Unfortunately, now, with Joe Biden, we are back to what was happening under Barack Obama — bending over to our enemies and acting subservient to the world.
We saw that with him killing the Keystone XL Pipeline which would have benefited our oil production and our energy position. That killed thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, he waived sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that allowed it to be finished, empowering Russia’s energy position and foothold in Europe.
Now we see him also doing what Barack Obama did in Iraq, just now in Afghanistan — pulling out so precipitously that it creates a huge vacuum allowing the terrorist Taliban to take over the country.
As I previously reported, Biden has let the problem get out of control. He hadn’t gotten the interpreters out yet despite knowing the window was closing and the Taliban were taking over parts of the country. I’ve been calling for this since May. Biden said, in July, that it wasn’t inevitable that they would take over and he argued against his own U.S. intel assessments.
“No, it is not,” Biden stated when asked about an “inevitable” Taliban takeover. “Because you have the Afghan troops, they’re 300,000 well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.”
Later in the impromptu press conference, the president rejected reports claiming that U.S. intelligence assessments and top military officials in the country have determined the Taliban will take back power within a year — or sooner.
“That is not true,” Biden answered flatly to a question on the subject. “They did not reach that conclusion.”
That was in response to the Taliban, at that point, having taken over most of the country.
Now, we see things collapsing even faster with the Taliban capturing three more provincial capitals on Wednesday — giving them effective control of about two-thirds of the country and today capturing the third-largest city, Herat, giving them control of 11 of 34 provincial capitals, according to the Daily Mail.
As our Hollie McKay reports from Afghanistan, that’s leaving thousands having to flee for their lives and their safety. There are also reports of Taliban killing Afghan troops and forcing girls as young as 12 into marriage now as they move into cities, going door to door and demanding they be turned over as “war prizes.”
Things are moving fast on our position there as well. First, we heard word that the Biden Administration was pleading with the Taliban to leave our embassy in Kabul untouched, a horrible and ridiculous position to be in pleading with terrorists, and obviously not in concert with Joe Biden’s prior assessments. But then as we know, Biden is always wrong — for four decades.
Then came the word that we were evacuating the embassy as my colleague Bonchie wrote about earlier.
Last month, Joe Biden said we wouldn’t be seeing an airlift out of there, as had happened in Saigon when we pulled out of Vietnam, still a vivid memory of U.S. political failure forcing a retreat, for many people who were alive at the time.
But today, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said there would be an “airlift”to get out the embassy personnel and some of the Special Immigrant Visa applicants, as the threat of the Taliban moving on Kabul looms.
We certainly anticipate being postured to support airlift as well for not only the reduction of civilian personnel from the embassy but also in the forward movement of special immigrant visa applicants. So we do anticipate that there will be airlift required of us and we are working through the final plans right now to put that into place.
But now, after all that, the State Department’s Ned Price has said well, even if it looks like it, even if Kirby used those words, it’s “not an evacuation.”
“This is not abandonment, this is not an evacuation,” Price insisted just hours after the U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a security alert urging all Americans in Afghanistan to leave the country “immediately.”
Price claimed the “overall status has not changed” at the embassy in Kabul which “remains open” with a smaller staff even though they were pulling most of the people out of there in a quickly jiggered evacuation.
Translation? It’s a huge mess they let fester. They knew it was coming and failed to deal with it in any kind of effective way and now they’re left scrambling yet again. And the Afghani government has no idea what guarantees for help they will have going forward from the Biden Administration. That’s why it’s collapsing now. At the end of all this, unless he changes course, they’re going to have a terrorist Islamic state after all the blood and treasure we expended there. That wasn’t inevitable, but Biden has made it inevitable.