RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/remember-what-they-did-to-daniel-pearl/

On January 28, 2021, the Pakistan Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Omar Sheikh, the man previously convicted of playing a role in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Domestic politics obscured the story for most Americans. But now that thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan—some on the wrong side of the tiny bubble of protection offered by our retreating troops—it’s worth remembering what happened to this unarmed civilian reporter.

Pearl risked his life to give the Islamists the opportunity to put their best face forward to the world. The radicals used the opportunity to show us who they really  are. 

The description of the video I’m about to provide is from memory as I am unable to locate the original on the internet. Pearl’s captors recorded a video of Daniel Pearl begging for his life. The journalist readily confessed to his Jewish ancestry and offered no resistance nor demonstrated any hostility to his captors. The captors then stabbed Pearl to death. They then used a knife to slowly sever his head from his shoulders with a sawing motion. When they finished they held the head by the hair as a trophy while shouting for joy. A few stills from the video remain available here.

Before disappearing, Pearl was last known to be in Karachi, Pakistan. On January 23, 2002 he let the Wall Street Journal know that he was on his way to interview a prominent figure in the Islamic movement—likely a Taliban leader or a related movement. Four days later, the group sent an email with pictures of Pearl in chains. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/the-rotten-edifice-revealed/

Doubtless you have read or heard comments like those of the TV journalist Jen Griffen about Joe Biden’s brief remarks on Friday regarding Afghanistan. “I’m having a hard time digesting what we heard,” she said, “because I couldn’t fact-check it fast enough in real-time because there were so many misrepresentations of what is happening on the ground.” Bottom line: “This was just an alternate reality that was presented to us from the White House.” 

I presume what she had in mind were statements by Biden like this: “We know of no instance where the Taliban are not letting our citizens through the checkpoints freely.”

Or, in response to a question from the Associated Press, that he has seen “no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” 

The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

For the last week, chaos has ruled, notwithstanding Biden’s assurance on July 8 that the (supposedly) 300,000-man-strong Afghan army was among the best equipped and trained in the world and would be able to handle the 75,000-man-strong Taliban (which, for some reason, he pronounces “tally-bahn”). Pentagon spokesman John Kirby echoed his sentiment a few days later: “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban,” he said on August 14.  

“Imminent” is such a relative concept. 

A Crisis of Legitimacy 

One word has been repeated again and again, all along the ideological spectrum, in the reporting on the disaster in Afghanistan: “incompetence.” 

Incompetence there has been aplenty, and its display is both depressing and ubiquitous. It turns out that the technocratic elite to which we have entrusted our lives, not to mention the lives of the Afghans, is technically maladroit and incapable of effective governance. Our preposterous and “woke” Secretary of Defense epitomized the incapacity a few days ago when he admitted that the United States does not have the “capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” Hello? 

But incompetence is only a surface presentation of a much deeper malady, which revolves around the question of legitimacy. 

I mean this in the deepest sense.  It’s not just a matter of whether certain rules have been followed in putting various people in office or securing their government sinecures. 

That’s one sort, perhaps an essential but ultimately superficial sort, of legitimacy.  

What is happening here is something much deeper, more existential, if you will.

What just happened—what is happening still—in Afghanistan is an unfolding horror for the Afghan people.  

For the United States, it is a rude snatching away of the curtain of legitimacy. 

That curtain concealed a rotting edifice. 

Many people have known this for some time. Some are only now, suddenly, aware or half aware of it.  

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

It’s not clear yet how many people attended Trump’s rally in Cullman, Alabama, but it was a lot. AL.com wrote that authorities were expecting 40,000 to attend. However many tens of thousands ultimately attended the rally, Trump gave them a show. He raged against Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco and offered a vulgar, but accurate, quote for the ages about the wokeness that has swamped America.

The photos and videos of the crowd gathered in Alabama on pastureland are stunning

Before Trump appeared, the audience was treated to the George C. Scott version of Patton’s famous speech about America being a winning nation:

And speaking of generals, Trump chose the earliest possible opportunity to castigate the “woke generals” who “move our military out before they move our civilians and before they move $83 billion worth of equipment. Let’s move ‘em out. And the Taliban looks, and they say, ‘I can’t believe it. This could only happen to us. I can’t believe it.’”

As Trump clearly knew, the Taliban, who are very attuned to America, have been rubbing America’s face in the fact that the retreating American military gave them enough advanced weaponry to wage war for years:

Even CNN was compelled to report that the “Taliban celebrate their new American arsenal”:

The Taliban’s newfound American arsenal is likely not limited to small arms, as the group captured sizable stockpiles of weapons and vehicles held at strongholds once controlled by US-backed forces, including modern mine-resistant vehicles (MRAPs) and Humvees.

Initial estimates suggest the Taliban may now also possess several Black Hawk helicopters and other US-funded military aircraft, according to a congressional source familiar with early assessments provided by defense officials.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17670/western-diplomacy-imploring-terrorists

Born in the years of the Cold War, the German Army was the backbone of NATO forces in Europe. Today, it is… “a quasi-humanitarian organization, a kind of Médecins Sans Frontières with guns”.

Meanwhile…. American officials, not humiliated enough, were trying to obtain assurances from the Taliban that, in exchange for aid, they would not attack the US Embassy in Kabul.

Afghan feminists counted on the solidarity of their German colleagues. But the Green Party was apparently too busy deleting male politicians from official photos for their own feminist propaganda. Well, what about the Swedish Army, then? It was busy waving the LGBT flag.

Meanwhile, the US military was busy teaching “critical race theory” at West Point. All great on the Western front …

In the so-called “free world” there is the thick, unhealthy air of betrayal.

“What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote. “America cares more about pronouns than the fate of Afghan women.”

You could see it from the Western diplomatic response after the Taliban conquered Kabul without firing a shot and arrived in the capital as tourists.

“The Afghan government should engage with the Taliban to reach an inclusive agreement”. Even before Afghanistan had fallen into hands of the Taliban, that intrepid EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was already begging the Afghans to reach an agreement with the Islamists.

The same day, the Associated Press was reporting what now awaits millions of Afghan women. In a park of Kabul, which was turned into a refuge for displaced people, girls returning home were stopped and whipped for… wearing sandals. Since then, there are reports of women being raped, sold to terrorists as sex slaves, murdered for not wearing a burqa, having their eyes gouged out, and girls as young as 12 being hunted door-to-door and “dragged out as sex slaves” or forced to marry fighters in the terror group. Associated Press added:

“Borrell warned that the Taliban would face non-recognition, isolation, lack of international support and the prospect of continued conflict and instability in Afghanistan if they take power by force and re-establish an Islamic Emirate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/the-forever-war-isnt-over/

The Afghan debacle just marks a new, more murderous phase.

‘I‘m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans,” President Biden said during his speech on August 16. “I will not pass this responsibly on — responsibility on to a fifth president.” He needn’t have corrected himself. He did indeed irresponsibly bequeath to his successor a terrible situation in Central Asia.

The best-case scenario, according to Biden, would look like this: Afghanistan’s reversion to Islamofascism fades from the international headlines. The Taliban understands that its continued rule depends on its ability to prevent terrorists from launching attacks from its territory. America goes back to fighting over masks and vaccinations and “building back better,” or whatever.

But the best-case scenario is an illusion. Why? Because the war isn’t over. Afghanistan is just one front in a global conflict that the United States did not initiate and cannot wish away. The Cold War did not end when the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Nor will the war on terror or the “Long War” or the “Forever War” cease with Taliban control of Afghanistan. When participants in the worldwide Salafist-jihadist movement look at the developments of the last week, they don’t see reasons to quit their mayhem. They see the chaos, panic, violence, disorder, and American retreat as a vindication of their ideology and a spur to further action.

It’s happened before. North Vietnam’s victory over the South did not make communism less expansionist or revolutionary. On the contrary: Laos fell to the Communists, Cambodia was subjected to the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, Cuba sent advisers to the pro-Communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the Sandinistas overthrew the anti-Communist Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and a pro-Communist insurgency took root in El Salvador. The relentless humiliations that followed America’s defeat in Vietnam ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency. They did not stop until Ronald Reagan shifted the nation’s course.

Or try a more recent example. When America removed its troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 and failed to enforce its red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013, the Middle East did not become less violent or pathological or dangerous. It was only a matter of time before ISIS overran the Iraqi cities of Falluja, Ramadi, and Mosul. On June 29, 2014, the terrorist army’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the formation of a caliphate. Then ISIS moved toward Baghdad and enslaved and massacred Iraq’s Yazidi population along the way.

https://amac.us/is-pelosi-losing-her-gucci-gloved-grip-on-the-gavel/

As harrowing images and videos continue to emerge from the United States’ disastrous exit of Afghanistan, the Biden administration is rightly facing major scrutiny and public outcry for what increasingly appears to be a complete lack of preparation or any sort of coordinated plan to leave the country. Following days of chaos and broken promises, President Biden and State Department officials have suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of criticism from both sides of the political aisle. But even as the Biden team attempts to weather the media storm, the domestic political fallout from this tragedy may have only just begun. For one Democrat in particular, her full-throated defense of Biden’s Afghanistan policy and hapless response to the crisis are the latest in a series of blunders that may break her already tenuous grip on power: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While Biden has received his share of criticism for his response (or lack thereof) to the Afghanistan debacle, arguably no other single individual has displayed a more complete and total lack of political awareness than Pelosi. Even as Afghan government officials fled the country and the Taliban tightened its control, she applauded President Biden for his “clarity of purpose.” Americans were left to wonder what that purpose was. The Speaker did not elaborate.

As accounts of torture, rape, and murder at the hands of Taliban forces surfaced on social media and from reporters inside Afghanistan, Pelosi offered another similarly meaningless platitude, saying that she was “deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban’s brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls.” She then said that “the U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.” A good place to start would have been coordinating an orderly withdrawal so that the Afghan people she claimed to have concern for wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

The statement was blasted as tone deaf at best and outright delusional at worst. The Afghan government has all but crumbled and President Biden has made it clear that he will not challenge the Taliban. Though Pelosi has survived other messaging blunders, the Afghanistan debacle for the Democrat Party comes at a time when Pelosi is facing leadership challenges from the left, right, and center. The crisis may prove particularly damaging in light of her other recent failures.

Pelosi’s control over the House was once described as an “iron fist in a Gucci glove,” but questions about her continued capability as a leader first started to seriously arise following the 2020 election cycle. Despite unprecedented campaign spending, promotion, and an all-out effort by the media, Democrats lost 15 seats in the House of Representatives, shocking pundits and progressives across the country.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/08/21/biden_again_defends_admins_afghan_planning_as_perils_intensify.html

President Biden walked into the East Room of the White House with backup. Four high-ranking administration officials, masked and standing six feet apart, flanked him as he tried to restore calm, assuring the nation that any American still in Afghanistan could eventually get out as that country descends further into chaos.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. They were all there. None said a word, instead staring straight ahead, motionless or swaying slightly from side to side.

“Let me be clear: Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home,” Biden said as he read from a teleprompter. “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be, or that it will be without the risk of loss.”

While the president did his best to project calm and control,  the assertions and promises he made were immediately questioned by witnesses on the ground, lawmakers in Congress, and even members of his own administration.

All eyes remain on the airport in Kabul, the last remaining exit since the Afghan government folded and its military evaporated. Sullivan told RealClearPolitics earlier this week that the U.S. government is committed to providing safe passage out of the country for American citizens—so long as they can make it to the airfield: “We have asked them all to come to the airport to get on flights and take them home.”

U.S. personnel who have left or are trying to leave report that the commute to the Karzai airport isn’t easy. Instead, they face a harrowing journey as they navigate a daunting gauntlet of checkpoints set up by the Taliban. Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee told RCP on Wednesday that his office remains in contact with Americans near the airfield “who are trying to figure out when they run for it.”

Biden tried to paint a much calmer picture of that exodus Friday, telling reporters that “we have no indication that they haven’t been able to get in Kabul through the airport,” citing an agreement with the Taliban. The president insisted that Americans were receiving safe passage through the checkpoints.