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The Taliban is now better armed than almost every Nato country The Biden administration has pulled off a military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it. Douglas Murray

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/taliban-better-armed-nato-afghanistan/

It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing an ‘elite unit’ of the Taliban. In a season finale that the most dystopian screenwriter would have struggled to invent, the elite Taliban unit was itself bedecked in US military kit. That is, they were not only wearing uniforms and protective kit provided by the fleeing US army, but were parading the airport with US-provided guns in US-provided vehicles.

This was the culmination of a two-week period that the White House is still trying to present as a success. One of the biggest airlifts in history, they insist. In reality the Biden administration has pulled off a feat few of us thought possible. A military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it.

Take the issue of the kit that the Americans have left behind. I’m sure by now everyone has seen the lists of armaments that the US left with the swiftly dissolved Afghan army that America and its allies struggled to train for two decades.

The Taliban inherited that defeated army’s kit in its entirety. That entirety includes 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 43 MD 530 helicopters, 32 Mi-17 helicopters, 23 A-29 light attack planes, at least 33 other attack planes and three gigantic Hercules aircraft thrown in for good measure. Thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, the Taliban now has more attack helicopters than the UK, and is better armed than almost every Nato country, apart from the US.

When these facts emerged this week, a portion of the commentariat tried to pretend this was no great shakes. These last defenders of the President insisted it didn’t matter that the Taliban had control of all these Black Hawks. For how could a group of goat-herders, who have barely learned to operate their rusty old Soviet motorcycles, be expected to retrain as helicopter pilots? As if they were listening, right on cue, the Taliban began flying one of their new Black Hawks over the skies of Kabul. That was quite the F-you: top kit, in new hands, only one previous owner, hardly used.

Perhaps aware this does not look great, the US military is claiming to have disabled some of the kit they left behind. On Monday, Gen. McKenzie said that before leaving Kabul airport the US military permanently disabled 150 vehicles and aircraft so they can ‘never be used again’. The rocket air defense system was reportedly kept online until the last minute and then demilitarized.

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Iranian Mullahs’ Torture Epidemic: UN, EU, Biden Administration Continue Appeasing Anyhow by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17714/iran-torture-epidemic

While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.

There are reports of slow public hangings-to-death on cranes, amputations of fingers by special guillotines, electric shocks, floggings and rape….

One can also regrettably assume that neither of these men, nor any of the multitudes of others treated in a similar way, was given a fair trial or anything close to a legal defense. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Three more human rights attorneys in Iran were handed unjust prison sentences in July 2021 amid an ongoing campaign to eliminate due process for activists and dissidents by intimidating the lawyers who defend them….”

The UN, instead of doing its job, appears to have granted the Iranian regime’s leaders full impunity. For how long are the UN, the European Union and the Biden administration going to continue appeasing the mullahs of Iran instead of holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity?

While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.

Recently, a hacking group calling itself Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice) leaked videos of Iran’s prisons, some of which revealed abuse, including beatings and other unspeakable treatment of detainees carried out by the Iranian authorities at the notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held. “We will continue to expose the oppression,” that the Iranian government is “inflicting on people,” the group said.

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Importing Enemies The demand to resettle Afghan refugees brings the war home. By Michael Anton

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://americanmind.org/salvo/importing-enemies/

Perennial Democratic White House aide, congressman, Chicago mayor, and ambassador-in-waiting Rahm Emmanuel’s sole memorable utterance—his only candidate for Bartlett’s—is his cynical 2008 maxim that the good guys (i.e., his team) must “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” He was speaking of using the financial crisis to usher in sweeping changes to law, policy, the economy, and society that would otherwise not have been possible through ordinary democratic processes.

The same logic applies now to the Democrats’—and many Republicans’—insistence that America be flooded with Afghan “refugees.” Importing as many immigrants as possible, from cultures as alien to traditional America as possible, is the ruling class’s top priority, after protecting its own wealth and power. But since importing millions upon millions of foreigners is the primary tool by which the ruling class maintains that wealth and power—by suppressing wage growth and dividing the population—it can be hard to disaggregate these two priorities.

The parallels between the two crises are obvious. Just as ruling class hubris, incompetence, dishonesty, and greed created the financial crisis, so did a similar combination produce the mess in Afghanistan. There is no need to rehash the “higher” motives for the failure here. It is worth noting, however, that lower motives were not absent: a lot of people were making a lot of money off that war.

And now, just like thirteen years ago, our rulers want to use a crisis they created as justification to ram through what they always wanted to do anyway. Which, in this case, is to resettle a hundred or two hundred thousand (the number varies depending on who’s speaking) foreigners with no tradition of liberty—who are indeed from a culture deeply alien, even hostile to, Western civilizational norms—in your communities.

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Is Our Military Woke, Broke or Both? Somehow our new woke Pentagon is hell-bent on losing the trust of the American people—along with the wars it fights abroad. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/01/is-our-military-woke-broke-or-both/

The fall of Kabul is not the end, as Joe Biden seems to think, of the Afghanistan nightmare. 

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 servicemen, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be forced to be vaccinated on arrival. Such statements are either untrue or absurd.

On the very day of the killing of Americans, the command sergeant major of the U.S. Army callously reminded us in a tweet that diversity is our strength in commemorating not the dead, but Women’s Equality Day. 

If so, then is the opposite of diversity—unity—our weakness? Will such wokeness ensure that we do not abandon the Bagram airbase in the middle of the night without opposition?

Recently the Office of Naval Intelligence, in reaction to the Kabul news, warned all its active duty and retired service members that they must not criticize their Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden. The office correctly cited prohibitions found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice barring any disrespect shown to senior government leadership. 

That is true. And indeed, the U.S. Marine Corps just relieved from active duty a lieutenant colonel who posted a video accurately blaming the military and civilian leadership for the Afghanistan nightmare. 

But until January 20, retired top brass had constantly smeared their elected commander-in-chief with impunity.

Recently retired General Michael Hayden retweeted a horrific slur that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be put on planes back to Afghanistan where they presumably would be left to die. Hayden earlier had compared Trump’s border facilities to the German death camps. 

Other generals and admirals in 2020 variously called their president an emulator of Nazi tactics, a veritable Mussolini, a liar, and deserving to be removed from office sooner than later. None of these retired politicized four-stars faced the sort of repercussions that the Office of Naval Intelligence just warned about.

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The Democratic Norm Breakers The Jan. 6 committee wants to subpoena GOP phone records.

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democratic-norm-breakers-jan-6-committee-bennie-thompson-subpoena-call-records-house-republicans-11630532406?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Critics feared that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s probe of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot would be partisan, and the latest proof are subpoenas for the private phone records of House Republicans. This is a violation of political norms that Democrats will come to regret.

Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.), chair of the House special committee, sent letters Monday to 35 companies, from AT&T to Facebook to Parler, asking them to preserve information about account holders charged with crimes related to, or “potentially involved with discussions” in planning, the Jan. 6 riot. The companies are requested to preserve emails, and voice, text and direct messages in preparation for subpoenas to come.

The letters contained a list of individuals whose names haven’t leaked. But CNN reports that nearly a dozen House Republicans are on the committee’s “evolving” radar, including Jim Jordan, ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Republicans are furious, and rightly so. Indiana Rep. Jim Banks noted in a letter to Mr. Thompson that this “authoritarian undertaking” would depart “from more than 230 years of Congressional oversight.” The move recalls California Democrat Adam Schiff’s public release of the call logs of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes in 2019.

At least Democrats claimed the collection of Mr. Nunes’s information was incidental to other records it targeted. The special committee is using its oversight power to snoop on political opponents. They’d gain access to information far beyond the events of Jan. 6.

Democrats say they need the call lists to see if Members of Congress fomented the assault on the Capitol. They hope to confirm their narrative that the riot was a planned “insurrection,” though Reuters reports that the FBI has found no such evidence in six months of looking. Conspiracy is a crime and matter for the Justice Department, not Congress.

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The Crisis of Gen Z One teacher’s grim testimony. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/crisis-gen-z-bruce-bawer/

I’m not well acquainted with many members of Generation Z – the commonly accepted designation for those who were born between the mid-1990s and 2010 – but I do have a couple of them in my family, I’ve talked to parents about their Gen Z kids, and I’ve watched some of those kids’ favorite “influencers” online. The impression I get, while based on very limited anecdotal evidence, is unsettling.

All too many of them experience the world largely through their devices, and to have trouble with real-life human contact. To an alarming extent, they’re prisoners of presentism, ignorant of and indifferent to history and hyper-aware of this week’s hottest fads, jargon, and pop-culture phenomena. Many are narcissists of the first order (if you don’t believe it, check out one of the countless online videos in which members of this cohort yammer on at heroic length about their pronouns and gender identity). They’re also, as the expression goes, so open-minded that their brains have fallen out, reflexively giving unreflecting assent to trendy ideologies about everything from climate change to transgenderism.

This mess didn’t happen overnight, or spring out of nowhere. As long ago as 1994, in Dictatorship of Virtue, Richard Bernstein cautioned that the rise of multiculturalism in the schools didn’t bode well; in The Victims’ Revolution (2012), I warned about identity-studies programs. Books like Harry R. Lewis’s Excellence without a Soul (2006) and Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007) blasted educators’ apathy toward deeper questions. In iGen (2017), Jean Twenge explored technology’s impact on the younger set. 

Now there’s a new volume to put on that bookshelf. If you’re a lost tourist in Gen Z-land, Jeremy S. Adams’s Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation is the guidebook you need. As Adams soberingly demonstrates, there’s no quick policy fix for these kids who, as he puts it, are nothing less than “bereft of an understanding of what it means to be fully human”; while materially rich, “they are utterly destitute in the realm of what we might call ‘human flourishing’ – fulfilling the timeless aspirations and deepest yearning of the human soul: to love, to know, to honor, to serve, to lead.”

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Public School Educators’ Obsessive Hatred of Israel Covert campaigns of hate. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/public-school-educators-obsessive-hatre

While public school teachers and their unions demonstrated a shocking obstinacy during the ongoing pandemic regarding opening up of schools to in-person learning for America’s students, they seemed to have found the energy at the same time to continue their activism and advocacy for teaching children to hate themselves because of the color of their skin, distrust law enforcement, blame white supremacy for systemic racism and the victimhood of marginalized people of color, identify their gender fluidity, and a bucket full of other progressive notions that animate what now currently passes for public education.

While a covert campaign to make critical race theory part and parcel of school curricula has been the most visible part of the activist educators’ efforts to corrupt teaching of America’s children, not far behind has been a troubling, pernicious campaign to demonize Israel and Zionism and to make the Palestinian cause the centerpiece of a campaign to slander the Jewish state and indoctrinate students with lies, contortions of history and fact, and outright propaganda that perpetuates Palestinianism as part of the cognitive war against Israel.

In May, as one troubling example, soon after Israel had initiated its campaign to suppress Hamas’s rocket fire from Gaza during an 11-day conflict, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” which, in addition to calling on the Biden administration to end all aid to Israel, denounced Israel’s alleged “forced displacement and home demolitions” of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and its imposition of “a regime of legalized racial discrimination.”  The resolution concluded by committing its membership to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign itself, stating “that UESF endorse the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement.

Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

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Bringing in Afghan Refugees with All of Their ‘Luggage’ What’s not being talked about. Dr. Stephen M. Kirby

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/bringing-afghan-refugees-all-their-luggage-dr-stephen-m-kirby/

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban and American forces are withdrawing.  As with such ventures, this has resulted in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees fleeing their own country.  And as night follows day, this has also resulted in calls by many American individuals and organizations to bring in as many of those refugees as possible, because we “owe” it to the Afghans.

To hear such claims, one would think that these many thousands of refugees will immediately become part of America, sharing our values and ideas, and contributing to our communities.

What is not being talked about are the values, ideas, and culture those refugees are bringing with them.

In order to better understand the people many are calling to be brought in by the tens of thousands, let’s look at some considerations about the society from which these refugees are coming.

National Security

There are two national security issues that must be acknowledged.

First, a 2019 study found that 13% of Afghans had a lot of (4%) or a little (9%) sympathy for the Taliban.[1]  This means that for every 100,000 Afghan refugees brought into the United States, we could expect about 13,000 of them to have varying degrees of sympathy for the Taliban.

Then we need to take into consideration that 39% of Afghans think that “suicide bombing” in defense of Islam is often or sometimes justified.[2]  If we use the 4% number for those with a lot of sympathy for the Taliban, this means that out of every 100,000 Afghans we could have up to about 1,560 Afghans believing that “suicide bombing” could often be justified.[3]

Combining these two issues means we could be bringing in a potentially significant base of support for a jihadist group; and that base of support could include a large number willing to engage in jihadist attacks in the United States using explosives.

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The Eternal Jihad Understanding what really happened in Afghanistan. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/eternal-jihad-raymond-ibrahim/

Although August 15, 2021 will forever live in infamy as the date when the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan, for over 13 centuries that date was famous for another event—Constantinople’s defeat of the caliphate, August 15, 718.  While these two events separated by exactly 1,303 years are vastly different in nature—not least that in 718 Islam lost, while in 2021 it won—they both confirm one irresistible point that the confident West should take to heart: the tenacity of Islamic jihad—this relentless snake of war that always bides its time, even if by remaining coiled for many centuries, before striking.

Consider the first event.  In 718, the Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) repulsed, in dramatic fashion, the Arabs.  It was such a spectacular victory, and Muslim losses were so bad, that, for many centuries, the caliphates never dared make another attempt against the walls of Constantinople.

Put differently, for many centuries after the year 718, anyone living in Constantinople would have thought—and would have apparently been justified for thinking—that the Islamic threat, whatever it was elsewhere, was well behind them.

And yet, in the early 1400s—700 years after the people of Constantinople had thought they’d seen the last of jihad—it was back again besieging them, with the city finally falling to Islam on May 29, 1453.

More significantly, those who besieged and conquered Constantinople in 1453 had little to do with those who besieged it in the eighth century.  The latter were Arabs, under the Umayyad caliphate centered in Damascus.  Those who actually conquered Constantinople were Turks, whose capital was Adrianople (now Edirne).

On the surface there is no connection or continuity between those who in the eighth century tried to conquer, and those who in the fifteenth century did conquer, Constantinople—except, of course, for one thing: both were Muslims, and both articulated their hostility for and need to conquer Constantinople in distinctly jihadist terms: like every other infidel, the Christian kingdom had two choices before it: submit to Islam—which it rejected—or fight.

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Three Takeaways from Afghanistan for Us at Home By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on September 2nd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/three_takeaways_from_afghanistan_for_us_at_home.html

First, remember our troops, living and dead, who served the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.  They are owed our gratitude for their steadfast presence in a difficult country and our help as they and their families, and the families of the dead, navigate the emotionally terrible terrain of a defeat inflicted not by the enemy, but by our government’s failure to plan properly for the end of their mission.  If it was time for the U.S. to leave, then so be it.  But there is nothing the civilians or the military higher-ups can say that will make Americans believe they knew what they were doing.  Resignations are in order.

Spare a moment, too, for the 182,071 soldiers in the Afghan Army and Air Force and the 118,628 members of the police and paramilitary security forces serving as of July 2021.  Yes, the Afghan force collapsed — but only after the U.S. withdrew its air power and intelligence capabilities, both of which the Afghans had relied upon under our tutelage.

Second, retire the word “privilege” as used in the U.S. to denigrate those perceived to have some inborn, unearned advantage.  Whatever your color, race, or sex; whether you are the sixth great-grandchild of slave or fifth great-grandchild of Chinese railroad slaves or the second-generation Vietnamese refugees or the remnants of the Holocaust — if you live in the United States today, you are privileged.  You have the advantages of freedom, liberty, and a Constitution.  You have access to education, food, medicine, and bathrooms.  If you doubt your privilege, watch CNN.