Joe Biden’s short walk in the Hindu Kush Roger Kimball
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?
To say that what just happened in Afghanistan caught the Biden administration by surprise would be the understatement of the year. Even Biden, even some of his senior advisors, admit as much. Biden Team Surprised by Rapid Taliban Gains in Afghanistan – that’s how the headlines read.
But why were they surprised? Joe Biden was elected – anyway, he campaigned – on the back of his vaunted “foreign policy experience.” After all, he had been in government for 120 years or whatever, so he had experience. Major-General William Elphinstone had a lot of experience, too. He was with Wellington at Waterloo and a few decades later, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, he found himself in charge of her majesty’s forces in Kabul: about 4500, European and Indian, troops and some 12,000 civilians, including families of the soldiers and camp followers.
Then came the fateful year of 1842 and the disastrous retreat of the entire garrison. The index of Peter Hopkirk’s magisterial The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, includes these items in the entry for Elphinstone: “his indecisiveness demoralises his troops,” “ignores Pottinger’s [Eldred Pottinger, an able senior advisor] advice,” tries to appease Akbar [Mohammed Akbar Khan, a treacherous Afghan leader],” “agrees to Akbar’s new demand for hostages,” “taken hostage himself,” etc., etc, right up to “death in captivity.” He had, Hopkirk remarks, “been dragged down by gout and . . . had long before sunk into a topro of indecision and despair.”
It was a horrible affair. Elphinstone, against the advice of his aides, left with the entire garrison, pregnant women and the ill being carried on litters. They had barely started when the Afghans began picking them off. Many lost fingers or toes from frostbite or froze to death. The majority were shot or hacked to death or sold into slavery by native tribesmen. Some 16,000 souls. After a couple of days, Elphinstone sat silently on his horse and refused to issue orders. Eventually, he and his second in command were lured by Akbar away from their charges, troops and civilians, into captivity. I think of the end of Kipling’s great poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The “captives of our bow and spear”
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.
Eight days after the British forces set out from Kabul, a lone pony, badly wounded, was seen approaching the British garrison in Jalalabad, some 90 miles from Kabul. It bore Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, also badly wounded when a tribal swordsman hacked away part of his skull early in the march. Asked upon arrival what happened to the army, he answered “I am the army.” Miraculously, Brydon survived, the only European to do so. The pony was not so lucky. “[D]irectly it was put in a stable,” Brydon recalled, it “lay down and never rose again.”
Someone told Joe Biden that Afghanistan is known as “the graveyard of empires.” I know this because he used the phrase in his brief remarks. It would be interesting to know what he thinks about the story William Elphinstone. I suspect, when he absorbed the question, he would respond with a “C’mon, man” or similar ejaculation. My son says he feels sorry for the lady who is always seen standing next to Biden trying to translate his vocables into sign language. I know what he means, though my chief emotion is not sorrow but rage. What is happening in Afghanistan is a horror story just beginning (or, rather, just resuming) for the Afghanis.
For the United States, it is not just a “foreign policy set back,” as I’ve seen repeated in the quivering press. The U.S. State Department just told the world that it is calling on the Taliban to form an “inclusive and representative government” with women in high positions. Really. You can’t make it up.
What just happened in Afghanistan is not just a horror for the Afghanis. It is a provocative exhibition of weakness not unlike the spectacle that the Brits made in Afghanistan just before Elphinstone’s implosion. But for us, the primary audience is not in Afghanistan but in Iran, China, and Russia.
Biden Took Ownership of the Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal Months Ago
By The sitting president’s own words make clear that he had control over the details of this process, before botching it completely. Charles C. W. Cooke
Biden Took Ownership of the Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal Months Ago
‘I stand squarely behind my decision,” President Biden told his fellow Americans from the White House yesterday. And that, he went on to explain, is why none of what you’re seeing on television is my fault.
By “my decision,” what Biden really seemed to mean was “Donald Trump’s decision.” “When I came into office,” Biden volunteered, “I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office.” The implication: that that absolute rotter Donald Trump did all this, while I, Good Ol’ Joey Biden, was just unlucky enough to be in the hot seat when it happened.
Trouble is: U.S. forces weren’t actually “out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021,” were they? Instead, they were out in August 2021 — which, along with President Biden’s loudly hailed reversals of other Trump initiatives — suggests that Biden had a lot more control over the details than he is now willing to admit. As, indeed, do Biden’s own words. “After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the vice president, as well as with Ashraf Ghani and many others around the world,” Biden said back in April, “I concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.” That’s a lot of conversations to have in pursuit of a policy that was already decided.
In July, Biden was equally emphatic that the plan — and the timetable — were his. “When I announced our drawdown in April,” he told the press, “I said we would be out by September, and we’re on track to meet that target.” In the same speech, Biden confirmed, saying, “I made the decision to end the war. . . . I made the decision to end the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. . . . I made the decision with clear eyes.” “The last administration,” Biden noted, “made an agreement with the Taliban to remove all our forces by May 1 of this past — of this year.” But, he said, “I want to be clear: The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan continues through the end of August.”
During his address yesterday afternoon, the president assiduously ignored all of this. “I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay,” he inquired: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth?” But this, of course, entirely fails to respond to the criticism at hand, for it is over the details of the departure, rather than the departure per se, that Biden is being lambasted. “After 20 years,” Biden sighed, “I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.” Perhaps. But there is a good way to withdraw U.S. forces, and it does not involve grounding the Air Force in the middle of an active fight; removing key military assets before 5,000 to 10,000 American citizens and a boatload of American hardware had been extracted; leaving sensitive information lying around; waiting until the last minute to take care of the 20,000-plus Afghan interpreters and helpers you promised to bring to the U.S.; stranding diplomats and other staff; and losing control of a detention facility housing thousands of the prisoners whom the United States has spent two decades rounding up. Nor, quite obviously, does it involve sending 6,000 troops in order to manage the bungled extraction of the remaining 2,500 troops. “Some of the Afghans,” Biden said preposterously, “did not want to leave earlier.” The desperate footage from the Kabul airport seems to suggest otherwise.
NOW WATCH: ‘Sasse Eviscerates Biden over ‘Campaign Photo-Op’ Address on Afghanistan Withdrawal’
At times, President Biden seemed to be arguing that what we’ve seen on our screens over the past few days were the inevitable wages of withdrawal. “If anything,” he contended, “the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.” But this line of argument makes sense only if “the developments of the past week” had lined up with Biden’s predictions — which they most definitely did not. In July, Biden insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable” and, indeed, that a unified Afghan government run by the group was “highly unlikely.” The Taliban, he suggested, was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to the Afghanistan National Security Forces and the federal police. And no, he assured a reporter who asked whether he saw “any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam,” they certainly weren’t equivalent to “the North Vietnamese army.” “There’s going to be no circumstance,” Biden told the press, “where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”
Well . . .
It is telling that, even now, Biden remains unable to tell a consistent story about his approach. The United States was in Afghanistan, the president said yesterday, to “get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.” As a result, he concluded, “our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.” And yet, just a few minutes later, he reversed himself on this completely, proposing that “human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.” He vowed that the United States will “continue to support the Afghan people,” will “lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid,” will “continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability,” and will “continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world” — with military force “if necessary.” Perhaps most disjointedly of all, Biden boasted that “we never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him.” We? We? Joe Biden is famous for having opposed that operation. Does he expect us to have forgotten that?
Judging by the speed with which he contradicted himself yesterday, one rather suspects that he does. Just five seconds separated Biden’s stone-faced insistence that “we planned for every contingency” and his pained admission that “the truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” and those were taken up by a furrowed reiteration of the promise that, as president, Joe Biden will always “be straight with you” — which, funnily enough, was precisely the one thing he failed to be throughout the entire sordid affair.
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