Posted on 08/27/2021 5:26:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Say what you will about President Joe Biden, he has stuck to his guns on ending America's 20-year involvement in Afghanistan's forever war.
His decision not to delay our departure after Aug. 31 was fortified by hard intel that the terrorist ISIS-K was preparing attacks at Kabul airport.
Thursday evening, the two bomb attacks occurred.
It now seems inevitable that the withdrawal will be completed by Aug. 31, with all U.S. military forces following the last civilians out.
Before yesterday's attacks, the airlift had been going far better than in its chaotic first days. Some 100,000 Americans and Afghans had gotten out of the country since Aug. 14.
Biden held his ground, refusing to be stampeded by Democratic critics, NATO allies, Republican hawks or media demanding he extend the deadline for departure until all Americans were out.
His adamancy testifies to the convictions Biden came by during decades at the apex of the U.S. government during our longest war.
Those convictions:
Even if the end result of a withdrawal is that Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the cause is not worth a continuance of the U.S. commitment or the blood and treasure that four presidents have invested.
Better to accept a U.S. defeat and humiliation than re-commit to a war that is inevitably going to be lost.
Biden's decision and the botched early days of the withdrawal have not been without political cost. Polls show the president's approval rating sliding underwater. A Suffolk poll has him down to 41%.
Yet, on his basic decision to get out now and accept the costs and consequences, his country appears to be with him. After all, former President Donald Trump was prepared to depart earlier than Aug. 31, and a majority of Americans still support the decision to write off Afghanistan and get out.
Still, we need to realize what this means and what is coming.
According to the secretary of state, 6,000 Americans were still in Afghanistan when the Afghan army collapsed and Kabul fell. Some 4,500 of these have now been evacuated.
The State Department is in touch with 500 other U.S. citizens to effect their departure. As for the remaining 1,000, we do not know where they are.
What does this mean?
Hundreds of Americans are going to be left behind, along with scores of thousands of Afghan allies who worked with our military or contributed to the cause of crushing the Taliban. And many of those Afghans are going to pay the price of having cast their lot with the Americans.
After Aug. 31, the fate of those left behind will be determined by the Taliban, and we will be made witness to the fate the Taliban imposes.
This generation is about to learn what it means to lose a war.
When the war for Algerian independence ended in 1962, and the French pulled their troops out, scores of thousands of "Harkis," Arab and Muslim Algerians who fought alongside the French, were left behind.
The atrocities against the Harkis ran into the tens of thousands. Such may be the fate of scores of thousands of Afghans who fought beside us.
Biden's diplomats may be negotiating with the Taliban to prevent the war crime of using U.S. citizens left behind as hostages. But we are not going to be able to save all of our friends and allies who cast their lot with us and fought alongside us.
Yet, while the promises of the Taliban are not credible and ought not to be believed, we are not without leverage.
As The New York Times writes, the Afghan economy is "in free fall."
"Cash is growing scarce, and food prices are rising. Fuel is becoming harder to find. Government services have stalled as civil servants avoid work, fearing retribution."
The Taliban's desperate need is for people to run the economy and for money from the international community to pay for imports of food and vital necessities of life.
What will also be needed from us, soon after the fall of Afghanistan, is a reappraisal of America's commitments across the Middle East.
We have 900 U.S. troops in Syria who control the oil reserves of that country and serve as a shield for the Syrian Kurds.
How long should we keep them there?
We retain several thousand troops in Iraq. Why?
These are questions for which new answers are going to be needed.
Indeed, there will be a temptation to counter our defeat and humiliation with defiant gestures or precipitate action to restore our lost credibility. Henry Kissinger's advice on any such action today seems wise:
"No dramatic strategic move is available in the immediate future to offset this self-inflicted setback, such as by making new formal commitments in other regions. American rashness would compound disappointment among allies, encourage adversaries, and sow confusion among observers."
As for Afghanistan and the Kabul airport, there comes a time when even a great nation needs to accept the reality that Corregidor is lost.
You go from the youngest Biden voter all the way up to the senile retardate himself, and you pretty much cover all of them.
Are We to Be the World’s Greatest Force for Good or Not?
https://dennisprager.com/column/are-we-to-be-the-worlds-greatest-force-for-good-or-not/
Dennis Prager
Tue, May 11, 2021
(Snip)
I remember the shame I felt as an American when I saw crowds of Vietnamese who had helped America begging to be taken out of Vietnam along with American troops when the last American helicopters left Vietnam. And who were simply abandoned to their fate.
Now America is poised to do in Afghanistan what it did then — abandon the people it defended to the Islamist sadists known as the Taliban. How many Afghan boys and women will be raped when we leave? How many Afghan men will be tortured to death? Only God knows. But you don’t have to be God to know that it will be a large number.
So, why would we do such a thing — again?
Three reasons are given.
One is, “We cannot stay in Afghanistan forever.”
That argument is offered as if it is so self-evident that it needs no explanation. Which is probably why no one seems to offer one. But why can’t we stay there “forever,” if doing so saves a country and tells the world that America sticks to its commitments and protects its allies?
We have stayed in Germany and South Korea “forever.” Is the world better or worse for it?
The second argument is, “We cannot nation-build.” That argument, too, is offered as if it is self-evidently valid. But it’s a phony argument. No one argued that we were in Afghanistan to “nation-build.” We were there because 9/11 was launched against us from there. And there is every reason to assume more terror will be directed from Afghanistan if we leave. And our presence there has kept Pakistan from falling into the control of Islamists.
We were not there, as Bret Stephens recently argued, “to kill Osama bin Laden, who was just one in a succession of terrorist masterminds. It was to prove Bin Laden wrong about America’s long-term commitments, especially overseas. In August 1996, Bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa declaring a war on the United States that he hoped would be long and bloody. He observed that, in one conflict after another, the Americans always cut and run.”
The third argument is that remaining in Afghanistan costs America blood and treasure. The blood argument is emotionally irrefutable. Every American killed in Afghanistan is an immeasurable tragedy. But in the last six years, the U.S. has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan. Between 2006 and 2018, we lost twice as many service members to training accidents than to all overseas actions. As for treasure, we spend between $50 and $100 billion a year in Afghanistan. That is far more morally justifiable than the trillion or more dollars we have spent in the last year to bail out Democratic governors and mayors and the unions they serve.
For the record, I would have made the identical argument if Donald Trump were president and removed us from Afghanistan. But the actual withdrawal is being conducted in a different administration.
Moral arguments didn’t matter to one Democratic senator in 1975. As he put it in a Senate speech on April 23: “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals … The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” That senator was Joseph Biden of Delaware.
To Democrats and Republicans who support the retreat from Afghanistan, I have a question: If Afghanistan comes to resemble Cambodia’s killing fields, will you still think it was the right decision? Or, to put it another way: Is there any level of evil, any emboldening of America-hating Islamists, any effect of an American defeat on the world or on America that would make you regret your decision to withdraw?
Quoting NWO’s Henry Kissinger, that’s rich.
I don’t have any faith in that number. Earlier in the week State dept. admitted the had no idea how many Americans were still in Afghanistan.
the BLOOD of the INNOCENT is on the hands of the RINOs
who attacked a good POTUS in the back, and cut the
neck of American Patriots.
RINOs and Democrats should abdicate, and then
HIDE in GITMO for the rest of their lives.
Replace “learn” with “find out” and it makes more sense.
This is all intentional; Demented Joe handed the country to China.
One of Trump's great successes was that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was so benign that it was easy to forget they were even there.
Buchanan makes it sound like the U.S. will lose this war when the last C-17 flies out of Kabul. In reality, the war was lost as soon as that retarded baboon in the White House decided in 2002 that occupying the country was a good idea.
Barack’s 3rd term
Not long after that I left the Republican party. So yeah, I’m with you.
I'll bet neither one of these dopes has had a single family member within 15 branches of their family tree serve in the U.S. military.
As a long time PJB reader and supporter, he is past his due date.
Biden is an unmitigated disaster. He cannot do anything correctly, likely because he has a committee inside his head arguing policy.
I never joined the GOP in the first place — so I’ve got that on you. LOL.
The media will not report on it so we might never know.
This generation cares about pot, tattoos and free stuff. The idea of losing a war doesn’t register with them.
Don’t forget Valerie Jarrett.
Nonsense, this incompetent presidency is just what the younger generation needed to learn about their beliefs. Everywhere I turn the 20-somethings are tuning out of the national news providers and flocking to the Tim Pools, Rogan’s, Crowder’s, etc., and moving right.
They see they are being handed the debt of their elders, the desire to own and use a gun if needed is soaring (the 2nd Amendment belief is growing stronger with the month after they watched rioters treated with kid gloves, with one glaring exception) and that they need to take control of their own careers without corporate employment.
This is the Reagan Kids all over again, as they witness how nonsensical the education they were forced to endure was in preparing them for life.
Talk to them, they are waking up rapidly.
Pat Buchanan sucks.
Slow Joe is responsible for this disaster.
Period.
Buchanan has always worshipped the power in the Oval Office, and given little thought to the nature or character of the person sitting behind the desk.
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