RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/why-we-failed-the-american-exit-from?token=

While the leader of the free world hunkers down at Camp David and his top spokeswoman is “out of office,” many of us are left wondering what to make of the horrific images coming out of Afghanistan.

In lieu of an explanation from President Biden, I asked some of the most thoughtful people I could think of to answer the question: What are we to make of what just happened? What is the meaning of it for Afghanistan, for America and for the world?

Some served in Afghanistan. Others made policy decisions that shaped the war. Still others have been bearing witness to it — and helping the rest of us make sense of it — for two decades.

Some believe the collapse was inevitable, even as they acknowledge the tragedy. Others believe it was avoidable and that, as Gen. H.R. McMaster puts it below, “it will be years before the stain of 2021 can be effaced.” — BW

Blame Our Incompetent Leaders. Especially Our Generals.
By Thomas Joscelyn
America should never fight a war like the one in Afghanistan ever again. From the very beginning, America’s military brass and political leaders were ambivalent about the conflict. Their incompetence has now culminated in a Taliban victory.
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Blame President Bill Clinton. His administration didn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. Clinton and his advisers passed up multiple opportunities to target Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda threat manifested on Clinton’s watch, leading to 9/11 and, ultimately, the war in Afghanistan.
Blame President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001, they had the opportunity to deliver a death blow to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But instead of committing the forces necessary to hunt down bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and others, they hesitated. The U.S. relied on local warlords and other actors, some of whom were duplicitous. Bin Laden and Zawahiri finagled their way out of the remote Tora Bora Mountains. Al Qaeda regrouped in the years that followed.
Blame Barack Obama. Obama decided it was in our “vital national interest” to help the Afghans build the “capacity” to defend their country on their own. In December 2009, he committed forces — at their peak, more than 100,000 of them — to accomplish the task. More Americans were killed in Afghanistan during Obama’s war than in any other period of this debacle. But Obama wasn’t fighting to win. His surge in forces came with an expiration date of just 18 months and then he chased a fanciful peace deal with the Taliban. To his credit, Obama ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. But Al Qaeda lived, despite Obama’s attempts to declare the group dead.
Blame Donald Trump. His instinct was to bring the soldiers home. Instead, he agreed to a small increase in America’s footprint, claiming that the U.S. was fighting for “victory.” He didn’t mean it.
Blame Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who portrayed the Taliban as America’s counterterrorism partner, saying the group had agreed to “work alongside of us to destroy” Al Qaeda. Trump repeated Pompeo’s claim, saying the Taliban “will be killing terrorists for us.” This is nonsense. The Taliban’s men are terrorists and there’s no evidence they’ve broken with Al Qaeda.
Blame the generals. It is true that they were asked to fight a war that was undermined by America’s erratic political leadership. But no general ever stood up to say: No. We cannot prosecute an unwinnable war.
Since 2018, the U.S. military has been invested in the State Department’s delusional peace process with the Taliban, repeatedly claiming that there was no “military solution” to the conflict. But this was always a lie.
As the Taliban takes control of Kabul, Americans can see for themselves that the jihadists had a “military solution” in mind all along. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were never ambivalent about their jihad. They were fighting to win.
In the end, President Joseph Biden wasn’t ambivalent about the war either. He was willing to watch the jihadists resurrect the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And so they have.
Thomas Jocelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a senior editor at The Long War Journal.
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The White House Transforms Stalemate Into Catastrophe
By Eli Lake
To those cheering the ending of an endless war, this was all inevitable. Afghanistan, they remind us, is the graveyard of empires. It was always hubris to think America could tame such a wild and perilous land.
Don’t believe it. A better way to think of America’s humiliating defeat in its longest war is that President Joe Biden, and President Donald Trump before him, enabled a catastrophe to end a stalemate.
Let’s just stipulate the fair criticisms of the 20-year war for Afghanistan. Its leaders and warlords are corrupt. Its military is weak, despite billions of dollars of U.S. investment and 2,448 U.S. soldiers lost. In most of the country, the culture is hostile to anything resembling liberalism. Many of America’s allies in the country were fiends.
All true. Yet the status quo of two weeks ago was far better than what is coming.
Consider a few recent headlines. In Shir Khan Bandar, a port city on the border with Tajikistan, an order went out instructing local imams to provide a list of unmarried women and widows, beginning at age 15, so they can be “married” off to Taliban commanders. In Kandahar province, Taliban fighters tortured and then murdered a popular comic named Nazar Mohammad. When asked Sunday whether the Taliban would return to meting out medieval punishments like amputation and stoning, a spokesman for the terror group said it would be up to the Islamic courts.
That’s a tragedy, say those Americans who applaud war’s ending. But why, they ask, should another American die so Afghan girls can go to school? This misses the price paid in American honor.
As a candidate in 2020, Biden made a similar mistake. He was asked on Face the Nation whether or not he would bear some responsibility for the treatment of Afghan women if the Taliban seized control of the country after he as president ordered a withdrawal. “No I do not,” he said. “Are you telling me we should go to war with China because of what they are doing to a million Uighurs out in the west in concentration camps, is that what you’re saying to me? . . . I bear zero responsibility.”
This is morally illiterate. The question is not whether America should prevent an atrocity in a country where it is not fighting. It is whether America should keep a few thousand forces in a country that have prevented the atrocities that are now unfolding.
Bill Clinton’s decision not to intervene in Rwanda and Barack Obama’s decision to call off strikes in Syria at the last minute were shameful. But they were failures to respond to a horror not of America’s making. Biden’s decision is resulting in a horror which he had no intention of preventing.
In this respect, Biden’s closest parallel is Donald Trump. When Trump announced by tweet that he was ending U.S. support for the Kurdish fighters that helped destroy the ISIS caliphate, it forced them to side with our adversaries in Russia and Iran, as our ostensible ally, Turkey, invaded the Kurdish regions with jihadist militias. But Trump only betrayed a brave militia. Biden has betrayed an entire country.
Was it worth it? Now, America is humiliated by the same fascist gang that hosted al Qaeda before 9/11. That gang will almost certainly offer a safe haven for jihadists with revenge on their minds. Women who dreamed of a 21st century life will be forced back into the 8th. Allies that count on America to protect them from China, Russia or Iran will now think twice if that protection will come in their hour of need. All to bring a few thousand forces home from a war fought to a stalemate. Shame.
Eli Lake is a columnist for Bloomberg and a fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin.
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The Stain of 2021
By H.R. McMaster
We heard that it was past time to “end the endless wars.” But wars do not end when one party disengages and the enemy is waging an endless jihad.
We heard that we had accomplished nothing in Afghanistan. But then we watched as the Afghan people, especially women, overnight lost the freedoms they secured over two decades with the support of the United States and our partners.
We heard that the Taliban had changed, that it would share power, that it would be more benign this time. Then we we watched as the Taliban forced “marriages” with 15-year-old girls as cover for rape and gunned down civil servants in public squares.
We heard that the Taliban was distinct from and different from Al Qaeda. But anyone with eyes could see that those groups are intertwined and the reestablishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is as much a victory for Al Qaeda and other jihadists as it is for the Taliban.
We heard politicians enjoin “the international community” to express disappointment in the Taliban’s behavior. But the idea that these enemies of humanity are concerned about chiding tweets or disapproving speeches in American and European capitals is ludicrous.
We hear that Afghan forces should have fought harder, that they rolled over, that they lacked will. But tens of thousands of Afghans made the ultimate sacrifice and the psychological blow delivered through America’s sudden retreat fell harder than even the physical blows that the Taliban delivered.
We heard, again and again, that there was no military solution to the war in Afghanistan. But the Taliban clearly had one in mind.
We hear that the consequences of this lost war can be managed. But self-defeat based in incompetence and lack of will should be cause for grave concern.
There is much more suffering and violence ahead. It will be years before the stain of 2021 can be effaced.
H.R. McMaster retired from the United States Army after 34 years. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and is the author of “Battlegrounds” and “Dereliction of Duty.”
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American Hubris and Mendacity
By Jacob Siegel
The fall of Afghanistan is tragic but entirely unavoidable. American officials could claim for years that the country was progressing toward a day of independence — but only by preventing that day from coming.
It didn’t have to be this way. By 2004, the American-led war had achieved a partial but significant victory against both Al Qaeda, the international terrorist group that attacked the U.S. in September 2001, and the Taliban, the Islamist government of Afghanistan that harbored them. But rather than leverage that victory into peace, the Bush administration decided to stay and invent a new Afghanistan.
In 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president after being hand picked by the U.S. Karzai’s rule was subsidized by CIA agents handing him tens of millions of dollars in cash in suitcases and shopping bags. Karzai, who later said this “ghost-money” was “nothing unusual,” won re-election in 2009 “after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes,” according to The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. In 2013, an anonymous American official told the Associated Press that “the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.”
Extrapolate the Karzai fix over 20 years and you’ll have a sense of why average Afghans were not keen to stand and fight against the better organized and far more motivated Taliban. However capable isolated Afghan military units might be, at the national level it was a paper army that existed to satisfy American, not Afghan, priorities. Cut the cord of U.S. funding and military power, and it simply stops playing.
In 2012, I spent six months in Western Afghanistan as a U.S. army officer. While the war had long since ceased to serve any vital national security interest, it became clear why we were there: it provided lucrative opportunities for the defense industry and a relatively safe means of career advancement for senior U.S. officials and military officers. To justify this state of affairs, they denigrated the notion of military victory as unsophisticated and obsolete. The fact that America was no longer fighting the war to win was no reason to end it, they insisted. But of course that is the best reason, since a war fought for any purpose other than a commonly recognized standard of victory, tends to become a malleable instrument to serve the people leading it.
John Sopko, who headed the Congressional watchdog group on the war, cites two causes of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan. One is the “hubris, that we can somehow take the country that was desolate in 2001, and turn it into a little Norway.” The other is the “mendacity” of U.S. military and civilian leaders who misled the American public by exaggerating meager accomplishments and holding out the promise that, finally, we were “ready to turn the corner.”
When it comes to the nation’s longest war, the Biden administration, amazingly, has been steadfast and weak. Ending a war that long ago stopped protecting vital American interests took real resolve. But Biden did so while on a retreat in Camp David, where he’s spent days avoiding questions from reporters while Afghanistan explodes. Meanwhile, Jen Psaki is on vacation.
Despite knowing for months that this day was coming, military planners could not manage to keep many millions of dollars in U.S. equipment from immediately falling into the Taliban’s hands. They failed to arrange safe passage for American personnel now stranded in Afghanistan. Worst of all are the pathetic public attempts to bribe the Taliban by promising future payments to the group only if they refrain from attacking the U.S. embassy. Once again, as happened with ISIS in Iraq, the U.S. has armed its enemy.
Jacob Siegel is a senior writer at Tablet magazine. He co-hosts Manifesto! a Podcast with the novelist Phil Klay. Siegel served with the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2006-2007 and Afghanistan in 2012.
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The Price of Joe Biden’s Failure
By Nikki Haley
I will never forget the day my husband Michael deployed to Afghanistan as a Major in the South Carolina Army National Guard: January 10, 2013. It was tough for our family to watch him go. But we knew that he, like so many Americans, was doing his duty and protecting our country.
Now I’ll never forget August 15, 2021: the day Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. Just a month ago, President Biden assured us it was “highly unlikely” this would happen. America is now begging the Taliban to let us remove our embassy personnel. It’s a humiliating sight.
We went to Afghanistan in 2001 for one reason: To destroy the Taliban government that protected the terrorists that came for us. Over the two decades that followed, we maintained a small yet capable military presence in Afghanistan. By this past January, we had just 2,500 troops there. That’s fewer soldiers than we have in about a dozen other countries today and our presence kept the Taliban in check.
In April, President Biden announced we would withdraw the remainder of our forces without any pre-conditions on Taliban conduct. No one should have been surprised at what’s happened since and everyone should be honest about what will happen next: The Taliban will enslave the Afghan people once again.
There are many barbaric regimes in the world. It is not America’s duty to police them. Afghanistan, however, is different. Twenty years ago, the terrorists bred in that country came for us. Now they are getting what they wanted.
They aren’t the only enemy satisfied by our defeat. China, Russia and Iran are watching a weak and retreating America unable to protect our interests. As a result, America is less safe today. That’s the biggest price we’ll pay for Biden’s failure in Afghanistan.
Nikki Haley is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former governor of South Carolina.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-afghanistan-surrender-withdrawal-ashraf-ghani-kabul-saigon-jihadist-9-11-11629054041?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden’s statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history by a Commander in Chief at such a moment of American retreat. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Mr. Biden sent a confirmation of U.S. abandonment that absolved himself of responsibility, deflected blame to his predecessor, and more or less invited the Taliban to take over the country.

With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed. Taliban fighters captured Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country while the U.S. frantically tried to evacuate Americans. The jihadists the U.S. toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden will now fly their flag over the U.S. Embassy building on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

***

Our goal all along has been to offer constructive advice to avoid this outcome. We criticized Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban and warned about the risks of his urge to withdraw in a rush, and we did the same for Mr. Biden. The President’s advisers offered an alternative, as did the Afghanistan Study Group. Mr. Biden, as always too assured of his own foreign-policy acumen, refused to listen.

Mr. Biden’s Saturday self-justification exemplifies his righteous dishonesty. “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” Mr. Biden said. But the Afghans were willing to fight and take casualties with the support of the U.S. and its NATO allies, especially air power. A few thousand troops and contractors could have done the job and prevented this rout.

Worse is his attempt to blame his decisions on Mr. Trump: “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/running-away-afghanistan-jamie-glazov/

The Biden administration’s feckless withdrawal from Afghanistan is sending the worst possible message to our enemies across the world. Our rivals are already convinced of our lack of morale and our fear of the consequences from a response serious enough to concentrate their minds. Twenty years after 9/11, and we still haven’t figured out the nature and aims of those who for decades have in word and bloody deed told us we are an enemy they want to destroy.

Instead we cling to our shopworn belief that “diplomatic engagement” can deter and stop a fanatic enemy, hoping words can substitute for deeds. But all we’ll achieve is further damage to our already fraying national prestige.

The plans to withdraw the last of our forces began during the Trump administration, which thought it could negotiate in good faith with a foe that has already demonstrated that agreements and covenants are mere “tactical adjuncts,” as Robert Conquest said of the Soviets, to their actual strategic intentions to be realized with violence. Here’s failed lesson number one: “diplomatic engagement” works only when those sitting across the table truly believe that if they violate the terms, as the Taliban have done with the Trump agreement, they will suffer serious consequences.

But in just six months Biden has shown that his team has no interest in any response other than timid diplospeak and maybe some showy cruise-missile fireworks. His cringing solicitude for the Iranians and obvious desperation to rewrite the nuclear deal––signaled by his removal of some sanctions without any reciprocal concessions––have made it clear throughout the region that he, like his boss Barack Obama, can be had. No one in the Khamenei cartel or among the Taliban fears or respects this administration or our power.

Why should they? Biden announced a date-certain withdrawal without any conditions, the same error Obama made when he skedaddled from Iraq in 2011. Worse, Biden abandoned our military bases and withdrew the in-country air support that gave the government in Kabul a fighting chance against the Taliban. Pocketing these gifts, the Taliban started their march through the country two weeks later, and since then have been rolling up region after region and city after city. According to the Pentagon, they could be in Kabul in a month. (In fact, on Sunday Taliban fighters were seen in Kabul, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the Afghan National Reconciliation Council was left to negotiate the transfer of power to the Taliban.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/joe_bidens_afghan_fiasco.html

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted that the Afghan situation is “manifestly not Saigon.”  This has been suggested because helicopters are being used to evacuate embassy personnel.  Perhaps it is more like Benghazi.  In both cases, the commander-in-chief left the scene: Obama to bed and Biden to Camp David.  Americans have been advised to “shelter in place” and fill out a Repatriation Assistance Request.  Civilians are advised not to come to the embassy or airport.  There has been no mention of the archaic notion of “women and children first.”

The president was confident that Afghanistan would not fall to the Taliban.  He claimed this because the Afghan government has “300,000 well-equipped” troops. He said they were “as well-equipped as any army in the world.” The United States spared no expense in equipping the Afghan army:  Airplanes, helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, night-vision goggles, a flight simulator, and even the latest Black Hawk attack helicopters.  The president claimed, “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more—more competent in terms of conducting war.”  With the rapid surrender of government forces it now seems that the Taliban is “as well-equipped as any army in the world.”

The first explanation for this fiasco is that it was a total surprise.  The AP reported Biden was “stunned.” “This Week” co-anchor and chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz said Sunday that the U.S. was “caught unaware and completely off guard” by the Taliban’s rapid advance in Afghanistan. She said that there was a “massive intelligence failure.”  A earlier U.S. intelligence assessment said Kabul could be encircled in 30 days and could fall to the Taliban within 90 days, but the insurgents captured most of Afghanistan’s major cities in less than a week and entered the capital on Sunday.  NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel disagreed.  Engel was asked whether it is surprising “not that it is happening, as much as how fast it is happening,”  “No. everyone keeps saying that. I’ve been listening all day: ‘oh my God, we’re shocked at how fast’ — I’m not shocked at all! I thought Kabul was going to fall about now. And lots of people I spoke to believed that . . . It was well known that the security forces were collapsing, a month, two months, three months ago.”

The administration is attempting to spin that as a victory.  The president stated, “We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. [Osama] Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.” Secretary of State Blinken claimed, the United States’ original mission in Afghanistan, launched to oust al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been fulfilled.  Washington had prevented further attacks by militants harbored by the Taliban.  Richard Engel viewed the situation differently.  Engel reported that “many will see this as a humiliating exit” for the United States. My only quibble would be to ask, “many”? Who doesn’t see this as a humiliating exit?”

https://www.steynonline.com/11598/the-scale-of-humiliation?fbclid=IwAR1881cNi_fEzOQEDQwjU0Rqrral052ftbIJH3o4MrEO96lSk_Hxthij0sc

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:

Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise

You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?

But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:

Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours – which is close enough for US intelligence work.

Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election – and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?

Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency – most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.

To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?

Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.

So what’s the point?

Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-humiliation-in-afghanistan

HUMILIATION IN AFGHANISTAN. The government of Afghanistan is falling fast in the face of a new Taliban offensive. The United States is urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately.” The Biden administration has sent a small force of troops to speed the evacuation. In a particularly telling development, the U.S. is asking the Taliban — pretty please! — not to target the American embassy when they take over the capital of Kabul.

At the Pentagon Wednesday, a reporter asked spokesman John Kirby, a retired Navy admiral, whether the Defense Department “could have done a better job…in articulating what the goals were in Afghanistan and what things were supposed to look like or what they’re not expected to look like when we leave?”

Kirby’s answer was painfully revealing. He began by saying he couldn’t speak for the entire 20-year history of the Afghan war. He conceded that “the goals did migrate over time.” And then he said: “It would be wrong for us not to acknowledge that we did help enable some progress in Afghanistan. More children in schools, including girls, economic and political and social opportunities for women. A democratically elected government — not saying it’s not flawless, but a government. And living conditions that are much better, including life expectancy.”

Kirby echoed a statement made nearly five years ago, in October 2016, by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the war began, Kerry said, “maternal mortality in childbirth in Afghanistan has gone down by 75 percent. Average life expectancy has risen from 42 years to 62 years. Access to basic health care has skyrocketed from nine percent to 67 percent. In 2001, there was only one television station, and it was owned by the government. Now, there are 75 stations and all but two are privately owned. Back then, there were virtually no cell phones, zero. Today, there are 18 million cell phones covering about 90 percent of residential areas connecting Afghans to the world.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/afghanistan-illustrates-bidens-disastrous-foreign-policy-instincts/

He’s usually wrong, and he’s never called to account for his policy flip-flops.

” The problem is that his instincts are complete garbage.”

T he unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, trans-administrational failure. It is a humiliation.

Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives and hundreds of billions spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure and education, the country is likely to fall to radicals in less than 20 days. As of this writing, the Taliban are routing Afghan troops with seeming ease, taking Kandahar, Herat, and closing in on Kabul. The United States has been forced to send 3,000 troops to evacuate Americans to avoid another Fall of Saigon moment.

And for the past 20 years, Joe Biden has been on every side of nearly every position on Afghanistan — usually the wrong one at the wrong time. It’s surreal that a person so uncannily incompetent, so tenaciously wrong on foreign policy, could rise to the presidency, but here we are.

It’s true that support for invading Afghanistan after 9/11 was overwhelming. In October 2001, a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 88 percent of Americans backed military action abroad, and 66 percent supported “sending large numbers of ground troops into combat in Afghanistan.” The United States was going in to weed out those who attacked us. What about the aftermath?

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/moment-of-truth-for-the-biden-doctrine/91615/

Only a month ago President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and assured the American people that “there is going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” Today, the State Department announced that several thousand additional military personnel will be sent to Kabul to provide security as we airlift our civilians from our embassy.

That’s because President Biden’s strategy for withdrawal of our GIs from Afghanistan has become a debacle. We are not saying that Mr. Biden is to blame for this war. That blame attaches to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet in his first major war decision — to refuse, as our enemies are on the march, to adjust his plan of appeasement but rather to insist on withdrawing our troops — he has proven himself to be a catastrophe as a war leader.

And one who can’t give his own countrymen straight talk. The news today is that Mr. Biden is rushing something like 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to “help,” as NBC reported it, “secure the withdrawal of most staff from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul” amid “growing alarm over a Taliban military offensive.” NBC cited “officials.” The NBC quoted the Pentagon press secretary as saying one Army battalion and two Marine battalions will head to the airport at Kabul.

The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, is quoted as telling reporters: “We are further reducing our civilian footprint in Kabul in light of the evolving security situation.” What diplomatic malarky. The State Department cited the Taliban’s advances and rising violence, NBC reported. That’s been plain to Democrats and Republicans for weeks, as Mr. Biden insists on getting our GIs out of Afghanistan whatever enemy advances are occuring.