Joe Biden’s emergency Afghanistan press conference Monday accomplished exactly the opposite of instilling confidence in the American regime, by neither promising accountability for this catastrophic failure nor releasing a plan to stabilize the situation, reassure our allies, and recapture at least some deterrence against our watching enemies. This is a disaster with evil consequences that will reverberate long and far.
The lack of accountability worsens the debacle by teaching Americans, our friends, and our foes that things this grossly incompetent will happen again. As Ben Domenech pointed out Monday, “Whoever Biden doesn’t fire, their performance Biden believes is acceptable. If this is acceptable, how can the American people possibly trust the NSA, CIA, or the Pentagon? Even their most recent predictions were completely off. Once again, the intel community and expert class totally failed us, predicting this would take months and the Afghan army would fight.”
The right thing to do would be for Biden’s generals to all resign so he doesn’t have to. Top of the list is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has spent the entirety of the Biden administration — as well as well before it — playing politics instead of doing his job. Because of his lies and cowardice, Americans and Afghans have died and our national security has taken a massive blow.
Just juxtapose Milley’s behavior against the increasingly alarming timeline from a July 30, 2021 inspector general report to Congress. This timeline below, just of June and July, shows Milley publicly acknowledging increasing Taliban control of Afghanistan as the military he leads prepared to leave.
The report grimly notes — again, two weeks ahead of the crisis in Kabul:
The news coming out of Afghanistan this quarter has been bleak. The Taliban offensive that began early in the quarter accelerated in June and July. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified on June 23 that the Taliban controlled about 81 districts. Less than a month later, on July 21, he told reporters the group now controlled about half of Afghanistan’s 419 districts, or more than twice as many as before. According to media reporting, the Taliban also controlled large stretches of multiple major highways, and at least six international border crossings as this report went to press. The ANDSF [American-propped up so-called Afghan army that fled Kabul in August] has retaken some districts and the Afghan government still controls all 34 provincial capitals, including Kabul, but from public reporting, the ANDSF appeared surprised and unready, and is now on its back foot. Civilian casualties hit a record high in May and June, according to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
What has Milley been doing as these events culminated in a spectacular national failure? Defying elected civilian control of the U.S. military, participating in top generals’ decades of big lies to foment their greed at America’s expense, demoralizing troops by endorsing the same racial extremism the Chinese Communist Party uses to destabilize the United States, and training military resources on American citizens over nonviolent political views. These are grounds for his resignation, firing, and prosecution.
Defying Elected, Civilian Control of the Military
Civilian control of a military is a non-negotiable barrier against coups and dictatorships. It is a precondition for securing Americans’ individual right to govern ourselves by reason and persuasion, instead of force. In the United States, we accomplish this by electing civilian executives to head military forces. This is why the president is called the “commander in chief.”
Milley has established a track record of subverting this crucial safeguard against military dictatorship. That we even know this is an alarming hint at more under the surface.
As Domenech noted on Fox News “Primetime” in June, “General Milley was a major force undermining the Constitutional authority of the President of the United States during the insurrectionary summer of 2020. While American cities were literally on fire, in the grip of a violent uprising with a body count and pervasive fear, Milley assumed for himself the role of preventing the President from using his lawful authority to bring peace and order to our communities. He made it his mission to deny the American people the lawful and Constitutional aid of their own Armed Forces.”
According to a book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig that came out this summer, soon after the 2020 election, “Milley began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.” According to the Washington Post, Milley also “sought to stay close with Trump through the final months of his presidency out of concern that he might invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty troops on America’s streets, according to [a] book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.”
On Tucker Carlson’s show this July 15, Chief of Staff to the former U.S. secretary of defense Kash Patel said of Milley: “He wants to create and has created a joint staff operation that is a pseudo-defense department all on its own, which he has hijacked the authority of the secretary of defense and the president of the United States, and to execute as he sees fit and that is in contravention of the law.”
In addition, as Carlson noted on the same show, “Ironically, preserving a peace deal with the Taliban was the same justification that Mark Milley used later in late 2020 to overrule Donald Trump’s order to pull out of Afghanistan. Milley told the president it was only possible to remove half American forces there, not all.”
Look it’s not a general’s job to decide whether a president’s commands are “dangerous” or “possible.” That is for elected civilian heads of the military to decide. If the president tells a general to pull out of Afghanistan, the general’s job is to do that as effectively as possible, not tell the elected civilian head of the military, “No.” Milley did that, even openly admitting it, and he should be fired for it — if not court-martialed and then sentenced.
Amplifying Anti-American Propaganda Operations
On July 21, 2021, Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin responded to criticism of Milley’s public support for critical race theory with this: “I’ve known the chairman for a long time. We fought together, we served a couple of times in the same unit, so I’m not guessing at his character. He doesn’t have a political bone in his body. I clearly have tremendous faith and confidence in the chairman.”
This statement also commends Austin’s resignation or firing. Milley is a very obvious political actor, as his anti-constitutional activities detailed above prove. There are more. While Afghanistan has been clearly descending into chaos and danger under his alleged oversight, Milley’s public focus has been on defending political extremism that assists America’s enemies.
Remember the Anchorage summit? The Chinese Communist regime amplifies and employs the left’s false accusations of “systemic racism” as a tool of psychological warfare against the United States. And Mark Milley helps instill this same anti-American ideology in America’s warfighters.
At a speech to the 2020 class of the National Defense University, Milley smeared his own country, accusing it of the “systemic racism” of “unconscious bias”: “We are still struggling with racism and we have much work to do. Racism and discrimination, structural preferences, patterns of mistreatment, unspoken and unconscious bias have no place in America. And they have no place in our armed forces.” In the speech, he also promised to make other military personnel placements according to race, to address concerns about “equity.”
On June 23, 2021, Milley answered for the military’s use of racist theories to indoctrinate troops, defending this as “having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend.” “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” he proclaimed, followed by repeating the leftist accusation du jour that half of Americans are potential domestic terrorists deserving of mass surveillance, provocation, incitement, and harassment.
Watch: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just now on Critical Race Theory, ‘Wokeness’ & Jan. 6. “I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding…the country which we are here to defend?” pic.twitter.com/KsRtOoWN0w
— James LaPorta (@JimLaPorta) June 23, 2021
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that a man who thinks critical race theory could be a useful analytical tool for understanding the United States would also give false testimony about on-the-ground conditions in Afghanistan as the military he led prepared to withdraw.
Gen. Milley on the "responsible drawdown" in Afghanistan during the same testimony he addressed CRT. Guess what we spent more time talking about?
pic.twitter.com/My3Kq1gwYW— Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) August 16, 2021
Milley surely knows the strategic propaganda value of CRT to American adversaries. And he still chooses to aid our enemies while subverting the trust and morale of our very own troops as their leader. That’s quite simply treasonous, just as membership in the Communist Party is also treasonous and disqualifying for any American officials.
Lying About Afghanistan and the Entire War on Terror
In that same July 21 pro-CRT press conference conducted as the Taliban was advancing across Afghanistan while the Biden military retreated in disarray, Milley promised:
We continue to dedicate our security resources to that, to secure the embassy, to secure the international zone and secure HKIA, the international airport in Kabul for our diplomats, our personnel and our continued support to the government of Afghanistan.
The Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country… I want to emphasize repeatedly, and I’ve said this before, a negative outcome, a Taliban automatic military takeover, is not a forgone conclusion. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and make adjustments as necessary.
Obviously, that all turned out to be completely false and utterly disqualifying of Milley’s professional judgment just weeks later. In the presser, he also promised:
I always personally provided the best military professional advice to President Trump previously, to President Biden or any other president. I always provide that best military advice to the secretary of defense, whomever is the secretary of defense, and I do that for the National Security Council, as well. And — and I will speak also for this one time on the part — on behalf of the Joint Chiefs. The same applies to them. We’ve always adhered to providing best professional military advice, bar none. It was candid, honest in every single occasion.
As Glenn Greenwald documents, this is quite simply a bald-faced lie. America’s military leaders have lied for decades, almost like being a constant liar is required to reach their level of incompetence.
“U.S. political and military leaders have been lying to the American public for two decades about the prospects for success in Afghanistan… Numerous documents, largely ignored by the public, proved that U.S. officials knew what they were saying was false — just as happened so many times in prior wars — and even deliberately doctored information to enable their lies,” Greenwald writes.
“The United States has been and will remain an ally to the Afghan people, as defended by the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.”
#EnduringPartnership pic.twitter.com/SmFlviLtQP— U.S. Embassy Kabul (@USEmbassyKabul) August 9, 2021
While Milley has spent his career constructing a throne of lies for people wearing only leftist-approved crazy hats to assume, Domenech’s epic roundhouse kick to Milley’s keister has proven itself right over the target this week: “General Milley’s record will likely include presiding over America’s defeat in Afghanistan, culminating in the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and a series of massacres thereafter,” Domenech prophesied six weeks before that happened before our eyes.
Since they seem to have sold their souls to the devil for a few messes of rotting pottage, our corrupt regime will never hold itself accountable for their errors causing thousands of American soldiers to die, Afghan women and boys to be raped, trillions of Americans’ hard-earned wealth to be blown up in smoke, and now tens of thousands to flee to refugee camps.
That means we must hold these shameful disgraces to our country accountable. Mark Milley, Joe Biden may not be coming for you, but the American people will never forget what you have done. You’re afraid of us, and you should be.