https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/still-spinning-the-mission-after-all-these-years/
“President Biden will have his heedless withdrawal. But far from ending the war, he has galvanized our enemies. That’s how you extend a forever war.”
Biden has unwittingly prolonged our ‘forever war.’
F or our military, it was the bloodiest day in the last decade of war in Afghanistan. The 13 deaths suffered on Thursday — ten Marines, two soldiers, one Navy corpsman, all killed in a jihadist mass-murder attack that also claimed dozens of Afghan lives — marked the worst day of combat for our armed forces in the seven years since the Obama/Biden administration announced that combat was over.
Yes, as far as the United States was concerned, the Afghan war was said to be over years before President Trump and then President Biden scorned the remaining counterterrorism mission as a “forever war” that had to be “ended.” How galling that, with Biden supposedly “ending 20 years of war,” we now have more combat casualties than we had when the mission was supposed to be combat.
Of course, even then the government was not clear on what exactly the mission in Afghanistan was. It never has been.
In addressing the nation after Thursday’s atrocity, Biden tried to explain and defend one inexplicable, indefensible thing after another — the Bagram bug-out, the trusting of our Taliban enemies with the security of our people, the sharing of intelligence with the Taliban, the provision to the Taliban of lists identifying Americans and our Afghan collaborators. In his habitual way, Biden’s mien was somber, almost teary, as he claimed to take full responsibility for the derelictions that led inexorably to the calamity; then, of course, he proceeded to insist that there were no derelictions — or, if there were, to blame them on his predecessor, or on U.S. military commanders.
Biden’s blame-shifting to Trump is the same stale tale he has been peddling for weeks. The president, who has modeled himself as the anti-Trump, who has self-consciously reversed every Trump policy under the sun — including successful immigration and foreign policies whose benefits a savvier successor could have played to his advantage — would now have you believe the shameful 2020 pact with the Taliban is the one and only Trump policy he had no choice but to execute.
This is not just false in principle; it is a proven lie in practice. Biden did, in fact, change Trump’s policy, extending the pullout date by over four months. Even if unratified agreements with terrorist organizations that the U.S. doesn’t recognize as governments were enforceable, and even if the Taliban had not been in serial violation of the agreement, Biden’s own actions demonstrate that the U.S. withdrawal is Biden policy.