No American Military Leader Should Ever Say What Lloyd Austin Said By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/no-american-military-leader-should-ever-say-what-lloyd-austin-said/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=fourth

Can you imagine Norman Schwarzkopf — to say nothing of Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur — making this statement?

T here are an estimated 10,000–15,000 Americans in Afghanistan now who need to be evacuated as the Taliban seize control of the country. Anyone left behind could find themselves reliving the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis or the hostage crisis in Lebanon shortly thereafter. The Taliban are undoubtedly well aware of the leverage they could obtain by holding Americans hostage. Evacuation is therefore not just a pressing humanitarian matter; it is essential to preventing a bunch of Stone Age barbarians from dictating terms to the United States of America.

The Biden administration has not exactly exuded confidence in the face of this threat. On Tuesday, the State Department sent a cable to thousands of Americans in the country telling them to make their way to Kabul’s soon-to-be-renamed Hamid Karzai Airport (we already abandoned Bagram Airfield) but warning them, “Please Be Advised That The United States Cannot Guarantee Your Security As You Make This Trip.”

Then, in a briefing this morning, Defense Department spokesman John Kirby admitted that the administration not only does not know how many Americans are trapped in Afghanistan, they do not even know how many have been evacuated:

Worst of all, at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked about the U.S. military’s capability to get its citizens out of Afghanistan, his answer was jaw-dropping: “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” You have to watch Austin deliver this line to grasp its full air of defeatism about a place where our military has moved about with some impunity for two decades, while General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a fellow Army lifer, stood by looking as if someone had just shot his dog:

The best Austin could offer was a promise to try, at least for a while: “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. . . . I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul.”

A newly revealed State Department memo has explosive news. By Andrea Widburg

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

During his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden reiterated his July 8 claim that he had no idea the Taliban would move so quickly. However, according to a Wall Street Journal article, the administration has known for over a month about the speed with which the Taliban were moving. There was time to get people out safely.

On July 2, the American military abandoned Bagram Airfield, the most important base of operations still in Afghanistan. They didn’t inform the Afghans and the State Department made no effort to get Americans and their allies out of Afghanistan before the military left.

Six days later, Biden gave his boastful July 8 Afghanistan press conference, which will go down in infamy in the annals of American history:

Q    Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?

THE PRESIDENT:  No, it is not.

Q    Why?

THE PRESIDENT:  Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.  It is not inevitable.

Paying Yesterday’s Bills in Afghanistan What could we have accomplished with all of that money, all of that talent, and all of those American lives if they had been focused on revitalizing our own country? By Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/18/paying-yesterdays-bills-in-afghanistan/

Let’s get one thing clear: withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending America’s longest war was the right policy. It was Trump’s policy, but one he was blocked from implementing by the bipartisan war caucus in Washington. The fact that the Biden Administration executed this policy with staggering incompetence does not compromise the policy itself. In fact, it underscores the necessity of leaving Afghanistan and ending the two-decade fantasy that cost $2 trillion, more than 4,000 American dead in combat, 20,000 Americans wounded, and a much larger—but still unknown—amount of death, destruction, and misery on the people of Afghanistan.

On July 8, Biden was asked by a reporter if a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable. Biden responded, “No, it is not. Because you have—the Afghan troops have 300,000 [sic] well-equipped, as well-equipped as any army in the world and an air force against something 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.” The video of this press conference is now infamous.

 Then on August 9, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who was last seen testifying in front of Congress defending the military’s new woke curriculum for its recruits and professing his profound interest in systemic racism and white supremacy, said that “Afghan security forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country, and we will continue to support the Afghan security forces where necessary in accordance with the guidance from the president and the secretary of defense.” This was posted on the Twitter account belonging to the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

US must stop fighting limited wars The debacle in Afghanistan follows a disastrous pattern of American attempts at limited engagements across Asia by Bruce Abramson

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.

Where’s Biden’s Plan to Stop Terrorism? He acknowledges the national interest, but his administration has failed to develop a strategy. By Seth G. Jones

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-stop-terrorism-afghanistan-al-qaeda-islamic-state-taliban-jihadist-islamist-11629376977?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden said Monday that “our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on [the] American homeland.” Yet one of the administration’s most egregious failures has been neglecting to develop a clear strategy to target terrorists in the country. With more than 10,000 foreign fighters already there, from groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State, the administration quickly needs an armed surveillance strategy that involves using intelligence and air power to target terrorists.

U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have long known the Taliban continue to have close ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In a June 2021 assessment, the United Nations Security Council concluded that a “large number of al Qaeda fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” The Taliban this week released thousands of them from prisons in Bagram, Kabul, Kandahar and elsewhere.

The Taliban and al Qaeda enjoy longstanding personal relationships, intermarriage, a shared history of struggle and sympathetic ideologies. Al Qaeda leaders have pledged loyalty to every Taliban leader since the group’s establishment. It is shocking, then, that U.S. officials have brushed off the implications of a Taliban victory, even as intelligence analysts said that a Taliban victory would likely be a boon for jihadists.

The Taliban has well-established ties with other regional and international terrorist groups, such as the Pakistan-based Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. In addition, there are roughly 2,000 Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan, and the group has conducted mass-casualty attacks across the country.

The Taliban victory presents a remarkable opportunity for these groups to reorganize and threaten the U.S. at home and abroad. Jihadist groups gleefully celebrated the Taliban’s conquest of Kabul on chat rooms and other online platforms, pledging the revitalization of a global jihad. We have seen this before. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late 1980s spawned al Qaeda.

The best way to target terrorists in Afghanistan is through armed overwatch—collecting intelligence from airborne assets and striking terrorists from drones and fighter jets. The U.S. will need to fly persistent strike and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) missions, most likely from Qatar and other countries in the Persian Gulf.

How Biden Broke NATO The chaotic Afghan withdrawal has shocked and angered U.S. allies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden’s Appalling Mistake is a Watershed for the West by Gwythian Prins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNRWA’s Jihad against Israel (Part One) Andrew Harrod

ww.jihadwatch.org/2021/08/unrwas-jihad-against-israel-part-one

Congressional Republicans have recently introduced legislation to reenact President Donald Trump’s cutoff of American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Closing UNRWA and ending a decades-long, multigenerational “refugee” status for over five million Arabs is long overdue, as documented in the 2014 book Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict—UNRWA Policies Reconsidered.

The book’s author, David Bedein, director of the Center for Near East Policy Research in Jerusalem, provided a detailed, damning indictment of UNRWA. Founded in the wake of Israel’s 1948-1949 War of Independence, UNRWA had the mission of providing for Arabs who lost their homes in the territory that became Israel. Various estimates of their number ran between 540,000 and 750,000.

“When UNRWA launched its operations on May 1, 1950, it was thought that, since the refugee situation would soon be resolved, UNRWA would have a limited life span,” Bedein wrote. Yet ever since UNRWA’s mandate has been “renewed every three years by the UN General Assembly.” As a later article will analyze in detail, the key to UNRWA’s longevity lies in UNRWA’s refusal to apply ordinary resettlement processes to these refugees and their multiplying “refugee” descendants. Rather, UNRWA insists that they “return” to modern Israel.

UNRWA is anomalous in other ways, for it demonstrates an inordinate global attention to Palestinian refugees. As Bedein wrote, “UNRWA remains the only UN organization dedicated to handling exactly one ethnic group of refugees.” Thus, UNRWA “stands in sharp contrast to” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who “works on behalf of all refugees in the world.”

Requiem For Afghanistan Francis Menton

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.

Biden can’t — and won’t — escape blame for Afghanistan fiasco Victor Davis Hanson (August 9, 2021)

https://www.jewishworldreview.com/0821/hanson081921.php

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul.

Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs.

Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities.

Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis — only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its hated oil before the U.S. midterms?

Why not, when Biden asks Russia’s Vladimir Putin to request that Russian-related hackers be a little less rowdy in their selection of U.S. targets?

And why not, when our own military jousts with the windmills of “white supremacy” as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?

Biden keeps repeating that he was bound by former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal.

Really?

A mercurial Trump repeatedly demonstrated that he was willing to use air power to protect U.S. personnel and to bomb an Islamic would-be caliphate. The Taliban knew that and so struck when Trump was gone.

Biden claims he was bound by Trump’s decision to withdraw and thus cannot be blamed for his reckless operation of a predetermined departure. But all Biden has done since entering office is destroy Trump pacts, overturning past agreements on energy leases, protocols with Latin America and Mexico on border security, and pipeline contracts.

No sooner did Biden claim he was straitjacketed by Trump than he reversed course to defend not just his own withdrawal but the disastrous manner of it. Biden claims that he has no free will while insisting he would have done nothing differently if he did.

In a sane world, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense would resign. We have heard for too long their careerists boast about assigning climate change as their chief challenge. For too long they have virtue-signaled their critical race theory credentials to Congress. For too long they have bragged about rooting out alleged white supremacists from their ranks. For too long they have sparred with journalists while fighting Twitter wars and issuing cartoonish commercials attesting to their woke credentials.