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The ‘Endless Wars’ Fallacy There are many options between nation building and giving up, and we had found a good one in Afghanistan before President Biden abandoned it. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-district 2)

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endless-wars-neocon-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-kabu

Daniel  Crenshaw is a  United States Representative for Texas’s 2nd congressional district since 2019.He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 as a member of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 3.

Almost everyone agrees that what’s happening in Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster. There is no way to whitewash it, and few are trying. The scenes from Kabul speak for themselves, casting shame and embarrassment on the world’s greatest superpower. There is plenty of blame being passed around, including to the “neocons,” the generals and the Afghans themselves. But what got us here was the widespread belief that American foreign policy should be dictated by a simple slogan: “No more endless wars.” The current spokesman for that belief is President Biden.

The argument for bringing the troops home is an emotional one, arising from exhaustion with overseas conflict. Most people don’t understand the situation in Afghanistan, and that causes distrust and anger. Few deny we needed to take action after 9/11, but few understood what our strategy would be after we got there. Leaders failed to explain that simply leaving would allow the Taliban to re-emerge and again provide safe haven for terrorists. Americans felt stuck and became exhausted over the years with the vast sums of money spent and lives lost, seemingly in a futile attempt to build democracy.

With this growing impatience, the case for cutting our losses grew stronger. But it fails to acknowledge trade-offs—and this simple question: If we evacuate Afghanistan, what will happen? The “no more endless wars” crowd always refused to answer. They prefer to live in a dream world rather than face the reality that our enemies are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and will gladly stage another 9/11 if they have the opportunity and means. They are at war with us whether or not we are at war with them. Leaving Afghanistan would inevitably create a terrorist safe haven.

That simple reality was never properly explained to the public. When Quinnipiac asked in a May survey, “Should we leave Afghanistan?” 62% of respondents said yes. But what if the question was framed more completely: “Should we leave Afghanistan even if it means an increased threat of terrorism to the homeland?”

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China’s Afghanistan Taunt Beijing’s propagandists suggest Taipei will face Kabul’s fate.

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-afghanistan-taunt-joe-biden-withdrawal-11629236906?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It’s too early to know the wider strategic fallout from America’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. But there’s strong reason to doubt convenient claims that the retreat will help the U.S. balance a revisionist China. Beijing is more likely to see the display of fecklessness as an opening to exploit.

“Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” said President Biden in his defiant Monday speech.

Put aside that, because of the Taliban triumph, the U.S. now has more attention and troops devoted to Afghanistan than it did before the exit. Beijing is already using the debacle to taunt Taiwan and the U.S.

“Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate?” said an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party organ. “Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces,” the paper added, “the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere.”

China’s Foreign Ministry also took a victory lap in a press briefing Tuesday. Its spokeswoman said the Afghanistan war shows that the U.S. shouldn’t “interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” pointedly using the same language Beijing uses to object to America’s support of Taiwan’s independence. China says Taiwan’s status is an “internal” issue, though the self-governing democracy is a linchpin of security for Pacific states including Japan.

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An Abbreviated History of Anti-Zionism* Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

 For more than 20 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism was a regional phenomenon—a clash between Arab and Jewish national movements in the Middle East. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe the Soviets exploited antisemitism for political purposes, but it was rarely part of international debate until after the Six-Day War in 1967. By the end of the 1960s, and since 1975, anti-Zionism became international in scope. It first appeared in the universities in the West where the New Left, in cooperation with the Arab student associations, attacked Israeli policy. [1]

 When the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975 and declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” it significantly expanded anti-Zionism into the sphere international non-governmental organizations and therefore into the Third World countries. This was done by an alliance of the Arabs and the Soviet Union. They endowed anti-Zionism with legitimacy and official recognition. [2]  

 After the First World War, the Arabs expected Greater Syria—which included Palestine and Lebanon—to become a vast united and sovereign Arab empire. Instead the French and the British divided the area into what the Arabs considered “irrationally carved out” entities that became the present-day states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), Iraq and Israel. They were outraged that a “non-Arab embryo state in Palestine” had been inserted into an area where they would never be accepted. They claimed that this shattered their dreams of unification and impeded their search for a common identity.  [3]  

 The Fight for “Dignity and Independence”

The fight against a Jewish homeland became an integral part of their struggle “for dignity and independence.” Israel’s existence, they claimed, “implied that not only a part of the Arab patrimony, but also parts of Islam had been stolen. For a Moslem there was no greater shame than for that to happen.” The only way to eliminate this deeply felt affront—this “symbol of everything that had dominated them in the past”—was to rid the area of “imperialist domination.” [4]  

Zionists were the official enemy of the Arab national movement, but Arab governments have long been accused of using the Arab Israeli confrontation to divert attention from their own critical domestic social and economic problems. When confronted, they respond that if this were not a real concern, it would not resonate so strongly among the Arab masses. [5]

The late Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle Eastern scholars, said Arab preoccupation with Israel is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which they live—the poverty, unemployment, oppression—having a grievance which they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage.” [6]

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We Are Perilously Close to a Post-American World By David P. Goldman

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/08/17/welcome-to-the-post-american-world-n1470228

After the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Union began five years of aggressive subversion around the world, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Henry Kissinger and the elites in the US and Europe all predicted a Russian victory in the Cold War. The fall of Kabul is worse: In Vietnam, we faced a well-trained and equipped North Vietnamese Army; we were humiliated by 75,000 rag-tag irregulars in Afghanistan.

The big difference is that China’s economy is fifty times bigger than it was in 1975 — $11.8 trillion in constant 2010 prices, vs. $250 billion in 1975. That’s what happens when you grow at 8% a year for fifty years. China’s exports to the U.S.–now running at an all-time record–are just 3.5% of China’s $15 trillion GDP. But they comprise a fifth of all U.S. consumption of manufactured goods. It would take $1 trillion or more and perhaps a decade to replace most of America’s dependency on Chinese imports, especially electronics. Among other things, we would have to train hundreds of thousands of engineers and skilled workers.

You learned everything you need to know about Chinese foreign policy from “The Godfather” — keep your friends close and your enemies closer. China’s main concern is an Islamist insurgency in Xinjiang, and several thousand Uyghur jihadists trained in Syria and elsewhere who have returned to China. Russia’s main concern is jihad among its Muslim minority, a fifth of the population of the Russian Federation.

China’s “Godfather” move is to recognize the Taliban while admonishing them to stay out of Xinjiang and leave the Uyghurs to their fate. China and Russia are cementing their alliance with Iran, which provided weapons to the Taliban. Iran will join the Sino-Russian umbrella group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China will invest in Iran’s oil and gas, while it builds pipelines frantically to secure hydrocarbon supply from places the U.S. can’t touch.

The Biden administration is now begging Beijing and Moscow for help in Afghanistan. That will be expensive, as the South China Morning Post reports this morning:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken picked up the phone on Monday to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for a discussion on how the two countries could work together to achieve a “soft landing” for Afghanistan. He was told Beijing was willing, but Washington would need to step back the pressure on its greatest rival, according to China’s state media.

Wang earlier had spoken to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, with both sides agreeing that Beijing and Moscow should step up their communication and coordination over the Afghanistan situation.

In a flurry of diplomatic phone calls, Blinken also spoke to Lavrov, as well as Nato’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, the European Union’s high representative Josep Borrell and foreign ministers from Pakistan, Britain and Turkey, in the aftermath of the chaotic fall of the Afghan government as the Taliban took over Kabul and the presidential palace on Monday.

One reason that Blinken is so solicitous toward Moscow and Beijing is the presence of 10,000 American citizens in Afghanistan, all potential hostages.

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Taliban Spokesman: Afghan Women Will ‘Be Happy’ Living Under Sharia Law By Caroline Downey

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/taliban-spokesman-afghan-women-will-be-happy-living-under-sharia-law/

Addressing the media at a press conference Tuesday in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised that the country’s women would embrace sharia law, the strict Islamic fundamentalist moral code the militant organization subscribes to and enforces for citizens.

“Our women are Muslim, they will also be happy to be living within our framework of Sharia,” he said, according to a translation from the Independent.

The group’s representative indicated that the rights of women will be recognized and respected under Taliban reign, insisting that nobody should be “worried about our norms and principles.” On Monday, the UN Security Council released a unanimous resolution, securing the agreement of all 15 member nations, calling for the establishment of a new representative and inclusive government in Afghanistan that guarantees the “full, equal, and meaningful participation of women.”

Given the Taliban’s treatment of women under its previous reign in the 1990s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have expressed skepticism with the terrorist entity’s pledge to suddenly adhere to international standards of freedom, democracy, and human dignity. Prior to the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Taliban ruled the native population with an iron fist, prohibiting dancing, music, and most inter-sex fraternizing. Women were typically forbidden from working, attending school, and leaving the home without a burqa and male escort.

“This is a proud moment for the whole nation,” the spokesman commented. “After 20 years of struggle, once again we have emancipated our country,” he said referencing the two-decade span during which the United States military occupied the nation, forcing the Taliban operatives to retreat to the countryside. While Afghan women were repressed under the Taliban’s rule, they enjoyed many privileges and liberties to travel, study, drive, and wear makeup and attire of their choice during the twenty years of U.S.-secured peace.

Mujahid also ensured that the Taliban’s former enemies, including Afghans who collaborated with the U.S., would not be targeted under the new regime, despite conflicting reports from multiple outlets that some militants have already started going door-to-door in Kabul tracking down U.S. allies and sympathizers.

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The Afghanistan Failure Proves America’s Regime Isn’t Fit To Lead By J.D. Vance

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/16/the-afghanistan-failure-proves-americas-regime-isnt-fit-to-lead/

J.D. Vance is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022. He is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

The Americans who died in Afghanistan won’t have done so in vain if we learn the long-term lesson here: the people who lead this country aren’t fit for the task.

For nearly 20 years, American men and women have gone to Afghanistan and performed heroically. But they were asked by our leaders to do an impossible task: to turn a mountain backwater into a thriving democracy. We lost our best and brightest in those mountains—men and women who would have started families, built businesses, and sustained communities.

My heart breaks that these dead may have died in vain. But they won’t if we learn the long-term lesson of Afghanistan: the people who lead this country aren’t fit for the task.

In this moment, it is tempting to focus on the short term. Undoubtedly, the Biden administration has failed miserably in the short term.

They telegraphed and delayed our departure date, maximizing the Taliban’s planning abilities, and they abandoned Afghanistan at the peak of Taliban fighting season. They allowed critical weapons technology to fall into the hands of the enemy.

Perhaps most inexplicably, they abandoned the most important airbase before they ensured safe passage for Americans leaving the country. This is why the world’s media is plastered with images of American planes taxiing down runways overrun with Afghans.

But this is not merely the consequence of seven months of disastrous Biden policy, it is the failure of the entire American regime. Every major institution in our country revealed itself as a farce.

Let’s start with U.S. generals. Over 20 years, we have spent $1 trillion and lost nearly 3,000 Americans. Our leaders told the American people that Afghanistan was slowly becoming a more peaceful, stable country. In June, Mark Milley, our nation’s highest-ranking military officer, warned of “white rage” in the U.S. military. In July, he assured our nation that Afghan security forces had the “capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.”

In reality, it turned out that the Afghan national army couldn’t withstand four weeks of Taliban assault. Why was Milley focused on fake problems like white rage as he failed to do the job we pay him for? And why won’t Milley face an ounce of consequence for so clearly failing at the job he was given?

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A rift of Poland’s making Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-rift-of-polands-making/

The diplomatic crisis unfolding between Jerusalem and Warsaw is unfortunate. Eastern European countries have been staunch supporters of the United States and Israel in a way that their counterparts in the Western continent have long ceased to be.

As a result, conservative columnist Amnon Lord is among those stressing that Israel needs to be smart, not just right, when it comes to its relations with Poland.

Despite its nationalism, he recently wrote, Poland “is a type of ally. … The cooperation with it in terms of military aviation is a cornerstone of our national security. The Poles also buy weapons and other systems from us. Poland is also an important potential partner for Israel, together with the member countries of the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), with regard to Israel’s effort to crack the anti-Israel Western-European bloc.”

It’s more than a valid point. But let’s not kid ourselves.

Poland’s hysterical reiteration that it played no part in the Holocaust—other than being victimized by the occupation of their country first by Hitler and then by Stalin—is problematic. Though technically true, both in relation to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the reality where the former is concerned is more complicated.

For decades, any mention of the death camps in Poland has been pounced upon by Polish politicians and intellectuals as a lie, or at least, as misleading. German-occupied Poland did, however, house 457 Nazi camp complexes. The most notable of these, Auschwitz-Birkenau, is the site of the annual March of the Living, which attracts participants from all over the world, including Israel.

Warsaw’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge any role in or cooperation with the genocide of the Jews—let alone pursue and prosecute individual Polish collaborators—culminated in actual legislation. According to a law passed by the Polish parliament and then signed in February 2018 by President Andrzej Duda, “Whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.”

The outcry that ensued in Europe, the United States, and, of course, Israel, caused Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to amend the law, which he argued had merely been intended to “defend Poland’s good name.” He stated that the “correction” would be to switch violations from criminal offenses to civil ones.

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Joe Biden’s short walk in the Hindu Kush Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/jbiden-short-walk-hindu-kush-afghanistan/

“There is no light in the bazaar. The Americans brought the light when they came to build the great dam . . . but when they left the took the machine with them and now there is no more light.”—Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

There really isn’t much that is amusing about Afghanistan. There never has been. But Eric Newby wrote a most amusing book about his trek through the Hindu Kush in the late 1950s.  These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons – literally tons – of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts – you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban. Over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the world that “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban.” Whew. That gave the team at our Kabul embassy time to shred or other render inoperative all the sensitive information they were sitting on – that stash of Pride flags, for example, which the new masters will not have much use for, unless it is to drape over the shoulders of the gays they execute by pushing them off roofs.

Well, it turns out the embassy workers did not have quite enough time. If we still used ink, the bit used to record Kirby’s words would not have been dry before his words were replaced by headlines that Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, who now occupied the presidential palace, the president himself having fled the country, and that the country as whole was in a state of crisis.

President Biden – or, as I like to denominate him these days, due to the deference shown him by all those eager-beaver members of the press, President Ice Cream – was hors de combat when this important news came over what counts as the wire these days. He had left the White House for Camp David. Monday, I think, is when Ben and Jerry’s makes its deliveries, and all we could glean was that he would be addressing the nation “in a few days.”

The outcry over that bit of impertinence was loud, sustained, and widespread, even among the housebroken poodles of the Fourth Estate. So just a few hours before I sat down to write this, the President of the United States shuffled before the cameras, blinked, and told us two things. One, he felt really badly about what just happened. Really, his heart goes out to the thousands Afghans who are about to be raped, mutilated, or slaughtered. Two, it was all Donald Trump’s fault. Really. “I inherited a deal that president Trump negotiated with the Taliban.” I’m the president and the “buck stops with me,” but still, it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

Quick question: does anybody, anybody believe that if Donald Trump were still president Afghanistan would have been consumed in this humiliating maelstrom?

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PAUL SCHNEE: COMMENTARY

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

http://www.PaulSchnee.com

Blinken and General Milley should be dismissed from office, the 25th. Amendment should be invoked to rid ourselves of Biden. Cackling Kalamity Harris should resign.

We can not go on being led in this manner. The entire rotten edifice of the Biden administration should be pole-axed before it empties the future for us all.

            ********************

It took us 3 years and 8 months to defeat Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

During that time we built two navies, developed the atomic bomb, built the Pentagon in 16 months, and increased our military from about 370,000 personnel in 1941 to around 15 million when hostilities ended in August 1945.

How is it possible for us to have been in Afghanistan for 20 years and after so much sacrifice in blood and treasure we are now facing defeat by an enemy that has neither a powerful air force nor a navy that can apply constant and devastating applications of force?!

It has been said that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it but this war was dragged on for two decades.

Like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan has been lost in the Congress of the United States helped by successive administrations that lacked clarity and, worst of all, a fierce resolution to obtain the kind of absolute victory that allowed us to win WWII.

We have failed to do the one thing that was responsible for that historic victory. We have failed to ELIMINATE THE THREAT!

All the time we had the means, the men, and the money to prevail in Afghanistan. We simply did not have the political will to kill and crush the Taliban and hand them and their terrorist pals the sort of devastating defeat from which they would never be able to recover.

Now we are witnessing in real-time the truth of the old adage that the conventional army loses if it does not win whereas the guerrilla army wins if it does not lose.

We cannot go on being led in this manner by men who, reclining safely in their armchairs, still do not understand that there is no substitute for victory.

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Watching America’s Crack-Up by Benjamin Kerstein

Posted By on August 17th, 2021

https://quillette.com/2021/08/09/watching-americas-crack-up/

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.