John Kirby’s Clean-Up on Aisle Kabul The Biden administration has been lying about the evacuation from Afghanistan from the day that it began Roger Kimball
https://thespectator.com/topic/john-kirby-clean-up-aisle-kabul-afghanistan/?utm_source=
I almost feel sorry for John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman tasked with tidying up after the icky messes deposited about the landscape by Joe Biden.
Let me emphasize the adverb “almost.” Kirby’s job is unenviable. Basically he has to lie and pretend that his boss and that excruciating, illiterate muppet of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, make sense. It’s always a horrible goulash that Kirby has to contend with. He has my sympathy for that.
But yesterday, when Kirby stood before the press to answer questions about the administration’s report on Ameirca’s humiliating flight from Afghanistan in August 2021, his performance was not just cringe-making. It was infuriating.
There was, said this wretched tool, “a lot to be proud of” in the way the administration handled the withdrawa- no, it wasn’t a “withdrawal.” It was a panicked flight from Bagram Air Base and Kabul. Why? Because our laughably named “intelligence services” once again bungled the job. The Taliban, they said, were making advances, but not to worry, it will take weeks if not months for them to take control of the capital.
Wrong. America’s flight from Afghanistan, after twenty years, trillions of your dollars, Dear Reader, and countless classes in “transgressive” modernist art for the natives, was the most spectacular military and public relations failure for the United States since our choppers took flight from our embassy in Saigon in 1975.
Where does the buck stop, Mr. Kirby? With Donald Trump, bien sûr. Kirby repeatedly echoed the party line: “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” But does anybody, anybody believe that if Donald Trump were still president in 2021 that Afghanistan would have been consumed in the humiliating maelstrom that John Kirby now wants us all to forget?
Kirby was careful to spread the blame around. If it wasn’t Trump’s fault, it was the fault of the bad “intelligence” provided to the Biden administration. “No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days,” Kirby whined. “No agency predicted the rapid fleeing of President [Ashraf] Ghani who had indicated to us his intent to remain in Afghanistan up until he departed on the 15th of August, and no agency predicted that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan National Security Defense Forces would fail to fight for their country.” Will surprises never end?
The Biden administration has been lying about the evacuation from Afghanistan from the day that it began. “We know of no instance where the Taliban are not letting our citizens through the checkpoints freely,” Biden said around the time the Taliban were caught manhandling crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden administration by the British Parliament.
And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban,” Kirby said on August 14, just days before that overran the country and a suicide bomber killed thirteen American service men and women.
America’s hasty and irresponsible flight from Afghanistan was nothing to be “proud” of, Mr. Kirby, and your willingness to haul yourself before the public and say otherwise is a testimony to how bankrupt this administration really is. There is not enough shame and obloquy available to heap upon the heads of these venal and mendacious courtiers.
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