RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-joe-biden-broke-nato-allies-boris-johnson-angela-merkel-emmanuel-macron-11629406300?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Remember when candidate Joe Biden said America “needs a leader the world respects”? Apparently President Biden forgot. Of the many consequences of his misbegotten Afghanistan withdrawal, one of the more serious is the way it has damaged America’s relationships with its allies, especially in Europe.

Afghanistan was an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and America’s NATO allies have invested significant blood and treasure in the conflict. That includes tens of thousands of troops over 20 years, more than 1,100 of whom were killed, and billions of dollars spent on the military operation and reconstruction effort.

This was a fulfillment of their obligations after the Sept. 11 terror attack led to the first invocation of the mutual self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty. European allies also have a stake in preventing a nation of nearly 40 million people from collapsing into a failed state that could trigger more mass migration to Europe, or become a new breeding ground for terrorism.

Yet everything about Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal has been a slap to those allies. They didn’t want the U.S. to leave, but he did. The botched execution has left them scrambling to airlift out thousands of their citizens and thousands more Afghan translators and others who assisted each nation’s war effort.

And the snubs keep coming from Washington. In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

No wonder European leaders are apoplectic. U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the Trump -Biden agreement with the Taliban “a rotten deal,” in an interview this month after the Taliban started capturing chunks of the country. In Parliament on Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat —chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who served in the British forces in Afghanistan—called Mr. Biden “shameful” for blaming the retreat on a supposedly pusillanimous Afghan military. Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Mr. Biden for following President Trump’s lead in a “unilateral” negotiation with the Taliban.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17657/biden-appalling-mistake

The main mission was and should have remained one of self-defence. Once this was forgotten, muddle and a sapping of will set in. Moral ambivalence about our values and ourselves, which our enemies do not have about themselves, expressing itself as an embarrassment about using force in our self-defense, meant that softer edges were attached.

We needed strategic patience of the sort that has kept US forces on the Korean peninsula, or British forces in Cyprus, for a lifetime of decades. Our leaders, and mainly one, lacked the vision to have that patience and we shall pay a heavy price.

This withdrawal is therefore a set-back for the Free World as we square off to defend our way of life against Xi Jinping’s communist command group which, like the Taliban, does not understand win-win. “We win, you lose” is the next game.

[O]ur political class … was utterly naïve at “12/11” when the PRC was let into the WTO, expecting it to become like us. This was like letting the fox into the hen-house in the expectation that it would behave like a hen.

What is needed now is a swift cold shower of geo-strategic reality in our political classes. The time for self-harming distractions with “wokus pocus,” obsessing about sexual dysmorphia, Marxist “critical race theory” and “climate catastrophism” … — all of which the Chinese Communist Party is glad to encourage — must end.

Of course we, the Western Alliance, were going to withdraw from Afghanistan sometime. But not now and not like this. The twenty-year expedition in Afghanistan has been a litany of strategic and tactical errors starting with the failure to follow through on the success of Task Force Dagger to crush the Taliban when we most easily could have done so. The operationally brilliant first intervention by the Green Beret Special Forces “Horse Soldiers” of Alpha 595 (known to cinema-goers from the film “Twelve Strong” and now immortalised in an equestrian statue at 9/11 ground zero in New York), partnered with the Northern Alliance at the end of 2001, vectoring in modern Air Force fire-power from horse-back.

The Taliban were out of Kabul and on the run by November 2001 and Osama Bin Laden was on his way to the Tora Bora caves. US President George W. Bush’s decision to open up war in Iraq before the Afghan job was done was a costly deflection. In the second phase, the Afghanistan mission lacked focus. Crushing terrorist bases? Nation-building? Narcotics suppression? Educational programmes for girls? Which? All?

Our mission should have been kept perfectly clear and the maintenance of aim should have been constant. It should have been about our national security first and last. Security from Islamist terrorist attacks was to be maintained by dominating these hard lands to the exclusion of others, as the British had done with some success for decades after General “Bobs” Roberts culminating victory over Ayub Khan in September 1880 at Kandahar in the Second Afghan War. This was called the Great Game. Geo-politics are facts on the ground. It is the Great Game still.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hassan-nasrallahs-schadenfreude-opinion-677195

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah may be evil, but he’s not stupid. This was evident in his televised speech on Tuesday night, delivered in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

His oratory appropriately coincided with the ninth day of the “Mourning of Muharram,” observed by Muslims to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was killed by the forces of Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad.

What a perfect opportunity to assert Islamic victory over the West.
Gloating over the Taliban takeover, the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed terror-master compared the scene on Monday, when US personnel absconded from Kabul, to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“The United States is still ignorant,” he said, “and is repeating the same mistakes.”

It’s not that his heart was bleeding for the terrified Afghans desperate to escape their fate and attempting to board the US jets taking off from Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nor was his analogy meant to express sympathy for the South Vietnamese who faced the same predicament 46 years ago.

No, he couldn’t care less about the torture and killing of innocent people, certainly those who aren’t Shi’ites – especially not ones who spent two decades collaborating with Uncle Sam.

But he definitely loves witnessing Washington’s weakness on display for all the world to see and ridicule. It’s a sight that gives credence to all his hopes, dreams and predictions about the decay and eventual death of “America, the Great.” 

The “Great Satan,” that is.

“Biden wanted a civil war in Afghanistan through a fight between the Taliban and Afghan forces,” Nasrallah continued. “[And] the Americans… came out as humiliated, losers and defeated.”

Indeed, he added, not only did the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan “fail miserably,” but Biden’s behavior showed that Washington couldn’t be counted on to “fight on behalf of its allies.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/whats-in-store-for-the-women-of-afghanistan/

With Afghanistan to all intents and purposes now restored to the Taliban’s control,  the most devastating and tragic impact will be felt by women and girls. As Greg Sheridan has written in The Australian:

We are about to witness one of the worst tragedies for women and girls in modern history. From now on, once more, young girls, pre-teens, will be married off too much older men, often enough with multiple wives. Young girls won’t be allowed to go to school, they won’t be allowed to learn to read and write, let alone sing, they won’t be allowed to practice most careers, they won’t be allowed to go the bazaar without the permission, and generally the presence, of their controlling male relative.

Senator Amanda Stoker from Queensland also commented on Facebook, “Afghanistan’s women and children, who are—as shown by the photo (above) of pictures of women being painted out of the public eye—likely to face great suffering in the time ahead.”

The ABC is also reporting:        

For Afghan women, their increasing power is terrifying.

In early July, Taliban leaders, who took control of the provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar, issued an order to local religious leaders to provide them with a list of girls over the age of 15 and widows under the age of 45 for “marriage” with Taliban fighters.

If so-called progressives are  true to form, they will gloss over these actions as not representing “true Islam” but of militant extremists. This is anything but the case. What follows is a ten-point summary of what the religion of Islam actually teaches.[1]