RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-friends-the-taliban-biden-administration-al-qaeda-haqqani-network-afghanistan-11630954075?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Taliban claimed Monday to have conquered the last major opposition to its takeover of Afghanistan, routing remnants of the former Afghan military and others in the Panjshir Valley. No doubt the abandoned U.S. military equipment helped. Let’s hope the Talibs feel grateful—because the Biden Administration plans to depend on them for years to come.

The White House hopes Americans forget about all this as it focuses on domestic affairs. But this is one of the more extraordinary political transformations in U.S. history. The Taliban, the sponsors of Osama bin Laden and killers of Americans for 20 years, have overnight turned into a courted U.S. partner.

“A new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun. It’s one in which we will lead with our diplomacy,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared recently, almost as if he was announcing a triumph like the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The military mission is over. A new diplomatic mission has begun.”

Mr. Blinken says the U.S. will now work with the Taliban to get the remaining Americans and Afghan allies out of the country, and he’s optimistic. “The Taliban has committed to let anyone with proper documents leave the country in a safe and orderly manner. They’ve said this privately and publicly many times,” said the Secretary of State.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17709/china-crime-of-the-century

The President of the United States does not need perfect knowledge to act.

The failure to share information when it has an obligation to do so is enough reason to impose severe costs on Beijing, but there are two additional reasons — both sufficient in and of themselves—to do so.

First, for at least five weeks, Chinese officials first covered up and then lied about the human-to-human transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, telling the world COVID-19 was not contagious when they knew it in fact was…. Second, China’s military is working on the next generation of pathogens.

If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next microbe, virus, or germ from China could end non-Chinese societies. This will be Communist China’s civilization-killer.

The next pandemic, therefore, could be the one that leaves China as the world’s only viable society. The world, therefore, needs something far more important than justice or compensation. It needs deterrence.

Beijing’s determined campaign to collect genetic profiles of foreigners while preventing the transfer to recipients outside China of the profiles of Chinese is another indication that the Chinese military, in violation of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention, is building ethnic-specific bioweapons.

Up to now, Biden has shown little — and sometimes no — interest in holding China accountable…. So far, Biden, with his feeble reaction, has shown Xi Jinping that Beijing can, without cost, kill millions of non-Chinese with a pathogen. Xi, unless stopped, will certainly do so again.

On August 27, the Biden administration released an unclassified summary of the intelligence community’s report on the origins of COVID-19. The IC, America’s 18 intelligence agencies, could reach only a few definitive conclusions. The agencies said they needed more information, but the world now knows enough to begin imposing severe costs on China.

America and other nations must impose those costs to prevent China’s Communist Party from releasing a civilization-killing disease. Yes, the People’s Liberation Army is now developing pathogens to destroy non-Chinese societies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/democracy-and-foreign-policy-bruce-thornton/

On Tuesday August 30, the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on the last plane, a few days after the terrorist murder of nearly two hundred people, including 13 U.S. military personnel. The fate of untold numbers of Americans who have been left behind remains uncertain. This bloody and shameful ending of 20 years of U.S. engagement in that country has confirmed the feckless incompetence and rookie mistakes of the Biden foreign policy team. Biden and his advisors both civilian and military should be held accountable for this disaster, the consequence of partisan politics, careerist mediocrity, and stale foreign policy paradigms.

Yet we also need to acknowledge the responsibility that we the voting people have in shaping foreign policy decisions, a role sanctioned by our rights to deliberate on policy, choose our leaders, and hold them accountable. In other words, the very institutions and rights that create political freedom paradoxically can also endanger that freedom by compromising our national security.

From Thucydides to Winston Churchill, this weakness of democracies in conducting foreign policy has been a constant theme in the history of war. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed about foreign affairs, “A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.” Similarly, in his 1946 The Gathering Storm, Churchill highlighted “the structure and habits of democratic states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and conviction” necessary for national security, and in which “even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years.”

“Structures” like regularly scheduled elections, for example––which voters can use to punish leaders for unpopular policies, and reward those who promise to gratify the voters’ preference for “butter” over “guns”–– ensure that every two years any policy is hostage to the self-interested or sometimes irrational vox populi. In matters of foreign policy, civilian control of the military through a president, who is also commander-in-chief, creates accountability that often for elected policy-makers an exorbitant political risk that can inhibit necessary policies out of fear of electoral retribution.

Equally important, the President and Congress can propose policies that also carry risks that aren’t always made apparent, or aren’t adequately explained to the voters, many of whom pay no attention to foreign affairs anyway. Dubious ideals and assumptions about what complexly diverse foreign cultures believe or value can lead to policies and aims doomed to fail.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/insanity-the-u-s-reportedly-handed-a-list-of-americans-to-the-taliban/

General Kenneth McKenzie told the press today that Americans “share a common purpose,” and counterterrorism intel, with the Taliban — a military group we were bombing only a few weeks ago. Politico now reports that U.S. officials had handed the Taliban a list of “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies” so that they could be granted entry into the U.S.-controlled airport at Kabul.

Andrew McCarthy has already hit Joe Biden for his capitulation to the Islamic group earlier this week. Still, it’s worth noting that we just apparently provided this useful list of names to the same Taliban that says there’s no proof that bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11, that threatened Americans only days ago, and that is reportedly already hunting down and executing Afghans who partnered with the U.S. If Biden holds to his August 31 deadline and leaves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans behind, the Taliban now have a list to work off of. “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” an anonymous defense official said. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-will-trust-us-after-afghanistan/#slide-1

Our disaster in brief:

Following 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.

The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.

Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.

Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”

On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.

In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.

Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/26/shame/

As of midafternoon on Thursday, several hours after the killing of innocents began, Joe Biden still had not addressed the nation to mourn the devastating loss of life—including at least 12 American troops—from terror attacks near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

His lengthy absence on the deadliest day for the U.S. military in a decade was in sharp contrast to his conduct on January 6, 2021. Shortly after 4 p.m. that day, less than two hours after the start of the raucous protest, Biden gave a speech from his home in Delaware.

Fuming with rage, Biden spoke for more than eight minutes. “Our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden ranted. “This is not dissent, it’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. It’s insurrection.” The words of a president, Biden said, can inspire. “They also can incite.” He demanded that President Trump “go on television now . . . and demand an end to this siege. Step up.”

“The world is watching,” Biden warned.

The world is watching now, too. The world has been watching as this fast-moving catastrophe reached its inevitable apex on Thursday when at least two suicide bombings took the lives of 11 Marines and one Navy corpsman, wounding at least a dozen more servicemembers. The situation undoubtedly will worsen while thousands of American troops remain in a country now run by terrorists ostensibly to defend a country now run by an incompetent, and largely AWOL, commander in chief. (Biden finally took the podium around 5:30 p.m.)

The difference between Biden’s MIA routine on Thursday versus his quick reaction on January 6 is representative of how his administration has handled the first eight months of his term. While legitimate terror threats fester overseas, Biden and his top military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials have fixated on the brief disturbance on Capitol Hill on January 6.

Instead of focusing on his job, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has played politics since before Inauguration Day. He issued a statement on January 13 signed by the head of each branch of the U.S. military to condemn the Capitol protest: 

The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process. We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law. The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection. On January 20, 2021, in accordance with the Constitution, confirmed by the states and the courts, and certified by Congress, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.

Attorney General Merrick Garland compared January 6 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people including more than a dozen children. He promised to make the Capitol breach probe his top priority as head of the U.S. Department of Justice. In June, Garland held a press conference to present the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an assessment that Biden ordered on his first day in office. “President Biden directed his national security team to lead a 100-day comprehensive review of U.S. Government efforts to address domestic terrorism, which has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today,” the White House announced.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-tried-send-pallets-cash-taliban-kabul-fell-daniel-greenfield/\

On August 14, Secretary of State Blinken spoke with Afghanistan’s former president and promised that the Biden administration would provide a bulk shipment of dollars.

The next day Kabul fell.

On that same call, Afghanistan’s former leader had agreed to surrender power to the Taliban. 

The Biden administration had effectively agreed to provide a massive infusion of cash to the Taliban. But the final deal fell through, the Afghan government fled, and the Taliban took Kabul.

The bulk shipment of dollars never did arrive. 

Biden’s diplomats scrambled to evacuate from Kabul. Ajmal Ahmady, the governor of DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, already had a ticket and headed to the airport. He managed to get on a military plane.

Since then he’s tweeted that he was warned that the Taliban had come looking for him.

The Taliban were hoping to get their hands on Afghanistan’s money, but much of it is in the United States. The most tangible part of Afghanistan’s assets, $1.3 billion in gold, is sitting in downtown Manhattan, a little bit south of Ground Zero, in the vaults of the Federal Reserve.

If there were any justice, that money would be used to compensate the police officers, firefighters, and workers who died on that day or later on from ailments related to 9/11.

Meanwhile, all the Taliban have to do is fly into JFK, take an Uber to 33 Liberty Street, and ask to be taken down to the basement to see all the bars of gold. And even in Biden’s America and De Blasio’s New York City, they might have trouble walking away with over a billion in gold bars. 

Not unless they trade their camos and kameezes for Black Lives Matter t-shirts.

The United States did plenty of dumb things in Afghanistan, but it kept the gold locked up in the basement vaults and $3.1 billion of DAB’s assets went into U.S. Treasury bills and bonds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/how-bidens-decisions-afghanistan-benefit-china-joseph-hippolito/

No matter what else he might do, Joe Biden will be remembered forever for inciting the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, abandoning American civilians who remain trapped there and displaying utter contempt for American soldiers who have died there. Those soldiers include the ones killed in the barbaric suicide bombing in Kabul yesterday.

Those events raise a puzzling question: Why would a veteran of nearly five decades in Washington, a former Senator and vice president, risk destroying his own legacy?

Perhaps Americans need to consider that Biden’s decisions reflect his and his family’s previous dealings with China, which views the United States as its main competition for world dominance.

FrontPage Magazine explored China’s possible interference in November’s Presidential election in “Beijing Is Called For Biden,” China’s clandestine support for Black Lives Matter in “Beijing’s Lies Matter” and COVID-19’s role as a potential bioweapon in “China Virus, Indeed.”

China benefits tremendously as American influence evaporates in Afghanistan. Those benefits came not by accident but from deliberate foresight and preparation.

Afghanistan contains a range of minerals worth between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. The United States Geological Survey estimated that the country has 2.2 trillion tons of iron ore, 60 million metric tons of copper, and 1.4 million tons of rare earths, as well as gold, silver, platinum, uranium, aluminum and lithium.

Rare earths are indispensable for producing consumer and military electronics, especially guidance and communications systems. Rare earths also can provide the key for Afghanistan’s economic recovery.

“Afghanistan’s rich mineral resources, if exploited effectively, could prove to be the best substitutes for foreign aid and decrease the country’s dependence on donor countries and foreign support,” wrote Ahmad Shah Katawazai, a former diplomat who belonged to the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan. “Robust policies, strong institutional arrangements together with clear policy direction will pave the way for attracting both domestic and foreign investors.”

Enter China, which already owns a monopoly in processing rare earths.

In 2016, China signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of the now-deposed president, Ashraf Ghani. As part of that agreement, China sent $100 million in aid. That funding provided the seed money for China to become the largest investor in Afghan business, and to spend $62 billion on Afghan infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Projects include natural gas pipelines, electrical transmission, fiber optics networks, and massive highway and railway reconstruction. Two pivotal lines are the Five Nations Railway, which links China to Iran through Afghanistan, and a north-south route to Pakistan, a key Chinese ally.

By asserting itself economically in Afghanistan, China does more than enhance its presence as a major player in a volatile region. Access to increased mineral wealth strengthens China’s dominance in rare earths, making such developed countries as the United States more dependent on that nation.

The Chinese also can mine Afghan uranium, which they can use for their own nuclear weapons or send to Iran or Pakistan.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/25/afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-experts/

At the beginning of July, US president Joe Biden told the press it was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would retake the whole of Afghanistan.

This was clearly a prediction based on what the experts had told him, from military strategists to intelligence agencies. But by 11 August, the experts had changed their tune. A US official told the press that Taliban fighters could be in a position to besiege Kabul within 30 days and possibly take it within 90.

Just four days later, on 15 August, the Taliban took control of Kabul, and with it, Afghanistan. In the end, it didn’t take 30 days, or 90 days – but four days.

So much for intelligence. So much for experts. So much for all those who claimed to know how things really were in Afghanistan. As the US joint chiefs of staff chair, General Mark Milley, told reporters last week, he and his colleagues had underestimated the speed of the Taliban’s advance. ‘There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days’, he said.

That a senior military official can admit that the US and its allies had no idea that a state they built was about to collapse is a spectacular admission. It tells us that all the intelligence gatherers, the planners and the nation-building technocrats – in short, the experts – had no idea what was actually happening in a country the US and its allies had been occupying for nearly two decades.

But this wasn’t an aberration. It wasn’t a catastrophic but momentary lapse in intelligence. The experts haven’t just got it wrong on Afghanistan over the past few months – exaggerating the resilience of the Afghan army and government and downplaying the Taliban’s resurgence.

No, the experts have been getting it wrong on Afghanistan throughout this 20-year-long tragedy. Indeed, the whole bloody debacle has been marked by a conspicuous expert failure to understand the dynamics of this still tribal country. And the result has been a fatally flawed attempt to impose a prefabricated political order on a recalcitrant society.

This was apparent right from the outset, when President George W Bush launched the war on Afghanistan in October 2001. At the time, expert failure was certainly evident at the level of intelligence gathering. An unnamed adviser to a US Army Special Forces team told interviewers in 2017 that he was repeatedly asked during the early stages of the conflict, ‘who are the bad guys, where are they?’. He didn’t know. It was a sentiment clearly shared by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who complained in September 2003, ‘I have no visibility into who the bad guys are. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.’

The US and its allies were not just ‘woefully deficient in human intelligence’. This was a war waged in spite of the social and political realities of Afghanistan. It was the product of ignorance and technocratic hubris.