https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-bungles-afghanistan-joseph-klein/
Afghanistan has become the playground of global Islamist terrorists once again, less than one month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America’s homeland.
The Taliban and their friends from al Qaeda and ISIS will be marching in the streets to celebrate, while we at home we will be mourning the lost lives the terrorists took on 9/11. We will also be mourning the fact that we are right back where we started twenty years ago. That’s when the Taliban was previously in charge of Afghanistan and provided al Qaeda a sanctuary from which to plan and launch its global terrorist jihad.
Back in July, President Joe Biden assured us that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Wrong.
“Unlikely” became reality when the Islamic jihadists overran Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15th. The Taliban met virtually no resistance. Afghanistan’s president fled the country.
In short, the Taliban have overrun everything, and they now own Afghanistan. And Biden is responsible for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan that made the Taliban’s rampage possible. The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has risen again to become a magnet for Islamic terrorists from all over the world.
Biden tried to put as best a spin as he could on the Afghanistan debacle in remarks that he delivered to the American people Monday afternoon. ”I stand squarely by my decision,” Biden said, while admitting that events unfolded more quickly than his administration had anticipated.
Biden said that the buck stops with him, but he refused to accept any responsibility for the disastrous implementation of his decision to quickly withdraw completely from Afghanistan. Biden blamed the Afghan armed forces for lacking the will to fight for their country. He also blamed former President Donald Trump for handing him an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces that Biden claimed he could not break without having to send many thousands more U.S. troops back to Afghanistan for a “third decade” of war.
Biden’s excuses are a lame attempt to cover up his own catastrophic failures. This humiliating debacle that has gravely undermined the credibility of the United States is President Biden’s doing.
Trying to blame the mess on Donald Trump won’t cut it. It is true that the former president had negotiated the outlines of a peace deal with the Taliban and originally planned to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. But instead of just delaying the complete withdrawal by a few months and then moving full steam ahead with the withdrawal, Biden could have reversed Trump’s withdrawal decision altogether once he took office.
The choice was not between Biden’s disorderly cut-and-run versus recommitting many thousands of U.S. troops to continue fighting the Taliban. The Biden administration could have kept a limited number of special force operatives and air power resources in Afghanistan to make sure that Afghanistan would not reemerge as a safe haven for al Qaeda and ISIS. It was up to the Afghan military that we trained and equipped to protect the Afghan people from the Taliban insurgency. Nation-building is not a U.S. national security priority. But making sure that Afghanistan cannot be used as a global terrorist stronghold from which al Qaeda and ISIS can plan and carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens remains a vital national security interest.