The Afghanistan Debacle is Exactly What the Left Wanted
There's not much to say that hasn't already been said regarding Biden's unconditional surrender to the Taliban, and it's only the first week. Bookshelves will be filled with analyses of these events, and we won't understand their full ramifications for decades. My two cents, for what they're worth, are that the left doesn't consider the fall of Kabul and the betrayal of our allies to be a tragedy. Rather, this is deliberate foreign policy strategy, and it's right on track.
The pattern is clear for those who wish to see. Simply put, the left thinks America is not only evil, but irredeemably so. Hence, any policy, be it foreign or domestic, that weakens our nation-state should be pursued, the goal being that the nation-state will eventually corrode to the point of collapse. They don't care that the hollowed-out dystopia will be long past its desirability for subjugation, so long as they get to be in charge. As Lord Varys said of Littlefinger, "He would see this country burn if he could be king of the ashes".
What started with Woodrow Wilson finally came into full force and in open view under Obama. Every time he could, Obama favored strict Islamist regimes over Western-friendly governments. Whenever overseas pro-democracy demonstrators flew American flags, Obama reflexively sided with their oppressors. He removed sanctions from Cuba and Iran and asked for nothing in return. The JCPOA, the Paris Accords, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership were specifically designed to weaken American power behind the flimsy guise of noble causes.
What would strike the neutral observer as unabashed idiocy comes across as cold, deliberate Machiavellianism to anyone reading between the lines of Obama’s head swivel speeches. Obama is a mechanical Leftist, harboring the paint-by-number faculty lounge dictums of America as a negative historical force. Hence, almost every action he took was to weaken that force. Through this lens, one can see the pattern clearly, and his actions make perfect sense.
Obama is too arrogant for his own good, and his governance was rooted in yard sign aphorisms rather than any real understanding of how the world works. But one can’t deny his strategy was both coherent and effective.
One can’t say the same of Joe Biden, that moth-eaten sock puppet who, to paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton from Bad Santa, doesn’t know his ass from last Tuesday. The man is an unparalleled moron, used lackadaisically as a mouthpiece by the ventriloquists behind the throne when they need to convey the message, “We know this clown wasn't our first or tenth choice for mascot, but he’s a company man through and through, and he’ll do exactly what we tell him to do so long as the ice cream keeps coming”. Biden can't be pro-American or anti-American or anything in between because he lacks the capacity to formulate a value system necessary to organize and prioritize such concepts.
Not so for every bureaucrat underneath him who was at best complicit, at worst a willing executioner, of his disastrous Afghanistan pullout. The same fool-me-once suspicion that Americans apply to the supposed 99.99998% of FBI field agents who, we are assured, are disgusted at their "few bad apples" who tried to overthrow a presidential election...yet from whose noble ranks emerged not a single whistleblower...should now be applied with equal force to the Pentagon.
The Pentagon employs 26,000 people, and from September 12, 2001 to August 15, 2021, not one of them alerted the American public… theoretically, the people they claim to serve… that our beribboned parade generals were doing little more than throwing darts at a flowchart to decide what our Afghan strategy should be. Indeed, the only “whistleblower” during that time was ol' Porkchop Vindman, who “came forward” not with evidence of any actual wrongdoing, but with the opinion that, as an unelected mid-level drone whose foremost duty was to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief, he himself should dictate Ukraine policy.
Of course, now that the cat is out of the bag (and the Afghan girl back in it), the Pentagon is tripping over the “intelligence community,” who is tripping over the State Department, who is tripping over the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Office for Non-Binary Pashtun Child Brides to be first to raise its rifle in the circular firing squad of the pathetic blame game they’re now playing. Sorry boys, but after the fact, after your crime has been laid bare for the world to see, is not the time you get a cookie for claiming that you were misled by the other guy for two decades straight, or that you were the sole voice of sanity in the closed-door CSI meetings. The fact that, as of this writing, none of you have resigned is testament to your complete lack of any sense of honor.
We just let the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, Cuba, and Iran know that they don’t have our support, other than the occasional week-too-late hashtag. We just let our allies in Taiwan, Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel know that we folded like wet paper to illiterate pedophiles in pickup trucks, so good luck against the million-man professional armies who are busy reassessing the futility of your current ceasefires. We just showed that, contrast to the dictum of “leave no man behind”, we will leave every man, woman, and child behind who, be they American or Afghan, civilian or military, ever lifted a finger to help us. We will literally let them fall off our planes.
We just gave up a position strategically located smack dab in the middle of our three most formidable enemies: China, Russia, and Iran. Not to worry though. Surely our vaunted “intelligence community”… the same community that filed to predict the Berlin Wall coming down, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks, the WMDs, and the 90-day-oops-we-meant-90-hour fall of Kabul… surely they’ve had two decades to ensure we have well-trained intelligence assets firmly in place in Afghanistan for the day we inevitably left, right? Right?
We abandoned Bagram Air Base on July 4, 2021. Biden originally planned to complete the withdraw on September 11th. These aren’t flukes, nor the clockwork stupidity of our government’s well-credentialed experts. These were specifically designed as symbolic humiliations of America, by people who hate America, who are being paid six figure salaries to do so by America.
This was all deliberate.
Soviet Pravda writers, in the interest of maintaining their dignity, would have refused upon pain of death to fabricate a story like this on the grounds that it was simply too unbelievable. But truth is stranger than fiction, and 44% of Americans polled after Kabul fell think Biden did a "good job" in Afghanistan. With enemies like us, who needs a nuclear arsenal?
Another telltale sign that this was deliberate is this: who has been uncharacteristically silent this entire week? We've heard nary a peep from the biggest loudmouths of all, the activist left. They haven't lashed out in anger because they aren't angry. Indeed, the campus elitists, Black Lives Matter, the Antifa incels, and the Squad knaves couldn't be happier. They think America deserved this. They can't yet openly celebrate, but give our schools another decade of critical race theory and our students will be celebrating August 15th not as the fall of Kabul, but as its liberation.
The left, including its swamp bureaucrats who administer our wars, has no qualms with what happened in Kabul. They support Biden’s grotesque withdraw not in spite of its consequences for America, but because of them. They want to see America humbled and weakened on the world stage. They want our enemies to outmaneuver us. They want us to lose our global leverage.
They want to do to our military what they did to our police, by demoralizing and demonizing the institution to the point that they simply can't get qualified recruits. What young, idealistic American would enlist to defend a country that doesn't let them win wars, forces them to retreat from 7th century quadrupeds, all the while having one's own patriotism questioned and slandered by woke Pentagon careerists who blather about "white rage" and who remove Mahan and Clausewitz from the reading lists in favor of Ibram X. Kendi?
And what does the Left make of the tens of thousands of Afghans, assumedly members of the BIPOC oppressed class, who helped us? What do the legions of #MeToo "feminists," who show up in Handmaid's Tale gear whenever Nebraska tries to criminalize partial birth abortions for pre-teens without parental notification, make of the millions of their Afghan sisters who woke up Sunday morning free and went to bed that night as slaves? Merely pawns on a chessboard to be sacrificed.
The left wants our betrayal of these Afghans to be seen by our allies, and for them to infer from this (and rightly so) that they can't count on us to honor our commitments. It's a perverse twist of our domestic politics. In America, the message of the Left is: If we can impeach Donald Trump and silence Rand Paul and spy on Tucker Carlson with impunity, how well do you think you're gonna fare? You're on your own, pal.
Amplified across the world, the message of the left is: If America will sell you out to the Taliban, they won't even think about lifting a finger to the Iranians and North Koreans, much less the Chinese and Russians. You're on your own, pal.
What happened in Kabul was deliberate. In fact, I would argue it went far better than most leftists dreamed it would. Even they underestimated Joe's uncanny ability to make the absolute worst decision in practically every situation. Our kids' grandkids will be fighting the wars that result from this and will likely do it alone. Far from being a tragedy, our abandonment of Afghanistan was one of the left's biggest foreign policy successes.
