http://Biden’s mad-lib bungle He’s sticking to the mission, even as he throws out his back on every banana peel from here to Jalalabad
The terrorist attack at Kabul airport on Thursday was so horrific as to summon the word ‘unprecedented’. But it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was hard not to be struck by a numbing sense of déjà vu.
There was the nature of the attack: a suicide bombing, pioneered as a terrorist technique by the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka but introduced to Americans by our Islamist foes. I remember reading for the first time about a suicide bomb back in 2001 and trying to comprehend the sheer fanaticism that could lead anyone to push that button. Fast-forward 20 years to the supposedly more enlightened Afghanistan we created, and that same evil is still ripping apart the innocent.
There was the ghoulish disregard for human life, a trademark of Islamic extremists. The killed were not just combat forces but evacuees, men and women trying to get out of Afghanistan. The initial bombing was, according to one account, followed by a shooting, as a gunman sprayed fire into the desperate crowd. The attack killed more Americans than any incident in Afghanistan since 2011.
There was the fatigues-clad military man, General McKenzie from CENTCOM, discussing death in the calm tones of a specialist and vowing to press on with the mission.
There was the media, throwing it to their correspondents in Doha or Amman — not Kabul, to be sure, but still run by Muslims, so close enough.
There were the credentialed foreign policy gurus wearily returning to the cameras to reopen their vast stocks of Delphic wisdom for public consumption. Some of these graybeards were on-air in 2001 too. Being wrong about everything has in no way set back their careers.
And there was the hastily cobbled together presidential address. Joe Biden’s royal bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has drawn comparisons to Saigon under Gerald Ford, but it’s actually par for the course in the War on Terror.