As Kabul falls before the unblinking eye of the camera, blame-laying has become the new favorite sport in Washington, D.C.
“I am President of the United States of America and the buck stops with me,” Biden said of his policy toward Afghanistan Monday. He then proceeded to turn his speech into one giant passing of the buck. His use of President Harry S. Truman’s personal philosophy in such an ignoble manner is an insult to the 33rd president. Biden doesn’t know what responsibility is nor does he understand the implications of this massive embarrassment to the United States.
The nearest Biden got to taking any blame was when he said, “this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” He then went on to call out President Donald Trump and the Afghan military leadership.
“Afghan political leaders gave up and fled the country,” Biden said. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” he added. “If Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now” then it was pointless to stay any longer, the President explained. “I do not regret my decision.”
“When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban,” Biden explained, implying he was somehow constitutionally bound by that deal. Ridiculous, since he has not seen fit to be “bound” to any other items from the Trump legacy.
His attempts to blame the previous administration fell flat and were dispelled by everyone from POLITICO to The Wall Street Journal.
It is time to set the record straight.
No one in this world is more responsible for the Afghanistan debacle than Joe Biden and the Fascist handlers pulling his puppet strings.
Casting shame and embarrassment on the world’s greatest superpower, the scenes from Kabul speak for themselves. Pundits on the Fascist-sympathizing cable news networks are passing around blame to everyone except Joe Biden, naming the Republicans, even the Afghan people. The media is buying into the claim by the Taliban that the citizens of the war-torn country “chose” them to govern.
If “choosing” at gunpoint is democracy, then I guess the Afghan people did. Of course, that’s nonsense.
What got us to this point in history is a cancerous belief that has metastasized in D.C., that American foreign policy should be dictated by a simple slogan: “No more endless wars.” The current spokesman for that belief is President Biden.
There is no doubt Americans are tired of war. Bringing the troops home is an emotional appeal, even though most Afghanistan War veterans will tell you abandoning the country now is a slap in their faces, and even more, a slap in the faces of Gold Star families who lost loved ones over there during the last 20 years.
We had to take action after 9/11. Few would dispute that. The issue is what clearly defined path we would take after we neutralized al-Qaeda and killed Osama bin Laden. We didn’t have one.
Certainly, without some troop presence in Afghanistan the Taliban would reemerge They’ve just proven that emphatically over the last 120 hours. Now they will allow terrorists of all Islamic stripes to set up shop and create a base of operations for renewed attacks on the West.
It is no coincidence there have been no major attacks on the U.S. since our invasion of Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom beginning in November 2001. In fact, there hasn’t been a single U.S. casualty in Afghanistan in over 18 months. Both of those impressive facts are about to come to an end. There are somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 American citizens still in Afghanistan.
The Biden cabal can’t even give us an accurate number.
Amid growing impatience with war, the case for cutting our losses grew stronger. But it failed to acknowledge trade-offs ― and this simple question: If we evacuate Afghanistan, what will happen?
The “no more endless wars” crowd always refused to answer. These are people who have no combat experience, no foreign policy experience and no real-world experience. They live in an idyllic dream world that doesn’t require us to face our enemies, who are ideologically opposed to Western civilization.
Whether we are war with those enemies or not, they are at war with us. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS and others will gladly stage another 9/11 if they have the opportunity, as they already possess the motive and the means.
We have just afforded them the opportunity to do exactly that. Leaving Afghanistan has created a terrorist safe haven. The American people never had that reality explained to them by any administration over the last 20 years. No doubt President Trump’s supporters “got it,” but no one else did.
When Quinnipiac asked in a May survey, “Should we leave Afghanistan?” 62 percent of respondents said yes. It was the wrong question. A realistic framing of the query would have asked, “Should we leave Afghanistan even if it means an increased threat of terrorism to the homeland?” The outcome would have been much different, in my opinion.
There is another severe blind spot revealed by the “no more endless wars” position. The uneducated in foreign policy and military strategy are incapable of distinguishing between wasteful nation building and a small residual force that conducts occasional counterterror operations against a resurgent enemy. Far too many Americans hear that there is a single soldier on the ground in Afghanistan and they interpret it to mean “nation building” and “world police.”
They’re wrong. There are a lot of foreign policy options between nation-building and giving up. We found the proper balance in recent years — maintaining a small force that propped up the Afghan government while also giving us the capability to strike at the Taliban and other terrorist networks as needed. When Echelon asked about the troop presence in this context in July, more Americans, Republicans and Democrats, supported a small military presence in Afghanistan than supported ending our presence entirely.
Another failure of Biden’s blame game is his accusing the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces (ANDSF) of incompetence. These men and women fought bravely and well beside U.S. troops over the last dozen years or so. They learned to fight using American tactics ― strong command authority, air support, artillery and rapid strike forces.
We left their air support and mobile artillery behind at Bagram Air Force Base in Kandahar Province when our air-headed generals ordered a midnight pullout without even informing our Afghan allies we were leaving. Those weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban, as are the other billions of dollars of U.S. military weaponry scattered throughout the country.
Despite that, just one month ago, ANDSF was successful in battle. The Taliban launched an offensive on the Zinda Jan district of Herat in western Afghanistan ― one of only three provinces that have not fallen to the Taliban today. The enemy managed to burn some parts of the police headquarters after five hours of fierce fighting with ANDSF forces. Local officials in Herat said ANDSF fought bravely and repulsed the Taliban attack.
One member of Herat’s security committee put his finger on the crux of the issue that has impacted ANDSF’s ability to be more effective against the Taliban throughout the country and stave off the Taliban resurgence.
“Lack of coordination between the security forces is a serious problem. There is a need for a unified command and control center to provide morale to the security forces. The Taliban are using these gaps and then launching attacks,” Ghulam Habib Hashemi told America’s Conservative Voice in an early July interview by telephone.
“U.S. and NATO forces were supplying that command and control function, but now [in late July] they are pulling out. We do not have the digital communications equipment the Western troops use and they left none of that equipment for us when they began leaving.”
Today, family members of soldiers stranded in Taliban areas have raised concerns over the soldiers’ health conditions.
“My children are crying the whole day, they ask for their father. My husband has been serving in Oba for three months, he was wounded two times,” said Maryam during another America’s Conservative Voice telephone interview. Maryam is the wife of an Afghan Army Officer in Herat.
“My cousins, my uncle and my nephew are among the soldiers wounded in Oba, they are stuck there, no one is there to reach out to help them,” she added
Local officials in Herat pledged that soon they will transfer the wounded troops from Oba, providing they can find a way around Taliban forces.
“We are working to transfer the wounded soldiers from Oba to Herat city and to send additional forces to Oba to control the district,” Abdul Saboor Qane, the governor of Herat, told the Associated Press.
This is the plight U.S. troop withdrawal has left with ANDSF. No effective communications, no sophisticated weapons, low morale and disillusionment with American resolve. Yet they fight when they are able, the effectiveness of their ability to counter Taliban attacks growing less each day as they run low on ammunition, suffer casualties and are without command and control
It could be said that these Afghan forces have more character and integrity than Joe Biden and most of the Pentagon.
The U.S. didn’t lose this war, but we didn’t end it, either. We gave up on a strategic national-security interest. We gave up on our Afghan allies, expecting them to stave off a ruthless insurgency without our crucial support, which came at minimal cost to us.
Biden’s handlers’ actions are heartless, its justifications nonsensical. The consequences are dire for innocent Afghans and for America’s prestige. Twenty years after 9/11, I pray they don’t become equally dire for Americans at home.
——-Mike Nichols is a conservative, a patriot, U.S. Army veteran, behavioral therapist, political enthusiast, sports fan and writer living with his beautiful wife Liz in the Heartland. He has a regular blog at America’s Conservative Voice on Substack and a Facebook presence at Americas Conservative Voice-Facebook
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