I’ve been watching the unfolding Taliban takeover of Afghanistan for a couple of months now. Mostly, if you want to know what’s happening in Afghanistan, you have to turn to foreign news sources because here in the US, the American corporate news media is far too busy with Delta Variant Panic Porn and DeSantis-bashing to pay the disintegration of Afghanistan any mind.
And anyone who has been following the story could’ve told you that the current situation we find ourselves in was inevitable.
But apparently nobody in the Biden Administration saw it coming.
My jaw about dropped to the floor when I saw this tweet from John Haltiwanger Wednesday.
Maybe if the Biden people would take a few minutes to get the hell off of Twitter and pay attention, they wouldn’t be so stunned that America cutting and running out of Afghanistan in disorganized haste was bound to leave the country at the mercy of the Taliban.
And trust me. It was disorganized haste.
For crying out loud, back in early July the US military bugged out of Bagram air base without so much as a “Hey you guys, we’ll be leaving tomorrow.” Hell, they didn’t even tell the Afghan soldiers patrolling the perimeter of the base that they were leaving. Instead, they just up and left. Once they got to the airport in Kabul, they called to let them know they were gone.
Who does that?!
In the meantime, scavengers descended on Bagram and picked it clean – looting and carrying off anything that wasn’t nailed down. The New York Post published scores of photos of the mess left behind by fleeing US troops.
One of the Afghan soldiers told the Associated Press that in one night the Americans “lost all the good will of twenty years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.”
The Biden Administration didn’t even bother putting in place the procedure to evacuate the Afghans who worked with the US military and civilians during the duration of this twenty year war. The Afghan allies who aided the US and NATO forces – from interpreters to office staff – along with their families number in the thousands. We’ll be lucky if a thousand of them make it out before the Taliban controls the entire country.
And those Afghan allies will become targets of Taliban retaliation. America is leaving them to die horrible deaths. That’s the thanks they get for working with their US allies.
Look, like most of you, I too want the US to get the hell out of Afghanistan.
But if you’re going to leave a country, the least you should do is have some exit plan in place before you start bugging out. And there simply doesn’t appear to be a plan in place here. But the other problem was the US put too much stock in the Afghan civilian government and military. They actually believed that they could withstand the Taliban forces.
In July, President Biden assured reporters that the Taliban retaking Afghanistan “is not inevitable” — a view that was echoed by the Pentagon as well. Biden claimed that the US leaves behind three hundred thousand US-trained Afghan troops that, thanks to us, now have “all the tools and training equipment of any modern military.”
Not anymore they don’t.
With the Afghan forces crumbling like a house of cards, the Taliban can now take all the vehicles, arms, equipment and hardware taxpayers bought for the Afghan troops.
Yesterday the Free Beacon reported that the Taliban has seized US weapons and equipment abandoned by the US-funded Afghan forces.
The least the Taliban could do is send Joe Biden a thank you card for arming them – maybe throw in a gift basket of assorted ice creams while they’re at it.
Naturally when reporters yesterday asked Vice President Kamala Harris about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, Harris refused to answer the questions, only saying that she would be briefed on the matter.
Well, that’s a comfort. At least she didn’t cackle.
On Wednesday Jen Psaki pretty much exposed why the Biden Administration is so woefully ill-equipped to deal with animals like the Taliban – telling reporters that these bloodthirsty tenth century throwbacks have to “make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.”
Are you freaking kidding me?! How incredibly naïve can one administration be?
It’s the Taliban, Jen, not the staff from the Brookings Institute.
Heaven help us.
And while the Taliban moves toward Kabul, Americans at the US Embassy are being forced to evacuate.
But President Biden dismissed the notion that what is happening in Kabul would be anything like the 1975 evacuation of the embassy in Saigon.
Does Biden really want us to believe that the “Tah-lee-bon” is not comparable? Does he really expect us to buy that after seeing the “Tah-lee-bon” bulldoze over Afghan forces to retake cities like Herat and Kandahar?
Meanwhile, the vacationing Nancy Pelosi yesterday asked the Biden Administration to provide an “all member” briefing on the rapidly-changing situation when Congress returns the week of August 23.
Really?
By August 23 the only thing the Biden Administration can provide is a post-mortem. Because at the rate the Taliban is gobbling up Afghanistan, by August 23 they’ll be controlling the whole damn country.
This is a complete and utter mess.
As I said earlier, I have been watching this unfold – reading reports in Reuters mostly – for the better part of two months. The warning signs were there. And you would have to be a complete and utter incompetent not to have seen this coming.
But everyone in the Biden Administration — from the White House to the State Department to the Pentagon — was blindsided.
And, see, that’s the thing. Biden wanted the added optics of celebrating the US leaving Afghanistan on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. And in order to assure those optics, he and his administration rushed this withdrawal.
Meanwhile, with Kandahar’s fall and the Taliban moving closer to overtaking Kabul, what was President Joe Biden doing yesterday?
Calling a lid and heading home to Wilmington.
Something tells me the people who bristled at Trump’s mean tweets are starting to reevaluate their position.
Update:
Good grief.
Can you believe this guy?