If you believe it is bad just wait. You will not recognize America in 5 or less years. They came because they were told our streets were lined with gold. Now the gold is in their mouths.
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So you think I have been blowing smoke?
Biden’s Agencies Plan to Resettle Afghans Across Many Swing States
By John Binder
President Joe Biden’s federal agencies, with the help of refugee contractors, plan to resettle Afghans across a multitude of swing states.
As Breitbart News has reported, thousands of Afghans are being flown to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, where they are then dispersed throughout the United States. Many thousands are heading to swing states.
Just this past week, 11 flights of Afghans were taken to Wisconsin while hundreds of others are being resettled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More are going to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In addition, Afghans are being resettled throughout West Texas, areas of Arizona, the suburbs of Virginia, as well as Akron, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Florida, while refugee contractors in North Carolina hope to resettle Afghans in the state.
While the Biden administration has been unclear about the total number of Afghans it is seeking to resettle across the U.S., refugee contractors are expecting tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands when the operation is completed.
Afghans with Special Immigrant Visa (SIVs), a minority of the Afghans arriving, have green cards and can apply for naturalized American citizenship after living in the U.S. for five years.
Afghans arriving on refugee status can apply for a green card after living in the U.S. for a year. After obtaining their green card, they can then apply for naturalized American citizenship after five years of living in the U.S.
For the tens of thousands of Afghans that the Biden administration is giving humanitarian parole to come to the U.S., they must adjust status to secure green cards after two years. Later, they too could eventually get naturalized American citizenship.
Over the last 20 years, nearly a million refugees have been resettled in the nation — more than double that of residents living in Miami, Florida, and it would be the equivalent of annually adding the population of Pensacola, Florida.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to research, and each refugee costs taxpayers about $133,000 over the course of their lifetime. Within five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here
And:
Cynicism your name is Biden: Liberals will never allow anyone to pierce the wall the mass media built around Biden. His "Uncle Joe" image is a mirage for the smug elites who control The Swamp.
I caught a few nauseating mea culpa moments of Biden's speech defending his decision to vacate Afghanistan.
It reminded me of a surgeon who blew the operation so, when speaking to the patient's family, he focused on the post recovery care the patient received.
Or:
A car salesman delivers your new car to your home but happened to wreck it along the way from the showroom so he talked about what a fast car it was.
Most American's, according to polls, do not believe Biden is competent but they still allow him to continue to screw up, avoid answering questions etc. We have so lowered our standards of what we expect from our leaders, politicians it is depressing to watch and more so to see the bald back of president wind bag's head when he shuffles off for his "nappy."
WOE IS US!!!!!
Joe Biden Bets on Cynicism
Great presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature. Not this one.
By William McGurn
Even as the last American warplanes lifted off from Kabul on Monday, there were those holding out hope that Joe Biden might yet reconsider letting the Taliban dictate the terms of our exit. These people profoundly misunderstand the president and the political equations driving his decisions.
For Mr. Biden, the top priority was to use the 20th anniversary of 9/11 to take a victory lap as the president who ended America’s longest war. When Kabul fell, it added a new imperative: avoid any U.S. combat casualties that would mar the moment. Even at the cost of leaving Americans behind enemy lines and abandoning our Afghan partners.
Critics who accuse the president of having no strategy miss the point: What we are seeing is the strategy. It is based on Mr. Biden’s confidence that no one will hold the disastrous consequences of his decisions about Afghanistan against him so long as our troops are gone.
Accept this and Afghanistan falls neatly into place. In July Mr. Biden assured the American people “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.” Turned out plenty of folks were evacuated from our embassy in Kabul, but no helicopter dared land on the rooftop lest a photographer end up with an image too close to Saigon ’75 for the political comfort of the commander in chief.
Ditto for rescuing Americans in and around the city. Too great a risk of a replay of Mogadishu and another “Black Hawk Down.” So instead of sending highly trained soldiers and Marines outside the airport to do it their way and on their terms, they were largely confined to the airport while Central Intelligence Agency teams and volunteer groups brought people out.
Risk avoidance, especially of images that might be politically damaging, has been consistent from the beginning. Reasonable people rightly suggest it would have been better to hold Bagram Air Base and maybe the embassy and other points. But that would have required many more troops, and the last thing President Biden wanted was to be seen putting more boots on the ground—except for a limited number with the explicit, short-term mission of bugging out.
George W. Bush surged troops to fight in Iraq. Barack Obama surged troops to fight in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden surged them to pack up and go home. It is no coincidence that the two offensive uses of American force—the Hellfire missile attacks on an Islamic State militant and a group of would-be suicide bombers—were each the work of unmanned drones.
It’s of a piece with the way Mr. Biden had our troops sneak out at night from Bagram without even informing the base’s new Afghan commander they were leaving.
Meantime, the president refuses to acknowledge any hint of failure, much less his own culpability. He has variously denied making any mistakes, claimed he anticipated the entire mess, and wherever possible blamed Donald Trump.
He also dodges the hard question by constantly insisting the issue in contention is his decision to leave rather than the deadly hash he’s made of it. And he bizarrely keeps invoking his son, the late Maj. Beau Biden, a Delaware Army National Guard lawyer who served honorably in Baghdad and whose early death from brain cancer was tragic but has nothing to do with Afghanistan, much less the 11 Marines, Navy corpsman and Army soldier killed in Thursday’s suicide bombing. Mr. Biden is not a Gold Star father and should stop playing one on TV.
Add to this a pronounced presidential callousness about the human desperation on full display each night on American TV sets. In the now infamous Aug. 19 interview with ABC News, George Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Biden about Americans seeing Afghans fall to their deaths from the sky while clinging to a departing American plane. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” Mr. Biden snapped.
Leave aside that it had in fact been less than three days. What does such a reaction say about Joe Biden?
When Mr. Biden announced in April that we were pulling out, he promised it wouldn’t be a “hasty rush to the exit,” that it would be done “responsibly, deliberately and safely” in “full coordination with our allies and partners.” The next month in the Atlantic, Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he appreciated how tired so many Americans are of this war. But he went on to say this: “To simply wash our hands of an entire country and its people is deeply cynical.”
In demanding moments, great presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature. But Mr. Biden’s presidency now rests on a cynical bet that, by the time Sept. 11 rolls around, a war-weary American people will share the president’s indifference to what he has now wrought in Afghanistan. We can already imagine his response to any newsman who dares bring it up.
C’mon, man. That was two weeks ago.
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Bolton speaks out about China and Russia:
Russia and China Eye a Retreating U.S.
Beijing will push for more sway in Pakistan; Moscow will try in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics.
By John Bolton
America’s retreat from Afghanistan is ending tragically—and that has sweeping strategic implications. One major misjudgment underlying the “ending endless wars” mantra was that withdrawing affected only Afghanistan. To the contrary, the departure constitutes a major, and deeply regrettable, U.S. strategic realignment. China and Russia, our main global adversaries, are already seeking to reap advantages.
They and many others judge Afghanistan’s abandonment not simply on its direct consequences for global terrorist threats, but also for what it says about U.S. objectives, capabilities and resolve world-wide.
In the near term, responding to both menaces and opportunities emanating from Afghanistan, China will seek to increase its already considerable influence in Pakistan; Russia will do the same in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics; and both will expand their Middle East initiatives, often along with Iran. There is little evidence that the White House is ready to respond to any of these threats.
Over the longer term, Beijing and Moscow enjoy a natural division of labor in threatening America and its allies, in three distinct theaters: China on its periphery’s long arc from Japan across Southeast Asia out to India and Pakistan; Russia in Eastern and Central Europe; and the Russian-Iranian-Chinese entente cordiale in the Middle East. U.S. planning must contemplate many threats arising simultaneously across these and other theaters.
This underscores how strained our defense capabilities are to protect our far-flung interests, especially given the unprecedented domestic spending demands President Biden is now making. Washington’s most important task, therefore, is somehow to secure significant increases in defense budgets across the full threat spectrum, from terrorism to cyberwar. Diplomacy alone is no substitute.
Xi Jinping will be unimpressed by Mr. Biden’s assertion that America needs to end military activities in Afghanistan to counter China more effectively. Instead, Beijing has new opportunities: shoring up its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan; protecting against the spread of Islamic terror into China; and increasing efforts to establish hegemony along its periphery, especially regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea and India.
These initiatives fit seamlessly into Beijing’s existential threat to the West, extending well beyond our Afghan debacle. By contrast, Washington is floundering in tactical maneuvering and improvisational responses to particular Chinese ploys. Afghanistan is the urgent impetus to marshal our deeper conceptual and strategic thinking; while doing so, we can immediately seize several points of policy high ground. To eliminate ambiguity about our Taiwan defense commitment, for example, we should station military forces there. Theaterwide, we need those budget increases to boost our naval presence in the East and South China seas, thereby establishing deterrence and countering Chinese sovereignty claims.
Our defense relations with India, Vietnam and others must intensify. The scope of the “Quad” (India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.) should expand dramatically to include collective-defense issues and the Quad itself should consider expanding. We also must increasingly hold China accountable for its dangerous policy of proliferating ballistic-missile and nuclear technology to the likes of Pakistan and North Korea.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin was undoubtedly heartened by seeing a weak, flagging U.S. president at their June summit, recalling Khrushchev after meeting John F. Kennedy in 1961. Mr. Biden’s subsequent capitulations on Nord Stream 2 and Afghanistan now surely have Mr. Putin smiling broadly. He will act aggressively in Central Asia to stanch any resurgent Islamic terrorism, but his long-term focus remains Russia’s European neighbors.
Mr. Putin sees disarray in Europe, which fears the resurrection of endemic conflict, largely because it fears America faltering, even substantially withdrawing from world affairs. Although Presidents Trump and Biden don’t constitute a trend—the former was an aberration; the latter is merely a typical Democrat—Mr. Biden’s failure to warn North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies of his Afghan exit shattered already weak confidence levels. The inevitable calls for a larger “European” politico-military role will meet the fate of previous efforts. The European Union can never be a global geostrategic player because it habitually deploys more rhetoric than resources.
That leaves NATO, which Mr. Biden had eased back toward complacency, only to jilt the allies over Afghanistan. Instead of blaming Washington for being too interventionist and then for not being interventionist enough, Europe needs to decide whether it prizes collective self-defense in NATO seriously, or merely prizes dabbling in it. When Germany and others match their defense capabilities with their economies, their opinions will matter. While waiting, the U.S. should work with sub-NATO coalitions, mostly Central and Eastern Europeans, and threatened non-NATO countries just beyond, to counter Mr. Putin’s imperial instincts. Our force posture in Europe can be adjusted accordingly.
In the Middle East, Iran is China’s oil supplier of choice and Russia’s partner in bolstering Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. For Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is a surrogate for destabilization work and a foil to expand their influence throughout the region, recently demonstrated by the military-cooperation agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is hedging against U.S. disapproval and a possible Obama-style alignment with Tehran. Gulf Arabs fear America’s Afghan withdrawal could foreshadow the same in Iraq, or even from major U.S. air and naval bases in their countries. Who wouldn’t hedge?
Washington should emphatically not rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That part is easy, although the Biden administration still doesn’t get it. The key lies in recognizing that Iran’s objectives are fundamentally contrary to America’s, Israel’s and most of the Arab world’s. Only changing Tehran’s government stands a chance of reducing threats across the region, which is the last thing China and Russia want.
Sadly for those believing withdrawal from Afghanistan was a one-off decision with limited consequences, the world is far more complicated. The results are already deeply negative, and China and Russia are invested in making them worse. Over to us.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
And:
So what , who cares, what difference does it make. It will all be forgotten in a few weeks.
Last Flight From Kabul
A day that will live in infamy as thousands are left behind.
By The Editorial Board
The last American troops left Kabul on Monday—before the Aug. 31 deadline as the Taliban and President Biden had insisted—ending a 20-year conflict but also diminishing the hope of escape for tens of thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who helped America. The frantic evacuation flights managed to get many out, but this was a shameful day in American history, no matter how much the White House wants to spin it otherwise.
Aug. 31 was the arbitrary deadline Mr. Biden set when he thought he would be able to boast on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that he had ended a “forever war.” He refused to extend the date despite pleas from NATO allies and knowing the date was too soon to evacuate the deserving. Mr. Biden nonetheless told Americans that he would evacuate all Americans who wanted to leave.
His deadline meant that the evacuation failed as much as his withdrawal strategy did. An unknown number of Americans—perhaps a few hundred—weren’t able to leave on the last flights. Nonprofit groups estimate that as many as 60,000 Afghans who fought or assisted the NATO mission were left behind.
Many are in hiding amid reports that special Taliban squads are searching for the names on lists they may have acquired in the willy-nilly U.S. withdrawal. Many will be tortured and killed, and their families too.
Incredibly, Mr. Biden plans to rely on the mercy of the Taliban to get the remaining people out on commercial or charter flights. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already laying the groundwork for this American pleading as he says that the Taliban have reason to cooperate to earn international goodwill and presumably access to foreign aid. The apt phrase for this is paying diplomatic ransom.
The catalogue of strategic and military misjudgments that led to this ignominious day are many, and they flow from the current President of the United States. He insisted on a rapid, complete departure, despite the recommendation of most advisers to keep a residual force. He insisted on leaving Bagram and other airfields, taking U.S. contractors who were needed to keep the Afghan air force flying.
After the government fell, Mr. Biden refused to alter his plan in order to create safe spaces beyond the Kabul airport to help with the evacuation. That would have required more troops and Mr. Biden was set on rapid withdrawal to vindicate his original decision.
The Washington Post reports that, amid the Afghan government’s collapse, the Taliban offered to let the U.S. provide security in Kabul. Mr. Biden and the U.S. military said all they needed was the airport. Mr. Biden also chose to rely on the Taliban for security around the airport—with deadly results for 13 young American servicemen and women.
Mr. Biden and his aides have been repeating like a mantra that there will be time for assessing responsibility for what went wrong and why after the evacuation ends. That should start immediately. A national-security calamity of this magnitude demands an accounting, and it should start at the top.
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Seib writes a balanced, cogent Op Ed. Uncle Joe' desire to end the war ended a lot of other things as well. There will be a price to pay down the road but that's the bill the future president will find on his desk
New Afghanistan Worry Same as Old Afghanistan Worry
Taliban likely want to keep out Islamic State, but it’s unclear if they’re able to
In an optimistic scenario, the Taliban will turn away from extremism because they realize they need to keep out terrorism to maintain control of Afghanistan.
By Gerald F. Seib
As last week drew to a close, a senior State Department official was asked whether Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers have the willingness and the capability to stop more terror strikes by the Islamic State radicals who had just killed 13 American servicemen and women at the Kabul airport. The official replied: “The intent is there. I think the capacity is in question.”
In other words, it’s likely that the Taliban rulers now in charge in Afghanistan actually do want to stop Islamic State fighters—who are, in fact, their sworn enemies—as well as other Islamic extremists from plying their lethal trade on Afghan soil. But the Taliban’s ability to make good on promises to do so is very much in question.
Taliban militants took control of Kabul’s airport after the last U.S. cargo plane took off before President Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline. The departure marks the end of America’s longest war, which lasted nearly 20 years.
And that, in turn, underscores the biggest irony of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The hope in exiting the country is that Americans could finally forget about Afghanistan. The reality is that they now have to worry about it all over again.
Though the soldiers and Marines who served and sacrificed there never had the luxury to stop thinking about Afghanistan, the truth is that most Americans had done so. Over the course of a 20-year commitment there, it had become a long-ago, faraway problem that reared its head only occasionally, when something really bad happened on the ground. Afghanistan no longer served as a potential staging ground for attacks on the U.S.
Now, the military mission is over but the worry is back, and perhaps for a long time to come.
There is, of course, the possibility of a good-news outcome in Afghanistan. It goes something like this:
In two decades out of power, the Taliban have become wiser. They lost control of Afghanistan after 9/11 because they allowed al Qaeda extremists to turn their country into a laboratory for terrorism, so they won’t want to repeat that experience. “It’s self-evident on the basis of history that Taliban might conclude harboring terrorist groups….is not a recipe for their longevity,” says the senior State Department official.
Internally, the more extreme factions within the Taliban held sway the last time the group ruled, brutally repressing the Afghan people and losing popular support along the way. That, too, won’t be repeated this time.
Perhaps Taliban talks now under way with leaders of the former, American-supported government will produce some kind of coalition government that includes non-Taliban Afghans and tribal leaders, strengthening the central government and helping keep the worst elements at bay.
Finally, the new government’s desperate need for international aid to prevent economic collapse will force Taliban leaders to behave responsibly and make good on their promises to the U.S. and the rest of the world to keep terrorists in check and respect at least some basic human rights for women in their country.
So, that’s the optimistic scenario. There is, of course, a far more pessimistic one—and the recent history of Afghanistan may require betting on pessimism over optimism.
In this darker scenario, the Taliban faces an irreparable and ultimately fatal schism between pragmatists and Islamic extremists. The extremists within are ideologues who want harsh Islamic rule on the inside and are happy to have the scorn of the West on the outside. The more the Taliban takes steps to foster international goodwill through responsible behavior, the less these extremists will trust it.
Taliban fighters unhappy with moderation at the top have places to go. Standing in opposition is the Afghan arm of Islamic State, known as ISIS-K, which was responsible for last week’s horrific bomb blast at Kabul’s airport. Unlike the Taliban, Islamic State isn’t interested merely in imposing Islamic law on Afghanistan; it wants to incorporate parts of Afghanistan into a broader Middle East caliphate, directly threatening America’s friends and allies in the region.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda, which produced the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, hasn’t gone away either, despite President Biden’s declaration to the contrary this month. An Afghanistan study group established by Congress in late 2019 reported that “Al-Qaeda has never given up on Afghanistan.” In fact, al Qaeda has been allied with the Taliban in its efforts to push out the U.S. Now, it likely expects its Taliban friends to give it some room to roam.
All that could add up to a nightmare scenario: instability and perhaps even civil war within Afghanistan when Taliban leaders prove unable to keep a lid on the extremists, and a resurgence of a terror threat amid the chaos.
In its final report early this year, the Afghanistan study group wrote that the experts it heard from warned that a precipitous withdrawal of American troops “could lead to a reconstitution of the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland within eighteen months to three years.” So yes, it’s time to worry again.
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From HOOVER DAILY:
| US In Desperate Need Of A Foreign Policy Renewal | ||
| by Russell A. Berman via The Hill The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America's global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration's foreign policy planks. +++
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We at The Landings could be a pre-cursor of what is happening around the country:
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A Message from the Board President
Dear Fellow Landings Club Member-Owners,
How do you follow up a record month in membership growth? While July was not a record month, we grew 27 members in Golf, Athletic, and House membership categories. July finished with 3,179 total members and 1,559 Golf members– incredible growth. Now the challenge is to maintain this level and look to offset the inevitable resignations that occur each year.
Speaking of records, F&B revenues also set a record for the month. The July Food & Beverage events were a huge success with revenues totaling $1,383,000. All F&B venues are doing well and continue to exceed both budget and prior year revenues. F&B’s subsidy is well ahead of budget and prior year.
Club operations were profitable. We are ahead of budget at the operating profit line and forecasting operating profit for the year to come in at $2,400,000. This is our Transfer to Capital which helps pay for our Obligatory Capital needs. Also, be on the lookout for a letter from our Finance committee. The letter will further explain our Capital Funding process and how we plan to grow capital to handle ongoing obligatory needs, build reserves for emergency (hurricanes) funds, and address aspirational projects.
Raoul Rushin’s report on real estate activity stated that the average price per sale is up 18% over last year. In addition, he discussed the impact of the Capital plan being evident with dramatic increases in home sales at The Landings compared to the greater Savannah market since 2016. Just another testimony of how our reinvestment via the 2017 Capital Plan (Deck, OWC, and Marshwood) has paid dividends in stronger real estate prices. The current inventory level is extremely thin, but demand is still strong based on the volume of Discovery Visits.
If you missed Chris Steigleman’s recent fly over of the Magnolia Course, click here to view. The project continues to make great progress. I believe the changes to the course will be spectacular— like playing a new course!
Even though it’s the dog days of August, there is so much activity at the Club in both current operations and planning for our Vision of 2022. The details are available in the board deck, click here to view, or better, join us for Board Briefs Live at 9am on Tuesday, September 7 in the Operations Boardroom. For new members, this is a great opportunity to learn what is happening at your Club. Please take the time to look through the Board Deck materials– better information than the “whispering Landings winds.”
This is what you will read by category with extensive details:
Real Estate Market Review
Membership Report
Finance Report– KPI Performance for 2021
Marshwood Land Project (some other ideas)
Directors Updates including information on fall overseeding, HR, Engineering, Golf, F&B, Court Sports, Wellness
2022 Strategy meeting– Vision 2022– great information on what is working, what needs improvement, what can take TLC to the next level– thoughts on 2022 Capital and operating priorities
A quick note on Covid: Infections declined last week to 11 and have averaged 20 per week in the previous four weeks. That is a higher transmission rate than we have seen over the last 52 weeks but one third of Chatham County’s rate. I just read Savannah Mayor Johnson’s updated order and he now strongly encourages wearing masks indoors and is restricting larger gatherings on City property. We are watching the situation and continue to follow a policy where we recommend and encourage wearing masks indoors. Our staff are required to mask indoors. We encourage everyone to get vaccinated and I know some are already getting the recommended booster shot. If you choose to not take the vaccine, we ask you to wear a mask. Our staff is complying with our program, and we trust our members will too. It’s your decision how you choose to use your Club amenities based on your careful consideration and risk tolerance.
One more piece of good news— member behavior in July and August was exemplary, we had no rules infractions and nothing to discuss at this month’s board meeting.
Best,
Mike Barber
Club President
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