Our president decided he was bored with Afghanistan and so Afghans must suffer and perish for his impatience.
Our president decided he was bored with Afghanistan and so Afghans must suffer and perish for his impatience.
A fter President Biden’s now-notorious Afghanistan speech on July 8, a reporter said to the president, “Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” Biden replied to this statement, which was not only true but obvious, “That is not true.” The spooks said in June that Afghanistan would probably be lost in six months, proving to be about four and a half months too optimistic, but as the Taliban roared through the country early this summer, Biden blithely and stupidly averred, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Remember when the press spent an entire week in a lather about President Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd? How should we react to far more consequential lies, lies that result in the mass rape of little girls and the mass torture and beheadings of men? How many will point out that Biden’s vow to restore America’s international reputation is in tatters, not even seven months into his administration?
Trump’s asking a question about whether disinfectants could be used inside the body to fight COVID — an off-the-cuff musing taken seriously by no one — was taken as a suggestion to “inject bleach,” though what he said was, “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning . . . so it’d be interesting to check that.” This is generally held up as the single stupidest thing Trump ever said. Compare that to Biden’s assertion, just five weeks before Afghanistan fell, that the results of his actions would have no parallel— “none whatsoever” — with the collapse of South Vietnam, which took two years. “None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken,” Biden continued, nonsensically, about Saigon, as though the Taliban was not about to stage a rerun of 1975.
“The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” Biden went on.
In the previous administration, the press spent four years in four-mode discussing each one of Trump’s insults, his boasts, and his mostly trivial and silly falsehoods. Biden’s staggering combination of dishonesty, incompetence, arrogance, intransigence, ignorance, and dereliction of duty has already had far more devastating effects than four years of Trump’s slipshod leadership. Those who wondered whether an outwardly stable and calm president would necessarily prove to be a wiser manager than an unstable and erratic one have their answer.
Biden in June rejected suggestions that he slow the pace of withdrawal and maintain the air base north of Kabul to facilitate a more orderly exit, the Wall Street Journal reported, noting also that Biden had failed at that point to approve a detailed plan for evacuating the tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives working in close support of the U.S. military. In the coming weeks, we will learn more about how much misery Biden caused by yanking out U.S. troops as precipitously as an impatient toddler flipping over a checkerboard. Biden himself, as a senior senator, voted for the invasion of Afghanistan, on September 14, 2001, but this year, Biden decided he was bored with Afghanistan and so Afghans must suffer and perish for his impatience.
Top military advisers were pleading with Biden to understand that just a minimal presence — say, 3,000 troops in Afghanistan — would go a long way toward maintaining a fragile peace. Biden rejected this out of hand: “There would be no conditions put on the withdrawal, Mr. Biden told the men,” the New York Times reported. That entailed “cutting off the last thread — one that had worked with Mr. Trump — and that [Secretary of Defense Lloyd] Austin and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] General Milley hoped could stave off a full drawdown.” Referring, apparently, to the Fall of Saigon, Austin’s warning to the president that, “We’ve seen this movie before,” fell on Biden’s deaf ears.
The U.S. hasn’t just lost in Afghanistan, we have been humiliated. But our humiliation is less important than the fate of our Afghan allies left behind. Deserting them, President Biden has also handed their tormentors our equipment and weapons. Rape, torture, and murder on a gigantic scale await. All of it can be tied directly to Biden. On this issue and this issue only, the president claims he is bound by his predecessor’s policy. The Paris Climate Accord? The Keystone Pipeline? The Iran Deal? In all of these cases, Biden promised to reverse Trump.
The Democrats love to tell us that they are the party of “empathy.” Yet where is the evidence that they possess even a modicum of ordinary sympathy for Afghanistan? As an entire country descends into chaos and suffering, the Biden-Harris response is a shrug of total indifference. Hey, good thing we elected the first woman vice president, one who promised to use the gift of her empathy to focus extra attention to the world’s women and girls.
We can never know exactly what President Trump would have done in Afghanistan; at many junctures of his presidency, he seemed simply unable to overrule his supposed subordinates, though in some cases heeding their counsel was the wiser choice anyway. But a theoretical poor plan by Trump to exit Afghanistan in an alternate reality has to be measured against the real, actual catastrophe caused by Biden: a heedless scramble for the exits so hasty that our former allies will forever curse our name. Or maybe just one name. Who lost Afghanistan? Joe Biden lost Afghanistan.
PHOTO GALLERY: The Fall of Afghanistan