https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2021/09/the-greatest-victory-since-napoleon-left-moscow/
Maybe someone should hire Joe Biden to teach philosophy, or at least be in the classroom. You don’t have to be Ludwig Wittgenstein to appreciate the important philosophical lesson that our understanding can be bewitched by language. This can happen in a number of different ways, many of them illustrated daily by the President of the United States. One lesson revolves around the unpalatable truth that saying something is so does not make it so. Joe Biden gave a sterling illustration of that lesson the other day at one his weirdest press conferences to date. His withdrawal from Afghanistan, he barked madly at the cameras, was an “extraordinary success.”
Yes, he really said that. It was a success more or less in the same sense that Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow in 1812 was a success, that is to say, it was so extraordinary a success that it was an abject failure. It was not quite so bad as the withdrawal of Maj. Gen. William Elphinstone from Kabul in 1842, perhaps—the only European to make it out alive from that debâcle was a badly wounded army surgeon—but it was certainly nothing to brag about.
It will be many years before we get a full and accurate measure of the repercussions of this humiliating event. It has gravely damaged the already tottering administration of Joe Biden. It has disconcerted our friends. It has emboldened our enemies. And it is marked another waypoint on the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of American power.
The world has been especially stunned by two things the Biden administration left behind in Afghanistan. The first was the huge armory of military hardware and supporting matériel. Estimates of the value of that gift to the Taliban have varied widely from many hundreds of millions to $80 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a lot.
According to one assessment, the US left scattered in seven Afghan army garrisons across the country, from Kabul and Kandahar to Herāt, Mazār-i-Sharīf, and Kunduz, 22,174 armored Humvees, 42 pickup trucks and SUVS, 64,363 machine guns, 162,043 radios, 16,035 night-vision goggles, 358,530 assault rifles (the real ones, not the “assault rifles” that Joe Biden warns about in the United States), 126,295 pistols, and 176 artillery pieces. There was also plenty of ammunition to go along with all of that loot.