Horror in Kabul is political disaster for Biden By Niall Stanage

https://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/569652-the-memo-horror-in-kabul-is-political-disaster-for-biden

President Biden promised the United States would not suffer a “Saigon moment” as it withdrew from Afghanistan.

The reality has proven even bleaker. 

The attacks committed around Kabul’s airport on Thursday are a human tragedy. They are also a political catastrophe for the president.

At least 13 U.S. personnel have been killed and 15 wounded. The death toll among Afghans climbed to at least 60 according to some reports on Thursday, with more than 140 wounded. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the bombings.

The American people broadly agreed with Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan, which is nearing its 20-year anniversary and is the longest in the nation’s history. It had already cost more than 2,400 American lives and more than $2 trillion.

It is also true — as Biden noted once again in a White House news conference late Thursday afternoon — that it was then-President Trump who did the deal with the Taliban for a full American withdrawal, which had been scheduled to take place even earlier, in May.

But none of that absolves Biden of responsibility for a pullout that has been, by any reasonable measure, a debacle.

Events from the past few weeks will be seared into the public memory through a series of appalling images: Desperate Afghans clinging to a taxiing U.S. military plane on a runway, and some falling from it soon after takeoff; an infant being hoisted over razor wire toward a group of Marines; and the carnage of Thursday’s attacks.

The end, for America in Afghanistan, is in sight. Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline is just five days away and he has so far rebuffed allies who want him to extend it. But reaching the endpoint may involve navigating fresh horrors.

At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, warned of “very, very real threats” of more attacks that “could occur at any moment.”

Biden sought to steady the ship with his remarks from the White House, where he called f

US Veteran Volunteers Lead Covert Afghan Rescue Missions By Eric Mack

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pineapple-express-rescue-afghan-special-forces/2021/08/28/id/1034133/

A volunteer group of American military veterans have been helping hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety in a night-time operation called “Pineapple Express,” a daring and heroic private mission detailed by embedded ABC News reporters witnessing the heart-pounding operations.

“Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom,” a leader of the private rescue effort, Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander, told ABC News, which had journalists embedded with the groups.

The group is working with the U.S. military and U.S. embassy to move people in small groups, if not one at a time, into the secured areas of the U.S.-controlled Hamid Karzai International Airport, according to the report.

The dangers of the operation were increased by the pair of suicide bombings that killed at least 13 U.S. service members and wounded 15 more.

Pineapple Express, an offshoot of “Task Force Pineapple,” has rescued 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers, and their families overnight to date, ABC News reported.

The operation was named after refugees who would hold up their smartphones showing a graphic of yellow pineapples on a pink field to identify themselves, according to the report. The password has since changed.

“This Herculean effort couldn’t have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter, by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,” Mann told ABC News.

The operation began Aug. 15 when the group helped rescue an Afghan commando who was being hunted by the Taliban and had received death threats by text because they knew he was a high-value target having worked with Navy SEAL Team Six for a dozen years.

The operation was made more difficult by the ISIS-K threat warning that came before the suicide bombings.

“We have lost comms with several of our teams,” Jason Redman, a wounded former Navy SEAL, texted in an encrypted chat viewed by ABC News.

It was initially believed the blackout might have been because of the Taliban taking down cell towers, but another Task Force Pineapple member, a Green Beret, learned the U.S. military was jamming cell phones to counter terror threats outside the Kabul airport gates.

“The whole night was a roller-coaster ride,” Redman told ABC News. “People were so terrified in that chaotic environment. These people were so exhausted, I kept trying to put myself in their shoes.”

Biden’s mad-lib bungle He’s sticking to the mission, even as he throws out his back on every banana peel from here to Jalalabad Matt Purple

http://Biden’s mad-lib bungle He’s sticking to the mission, even as he throws out his back on every banana peel from here to Jalalabad

The terrorist attack at Kabul airport on Thursday was so horrific as to summon the word ‘unprecedented’. But it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was hard not to be struck by a numbing sense of déjà vu.

There was the nature of the attack: a suicide bombing, pioneered as a terrorist technique by the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka but introduced to Americans by our Islamist foes. I remember reading for the first time about a suicide bomb back in 2001 and trying to comprehend the sheer fanaticism that could lead anyone to push that button. Fast-forward 20 years to the supposedly more enlightened Afghanistan we created, and that same evil is still ripping apart the innocent.

There was the ghoulish disregard for human life, a trademark of Islamic extremists. The killed were not just combat forces but evacuees, men and women trying to get out of Afghanistan. The initial bombing was, according to one account, followed by a shooting, as a gunman sprayed fire into the desperate crowd. The attack killed more Americans than any incident in Afghanistan since 2011.

There was the fatigues-clad military man, General McKenzie from CENTCOM, discussing death in the calm tones of a specialist and vowing to press on with the mission.

There was the media, throwing it to their correspondents in Doha or Amman — not Kabul, to be sure, but still run by Muslims, so close enough.

There were the credentialed foreign policy gurus wearily returning to the cameras to reopen their vast stocks of Delphic wisdom for public consumption. Some of these graybeards were on-air in 2001 too. Being wrong about everything has in no way set back their careers.

And there was the hastily cobbled together presidential address. Joe Biden’s royal bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has drawn comparisons to Saigon under Gerald Ford, but it’s actually par for the course in the War on Terror.

Biden Admin Gives Iran’s Mullahs Another Victory: Taliban Takeover by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17678/iran-taliban-victory

In the past, the Iranian regime used to hide its ties with Taliban; not anymore…. “The Taliban today,” Kayhan wrote recently, “is different from the Taliban that used to behead people.” So far, there seems insufficient evidence if that is true. At the moment, it does not look that way.
“Thinking that the Taliban will come under Tehran’s command is tantamount to growing a snake up your sleeve.” — Ali Khorram, former Iranian diplomat, iranintl.com.
The Iranian regime seems happy to build alliances with any government or terror group that shares Tehran’s hatred towards Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, Israel or the US.
One of the critical opportunities that the Iranian regime sees in Taliban’s takeover is that the group can once again become a safe haven for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, or Islamic State — called virtually identical “Pepsis” to the Taliban’s “Coke” — that attack the United States.
In 2017, a trove of 470,000 documents released by the CIA also revealed close ties between Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime. A federal court ruling, found that “Iran furnished material and direct support for the 9/11 terrorists.” At least eight of the hijackers passed through Iran before heading to the US. A federal US District court ordered Iran, for its role in 9/11, to pay some of its victims more than $10 billion, although there may be no way to force Iran to comply. US Federal courts have also ruled that Iran still owes Americans $53 billion for Iran having bombed the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, and other assaults.
What we are seeing is that the Biden administration just handed the mullahs of Iran – as well as the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans and the Turks — yet another victory as they all cheer the US failure in Afghanistan and celebrate the takeover of Central Asia by terrorists.

Among the many winners of the Biden administration’s failure in Afghanistan and takeover of the country by the Taliban, are the mullahs of Iran’s regime. The assumption that Iran and the Taliban are not allies because one is Shia and the other is Sunni, is woefully inaccurate.

Iran’s leaders have long been waiting for this takeover — at least one of the reasons they have been cheering America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even before the American surrender, the Iranian regime had been meeting with the leaders of the Taliban. In January, a delegation from the Taliban was already publicly consulting with senior Iranian officials, including then Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. According to him, both parties held productive talks, and discussed their ties and the future of Afghanistan

As Zarif pointed out during his discussions with the Taliban delegation, the Iranian regime was lobbying for the Taliban and stating that:

“political decisions cannot be made in a vacuum and an inclusive government must be formed in a participatory process and needs to consider all fundamental structures, institutions, and laws, such as the constitution.”

In addition, in late January, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, tweeted:

“In today’s meeting with the Taliban political delegation, I found that the leaders of this group are determined to fight the United States.”

Biden is not leading America: David Marcus Biden buried his head in his hands, he looked close to tears, completely unable to make whatever his point was. There has never been an image of an American president that projects such abject weakness.

https://thepostmillennial.com/biden-is-not-leading-america

After wrapping up his rambling remarks about a terrorist attack that killed US Marines on Thursday, President Biden moved on to questions. He informed the American people, whom he was addressing, that he had been “instructed” as to who should get the first question. Who exactly was instructing the President of the United States? What other instructions does he obey? Did the American people elect a president? Or is Joe Biden just an old, sleepy eyed talking head? On Thursday, Americans got our answer.

The last question taken by Biden, we can only assume as a result of instruction, was granted to Fox News’ Peter Doocy. Doocy asked Biden if he bears responsibility for the American lives lost in the terror attack. The President proceeded to engage in a bizarre back and forth with the reporter. Then Biden buried his head in his hands, he looked close to tears, completely unable to make whatever his point was. There has never been an image of an American president that projects such abject weakness.

The United States effectively has no president. That must be distinctly understood at this point. He admitted this. Asked by Phillip Wegmann, White House correspondent for Real Clear Politics, if he had made the call to close American airbases before evacuation occurred, Biden said that it was what his military advisers told him to do.

The only decision Biden makes these days is what flavor ice cream he wants. Maybe.

Sen. Josh Hawley has called on Biden to resign in the wake of his administration’s Afghan withdrawal disaster. It’s a reasonable call, but also pointless. Joe Biden no more leads the nation than George Washington or Abe Lincoln do. He’s a presidential portrait painted before its time. Nothing more.

But the country does need resignations. Not Biden’s but resignations of cabinet secretaries, the well-credentialed fools who truly authored the administration’s idiocy. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken must resign. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan must resign. But that’s not enough.

Once they resign, moderate, serious minded Democrat senators must join Republicans in only confirming replacements that will reverse the horrendous foreign and national defense policies that have humiliated America on the world stage. Biden is president for three more years, Congress must act to ensure that the people instructing him are competent.

This is an emergency, and it is one we have never experienced before. The image of Joe Biden bowing his head in quiet, sad frustration is alarming. If there is a silver lining to this sad display it is that maybe Congress will act to take back control of our foreign policy. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has called for the House to come back in session to get control of this situation. Of course, he is correct.

Not Incompetence: Afghanistan and Globalism By Nonie Darwish

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/not_incompetence_afghanistan_and_globalism.html

Is the Biden administration’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan incompetence, or is it exactly as planned?  Is there a hidden globalist plan aimed at empowering Islamic governments in the Mideast?  If yes, how would empowering the Taliban fit in the larger plan of globalists and believers in the New World Order?

Socialists and globalists, whose home today is in the Democrat party, have been speaking about their lofty plans for decades, constantly testing the waters of public opinion and speaking from both sides of their mouths.  They insert insane ideas in the American psyche, then quickly deny they really said what they said.  After speaking about her dream of an open border, Hillary Clinton denied her comments by saying she meant only to call for reforms but not open borders.  But if we dare take their comments seriously, we are branded conspiracy theorists.

After decades of listening to the far left, by now we, the people of America, should more or less know where the modern-day Democrat party intends to take America and how these people envision the world.  Now it’s up to us to put two and two together and start uncovering what the deceptive left is really telling us.  Those who reject globalism and the New World Order should start analyzing and exposing globalist policies.  We should stop accusing the left of being incompetent because it is not.

All we need to do is listen to globalists — their plans, lies, hidden agendas — and expose them even when they give us double-messages aimed at throwing us off if we take their words seriously.  We can’t be intimidated when they accuse us of being conspiracy theorists.  It’s time to put the socialist-globalist agenda into perspective and connect it with their policies and behavior, instead of just calling them incompetent or accuse them of not caring about the unintended consequences.  This is because the consequences are actually intended.

Western globalists aim at eliminating borders between nations, and they have no problem starting themselves, in America and Western Europe.  Such an agenda, if fully understood, should explain why modern-day Democrats have no fear of China while fearing and hating their own patriotic citizens who oppose globalism and love American sovereignty.  It’s unimaginable that Democrats defended China over their own President Trump, calling him “racist” after he referred to COVID as the “China Virus.”

The four-year hysteria against Trump is not an unexplainable hate syndrome.  Democrats’ actions are motivated by their goals.  If we understand their goals, then their actions should be clear.  Trump was the first serious Republican president who rejected globalism and believes in the nation-state — America First.  That’s why Democrats not only hated him, but felt entitled to do anything and everything, legal or illegal, to stop him.  Democrats were laser-focused on removing Trump from office, by waging an unprecedented daily media campaign against him, using our Intelligence Community to spy on him, impeaching him twice, and even fraudulently winning the 2020 elections.

Landmark mass study finds vaccinated people 13 times more likely to catch Covid-19 than those who have recovered and have natural immunity By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/landmark_mass_study_finds_vaccinated_people_13_times_more_likely_to_catch_covid19_than_those_who_have_recovered_and_have_natural_immunity.html

A study of 800,000 people in Israel has found that natural immunity in people who have recovered from an earlier COVID-10 infection is vastly superior to the immunity acquired by vaccination using two of the major vaccines in use. The conclusion:

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant.”

Bloomberg summarizes:

People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.

The largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity — gained from an earlier infection — to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant. (snip)

The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. 

Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor and do not offer medical advice to any reader.

Israel, with its very high vaccination rate, is currently dealing with a severe outbreak of the delta variant.

(source)

It would seem that the vaccines are no panacea when it comes to a rapidly-evolving virus.

Alex Berenson goes into some detail on the body’s natural immunity response and cites other studies as well indicating the effectiveness of natural immunity, a position that was contradicted by some earlier studies.

Academia reaches its terminal stage of rot By Liam Brooks

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

“Those who can do; those who can’t teach.”

Most people who were born prior to the socialist infestation and eventual takeover of our education system probably remember that quote.  It was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903, a line from his four-act drama Man and Superman.  It has been upsetting teachers and professors ever since, many of whom had a valid complaint about being included among the alleged non-achievers. 

Many fine teachers throughout history have helped positively shape young minds — there’s no doubt about that.  But some educators who whined about the quote were mediocrities who inspire few if any students; others are subversive ideologues who spend their entire careers indoctrinating impressionable kids in their relentless pursuit of a utopian fantasy.  The effort is ongoing, and the warning signs have been there for decades.  But anyone who sounded the alarm was ridiculed and called a conspiracy nut, a wacko, or a Nazi.  Some things never change…especially in the tried-and-true Marxist playbook.  Saul Alinsky would be proud!

Sadly, we are now on the cusp of seeing that twisted dream become a reality.  Orwellian doublespeak, a socialist staple, is a Democrat favorite: those who brazenly violate the Constitution accuse the opposition of violating the Constitution…those who loudly decry racism pound race-hatred into the minds of our children…tyrants who twice impeached President Trump without a scintilla of evidence support the delusional hack in the White House while he commits numerous impeachable offenses…apparatchiks rant “follow the science,” all the while encouraging troubled children to pretend they’re members of the opposite sex.  I could go on, but you get the point.

The federal government encourages and often mandates the indoctrination in our schools, the primary tool for destroying young minds.  There are myriad reasons why this cancer continues to metastasize, but even a cursory look at who controls the reins of power in the federal behemoth provides a good part of the answer.

– Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, has had a lengthy career as a “public servant and educator,” according to her bio on Wikipedia.  In fact, it appears that she has done nothing except lecture at the academy and work for various bureaucracies.  She is lauded as a great economist but has never really worked in the private sector.  Yellen did serve as chair of the Federal Reserve, but the Fed is a quasi-government institution that manages currency supply and interest rates about as well as Congress manages the budget.  Hyper-inflation, anyone?

– Miguel Cardona, secretary of education, taught fourth grade through college, then worked as an appointed bureaucrat at the state and federal levels.  Period.  Apparently, he has never worked a day in the private sector.

Who will take the fall for Afghanistan? By Jeffery Locke

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

One of the Marine Corps principles of leadership is to accept responsibility for your actions.  In most Western cultures, those who fail spectacularly then resign.  Traditional Japanese military culture demanded that those who failed commit suicide out of shame and honor.

In modern Democrat party political culture, there is no true individual responsibility for one’s own actions, either in public or private life.  Everything that goes wrong is either someone else’s fault or society’s fault.  It’s a victimology cult.  A hollow, ritualistic statement of “the buck stops here” is then usually accompanied by the non sequitur of blaming someone else.  This is what President Biden did yet again in recent days.

Not long ago, the U.S. military was the one branch of government that worked because of its culture of accountability.  There isn’t accountability in the civilian branches because of civil service rules and public employee unions.  President Obama began the aggressive politicization of flag officers, dismissing those who disagreed with his policies and promoting leftists.

 Now Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Milley aim to purge the entire officer corps and enlisted ranks of anyone who isn’t woke.  The results of their policies are on parade in Afghanistan.

A new and massive failure has entered the American Pantheon of Military Fiascos: “The Biden Blunder,” “The Kabul Katastrophe,” or “Stan Ran ’21,” take your pick.  It joins others in the Hall of Shame:

The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776
Custer’s Last Stand, 1876
Pearl Harbor, 1941
Bataan-Corregidor, 1941-42
The Yalu River, 1950
Saigon, 1975
9-11, 2001

Biden Gave Up More Than Bagram American blood now covers the hands of our disgraced president and his underlings. by Scott McKay

https://spectator.org/biden-american-gave-up-more-than-bagram/

Earlier this week, as covered in a previous column in the American Spectator, the Democrat National Committee bragged about the “achievement” of this alleged president in his “best-run evacuation” of Kabul. Chief among the DNC’s arguments for such ludicrous praise was the lack of American casualties.

The press flacks at the DNC, every one of whom would be fired if that organization had the slightest honor (its chairman, the failed U.S. Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, should similarly resign in disgrace before the weekend), were merely parroting statements the alleged president made about the absence of dead Americans at the time.

Every single credible person with either operational military experience or a knowledge of Afghanistan was warning that casualties were already inevitable by that point. Even the alleged president, in a fit of congratulatory onanism, qualified the alleged safety of the “best-run evacuation” with the proverbial knock on wood.

It was clear to anyone willing to see that an American president “knocking on wood” in hopes of avoiding an ironic national security cataclysm is only inviting such a disaster to our door. So on Thursday, when multiple suicide bombers attacked the Kabul airport and the Baron Hotel just outside its gates, killing an untold number of people (at last count before this column was turned in, the butcher’s bill was more than 90 dead, including 13 American military men: 12 Marines and one Navy Corpsman), absolutely no one should have been surprised.

In fact, an alert went out to any American left in Afghanistan shortly before the explosion that they should stay away from the Kabul airport because of a “security threat.”

Of course there was a security threat, and of course there would be a terrorist attack on the airport. By the very nature of waiting outside the airport for a chance to get on a plane and leave an Afghanistan governed by the Taliban, everyone there signaled themselves an enemy of fundamentalist Islam as practiced by the 7th century brutes now in control of that country. Of course they were terror targets.