RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/27/biden-turns-the-taliban-into-a-military-superpower/

A day after at least 13 U.S. soldiers were killed at the Kabul airport, it’s still unclear how many Americans will be abandoned in Afghanistan by the Biden administration. What we do know, though, is that most of the U.S. weaponry in the country will not be recovered. It’s as if Joe Biden himself was the military procurement chief for the Taliban.

Until Thursday, there had been no U.S. combat casualties in Afghanistan since February of last year. But a bloodbath that the entire world outside of the White House saw coming arrived, and it became the deadliest day in the country for American troops since 2011, when – yes, that’s right – Biden was vice president.

Homicide bombers and gunmen, reportedly from that brood of terrorist vipers called the Islamic State, killed at least 60 Afghans in addition to the American servicemen, and wounded more than 140. These horrific deaths and dismemberments are squarely on Biden, who rejected military leaders’ advice, has resorted to blaming the victims, and once again demonstrated that he has miserable, if not depraved, foreign-policy instincts.

Don’t bet Thursday’s deaths will be the last. The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this week. “And obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”

The list of equipment, provided by Open The Books, a nonprofit determined to force transparency on governments at all level, includes: combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers, Black Hawk helicopters, aircraft that can fire Hellfire and anti-tank missiles, drones, rifles, machine guns, bombs, hand grenades, grenade launchers, rocket-propelled weapons, mortars, and howitzers.

And, we might add, uniforms, which the Taliban have already used to taunt the U.S. by wearing them last month while acting out the famous, and treasured, shot of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

All told, the U.S. “provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001,” says Open The Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski.

At least this administration didn’t set up the Taliban with a navy and long-range bombers.

Even before the Biden Retreat, the Taliban had “a wealth of armaments,” says a January report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. The military gear included “armored vehicles, night-vision devices, Western rifles, laser designators, and advanced optics.” We’ve also seen the Taliban firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and missiles out of the back of trucks.

Though the Russians denied it, there have been reports of Moscow arming the Taliban over the years. Gen. John Nicholson, at one time commander of the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, said three years ago “we’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and (they) said, ‘This was given by the Russians to the Taliban.’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/26/us-officials-provided-taliban-with-names-of-americans-afghan-allies-to-evacuate-506957

By LARA SELIGMAN, ALEXANDER WARD and ANDREW DESIDERIO

The White House contends that limited information sharing with the Taliban is saving lives; critics argue it’s putting Afghan allies in harm’s way.

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban’s many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Asked about POLITICO’s reporting during a Thursday news conference, President Joe Biden said he wasn’t sure there were such lists, but also didn’t deny that sometimes the U.S. hands over names to the Taliban.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/cost-tragedy-kabul-airport/

America’s frantic, confused exit from Afghanistan was a humiliating shambles even before today’s terrorist attack. Now, it is something much worse. It is a deadly tragedy, leaving victims dead and injured and trapping thousands of Americans and friendly Afghans in a lethal environment, where terrorists roam free.

There will be a huge political price to pay for this unfolding disaster, and President Biden will pay it. This deadly fiasco didn’t just happen on his watch. It happened because of his decisions, a series of fundamentally bad ones, taken by the President himself.

Gone are the days when the administration could trot out a press secretary to try and spin away the unfolding catastrophe, Jen Psaki could quibble over whether Americans were ‘stranded’. Now, there are far more pressing questions the President himself must answer. He cannot just turn his back on the press corps and walk away. Those questions are ‘how the hell did this happen?’ and ‘how on earth are you going to safely evacuate the rest of our own people and our friends? How can we prevent this from becoming a hostage crisis?’

Beyond those immediate questions lie larger ones about how to repair America’s standing in the world, now that the world’s greatest military power has been visibly defeated.

The consequences for the Biden presidency are equally grave. Only a month ago, President Biden privately told our Nato allies that Kabul would be stable during our exit. He overrode their entreaties to leave a residual force. Only a month ago, President Biden held a press conference (you know, the kind where he actually answers questions) where he told Americans he expected the friendly Afghan army to perform well against the Taliban and to prevent the terrorists from winning for many months, perhaps years. This was far different from our loss in Vietnam, he said, where Americans lined up on the embassy roof to escape by helicopter. He’s right. It’s different. It’s far worse.

Biden himself overruled the generals who wanted to keep a small residual force in Afghanistan to provide intelligence and air support for the Afghan army. Biden himself decided to execute this withdrawal in the middle of the fighting season, not during the winter lull, when Taliban commanders pull back temporarily to Pakistan. Moreover, we tried to execute the entire withdrawal from a single airport, having abruptly abandoned the major airbase at Bagram, literally in the middle of the night and apparently without arranging for our local partners to replace our troops there. That left the US with only one location to stage its evacuation and provided terrorists a rich target to attack. His perceived weakness and the lack of military resources on the ground invited attacks by our enemies and endangered every American who remained.

The Biden administration will pay a huge price for this slaughter and humiliating defeat. So will our country and our friends abroad.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17669/biden-obama-jihadists

Biden is following in Obama’s ill-fated footsteps. In fact, Biden’s foreign policy is so unoriginal that you could almost describe the “Biden Doctrine” — as more and more left-wing pundits are calling it — as “Obama on steroids.”

The Biden administration must… Refuse with absolute consistency to work with radical Islamist groups. Exceptions to this rule must be limited to cases of absolute and immediate necessity. Never trust and always verify, verify, and verify.

Send powerful messages of support to Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel and our allies in Asia such as Japan and Australia especially. These are the partners most at risk because of Biden’s failure in Afghanistan, and his inadequate responses to China and Russia, our other greatest adversaries.

Make it clear, now that the U.S. is at a much greater risk than just a few weeks ago, that any attack against the U.S. will be met with the harshest response.

“Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” An unforgettable line from the classic movie Patton. George C. Scott, in the title role as the legendary General George Patton, is surveying the battlefield from his command post. He senses that his U.S. forces will rout the Germans, led by the brilliant Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in this pivotal World War II tank battle in Tunisia. Why would the Americans be blessed with victory? In large part because Patton, himself a military genius, took the time to thoroughly study Rommel’s book on battlefield tactics and strategy during the previous war, World War I. Patton believed in the value of knowing his history, learning from his adversaries and avoiding the mistakes of his predecessors.

I truly wish President Joe Biden were interested in learning from history. Tragically, however, the pattern is becoming more pronounced every day: instead of learning from the mistakes of the Obama administration, many of them, by the way, his own mistakes as Obama’s vice president, Biden is following in Obama’s ill-fated footsteps. In fact, Biden’s foreign policy is so unoriginal that you could almost describe the “Biden Doctrine” — as more and more left-wing pundits are calling it — as “Obama on steroids.”

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/us-must-stop-fighting-limited-wars/

The debacle currently unfolding in Afghanistan has long been predictable. It’s the inevitable consequence of a dismal bipartisan strategic doctrine that has crippled American military effectiveness for at least 60 years: the doctrine of Limited War. This doctrine has proved particularly deadly in Asia, where its victims stretch from Southeast to Southwest to North Central.

Limited wars combine vague goals, internally conflicting desires, inattention to local incentives, inadequate resources, and restraints on military actions and responses.  

What’s the alternative? A clear statement from the president that from the moment he asks the first American kid to put his life on the line, he has committed the full force and entire arsenal of the US military toward achieving a clear, concrete goal.

Anything less is both strategically foolhardy and deeply immoral. Limited war is monstrous in its cavalier dismissal of human lives and disastrous in its effects on long-term national interests. It sends a clear message to some American family: What we’re trying to achieve is important enough for you to sacrifice a son, but not important enough for the country to commit other resources that taxpayers have put at our disposal.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, limited wars in Southeast Asia did untold damage to American soldiers and society – along with the populations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. When the primary theaters of American military engagement shifted across the continent in the late 1970s, the disastrous doctrine continued its wreckage. Every US president since then has contributed to the carnage. 

Jimmy Carter’s feckless attempts to deal with Iran’s Khomeinist revolution led to hundreds of American diplomats being held hostage for more than a year, a deadly failed rescue attempt, and a devastation of Iranian society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/biden-raises-afghan-troop-numbers-7000-3x-number-daniel-greenfield/

Biden disastrously withdrew the military before pulling out the civilians. 

His big withdrawal pulled out 1,900 troops of the 2,500 in the country. The Taliban quickly took over forcing an emergency evacuation and the latest reported numbers with the added forces that Biden has dispatched show that there are 7,000 American military personnel already on the ground or soon to be there.

That’s more than 3 times the number of troops that Biden withdrew.

Except that now American forces are operating in a dangerous and chaotic environment controlled by the Taliban.

Had Biden conducted a responsible withdrawal, American civilians would have been pulled out before the military. Instead, Biden and his radical incompetents wanted to celebrate a military withdrawal, and pulled out most military personnel, resulting in the collapse of Afghanistan which trapped many Americans in the country.

If the Taliban had been more aggressive, they would have countless foreign diplomats and reporters as hostages. Instead, the Taliban want to avoid giving Biden any reason to stay, so they’ve avoided any aggressive confrontations. 

But this is a disaster and it makes a mockery of Biden’s withdrawal.

Every 12 hours it seems as if another 1,000 troops are being dispatched to help cope with Biden’s withdrawal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-bungles-afghanistan-joseph-klein/

Afghanistan has become the playground of global Islamist terrorists once again, less than one month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America’s homeland.

The Taliban and their friends from al Qaeda and ISIS will be marching in the streets to celebrate, while we at home we will be mourning the lost lives the terrorists took on 9/11. We will also be mourning the fact that we are right back where we started twenty years ago. That’s when the Taliban was previously in charge of Afghanistan and provided al Qaeda a sanctuary from which to plan and launch its global terrorist jihad.

Back in July, President Joe Biden assured us that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Wrong.

“Unlikely” became reality when the Islamic jihadists overran Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15th. The Taliban met virtually no resistance. Afghanistan’s president fled the country.

In short, the Taliban have overrun everything, and they now own Afghanistan. And Biden is responsible for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan that made the Taliban’s rampage possible. The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has risen again to become a magnet for Islamic terrorists from all over the world.

Biden tried to put as best a spin as he could on the Afghanistan debacle in remarks that he delivered to the American people Monday afternoon. ”I stand squarely by my decision,” Biden said, while admitting that events unfolded more quickly than his administration had anticipated.

Biden said that the buck stops with him, but he refused to accept any responsibility for the disastrous implementation of his decision to quickly withdraw completely from Afghanistan. Biden blamed the Afghan armed forces for lacking the will to fight for their country. He also blamed former President Donald Trump for handing him an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces that Biden claimed he could not break without having to send many thousands more U.S. troops back to Afghanistan for a “third decade” of war.

Biden’s excuses are a lame attempt to cover up his own catastrophic failures. This humiliating debacle that has gravely undermined the credibility of the United States is President Biden’s doing.

Trying to blame the mess on Donald Trump won’t cut it. It is true that the former president had negotiated the outlines of a peace deal with the Taliban and originally planned to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. But instead of just delaying the complete withdrawal by a few months and then moving full steam ahead with the withdrawal, Biden could have reversed Trump’s withdrawal decision altogether once he took office.

The choice was not between Biden’s disorderly cut-and-run versus recommitting many thousands of U.S. troops to continue fighting the Taliban. The Biden administration could have kept a limited number of special force operatives and air power resources in Afghanistan to make sure that Afghanistan would not reemerge as a safe haven for al Qaeda and ISIS. It was up to the Afghan military that we trained and equipped to protect the Afghan people from the Taliban insurgency. Nation-building is not a U.S. national security priority. But making sure that Afghanistan cannot be used as a global terrorist stronghold from which al Qaeda and ISIS can plan and carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens remains a vital national security interest.