers) wanted to concentrate on domestic politics.  The result we see before us.

Click the image below to watch the video on Twitter.

You want something even more horrifying?  Try this:

Three stowaways ‘fall to their deaths from plane’ and five are killed at airport as increasingly desperate Afghans climb on MOVING US Air Force jet as they flee from Taliban: All US Embassy staff have now been evacuated

The pictures at that link are . . . sickening.

Remind you of anything?

And through all this, where was President Biden?

The Biden administration and its military commanders have screwed up by the numbers.  This is a national humiliation for the USA on a scale we’ve only seen a handful of times before . . . and they OWN it.  It’s entirely their fault, and could easily have been prevented by a modicum of prior planning and making better arrangements to support a more competent, more broadly based local government – but it seems they figured that would have been too much trouble for America.

Even their media allies are having a hard time defending them.  To cite just one example, here’s the reliably left-wing and progressive Atlantic:

Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.

There’s more at the link.

I don’t deny the necessity of US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  We’ve needed to be gone from there for a long time already, as I’ve said often enough on this blog.  There was, and is, no military solution to the problems of that country.  However, US withdrawal has been so incompetently mismanaged that it’s going to become a poster child for the incompetence of the Biden administration in general.  Every nation that considers itself a friend of the USA must now surely be wondering, “What if that was us?”

Mark Steyn puts it succinctly.

… if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America.

. . .

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians … as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.

. . .

I’m in favor of razing the Pentagon and salting the earth – or, at the very least, firing Milley and the massed ranks of “parade generals” (a useful Commonwealth term) and moving the few guys left to a new HQ in a strip-mall on the edge of Cleveland. The bigger your armed forces get, the more they become a racket – as the US-created “Afghan National Army” “300,000-strong” (and now down to, oh, twenty-seven maybe) has just conveniently demonstrated. As for where all the money wound up, the Taliban’s tour of American “ally” and former Afghan vice-president “Marshal” Dostum’s palatial spread provides a clue.

I’ve said for years, into the void of silence from Bill Kristol, Max Boot and the rest of the shock-‘n-awe crowd on the laughably misnamed “national-security right”, that the entire American way of war needs rethinking.

. . .

As for the enemy, the good news is that if your regime is attacked by America you’ll likely wind up with even more territory than you started with:

The Taliban now controls more of Afghanistan than it did before the US invaded in 2001.

That happens to be true: the only change effected over two decades of Nato occupation is that the Taliban now controls northern Afghanistan, which it didn’t do on October 7th 2001. But don’t worry; here’s how US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent his Saturday night:

Very productive conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister @MarcGarneau about our efforts to reach a diplomatic solution in Afghanistan.

In the course of that “very productive” telephone call, the Taliban took three more cities.

America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

Again, more at the link.

The Taliban are now back in charge in Afghanistan, and everyone there who supported, or worked for, or benefited from the American occupation is now in grave danger.  Many will be killed.  That’s on our consciences, too.  Pray for the souls of those being imprisoned, tortured and murdered in Afghanistan right now, or who soon will be.  Their deaths are largely our nation’s President Biden’s fault.

Oh – let’s not forget:  that’s what happens when you get an invalidly “elected” Administration.  They stole power through electoral fraud, and now they can’t even wield it competently.  Quelle surprise!

As one user on MeWe posted:

No s***, Sherlock!

Peter