BIDEN'S AFGHANISTAN SURRENDER
Opportunistic world leaders are taking advantage of President Joe Biden’s mishandling of Afghanistan, and it’s becoming eerily dangerous...
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Breaking: Biden Withdrawal Leaves Navy Vet In Taliban’s Hands
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ONE FOR HISTORY BUFFS THAT I BET YOU DID NOT KNOW
In 1975, President Ford was left to manage the difficult ending of the Vietnam War. President Ford went to Congress for a relief package to allow American personnel and our allies to evacuate. However, there was ONE US SENATOR who opposed any such support. The result was the embarrassing and hurried evacuation from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon
This senator reveled in the embarrassment and did everything he could to leverage it politically against Ford. Despite the efforts of this U.S. Senator--President Ford managed to rescue 1,500 South Vietnamese allies prior to the country's fall. Had President Ford not acted quickly, these people would have been targeted and slaughtered for their support for America . When they arrived in America , President Ford asked Congress for a package to assist these refugees to integrate into American society.
That SAME troublesome SENATOR TORPEDOED ANY SUPPORT for these shell shocked, anti-communist, Americans and our helpers, the refugees.
Instead, President Ford had to recruit Christian organizations to offer assistance on a voluntary basis. As he did so, the Senator belittled those efforts. What kind of person would oppose President Ford's tireless work to do the right and humanitarian thing? Who would want to play politics with the well-being of innocent people who stood by America in the tragic Vietnam War?
THAT SENATOR WAS JOE BIDEN
From the book - "When the Center Held." by Donald Rumsfeld in 2018.(biography)
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https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundi
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The Secret of Statecraft That the Gipper Understood and Biden Fails To Grasp
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, Special to the Sun
The Afghanistan catastrophe dominate the news, as it should. I want to make a few points at the outset, starting with the terrific op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal by Vice President Pence. The headline is “Biden broke our deal with the Taliban.”
This is a key point. It is one that the press manages to overlook.
I first saw Secretary Pompeo talk about it on a Sunday news show and this past few days at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the former director of the National Security Council Robert O’Brien and I and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe spoke at length about President Biden breaking the strict conditions that were initially agreed to between the Trump administration and the Taliban.
When Joe Biden spoke to the country about this disaster on Monday, he played the blame game, like he always does. Of course, he blamed Mr. Trump. Then he blamed other administrations. Then he blamed Europe. And if he had time he undoubtedly would’ve blamed the man on the moon.
One group Biden forgot to blame, I’m sure it was just an oversight, is the Taliban. They are terrorists. They are to blame. In fact, many have forgotten the original mission in Afghanistan post 9/11 was to destroy the terrorists the Taliban harbored in that country who were crucial in the attack on America in 2001. That was the mission. It should remain the mission today.
The problem with this whole story is that the foreign policy liberals and globalists multilateralists turn this anti-terrorist mission into a nation-building mission. That kind of mission creep is dangerous. To some extent it is going to be one of the worst consequences of this foreign policy humiliation inflicted on the country by the Bidens.
You see, the Taliban terrorists will harbor groups like ISIS. And Al Qaeda. And who knows what other America-hating, crazy terrorist groups will be found in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. Let’s not forget also that Joe Biden, who is always wrong about foreign policy (and a whole lot of other things as well), opposed President Obama’s mission to get Osama bin Laden.
Well, guess where we found and destroyed bin Laden? Pakistan. That country has been harboring terrorist groups for quite some time. They will continue to do so. The Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, cheered the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. This guy’s supposed to be an American ally, but he’s not. He offered Pakistani safe haven to the Taliban during this whole two decade period.
You can count on Pakistan to provide resources to the Taliban terrorists in the future. I'll bet you Iran does the same. I don’t know about China and Russia. Surely they like the fact that America is a paper tiger once again, but those countries have no love for Islamic terrorist groups.
Maybe China will be emboldened in Taiwan. A clear risk. Maybe Russia in the Middle East and elsewhere for cyber-hacking. Another clear risk. We will see. The key point is that when the Taliban broke the Trump deal, the Biden administration should have immediately been all over them.
Just as soon as the Taliban started taking over provincial capitals, the Bidens should’ve launched massive airstrikes with spotters and other support on the ground to crush the terrorist takeover.
as Mr. Pence noted in his op-ed, “Taliban leaders understood that the consequences of violating the deal with Trump would be swift and severe.”
President Trump, after all, took out Soleimani. Mr. Trump crushed ISIS in Syria. He took out the ISIS leader. Mr. Trump bombed the Syrian airport. Mr. Trump drew red lines and never let anyone cross them. That’s the difference between Messrs. Trump and Biden.
The Taliban knew there was no credible threat of force with President Biden. In these delicate foreign matters, it is always better to be greatly feared than loved. To paraphrase Machiavelli.
Years ago, I worked for Ronald Reagan. His critics often labeled him a nuclear trigger happy cowboy from the west.
I always loved that, and I think the Gipper did, too — because that meant our adversaries feared him. Whether destroying the Soviet Union or destroying modern day terrorists, it is much better to be feared than loved.
That’s a lesson the Bidens don’t understand. They are engulfed in a paper tiger syndrome, and now America will pay dearly for this catastrophic mistake.
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From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox News.
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Mike Pence: Biden Broke Our Deal With the Taliban
It’s a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
By Mike Pence
U.S soldiers stand guard along a perimeter at the international airport in Kabul, Aug. 16.
Photo: Shekib Rahmani/Associated Press
‘The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”
One month later, the scenario Mr. Biden deemed impossible has become a horrifying reality. In recent days, the world has watched panicked civilians cling to U.S. military aircraft in a desperate attempt to escape the chaos unleashed by Mr. Biden’s reckless retreat. American diplomats had to beg our enemies not to storm our embassy in Kabul. Taliban fighters have seized scores of American military vehicles, rifles, artillery, aircraft, helicopters and drones.
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
It has embarrassed America on the world stage, caused allies to doubt our dependability, and emboldened enemies to test our resolve. Worst of all, it has dishonored the memory of the heroic Americans who helped bring terrorists to justice after 9/11, and all who served in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.
In February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement that required the Taliban to end all attacks on U.S. military personnel, to refuse terrorists safe harbor, and to negotiate with Afghan leaders on creating a new government. As long as these conditions were met, the U.S. would conduct a gradual and orderly withdrawal of military forces.
Unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, the agreement immediately brought to Afghanistan a stability unseen in decades. In the past 18 months, the U.S. has not suffered a single combat casualty there.
By the time we left office, the Afghan government and the Taliban each controlled their respective territories, neither was mounting major offensives, and America had only 2,500 U.S. troops in the country—the smallest military presence since the war began in 2001.
America’s endless war was coming to a dignified end, and Bagram Air Base ensured we could conduct counterterrorism missions through the war’s conclusion.
The progress our administration made toward ending the war was possible because Taliban leaders understood that the consequences of violating the deal would be swift and severe. After our military took out Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, and U.S. Special Forces killed the leader of ISIS, the Taliban had no doubt we would keep our promise.
But when Mr. Biden became president, he quickly announced that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for an additional four months without a clear reason for doing so. There was no plan to transport the billions of dollars worth of American equipment recently captured by the Taliban, or evacuate the thousands of Americans now scrambling to escape Kabul, or facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting. Rather, it seems that the president simply didn’t want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.
Once Mr. Biden broke the deal, the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan government and seized Kabul. They knew there was no credible threat of force under this president. They’ve seen him kowtow to anti-Semitic terrorist groups like Hamas, restore millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority, and sit by earlier this year while thousands of rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.
Weakness arouses evil—and the magnitude of evil now rising in Afghanistan speaks volumes about the weaknesses of Mr. Biden. To limit the carnage, the president has ordered more troops to Afghanistan, tripling our military presence amid a supposed withdrawal.
After 20 years, more than 2,400 American deaths, 20,000 Americans wounded, and over $2 trillion spent, the American people are ready to bring our troops home.
But the manner in which Mr. Biden has executed this withdrawal is a disgrace, unworthy of the courageous American service men and women whose blood still stains the soil of Afghanistan.
Mr. Pence served as vice president of the United States, 2017-21, and is chairman of Advancing American Freedom.
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I have had the pleasure of meeting Langone and tried to get him to speak here at The SIRC's President Day Dinner prior to Covid but he told me that was a family weekend which all his kids set aside.
Home Depot Billionaire Has Warning for America
You've probably never heard of Ken Langone.
The son of Italian immigrants, Langone describes himself as "a dumb kid from Long Island that barely got out of high school and almost flunked out of college."
Langone's dad was a plumber, his mom worked in a school cafeteria.
But Langone lived the American dream – he went from making $82 a week to one of the richest people in the world.
Langone's most-famous move was an early investment in Home Depot, which enabled him to become a co-founder of what is now the biggest business of its kind in the world, with 2,000+ stores and 400,000 employees in North America.
Langone and his partners were not the only ones to get rich from Home Depot. He says more than 3,000 entry-level employees have become multimillionaires.
Because of Langone's Home Depot connection, he has unique insights into the current status of the U.S. economy – the labor shortages, supply chain issues, soaring prices, and increasing inflation.
That's why it was telling to see Ken Langone go public on CNBC recently with an alarming prediction... (click here to see why Langone is so concerned)
He says a huge shift is looming in the U.S. economy and financial system. He says the government is already creating major distortions... and that, "the people they are trying to help are the ones who are going to get hurt the most."
What's interesting is that Langone is not the only one who's predicting problems... 8 other billionaires have issued similar concerns...
And a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker named Dr. David Eifrig agrees.
He says:
Most Americans are completely unprepared for what's about to take place in our country.
Dr. Eifrig adds:
This is not surprising, since roughly half the U.S. population was born AFTER 1981, and we simply haven't seen anything like this in roughly 50 years.
What exactly is going on, and what has these successful and wealthy Americans so concerned?
Well, today Dr. David Eifrig – in addition to being a part-owner in several restaurants and a winery – is a Founding Partner in one of America's most successful financial research firms.
And he's just issued an urgent warning... what he calls a "Final Wake-Up Call," for any American who cares about their money, finances, or retirement.
In his latest analysis,(to view it on our website click here) Dr. Eifrig explains exactly what's going on in America, why Ken Langone is so concerned, and four (4) steps that he recommends every American should take right now.
Get the facts for yourself. The worst thing you can do is to sit idly by, and do nothing.
We've posted Dr. Eifrig's full, brand-new analysis on our website.
You can view it free of charge (including his 4 recommended steps), right here.
Sincerely,
Mike Palmer
Founding Partner, Stansberry Research
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The Wolves Have Returned: The Day Biden Lost the Media | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Matt Keener
The Taliban haven’t formally taken any Americans captive in Afghanistan, at least not yet, but it’s clear that the jihadists already have the Biden Administration as a political hostage. That was obvious from Wednesday’s briefing at the Pentagon, where the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted they lack the military resources and political mandate to ensure that every American is evacuated amid the Taliban control of Kabul.
There was no lack of determination to do so on the part of Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, both of whom fought in Afghanistan. One or the other said more than once that they view their mission as getting out “all American citizens” who want to leave the country now in Taliban hands.
The problem is the U.S. military now controls only the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) with about 4,500 troops. Americans, foreign nationals and some Afghans who manage to make it to the airport are able to board flights to depart. But Americans and Afghans are on their own in trying to make it to the airport, which means getting past multiple Taliban checkpoints in the city and surrounding the airport perimeter.
Mr. Austin said that, so far, the Taliban are allowing U.S. citizens who have passports to get through. But the Taliban are not letting most Afghans through, and many who are trying are beaten and who knows what else. Many Americans and Afghan allies are also spread around the country and will have to find a way to get to the airport.
Pressed by reporters on whether the military could leave the airport and get Americans, or extend the airport perimeter, or create a safe-passage corridor from Kabul, Mr. Austin said he couldn’t do any of those and keep the airport secure. That means he’s also depending on the goodwill of the Taliban to let our people and our allies go.
Gen. Milley was also pressed on why the military had abandoned nearby Bagram Air Base in July. Bagram has two runways, while HKIA has one. The general said he didn’t have the troops to protect Bagram and the U.S. Embassy given the rapid troop drawdown order from President Biden. Gen. Milley said his orders were to protect the Embassy as a priority, and the military did.
Mark this down as one of the biggest mistakes of the Biden withdrawal plan, if you can call it a plan. Holding Bagram now would help speed up the evacuation and create more room for Afghans and others as they await departure. Gen. Milley ducked a question about whether retaking Bagram from the Taliban is an option. That means it’s Mr. Biden’s call, and the President wants this dreadful mess behind him pronto.
The U.S. military could fly in enough force to retake Bagram. And if the Taliban block Americans or the Afghans who fought with us from getting to the airport, it may have to. What should be unacceptable is for U.S. military leaders to have to tell the world, and the Taliban, five days into this crisis that they don’t have enough force on the ground for anything more than protecting one airport.
The White House may fear that a more robust show of force will cause the Taliban to take Americans hostage. But that concern underscores the degree to which the White House is letting the Taliban dictate the terms of the evacuation. This is a rolling humiliation.
The military men also weren’t any clearer than the White House on the Aug. 31 deadline that Mr. Biden has set for all U.S. military forces to be out of Afghanistan. They ducked the question, which means they’re either following orders not to answer, or Mr. Biden can’t decide whether to extend the date.
But there should be no deadline on evacuating Americans if some are still left behind enemy lines. The only deadline should be when all Americans and the Afghans who risked their lives to fight with us are safely gone.
We can understand why Mr. Biden would rather talk about Covid vaccines, as he did Wednesday, or $3.5 trillion in new spending. But he and his Administration are responsible for putting Americans and our allies in harm’s way. His top priority, his only priority, has to be getting them out no matter what it takes.
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Is Biden still absorbed in reversing everything Trump did while blaming Trump because, as Biden said, he was committed?
Can Biden reverse course and abandon Obama’s policies?
After Afghanistan, the administration may double down on Iran appeasement in pursuit of a dubious diplomatic triumph. Seeking to expand the Abraham Accords would be a better idea.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(August 18, 2021 / JNS) President Joe Biden has tried to shift the responsibility to his predecessors and to just about everyone but himself regarding the situation in Afghanistan, which is a colossal disaster. It demonstrates how ill-prepared the president and his staff were to deal with an entirely predictable catastrophe that they had helped create.
As bad his current predicament seems, Biden has an opportunity to segue from this calamity to something that would not only be productive but political gold. The only problem is that it would require him to pivot away from his current course in which he is acting as if he is leading the third term of the Obama administration and to contradict the beliefs of almost all of those who serve on his foreign-policy team.
After Afghanistan, the rest of the world is looking at the United States as a declining world power. The man who has ceaselessly boasted of his diplomatic expertise and that under his leadership, “America is back,” now finds his reputation and his credibility in tatters.
That leaves the administration and the foreign-policy establishment, whose members largely comprise Biden’s top advisers, in desperate need of a triumph of some sort. They may be counting on the public’s lack of interest in foreign policy to give them a pass for their blunders. Still, the terrible pictures coming out of Afghanistan and the fact that there are still thousands of Americans left behind as potential hostages as well as an untold number of Afghans who served as U.S. allies similarly being left to their fate, can’t be ignored. That means that Biden is going to want to do something soon to distract the country from a narrative about his incompetence.
Unfortunately, the most likely option for the Biden team involves doubling down on their desire to revive former President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. A rapprochement with Iran was the administration’s foreign-policy priority with the expectation when they took office in January that they would easily achieve their goal.
But rather than happily accept Biden’s tempting offer, the Iranians have proved themselves once again to be tough bargainers. They’ve made new demands that range from the implausible, such as having Congress repeal the extra sanctions imposed by the Trump administration for the Islamic regime’s role as a state sponsor of terror, to the constitutionally impossible, such as having the administration guarantee that any successor won’t overturn the agreement. The latter would require its passage as a treaty rather than merely an agreement, which would require a two-thirds affirmative vote in the Senate.
Neither is going to happen, though judging by the Iranian’s bargaining skills, which were on display during the negotiations for the 2015 agreement, Iran is counting on Biden being as desperate as Obama was to get a deal, no matter what the price. At the very least, that would probably mean a reinstatement of the old pact with various side deals thrown in to make it even more lucrative for a regime that is in dire economic distress in large part due to the Trump administration’s sanctions.
Given Biden’s current dilemma, you can count on him and his cheerleaders in the mainstream media to represent any agreement with Iran as a diplomatic triumph. In reality, a decision to up the ante on Iran appeasement would actually dig Biden an even deeper hole than the one he’s in now. It would not only further alienate Israel and the Arab states, which have been forced into each other’s arms in no small measure because they believed that Obama’s pro-Iran tilt betrayed their security interests. It would also make regional conflict in the Middle East—where an Iran that would be further enriched and empowered is already doing its best to stir up trouble with its Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist allies and auxiliaries—much more likely.
By appeasing Iran, Biden would set the stage for what might be a series of bloody conflicts along Israel’s borders, as well as those targeting its Arab allies, which could destabilize the region with unknowable consequences.
That said, Biden has a much better option than such a dismal prospect. The main obstacle is that it would be harder to persuade his foreign-policy team to pursue it than it would to sell it to the American people.
All he has to do is to put his foreign-policy team to work on an effort to expand the Abraham Accords. The normalization agreements between Israel, and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, were first agreed upon in August of 2020 and solemnized in a White House ceremony the following month. Later that year, Sudan and Morocco were added to the roster of Arab and Islamic countries that had diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. There are others waiting to join that list, and all it would take would be some encouragement from the United States.
But they haven’t gotten any since January for two reasons.
One is that the Biden team wants nothing to do with anything associated with former President Donald Trump. The other is that most of the people back in charge of American foreign policy—a group composed of veteran members of the establishment and young left-wingers—don’t actually believe in the Abraham Accords.
The idea that Arab countries view Israel as a strategic ally against Iran, as well as an economic partner, goes against everything they believe about the conflict in the Middle East. They are still convinced that the only legitimate path to peace is by brokering an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. In their minds, that means a two-state solution and an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines with only minor adjustments while throwing hundreds of thousands of Jews out of their homes and replicating the current mess in Gaza on a grand scale in the West Bank. The Palestinians—both the Fatah “moderates” who govern the West Bank and the radical Islamists of Hamas who run Gaza—have no interest in two states or peace. But for American diplomats and foreign-policy wonks, belief in this concept is a matter of what can only be described as religious faith since it requires one to disregard the facts.
While Biden has not sought to overturn the Abraham Accords, neither he nor his staff has shown the least interest in expanding them.
As historian Michael Oren, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, told me in an interview, Biden’s people are “looking for Sadats” (a reference to Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat who made peace with Israel in 1977), but in the wrong places. There are other Muslim and Arab leaders who understand that Israel isn’t their enemy, and can help them both strategically and economically. But they aren’t to be found in either Tehran or Ramallah.
Giving up on the impossible (a two-state solution with the Palestinians) or the dangerous (the appeasement of Iran) would be painful for Biden’s staff, many of whose members, especially at the lower level, have little love for Israel. But as Oren points out, for all of his arguments with Israel’s leaders, Biden thinks of himself as someone who cares deeply about the Jewish state. Expanding the Abraham Accords would be an easy diplomatic win as well as make the region safer and more stable, something that is more important than ever in the wake of the Afghanistan disgrace.
Unfortunately, there is little indication that Biden will choose this path. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously noted in his memoir, Biden has been consistently wrong about every foreign-policy issue facing the United States for 40 years. It would be totally out of character for him to discard Obama’s policy catechism. Nevertheless, it would be the best thing for the Middle East, American interests and Biden’s political prospects.
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Biden has a history of always choosing the wrong option and making the wrong decision.
President Biden had options
He chose the worst of them
By Clifford D. May
You don’t need to be a brilliant geopolitical strategist to understand that the United States should be the best friend – and the worst enemy – any nation could have. Following the events of recent days, the U.S. will be perceived differently: “harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.”
Many politicians and diplomats share blame for this outcome, as do those deep thinkers who fancy themselves proponents of “responsible statecraft,” based on the dangerous fiction that “forever wars” end once Americans stop fighting them.
But since the buck stops in the Oval Office, history will most vividly remember the terrible decisions President Biden made in the months leading up to the 20th anniversary of the most catastrophic terrorist attacks ever on American soil.
The commander in chief had options. None were good. Least bad would have been to continue to frustrate the ambitions of the Taliban and al Qaeda, which also would have ensured that Afghans in Kabul and other cities would retain a measure of freedom and security. That would have required leaving a small residual force in Afghanistan, a force that would train, advise, and assist – not engage in direct ground combat.
Or, if Mr. Biden was determined to trash everything that blood and treasure achieved over the past two decades (e.g., no additional catastrophic attacks on the U.S. homeland by al Qaeda, 60 women in the Afghan parliament), he could have gradually weaned the Afghan armed forces off their dependence on American assistance (e.g., for intelligence and close air support) as they continued fighting our common enemies.
Instead, he abruptly cut them off – and did so in the middle of the summer “fighting season.”
If nothing else, surely President Biden had the resources to organize an orderly retreat, one that would not require frantically sending troops to Afghanistan (having just pulled troops out of Afghanistan) with a helicopter evacuating the U.S. embassy and Afghans desperately clinging to American aircraft – Saigon, once again. And it’s not over. Not by a long shot.
Let me back up and mention that in the first paragraph above, I’m quoting Bernard Lewis, the eminent historian who would be chagrined but not surprised by what’s now happening in Afghanistan.
Professor Lewis, who died too young (three years ago at 101), was among the first to warn of the threat posed to what we used to call the Free World by militant revanchists in what we now call the Muslim world.
Sept. 11, 2001, he wrote, was “the culmination of a series of attacks throughout the 1980s and ’90s that had brought virtually no response.” Self-proclaimed jihadis saw this not as restraint on our part, to be respected, but “fear and weakness” to be exploited.
Such enemies of America, he added, “are encouraged by ‘experts,’ who keep repeating the mantra: ‘There's no military solution.’”
The Taliban knew that didn’t apply to them, yet Mr. Biden, with characteristic overconfidence and poor diction, reassured his fellow Americans that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
It’s no secret that the Taliban routinely perpetuate terrible atrocities: throwing acid in the faces of little girls for the “crime” of going to school; beheading “apostates;” castrating political opponents, and hanging them, alive, from lampposts; staging mass executions in sports stadiums with the audience encouraged to cheer.
Yet even as the Taliban was seizing females between the ages of 15 and 45 to be “married” to their fighters, and executing Afghan soldiers who had surrendered, presidential press secretary Jen Psaki was telling reporters that the Taliban “has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.”
News bulletin: There is no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, and no “international community” committed to Western values. As my colleagues at FDD made clear in a recently published monograph, authoritarian, despotic, and anti-American regimes, not least the People’s Republic of China, are increasingly dominating the U.N. and other international organizations.
Putin’s special envoy to Afghanistan already has said he prefers the Taliban over “the former puppet government of Afghanistan.”
Diplomats from Beijing already have met with Taliban officials, following which Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi praised the Taliban’s military and political prowess.
The Global Times, a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party, told its readers that the Taliban is “quietly transforming to alleviate concerns of neighboring countries and to improve their international image by becoming friends.”
Barnett Rubin, a former State Department official and a senior fellow at the hopefully named Center on International Cooperation, commented: “It would be unfortunate if the U.S. interprets this as a great power competition and tries to undermine what China is trying to do.”
News bulletin: China’s rulers will not mind if the Taliban restores al Qaeda to its previous status in Afghanistan, so long as both groups focus on the satanic Americans, rather than the genocidal persecution of (Muslim Turkic) Uighurs in (Chinese-occupied) Xinjiang, which lies just across Afghanistan’s northeast border.
I’ll conclude by sharing one more of Professor Lewis’ observations. “The Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic Empire were not conquered by more civilized peoples,” he said, “they were conquered by less civilized but more vigorous peoples. But in both cases what made the conquest – with the Barbarians in Rome and the Mongols in Iraq – possible was things were going badly wrong within the society so that it was no longer able to offer effective resistance.”
The assignment I imagine Professor Lewis giving his class: Discuss parallels between the downfall of those ancient civilizations and what is happening right now in America and other nations of what we used to call the Free World.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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I will end this long memo with this:
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