RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-joe-biden-broke-nato-allies-boris-johnson-angela-merkel-emmanuel-macron-11629406300?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Remember when candidate Joe Biden said America “needs a leader the world respects”? Apparently President Biden forgot. Of the many consequences of his misbegotten Afghanistan withdrawal, one of the more serious is the way it has damaged America’s relationships with its allies, especially in Europe.

Afghanistan was an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and America’s NATO allies have invested significant blood and treasure in the conflict. That includes tens of thousands of troops over 20 years, more than 1,100 of whom were killed, and billions of dollars spent on the military operation and reconstruction effort.

This was a fulfillment of their obligations after the Sept. 11 terror attack led to the first invocation of the mutual self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty. European allies also have a stake in preventing a nation of nearly 40 million people from collapsing into a failed state that could trigger more mass migration to Europe, or become a new breeding ground for terrorism.

Yet everything about Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal has been a slap to those allies. They didn’t want the U.S. to leave, but he did. The botched execution has left them scrambling to airlift out thousands of their citizens and thousands more Afghan translators and others who assisted each nation’s war effort.

And the snubs keep coming from Washington. In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

No wonder European leaders are apoplectic. U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the Trump -Biden agreement with the Taliban “a rotten deal,” in an interview this month after the Taliban started capturing chunks of the country. In Parliament on Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat —chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who served in the British forces in Afghanistan—called Mr. Biden “shameful” for blaming the retreat on a supposedly pusillanimous Afghan military. Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Mr. Biden for following President Trump’s lead in a “unilateral” negotiation with the Taliban.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17657/biden-appalling-mistake

The main mission was and should have remained one of self-defence. Once this was forgotten, muddle and a sapping of will set in. Moral ambivalence about our values and ourselves, which our enemies do not have about themselves, expressing itself as an embarrassment about using force in our self-defense, meant that softer edges were attached.

We needed strategic patience of the sort that has kept US forces on the Korean peninsula, or British forces in Cyprus, for a lifetime of decades. Our leaders, and mainly one, lacked the vision to have that patience and we shall pay a heavy price.

This withdrawal is therefore a set-back for the Free World as we square off to defend our way of life against Xi Jinping’s communist command group which, like the Taliban, does not understand win-win. “We win, you lose” is the next game.

[O]ur political class … was utterly naïve at “12/11” when the PRC was let into the WTO, expecting it to become like us. This was like letting the fox into the hen-house in the expectation that it would behave like a hen.

What is needed now is a swift cold shower of geo-strategic reality in our political classes. The time for self-harming distractions with “wokus pocus,” obsessing about sexual dysmorphia, Marxist “critical race theory” and “climate catastrophism” … — all of which the Chinese Communist Party is glad to encourage — must end.

Of course we, the Western Alliance, were going to withdraw from Afghanistan sometime. But not now and not like this. The twenty-year expedition in Afghanistan has been a litany of strategic and tactical errors starting with the failure to follow through on the success of Task Force Dagger to crush the Taliban when we most easily could have done so. The operationally brilliant first intervention by the Green Beret Special Forces “Horse Soldiers” of Alpha 595 (known to cinema-goers from the film “Twelve Strong” and now immortalised in an equestrian statue at 9/11 ground zero in New York), partnered with the Northern Alliance at the end of 2001, vectoring in modern Air Force fire-power from horse-back.

The Taliban were out of Kabul and on the run by November 2001 and Osama Bin Laden was on his way to the Tora Bora caves. US President George W. Bush’s decision to open up war in Iraq before the Afghan job was done was a costly deflection. In the second phase, the Afghanistan mission lacked focus. Crushing terrorist bases? Nation-building? Narcotics suppression? Educational programmes for girls? Which? All?

Our mission should have been kept perfectly clear and the maintenance of aim should have been constant. It should have been about our national security first and last. Security from Islamist terrorist attacks was to be maintained by dominating these hard lands to the exclusion of others, as the British had done with some success for decades after General “Bobs” Roberts culminating victory over Ayub Khan in September 1880 at Kandahar in the Second Afghan War. This was called the Great Game. Geo-politics are facts on the ground. It is the Great Game still.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hassan-nasrallahs-schadenfreude-opinion-677195

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah may be evil, but he’s not stupid. This was evident in his televised speech on Tuesday night, delivered in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

His oratory appropriately coincided with the ninth day of the “Mourning of Muharram,” observed by Muslims to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was killed by the forces of Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad.

What a perfect opportunity to assert Islamic victory over the West.
Gloating over the Taliban takeover, the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed terror-master compared the scene on Monday, when US personnel absconded from Kabul, to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“The United States is still ignorant,” he said, “and is repeating the same mistakes.”

It’s not that his heart was bleeding for the terrified Afghans desperate to escape their fate and attempting to board the US jets taking off from Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nor was his analogy meant to express sympathy for the South Vietnamese who faced the same predicament 46 years ago.

No, he couldn’t care less about the torture and killing of innocent people, certainly those who aren’t Shi’ites – especially not ones who spent two decades collaborating with Uncle Sam.

But he definitely loves witnessing Washington’s weakness on display for all the world to see and ridicule. It’s a sight that gives credence to all his hopes, dreams and predictions about the decay and eventual death of “America, the Great.” 

The “Great Satan,” that is.

“Biden wanted a civil war in Afghanistan through a fight between the Taliban and Afghan forces,” Nasrallah continued. “[And] the Americans… came out as humiliated, losers and defeated.”

Indeed, he added, not only did the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan “fail miserably,” but Biden’s behavior showed that Washington couldn’t be counted on to “fight on behalf of its allies.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/whats-in-store-for-the-women-of-afghanistan/

With Afghanistan to all intents and purposes now restored to the Taliban’s control,  the most devastating and tragic impact will be felt by women and girls. As Greg Sheridan has written in The Australian:

We are about to witness one of the worst tragedies for women and girls in modern history. From now on, once more, young girls, pre-teens, will be married off too much older men, often enough with multiple wives. Young girls won’t be allowed to go to school, they won’t be allowed to learn to read and write, let alone sing, they won’t be allowed to practice most careers, they won’t be allowed to go the bazaar without the permission, and generally the presence, of their controlling male relative.

Senator Amanda Stoker from Queensland also commented on Facebook, “Afghanistan’s women and children, who are—as shown by the photo (above) of pictures of women being painted out of the public eye—likely to face great suffering in the time ahead.”

The ABC is also reporting:        

For Afghan women, their increasing power is terrifying.

In early July, Taliban leaders, who took control of the provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar, issued an order to local religious leaders to provide them with a list of girls over the age of 15 and widows under the age of 45 for “marriage” with Taliban fighters.

If so-called progressives are  true to form, they will gloss over these actions as not representing “true Islam” but of militant extremists. This is anything but the case. What follows is a ten-point summary of what the religion of Islam actually teaches.[1]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17656/america-intelligence-failures

Just as the most optimistic among our leaders believed that Afghanistan had the potential to become a fledgling democracy, our leadership insisted that…. China would become a “stakeholder in the international order” and a trusted trading partner. Increased political freedom would follow economic growth, and a huge new marketplace would be opened to the West.

Now, though, China’s role in the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has revealed undeniably just how hostile China is to the West, and how dismissive it is even of its supposed allies in the developing world…. Apparently, more than four million lives worldwide were a small price to pay for increasing China’s power at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. When will our leaders open their eyes to that fact and act decisively to counter China’s ever more obvious attempts to achieve dominance over the West?

For years, it has been evident for anyone to see that our Afghanistan and China policies were not only ineffective, but that we were courting disaster by our lack of effective response. Our leaders have refused to acknowledge the increasing, and increasingly compelling, signs that our policies toward Afghanistan and China were failing. That is the true intelligence failure.

Let us hope and pray–and demand–that our leaders respond more effectively against the emerging China fiasco. The horrific scenes of the last few days will pale in comparison to what the world will experience if we stand aside and watch while China succeeds in its goal of becoming the world’s preeminent superpower.

One major intelligence failure by our leaders every twenty years is already one too many.

The U.S. and the West are experiencing two unfolding intelligence disasters. Oxford Languages succinctly defines the two possible meanings of the word “intelligence:” (1) the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, or (2) the collection of information of military or political value. What we are experiencing today is not chiefly a failure to collect information, but the ever more tangible inability of our leaders to apply the information they have acquired.

The two debacles began to unfold around the turn of the millennium, within twelve months of each other. We are now seeing the fruits of the first failure play out 24/7 before our very eyes: the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan despite twenty years of sacrifice and investment. The second, the failure to understand and counter the growing threat posed by China, is set soon to prove itself just as disastrous as the first. In responding to each of these two challenges, our leadership has demonstrated a profound lack of insight and skill: a true failure of intelligence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-afghanistan-taunt-joe-biden-withdrawal-11629236906?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It’s too early to know the wider strategic fallout from America’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. But there’s strong reason to doubt convenient claims that the retreat will help the U.S. balance a revisionist China. Beijing is more likely to see the display of fecklessness as an opening to exploit.

“Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” said President Biden in his defiant Monday speech.

Put aside that, because of the Taliban triumph, the U.S. now has more attention and troops devoted to Afghanistan than it did before the exit. Beijing is already using the debacle to taunt Taiwan and the U.S.

“Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate?” said an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party organ. “Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces,” the paper added, “the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere.”

China’s Foreign Ministry also took a victory lap in a press briefing Tuesday. Its spokeswoman said the Afghanistan war shows that the U.S. shouldn’t “interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” pointedly using the same language Beijing uses to object to America’s support of Taiwan’s independence. China says Taiwan’s status is an “internal” issue, though the self-governing democracy is a linchpin of security for Pacific states including Japan.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/08/17/welcome-to-the-post-american-world-n1470228

After the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Union began five years of aggressive subversion around the world, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Henry Kissinger and the elites in the US and Europe all predicted a Russian victory in the Cold War. The fall of Kabul is worse: In Vietnam, we faced a well-trained and equipped North Vietnamese Army; we were humiliated by 75,000 rag-tag irregulars in Afghanistan.

The big difference is that China’s economy is fifty times bigger than it was in 1975 — $11.8 trillion in constant 2010 prices, vs. $250 billion in 1975. That’s what happens when you grow at 8% a year for fifty years. China’s exports to the U.S.–now running at an all-time record–are just 3.5% of China’s $15 trillion GDP. But they comprise a fifth of all U.S. consumption of manufactured goods. It would take $1 trillion or more and perhaps a decade to replace most of America’s dependency on Chinese imports, especially electronics. Among other things, we would have to train hundreds of thousands of engineers and skilled workers.

You learned everything you need to know about Chinese foreign policy from “The Godfather” — keep your friends close and your enemies closer. China’s main concern is an Islamist insurgency in Xinjiang, and several thousand Uyghur jihadists trained in Syria and elsewhere who have returned to China. Russia’s main concern is jihad among its Muslim minority, a fifth of the population of the Russian Federation.

China’s “Godfather” move is to recognize the Taliban while admonishing them to stay out of Xinjiang and leave the Uyghurs to their fate. China and Russia are cementing their alliance with Iran, which provided weapons to the Taliban. Iran will join the Sino-Russian umbrella group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China will invest in Iran’s oil and gas, while it builds pipelines frantically to secure hydrocarbon supply from places the U.S. can’t touch.

The Biden administration is now begging Beijing and Moscow for help in Afghanistan. That will be expensive, as the South China Morning Post reports this morning:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken picked up the phone on Monday to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for a discussion on how the two countries could work together to achieve a “soft landing” for Afghanistan. He was told Beijing was willing, but Washington would need to step back the pressure on its greatest rival, according to China’s state media.

Wang earlier had spoken to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, with both sides agreeing that Beijing and Moscow should step up their communication and coordination over the Afghanistan situation.

In a flurry of diplomatic phone calls, Blinken also spoke to Lavrov, as well as Nato’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, the European Union’s high representative Josep Borrell and foreign ministers from Pakistan, Britain and Turkey, in the aftermath of the chaotic fall of the Afghan government as the Taliban took over Kabul and the presidential palace on Monday.

One reason that Blinken is so solicitous toward Moscow and Beijing is the presence of 10,000 American citizens in Afghanistan, all potential hostages.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/taliban-spokesman-afghan-women-will-be-happy-living-under-sharia-law/

Addressing the media at a press conference Tuesday in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised that the country’s women would embrace sharia law, the strict Islamic fundamentalist moral code the militant organization subscribes to and enforces for citizens.

“Our women are Muslim, they will also be happy to be living within our framework of Sharia,” he said, according to a translation from the Independent.

The group’s representative indicated that the rights of women will be recognized and respected under Taliban reign, insisting that nobody should be “worried about our norms and principles.” On Monday, the UN Security Council released a unanimous resolution, securing the agreement of all 15 member nations, calling for the establishment of a new representative and inclusive government in Afghanistan that guarantees the “full, equal, and meaningful participation of women.”

Given the Taliban’s treatment of women under its previous reign in the 1990s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have expressed skepticism with the terrorist entity’s pledge to suddenly adhere to international standards of freedom, democracy, and human dignity. Prior to the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Taliban ruled the native population with an iron fist, prohibiting dancing, music, and most inter-sex fraternizing. Women were typically forbidden from working, attending school, and leaving the home without a burqa and male escort.

“This is a proud moment for the whole nation,” the spokesman commented. “After 20 years of struggle, once again we have emancipated our country,” he said referencing the two-decade span during which the United States military occupied the nation, forcing the Taliban operatives to retreat to the countryside. While Afghan women were repressed under the Taliban’s rule, they enjoyed many privileges and liberties to travel, study, drive, and wear makeup and attire of their choice during the twenty years of U.S.-secured peace.

Mujahid also ensured that the Taliban’s former enemies, including Afghans who collaborated with the U.S., would not be targeted under the new regime, despite conflicting reports from multiple outlets that some militants have already started going door-to-door in Kabul tracking down U.S. allies and sympathizers.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-rift-of-polands-making/

The diplomatic crisis unfolding between Jerusalem and Warsaw is unfortunate. Eastern European countries have been staunch supporters of the United States and Israel in a way that their counterparts in the Western continent have long ceased to be.

As a result, conservative columnist Amnon Lord is among those stressing that Israel needs to be smart, not just right, when it comes to its relations with Poland.

Despite its nationalism, he recently wrote, Poland “is a type of ally. … The cooperation with it in terms of military aviation is a cornerstone of our national security. The Poles also buy weapons and other systems from us. Poland is also an important potential partner for Israel, together with the member countries of the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), with regard to Israel’s effort to crack the anti-Israel Western-European bloc.”

It’s more than a valid point. But let’s not kid ourselves.

Poland’s hysterical reiteration that it played no part in the Holocaust—other than being victimized by the occupation of their country first by Hitler and then by Stalin—is problematic. Though technically true, both in relation to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the reality where the former is concerned is more complicated.

For decades, any mention of the death camps in Poland has been pounced upon by Polish politicians and intellectuals as a lie, or at least, as misleading. German-occupied Poland did, however, house 457 Nazi camp complexes. The most notable of these, Auschwitz-Birkenau, is the site of the annual March of the Living, which attracts participants from all over the world, including Israel.

Warsaw’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge any role in or cooperation with the genocide of the Jews—let alone pursue and prosecute individual Polish collaborators—culminated in actual legislation. According to a law passed by the Polish parliament and then signed in February 2018 by President Andrzej Duda, “Whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.”

The outcry that ensued in Europe, the United States, and, of course, Israel, caused Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to amend the law, which he argued had merely been intended to “defend Poland’s good name.” He stated that the “correction” would be to switch violations from criminal offenses to civil ones.