RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-18-requiem-for-afghanistan

In the Archive section of this blog, I actually created a tag for Afghanistan. There are four posts under that heading, the first one on July 1, 2017, and the most recent on December 22, 2019. Thinking I might write something about the subject today, I went back and looked over those posts. The truth is that I don’t have much to say that I didn’t already say in one or another of those posts.

So most of this post will consist of excerpts from those earlier posts. But think of Afghanistan as the perfect metaphor for the main theme of this blog, which is the absurdity of a highly-credentialed American elite that thinks it can solve all human problems and bring the world to an egalitarian progressive utopia through unfettered access to the infinite resources of the American taxpayer. This one small piece of the grand enterprise has just fallen to pieces. The rest of the grand enterprise continues. It too will eventually suffer the same fate, but the process could take a long time.

From “What’s Going On In Afghanistan?”, July 1, 2017:

How could it be possible that things are going so badly? Amazingly, almost nothing you read on the subject addresses the fundamental issue, which is that the people are just never going to support a regime imposed from outside that intends to take away the major source of their income. The major source of their income is opium. How much of their income? Unfortunately, there are no trustworthy numbers from Afghanistan. The UN Office of Drug Control did a big survey of Afghan opium production in 2014, which claims to show that opium exports declined from close to 100% of Afghan GDP in 2002 to maybe 15% by 2014 (page 16). I’m highly dubious that the recent figure could be so small. For one thing, the same report shows opium production increasing from 3400 tons annually to 8400 tons over the same 2002-2014 period (page 17). And then, what is supposedly the rest of the Afghan economy that has grown so rapidly? They don’t say, but the likely answer is foreign aid and contractor disbursements from the U.S. and other countries, counted at 100 cents on the dollar as they tend to do with these things. But when the foreigners withdraw, all of that goes away, and the people who have been working for the foreigners become unemployed. The thing that is left on which they can rely is the opium.

http://An Afghanistan veteran asks what it was all for

You know how angry and saddened and outraged you feel looking at the images out of Afghanistan? How flabbergasted you are that our Secretary of Defense is not saying, of the 10,000 Americans trapped in a country now run by the Taliban, that we will not stop until we get every single one, but rather: we’ll evacuate them “until the clock runs out or we run out of capability.”

Now imagine that you served in Afghanistan. That you lost friends there. That you gave years of your life to a project that has not just failed, but has been disavowed by our current commander-in-chief.e

For military veterans, this week has been brutal in ways most civilians might not fully grasp.

Jordan Blashek spent five years as a Marine infantry officer, deploying twice overseas and once to Afghanistan. During an eight-month tour in Helmand Province in 2013, he served as a combat advisor to the 215 Corps of the Afghan National Army, working with thousands of Afghan soldiers and dozens of interpreters.

He is also the co-author of a very thoughtful book called “Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground.” — BW

…..”The other night, a friend texted to see how I was doing. We don’t know each other that well, but we had both served overseas in Afghanistan. We were sad — sad in a way that makes it hard to move. We felt the same way in 2014 when Fallujah fell to ISIS. That was painful too, but it taught us how to move forward. We learned that it’s just a matter of time before the stunned feeling washes away.

But then my friend sent another message. His first cousin Mike, a Marine lieutenant, had been killed in Afghanistan in 2009, and now Mike’s mother was devastated all over again. The past 72 hours had raised all those painful questions: What was it for? Did he die for nothing?

I broke down. I went into the shower and sobbed.

I’m not here to offer any political opinions or policy recommendations. There are enough of those flying around in the wake of the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, and they won’t change the conditions on the ground. They won’t help the tens of thousands of Americans and Afghan allies trapped there, hiding with their families or begging to be let into the airport.

But I do want to write to Mike’s mom, a Gold Star Mother watching all of this and wondering if her child died in vain. I want her to know what her son’s life meant to me. I want her to know what it was all for. 

I joined the Marines in 2009, the same year Mike deployed to Afghanistan for his first tour. Mike had made the decision to join four years earlier, after his sophomore year of college. That was during some of the heaviest fighting in Iraq. There was no doubt that he would be going into harm’s way. That’s exactly why men and women like Mike joined — because our country needed someone to bear that responsibility.

Mike was just 20 years old when he decided to dedicate his life to defending our country. A few years later he married his college sweetheart. And still Mike chose to go. To bring the fight to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to lead young Marines, and to protect the most vulnerable Afghans. He believed that there are things more important than his own life, and he chose to live by them.      

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/08/18/left-behind-billions-in-u-s-equipment-for-the-afghanistan-taliban-to-use-against-us-n1470346

Months ago, U.S. forces began either removing, breaking down, or selling for scrap the military hardware they would leave behind on Joe Biden’s hand-chosen date to leave Afghanistan: September 11, 2021. But with Biden’s clueless and hackneyed Bay-of-Pigs-like disaster in Afghanistan, the U.S. is instead leaving to the Taliban billions of dollars worth of weapons and equipment. These are real weapons of war, not the ones BLM and antifa call police rifles and service pistols.

is will take some self-control, but try to put aside for a minute your disgust at the moronic, clueless, and deeply symbolic  – for terrorists anyway –  date of  9/11 for the pull-out and consider this question: “Why was so much equipment left behind?!”

There’s no way to tally the human cost from Joe Biden’s debacle so we won’t try here. How many people dropped from that cargo plane to their deaths? How many women and children will be taken as Taliban “brides”? How many interpreters committed suicide after being left behind because they knew the Taliban were coming to behead them? The questions are answerless.

But consider the literal cost of the stuff Joe Biden’s left behind.

Military.com reports that the material cost to train the Army now redounds to the Taliban.

Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

And the material left behind and ready to use is more billions of dollars.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/secretary-of-defense-i-dont-have-the-capability-to-escort-stranded-americans-to-kabul-airport/

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the U.S. will continue to evacuate all the Americans “they can” from Afghanistan, although the U.S. is currently unable to “go out and collect large numbers of people” from outside the Kabul airport.

“It’s obvious we’re not close to where we want to be,” Austin said at a press conference at the Pentagon. “We’re gonna get everyone that we can possibly evacuate, evacuated and I’ll do that as long as we possibly can, until the clock runs out, or we run out of capability.”

Austin admitted that U.S. capabilities to venture outside the airport are already limited, however. “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul,” explained the defense secretary.

Americans attempting to reach the Kabul airport must cross through Taliban-operated checkpoints. While Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said the Taliban “are facilitating the safe passage to the airport for American citizens,” the State Department has accused the Taliban of blocking Afghans eligible for special visas to the U.S. from arriving at the airport.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul sent out a security alert on Wednesday telling Americans they should “consider traveling” to the airport. Embassy staff are currently working at the airport to process evacuations.

“THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT CANNOT ENSURE SAFE PASSAGE TO THE HAMID KARZAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT,” the alert reads.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17658/afghanistan-double-cross

Globally, there is not a friend or foe who doesn’t see that America’s reliability as an ally has been demolished. Great Britain, which has troops in Afghanistan, was not even consulted.

Thousands of Americans awaiting instructions and with no way to get to an airport whose access is now controlled by the Taliban are still trapped inside Afghanistan. Pathetically, they are being told to “shelter in place.” Interpreters and their families, who were promised that in the event of crisis they would be rescued, are not just trapped; reports are that members of the Taliban with “lists of names” are going door to door looking for allies of the U.S. military.

A strong argument was made for not pulling out at all. The objective was to ensure that America was never again attacked by a 9/11 type of terrorist group. To that end, the U.S. had a modest military footprint, like a small insurance premium, in Afghanistan…. The U.S. has, after all, had troops in Germany and South Korea for decades, and no one has been calling for their removal.

What must allies such as Taiwan or Israel be thinking now after watching poorly armed tribesman sweep aside an American ally we resolutely vowed to assist? Worse, what must America’s adversaries, such as China, Russia, Iran or North Korea be thinking now? That such cut-and-run behavior signals the perfect opportunity to strike the Ukraine or Taiwan?

Communist China can see what America and the West did in response to its seizure of Hong Kong, its deceitful build-up of fake islands as military bases in the South China Sea, its attacks on northern India, its threats of a nuclear attack on Japan, its threats to attack Australia and its lies about the human-to-human transmissibility of its Covid-19 virus that have so far caused the deaths of more than 4,000,000 people worldwide and the devastation of countless economies — exactly nothing.

The horror of President Joseph Biden’s deliberate retreat from Afghanistan is so immense and its geopolitical impact so severe, we have to fully comprehend the extent of the disaster.

In insisting on an immediate withdrawal Biden apparently rejected the advice of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the New York Times:

“Even as the number of American forces in Afghanistan steadily decreased to the 2,500 who still remained, Defense Department leaders still cobbled together a military effort that managed to protect the United States from terrorist attacks….”

Director of Central Intelligence William Burns also warned the U.S. Senate that a withdrawal would forfeit the ability to have human intelligence in the area to pick up what the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or Isis might be planning in their ongoing assault on the West.

https://www.newsweek.com/troubles-mount-biden-administration-opinion-1619812

The fall of Afghanistan is a disaster for the Biden presidency, but it is far from the only one. The rise of inflation and the massive surge of illegal immigrants are sharp blows, too. In fact, Joe Biden’s young presidency already faces an inflection point, as the simultaneous failure of so many major policies, foreign and domestic, suggest to many voters that the administration is incompetent. Voters are also beginning to reach a second, troubling conclusion: Biden is pursuing a very different policy agenda from the one he ran on. They thought they were electing a center-left candidate who would restore domestic calm and constitutional probity after the tumult of the Trump years. What they got instead was the most progressive—and expensive—presidency since Lyndon Johnson.

President Biden still enjoys positive job approval numbers, currently 4 points higher than disapproval. But the trend is not a favorable one. In February, Biden’s approval was up by almost 20 points. Since then, disapproval has risen by 10 points, while approval has declined by 5 points. With the loss in Afghanistan, it will decline further.

Perhaps the president’s biggest asset is voters’ perception that Joe is “one of us”—that he’s friendly and likable, not some elite technocrat like Elizabeth Warren or Al Gore. Biden could never have pulled off his narrow victory if he had been as widely disliked as Hillary Clinton or, as the Democrats now realize, Kamala Harris.

What Biden does not have is a popular mandate for the large, structural changes that he and his congressional allies are attempting. The November election and Georgia Senate runoffs gave the Democrats narrow control of both the House and Senate, but no popular mandate for big changes. Nor did they run on that platform.

Instead of reading that signal and respecting it, the White House and congressional leaders decided to push for major changes, from opening the floodgates for illegal immigration via executive order to pushing for giant spending bills which will lock in new, long-term entitlements and much of the Green New Deal. Other measures, such as extending the eviction moratorium for renters and suspending repayment of student loans, follow the same progressive ideology. The goal is to transform America, and Democrats are trying to do it in a hurry.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/bidens-afghanistan-bungle-wrong-man?token=

When it comes to the fast-accelerating calamity in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden is the wrong man, doing the right thing, in the absolute worst way.

It is for this reason that in his brief, no questions-allowed White House remarks on Monday, the president created the ultimate straw man, defending the decision to withdraw rather than his disastrously executed withdrawal itself.

Afghanistan, and the “Global War on Terror” more broadly, have proven an utter failure in which America frittered away its dominant position in two decades. That failure is a consequence of our ignorance of the enemy, arrogance/naïveté in thinking we could, or should turn Islamic, tribal backwaters into Jeffersonian democracies, pervasive corruption, and the bureaucratic and economic imperative among those invested in this project to keep the charade going.

All of this undermined our national interest.

These and other points ought to be addressed—though they won’t be because our establishment is so overwhelmingly complicit—but they are not the primary issue of the day.

At issue today is the disgracefully botched execution of an exit by a leader who, unlike his predecessor, is self-evidently neither feared nor respected.

At issue today is the failure of the Woke military and intelligence apparatus that the president commands.

At issue today is the propaganda coup our adversaries are enjoying, the strategic vacuum they will now fill and the reality setting in that while Emperor Biden meanders with no clothes, Emperor Xi may well make a move at Taiwan and beyond.

And at issue today, while the administration admits it can’t evacuate Americans, as I write in part, is this:

That the administration is poised to compound this disaster by layering on top of it another refugee-driven immigration crisis only further demonstrates the insane priorities of our current leaders, sure to be seized upon by those who wish us harm. It only further demonstrates that the elites have learned nothing—simply moving from the politically correct naivete of a generation ago to the cynical, Woke “equity” agenda of today.

https://bit.ly/2W5MrGq

1. In 1975, the US disengagement from Vietnam fulfilled the goal of the Viet Cong, thus ending the US-Vietnam conflict.

In 2021, the US disengagement from Afghanistan advances – but does not fulfill – the goal of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and therefore does not end the conflict between the US and Islamic terrorism.

In 1975, the vision and strategic goal of the Viet Cong was limited to the territory of Vietnam, consistent with an eventual peaceful-coexistence and cooperation with the resourceful US.

In 2021, the 14-century-old vision and strategic goal of Islamic terrorism is not limited to the territory of Afghanistan. It is driven by fanatic imperialism, striving to subordinate the “infidel” West – and especially “The Great US Satan” – which is perceived to be the key obstacle on the way to Islamic global domination. Islamic terrorism is determined to establish a global Islamic society, ruled by the Quran and Sharia (“divine law”), which is inconsistent with peaceful-coexistence with the “infidel” US, irrespective of its involvement in Afghanistan. In fact, it requires a decisive war against the US, including terrorism on the US mainland.  

In 1975, the US was involved in a Vietnam civil war, faced with the choice of fighting in the Vietnam trenches, or disengage and spare itself a war.  

In 2021, the US is fighting against an intrinsic, anti-US Islamic terrorism, faced with the choice of confronting Islamic terrorists in their own trenches (which is costly), or disengaging and gradually shifting the war to the US trenches (which is dramatically costlier).

2. In 2021, US policy-makers are reminded that the Taliban and all rogue regimes are not impressed by – and are not willing to adopt – the Western values of human rights, democracy, international law and peaceful-coexistence.
Moreover, rogue regimes are not impressed by US diplomacy, as they are by effective US counter-terrorism and posture of deterrence.

Islamic terrorists don’t seek popularity in the international community. They seek to intimidate the international community all the way to submission, peacefully or militarily.

3. The US retreat in the face of Islamic terrorism has severely eroded the US posture of deterrence, heating up the volcanic Arab Tsunami (mislabeled as the “Arab Spring”), which has traumatized the Arab Street since 2010. Furthermore, the erosion of the US posture of deterrence has recharged the fierceness of all rogue regimes (e.g., Iran’s Ayatollahs, Muslim Brotherhood affiliates from Pakistan through the Middle East and Northwest Africa, Yemen’s Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority), as well as the megalomaniacal aspirations of Turkey’s Erdogan. Thus, the US retreat has intensified existential threats to every pro-US Arab regime (e.g., Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco).

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/diplomatic-dodge-biden-hiding-behind-the-skirts/91623/

America — the founder of the United Nations, its biggest benefactor, and once its leading power player — now hides behind the skirts of the UN’s diplomats.

Exaggeration? It’s hard to escape President Biden’s attempts, via his aides, to convey a hyped-up, almost comical confidence in the magical powers of the UN to change realities in places like Afghanistan

In the face of horrifying images of deadly chaos at Kabul’s airport and reports of the Taliban conducting door to door executions, Mr. Biden appeared to be unable to slow — or even gauge — the catastrophe that his decisions had precipitated. Instead, he hid at Camp David

So it was the United Nations to the rescue, after a fashion. With Mr. Biden practically AWOL as the largest crisis of his presidency unfolds, Washington officials touted one success: uniting on Monday the 15-member Security Council behind a press statement, its least enforceable form of action. They presented that statement as a silver bullet with which to scare the Taliban into submission.

America’s Turtle Bay ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN, “We have expressed in no uncertain terms here at the United Nations, through a very strongly-worded press statement from the Security Council, that we expect the Taliban to respect human rights, including the rights of women and girls. We have also indicated that they have to be respectful of humanitarian law.”

The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, added in his daily briefing, “The UN Security Council . . . spoke with one voice to underscore that Afghanistan must abide by its international obligations, including to international humanitarian law, and insure the safety and security of all Afghans and international citizens.”

Mr. Biden, meanwhile, spent the crisis at his Delaware home and at Camp David. On Monday he delivered a widely-panned speech from the White House, after which he immediately hightailed back to Camp David. He then spent some more quality time at Delaware before, finally, returning to Washington today.

During that time the commander in chief declined to brief Congress on steps, if any, taken to ease the stress of up to 15,000 American citizens trapped in the Afghan mess that his decisions have created. Also ignored were a number of Afghans that have aided America for 20 years and now face the Taliban’s ire, and likely their bullets, too.

After the press outcry following National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s disclosure Tuesday that Mr. Biden has not consulted any foreign leader since the crisis started, the White House hastily arranged a quick phone call with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. That was far from enough to calm global fears about America’s commitment to participate in, let alone lead, world affairs.

At the UN’s headquarters at Turtle Bay, New York, speeches were made, briefings were listened to, and allies united behind meaningless pronouncements. How meaningless? To pass Monday’s statement, all 15 council members had to agree, including Beijing, which earlier had rushed to recognize the Taliban rule and is widely expected to be its top benefactor.