RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/lesson-afghanistan-debacle-no-more-nation-building-jeff-crouere/

As the nation sees Americans fleeing our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, it is reminiscent of another painful memory of the past, the fall of Saigon, Vietnam in 1975.

In that war, America lost over 58,000 brave military service members during the eleven years of the conflict, 1964-1975. When our troops mostly left in 1973, the responsibility fell to the South Vietnamese to fight the communists from the North.

The ultimate end to the war came after the Democratic Congress refused to provide needed supplies to the South Vietnamese military. Soon after that fateful decision, the North Vietnamese prevailed, installing a brutal communist dictatorship over the entire country. 

One of the reasons we fought in Vietnam was to prevent the expansion of communism throughout the world. We were following the “Domino Theory,” which feared that as one country fell to communism others would fall as dominos. 

In the years since Vietnam, communism continued to expand until the American military won a victory in Grenada in 1983, pushing out Cuban troops from the country. At the same time, tragedy struck in Lebanon and 241 American troops were killed in the bombing of our barracks. Soon thereafter, our troops left the country. 

Under President George H. W. Bush, the military was used in Panama to remove dictator Manuel Noriega. He also launched the successful Gulf War I, known as Desert Storm, which quickly forced Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

When Bill Clinton was President, he ordered an escalation of military personnel in Somalia, which led to a failed raid and the death of 18 American soldiers. It was a humanitarian mission gone awry. His other major military operation was an intensive bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.