Failure upon failure
Yesterday, after the news broke that US Marines were killed in a bombing in Kabul, I sat staring at a blank Word document struggling to find the words to describe the utter failure of Joe Biden’s Afghanistan pull-out. But I was so blind with rage, the only thoughts I could formulate consisted of profanity-laced venom.
I typed a few F-bomb-laden sentences, then deleted them again. After about twenty minutes, I gave up.
The fact that Biden’s pullout culminated in the death of Americans could’ve been predicted by anyone with even a passing knowledge of this disastrous chain of events.
Biden’s bungling withdrawal from Afghanistan has been failure upon failure from the very start.
If the objective was “Withdraw from a 20 year war” it could’ve been managed in a way that didn’t result in Americans stranded and US servicemen killed.
But the objective for Biden was “Withdraw from Afghanistan in time for me to spike the football on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.”
And therein lies the problem.
This timetable was politically motivated, not tactically planned.
And when you start from a foundation of failure, what else can you build but more failure?
In no time after Biden announced in April he would have us out by 9/11, the Taliban began to move, taking cities in the northern provinces.
Despite the emboldened Taliban gobbling up key cities and trade routes in the north, President Biden ordered Bagram Air Base shut down.
Less than a week later, Biden was back before the press bragging that things were going so swimmingly that he was moving the withdrawal date up to August 31.
And the Taliban kept moving.
Within weeks, Taliban fighters were moving on western Afghanistan, targeting the city of Herat. At the same time, Taliban fighters were headed to the south fighting to seize the city of Lashkar Gah – just a stone’s throw from Kandahar.
And this administration pressed on, vowing that the August 31 deadline was still on target.
Despite the speed with which the Taliban was taking over cities, the Biden administration kept living the dream that the US could maintain a consular presence in this mess of a country. When the fighting moved out of the northern provinces, a sane administration would have ordered every American out of the country.
Of course a sane administration also would have maintained control of their one military base a short drive from Kabul so that Americans in Afghanistan could’ve been evacuated from there.
Then Herat, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar fell to the Taliban. They had Kabul surrounded from north, west and south.
The Afghan forces could do nothing to stop the Taliban. They had no US air support. How could they? We had no base in Afghanistan anymore. We abandoned it six weeks before, in the middle of the night, without telling anyone we were leaving.
Failure upon failure.
So here we were, stuck with only the airport in the middle of Afghanistan’s largest city as our exfiltration point. Mobs of people – both those who should be evacuated and those who just wanted to get the hell out – roiled at every gate.
What a target-rich environment this failure of an administration created.
It certainly helped that the Taliban freed every prisoner on their way to Kabul. So all those ISIS fighters languishing behind bars were freed by their supposed “bitter enemy” the Taliban. Freed to carry out terror attacks on a ready-made target-rich environment.
And, yesterday, they made full use of it.
Now twelve Marines and one Navy corpsman are dead, many more American servicemen are injured and hundreds of Afghans are dead or injured.
Failure upon failure.
We deserved a full accounting from the White House. The American people deserved answers.
And what we got for nearly eight hours was deafening silence. The State Department cancelled its press briefing and went into hiding. The White House went dark. Not one single word from the alleged Commander-in-Chief.
And when he finally poked his head out of his hidey hole, Joe Biden, desperate to cloak himself in sympathy, invoked the name of his dead son Beau. Because that’s what Biden does when he’s cornered.
He feigned emotion and pretended to be near tears. But as soon as reporters started asking him challenging questions, the veneer of “compassionate” leader who “knows your pain because, did I mention my son is dead?” alternated between scornful, dismissive laughter and seething rage.
Was he seething with rage over the thirteen dead servicemen?
No.
He was seething with rage that Peter Doocy asked him a question he didn’t like.
Watch this exchange. See how white Joe’s knuckles get as he grips that binder tighter and tighter:
Did he put his head down in grief?
No.
He put his head down to hide his growing fury that a reporter dared to challenge him.
I’ve said before, I saved Biden’s Afghanistan speeches from April and July. I’ve read every word of them more than once. Let me tell you something. Joe Biden was boastful, swaggering and self-congratulatory over his decision to pull out of Afghanistan before September 11. At no point in either of those speeches did he express frustration over anything Donald Trump did. Instead, he was spiking the football before the opening kickoff.
But when Joe gets cornered, he has two deflector shields he deploys to protect himself – his dead son Beau and “It’s Trump’s fault.”
Biden is an arrogant, weak, disastrous failure. And the world is paying the price.
Last night, still livid over what happened, I saw a clip from Jesse Kelly’s appearance on Tucker Carlson that pretty much encapsulated exactly how I was feeling.
I want to close by sending you to read a couple of columns from Townhall.
First, this column by Matt Vespa, “Biden’s ‘Cold Political Calculation’ on Afghanistan Just Blew Up in His Face.”
Here’s the opening ‘graph:
Joe Biden made a calculation on a foreign policy initiative and was wrong. Dead wrong. Should we be shocked? The man has been the village idiot on American foreign policy for the past four decades. He has a prickly relationship with the military. He thinks he’s smarter than he is—which has led to big problems sort of like the fiasco we have in Afghanistan. Our withdrawal is a total calamity, and now we have dead Americans. At least 10 US Marines are dead in the terror attacks that occurred in Kabul today. Two bombings rocked the capital. It was near the airport which has been a source of chaos for days. This was bound to happen. Biden actually ‘knocked on wood’ concerning the situation when interviewed by ABC News last week.
And then Larry O’Connor’s column “The Danger of Biden’s Fragile Ego.”
After the tragic terror attacks in Kabul today, we are now venturing into extremely dangerous political waters that require wisdom, discipline, and strength… three attributes that our current American president is woefully lacking.
Yes, Joe Biden is a weak, narcissistic man. And he knows it. This is the danger.
When weak men want to prove to the world (literally to the world in this case) that they are not the weak men we all see that they are, there is a danger that they will present some grand gesture of strength to overcompensate for their weakness.
In the case of Joe Biden, this grand gesture of strength will be at the expense of young Americans who wear the uniform of our military. The very real danger right now is that this president will try to prove his courage and strength by exploiting the courage and strength of our troops by putting them in even greater danger than they already are due to this president’s weakness.
Both of those columns were written before Biden finally deigned to address the nation about yesterday’s attacks. And when he did eventually emerge, the Joe Biden both Vespa and O’Connor described was on full display.
The man occupying the seat of President and Commander-in-Chief is an utter fool and a disastrous failure.
And the American people will continue paying the price – some have already paid with their lives.
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