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Taliban death sentence awaits:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/08/20/fox-news-aishah-hasnie-afghan-civilians-are-waiting-for-their-death-sentence-following-taliban-takeover-n2594493
And:
Biden has created the most hellish environment possible in this country. He did so to pander to American progressives and now they are paying dearly.
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This is not the first time Biden has displayed his heartlessness. He did it when Justice Thomas testified etc..
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline. She argues that American culture no longer upholds universal democratic values undergirded by the nation’s Constitution. Instead, Hirsi Ali maintains, American self-confidence has descended into nihilism. While the culture embraces symbolism promoted by the progressive Left, it is failing to address genuine humanitarian crises
And:
In Afghanistan, the Tragic Toll of Washington Delusion
By H. R. McMaster and Bradley Bowman via Wall Street Journal
H. R. McMaster writes that some strategists in Washington believe it was necessary for American troops to withdraw from Afghanistan so that the United States could focus on threats posed by the People’s Republic of China. However, he asserts that the humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the Taliban’s seizure of power has only emboldened China and other adversaries who are eager to proclaim the US as an unreliable security partner.
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Here we go: 2 videos attached.
The Taliban Show Off their Newfound Wealth and Treasures Since Taking over Afghanistan
China Promotes Racist, Woke Ideology Video Meant to Divide Blacks and Whites in America
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To complete this memo I am going to post a variety of op eds from the WSJ, one of the last great remaining papers in America:
The Petraeus Op Ed is particularly good because, regardless of his personal misgivings, he is one of the more brilliant and thoughtful generals and his observations are wide ranging, in depth and less doleful than my own.
Second, it is evident that Pakistan plays a more significant part in the unfolding Taliban-Afghanistan drama than I gave it recognition.
Finally, we seem never to learn from our failures.
You cannot buy loyalty simply because you have dollars to dole out.
If you feel/are compelled, by some circumstance, to to use troops as a substitute for diplomacy you should have a well thought out strategy dedicated to exiting, an idea how long you plan to stay against various contingencies and allow nothing to suck you in because the goal becomes elusive and more murky.
I am posting the op ed on Iraq written by the person GW appointed to oversee our involvement. Brimmer was a disaster, in my opinion. The op ed he has co-written is self-congratulatory and, perhaps, somewhat justified, particularly when compared with Afghanistan. However, Iraqi's are different than the Afghanistani's and must be taken into consideration. Both still a tribal culture but the former are educated and literate, Iraq is wealthier, energy sufficient, had a trained military , more connected with the West etc.
Op Eds:
A ‘Pitiful, Helpless Giant’ in Afghanistan
Time for a NATO military operation to rescue those trapped behind Taliban lines.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden provided an update Friday on the emergency evacuation effort in Kabul, and as usual he was his own worst advocate. The President’s optimistic view doesn’t fit the chaos on the ground or the fact that the mission continues to be hostage to the goodwill of the Taliban.
“We’ve made significant progress,” Mr. Biden said, taking credit for “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was describing a humanitarian airlift in Haiti rather than the desperate rescue of Americans trapped behind enemy lines.
It’s good news that U.S. troops finally control the Kabul airport and its single runway, though that’s all the allies control. It’s also good that 18,000 people have been evacuated since the Taliban took control of the capital. But the U.S. still doesn’t know how many Americans are in the country, and the U.S. Embassy warned this week that “the United States government cannot ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport.”
Mr. Biden said Friday that “we’re in constant contact with the Taliban,” who he says are letting Americans with passports through their checkpoints. But it’s distressing to hear a Commander in Chief admit that he’s relying on the promises of jihadists who have spent years killing Americans. Mr. Biden even suggested they’ll let Americans pass because, well, they need to make a good impression on the world community. Lovel.
The situation is worse for the thousands of Afghans who have applied for entry to the U.S. through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. Including families, they total 50,000 or more. Mr. Biden vowed to evacuate them as well, as a matter of national honor.
But the Taliban have set up checkpoints throughout Kabul, making it difficult or impossible for some to reach the airport. Americans and Afghans trapped in other provinces face an even more daunting journey. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, asked Wednesday whether the U.S. could rescue Americans who can’t reach the airport, replied, “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul.” What an extraordinary expression of American helplessness.
Some of America’s European allies have taken a less defeatist approach. Elite French police units left the airport and rescued their citizens and Afghans from the French embassy. Media reports say British troops left the airport as well, and two German helicopters will be arriving in the country this weekend to assist with evacuations.
Mr. Biden boasted Friday about the U.S. coordination with these NATO countries, though our sources say there is much frustration over U.S. risk-aversion. If Mr. Biden believes what he says, he should organize a joint military operation to go beyond the airport and get people out. It isn’t clear that the U.S. can complete a rapid and successful evacuation of foreigners and loyal Afghans without an aggressive military component.
Joint NATO forces can expand the airport perimeter and create a corridor into Kabul city with more points of access to the airport for Americans, NATO nationals and Afghan SIV candidates. Special forces can conduct rescue missions in difficult to reach areas. The U.S. can establish military hubs outside the airport and around the country where evacuees can assemble for transport. Why should the U.S. and its allies limit themselves to the Kabul airport, which the Taliban could cripple by bombing the runway?
Such a joint military operation would send a message of resolve to the Taliban and evacuate people on U.S. terms, not the Taliban’s. The alternative is to remain captive to Taliban forbearance, which could end at any time.
Such an operation is risky, and on Friday Mr. Biden spoke about the risks of unspecified “unintended consequences.” That tells the Taliban they’re in charge. Mr. Biden no doubt fears the Taliban will take foreign hostages. But trapped Americans and allies are already de facto prisoners. If Secretary Austin needs more troops, then send them in. If Mr. Biden refuses, Mr. Austin should resign over not getting the force to fulfill his mission. The U.S. has enough combat brigades to do the job.
In 1970, in explaining a military offensive in Cambodia, Richard Nixon put the stakes this way: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
A nation that hesitates to rescue its people for fear of the Taliban is behaving like a pitiful, helpless giant.
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David Petraeus Reflects on the Afghan Debacle
He offers unsparing words about Trump and Biden, a defense of nation-building, and he says U.S. soldiers may have to re-enter Kabul in force to rescue Americans.
By Tunku Varadarajan
As Americans despair over the Afghanistan catastrophe, few have more cause to take it personally than retired Gen. David Petraeus. Not only was he commander of U.S. and allied forces there for 13 months in 2010-11; his son and daughter-in-law both served there in the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade. That involved an additional measure of personal sacrifice: During his command, he didn’t see his son to avoid making a target of the young man’s unit.
In a Zoom interview, I ask Mr. Petraeus, 68, what effect the ignominious withdrawal will have on military morale. He chooses his words carefully without masking his indignation. “I think—particularly for those who served there—that it is very sad,” he says. “It is heartbreaking. It is tragic. And I think it is disastrous.” He asks: “Is American national security better now than it was four months ago?” Then he answers indirectly: “It’s a tough answer to arrive at if folks have given 20 years of service and sacrifice.”
The general hastens to add, however, that “this is not the post-Vietnam military; there is no hollow Army.” He says what every American fighting man is inclined to say, “that this is best-equipped, best-trained, most combat-experienced military by far in the world.” It isn’t the Army he joined “as a very young lieutenant” in 1974. “That was a very different Army. That was an undisciplined Army.” He was “very fortunate” to go to an airborne battalion combat team in Italy that was “very elite, and everybody else wanted to go to.” But when he and his fellow officers would “go up to Germany at that time, the indiscipline was just stunning.” And “the racial issues were draining.”
Mr. Petraeus sounds pained when comparing “the reality we had” before the pullout to the new status quo. He valued—even cherished—the fallen Afghan government. “However imperfect that government was, however flawed, however many its maddening shortcomings and corrupt activities,” he says, its leaders were “great partners” in ensuring that al Qaeda, Islamic State and other terrorist groups couldn’t re-establish the kind of sanctuary that al Qaeda had under the Taliban before 9/11.
Yet he suggests the Taliban are so constrained that they may end up being less difficult to deal with than many Americans fear. Minutes before our interview, he says, he told Tony Blair : “The Taliban may discover that just like a political party, sometimes it’s easier to be an opposition than it is to actually govern.” The former British prime minister “just chuckled,” Mr. Petraeus says, declining to elaborate on Mr. Blair’s reaction. “I’m a loyal man,” he says. “Blair was my wartime prime minister.”
An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens remained in Afghanistan at the time of the pullout, and the most urgent priority is to ensure the evacuation of all who wish to leave, as well as the safe passage of the 18,000 Afghan battlefield interpreters—“we call them ‘terps’ ”—and their families, who face mortal peril from the Taliban. The latter “is a very big deal, a real moral obligation which we have not met in three consecutive administrations.”
The U.S. has to “continue to pressure the Taliban to enable these individuals to move to Kabul airport right now.” He is certain that the U.S. military is “examining various possible courses of action, where you go into the city—very visibly, and with very substantial capacity—and you may have to go get some of these people.”
“Does the U.S. have leverage with the Taliban?” he asks. “It has enormous leverage, and the Taliban is very familiar with it.” They’ve been “on the receiving end of our leverage. That’s our military power.” We don’t want to use it, Mr. Petraeus emphasizes. “But I don’t think they want to provoke us into a position of having to use our military power against them, given that they have experienced this on innumerable occasions, most of which have ended very badly for them.”
Thus, he thinks the Taliban won’t want to jeopardize their control of the country by taking hostages. “They’ve achieved what they set out to accomplish,” he says. “They control probably more of the country now than they did prior to 9/11.”
As for the challenges of governing, “I assume they have to be painfully aware that they face an enormous budget deficit.” Not only have Afghan assets been frozen and Western aid withdrawn, but the “big-spending Western organizations, nonprofits, and embassies that were really a part of the ecosystem of Kabul and the major cities around Afghanistan, are gone too,” as are many Afghan entrepreneurs.
The Afghan government budget is “roughly $18 billion a year,” Mr. Petraeus says. The government “might generate $2 billion in customs duties, some taxes, and so forth,” he says—and that’s “in a good year—a really good year.” They’ll supplement that with drug money, he says, but that won’t be enough. The economy is “clearly going to tank for a period of time.”
The Taliban will have to pay salaries, import fuel to keep generators going, provide basic services, and repair damaged infrastructure. That’s “a pretty tall order” in itself, Mr. Petraeus says, “and they’re about to get acquainted with the reality of governing a country that generates at most one-tenth of what it needs to meet its fiscal obligations.” What happens “when they just flat run out of money and the lights go out?”
Perhaps a bailout from Beijing, which has appeared to embrace the new regime in Kabul and is on the verge formally recognizing it? Mr. Petraeus says that he is “fully cognizant of the possibility that China is standing ready to try to exploit the $2 trillion or so in mineral wealth in Afghanistan,” including copper, iron, lithium and rare-earth metals. The Chinese may have an easier time than they’ve had, since they won’t have the Taliban shooting at them as happened at the Mes Aynak copper deposits, 25 miles southeast of Kabul, where the Afghan government awarded a concession to two Chinese state-owned companies in 2008. The Taliban “was shooting rockets and mortars” at Chinese operations, which eventually shut down. After the Taliban retook power, the China Metallurgical Group Corp. said it would resume mining.
Besides, there are limits to what the Chinese can—and will—do. Beijing will invest in Afghanistan, says Gen. Petraeus, and “that’ll help. But keep in mind that the normal way that China goes in and does this is to bring in Chinese workers, Chinese construction materials, Chinese design . . . even Chinese food!” In any case, he adds, it will take a long time to establish the extractive industries from which the Taliban could derive revenue.
On Monday President Biden blamed Afghans for the Taliban’s quick victory. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” the president said. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
Mr. Petraeus bridles at such criticism. “Their soldiers fought and died in very substantial numbers,” he says with the protective indignation of a fellow soldier who fought alongside them. “It’s way over 60,000 dead. Roughly 27 times as many Afghans died fighting for their country as did Americans.” He points out that it’s been 18 months since the last U.S. combat death in the country.
He’s critical of Mr. Biden’s predecessor as well, calling the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban “disastrous.” The U.S. “conveyed that we wanted to leave, and we thought we could get something from the Taliban in return for our leaving—which, of course, didn’t work out.” The agreement that was struck, “negotiated without the democratically elected government of Afghanistan at the table,” provided that the government would release more than 5,000 Taliban-affiliated detainees. Most went back to the battlefield.
He rejects the view that—as he sums it up—“it all went wrong when we started to nation-build.” He notes that the U.S. and its allies had 150,000 troops in the country at the height of the war, a figure that had dwindled to a few thousand “until about four months ago.” That was accomplished by “transitioning security tasks” to the Afghans.
Doing so required efforts of the sort that critics deride as nation-building. Unlike in Iraq, where literacy levels are high, the coalition in Afghanistan had to teach remedial skills “before we could do basic training for the future Afghan soldiers and police. Because if you can’t read numbers, how do you get someone to be on the lookout for license plates on cars? If you can’t read an instruction manual, if you can’t add and subtract, you’ve got serious problems.” If you don’t do nation-building, “to whom do you hand off tasks that you’re performing when you topple a government and are in charge of the country?”
At the same time, Pakistan was a major headache for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Mr. Petraeus recalls a September 2005 briefing with Donald Rumsfeld, in which Gen. Petraeus stressed to the defense secretary that “Afghanistan does not equal Iraq.” In Afghanistan, “the enemy’s headquarters were outside the country and beyond our reach.” Only occasionally was the U.S. able to strike in Pakistan, such as the 2011 raid against Osama bin Laden and the 2016 killing of Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Mullah Omar’s successor as head of the Taliban, who was targeted by a drone in Balochistan.
Efforts to press Islamabad were complicated: “Pakistan could shut down the ground lines of communication, and we were conscious of that,” Mr. Petraeus says. “We needed them to allow that to continue, for us to go to and from Afghanistan.” Afghanistan is landlocked, with Iran to its west, and “you can’t fly everything in and out of a country when you’ve got 150,000 troops on the ground.”
Mr. Petraeus is adamant that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was “sustainable,” and he expresses consternation that Mr. Biden felt compelled to follow through on a pullout to which Mr. Trump agreed. “Why did we just get so impatient that we didn’t appreciate that you can’t take a country from the seventh century—which is where it was under Taliban rule, when we toppled them—to the 21st century, in 20 years or less?” He observes that the new administration quickly reversed Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords. “There has seemed to be no compulsion to continue all that Trump had decided to do, but here, in Afghanistan, we followed through.”
What lessons should friends and foes draw from the Great American Pullout? “I don’t think you can dispute that the outcome here is a blow in some fashion to our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Petraeus says. “I think you have to be forthright and acknowledge that.” The U.S. has to “begin immediately to shore up that credibility and that reputation.”
Should someone in government be compelled to resign over the Afghan debacle? Again Mr. Petraeus chooses his words with care: “Without knowing who said what to whom and when, it’s impossible to answer that question. What I will say is, there is a long history in Washington and other national capitals of describing an undesirable policy outcome as intelligence failure, and we have to be keenly aware of that at present, clearly.”
When I ask Mr. Petraeus—who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency after retiring from the military in 2011—to elaborate, he says: “I think it’s very clear what I just said.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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What’s 50 Times More Dangerous Than Afghanistan?
Pakistan has nuclear weapons and 200 million people, many of whom celebrate Taliban victory.
By Sadanand Dhume
Since Kabul fell to the Taliban Sunday, critics have flayed President Biden for diminishing America’s global standing, empowering the Taliban and their al Qaeda partners, cold-shouldering U.S. allies, and abandoning Afghans who risked their lives to work with Americans. Add one more likely consequence of the cack-handed U.S. withdrawal: an emboldened Pakistan, whose Taliban-friendly generals and plethora of jihadist groups feel the wind in their sails.
In official statements, Pakistan says it backs a peaceful resolution in Afghanistan. But if there is one global capital where the Taliban victory was greeted with barely disguised glee, it was in Islamabad. On Monday, Prime Minister Imran Khan praised Afghans for “breaking the shackles of slavery.” On social media, retired generals and other Taliban boosters hailed the triumph of Islam, never mind that the defeated Afghan government too called itself an Islamic republic.
Exultant Pakistanis shared a video clip from 2014 featuring Hamid Gul, a former head of the army’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Gul says to a fawning TV studio audience. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”
You can understand why Taliban fans want to gloat. Between 2002 and 2018, the U.S. government gave Pakistan more than $33 billion in assistance, including about $14.6 billion in so-called Coalition Support Funds paid by the Pentagon to the Pakistani military. ( Donald Trump ended nearly all military assistance and also slashed nonmilitary aid from its peak in the Obama years.) During the same period, Pakistan ensured the failure of America’s Afghanistan project by surreptitiously sheltering, arming and training the Taliban.
“We found ourselves in an incredibly bizarre situation, where you are paying the country that created your enemy so that it will let you keep fighting that enemy,” says Sarah Chayes, a former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a phone interview. “If you wanted to win the war, you had to crack down on Pakistan. If you wanted to conduct operations [in Afghanistan] you had to mollify Pakistan.”
For Pakistan’s generals, winning the “double game”—ostensibly aiding America while simultaneously abetting its enemies—required finesse. At times, it appeared as though the jig was up, especially in 2011 when U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house next to Pakistan’s premier military academy. But successive administrations—Republican and Democratic—refused to take measures that could have forced Pakistan to rethink its support for the Taliban.
Ideas such as forcibly denuclearizing Pakistan, imposing sanctions on army officers, curbing the travel and education in the West of ISI operatives and their families, scrapping Pakistan’s farcical designation as a “major non-NATO ally,” and declaring it a state sponsor of terrorism never made it beyond think tank reports and newspaper punditry. Washington always blinked, fearing instability in a nuclear-armed nation of more than 200 million people.
“Pakistan is a country-sized suicide bomber,” Ms. Chayes says. “The message Islamabad sends is that if you get too close to us we’re going to blow ourselves up.”
The world will likely get that instability anyway. At least for now, the Taliban’s victory fulfills the Pakistani army’s decades-old quest to gain “strategic depth” by controlling Afghanistan. But this will not sate the generals; it will whet their appetite.
Before the 9/11 attacks, they used Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a training ground for anti-India jihadist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. Afghanistan also gave the ISI a way to deflect responsibility from itself for terrorist attacks traced back to territory controlled by its protégés. Given the Taliban’s close links with groups like al Qaeda and the LeT, only the willfully naive would take at face value assurances by the jihadist group that they won’t allow Afghan territory to be used to target other countries.
The symbolic significance of an army of zealots humbling the world’s sole superpower is hard to exaggerate. In the Pakistani army it will strengthen the hand of those who view Afghanistan not merely in geopolitical terms, but as the fulfillment of a religious project rooted in an extreme interpretation of Islam that shuns all Western influence.
The same holds true in Pakistani society at large. If music-hating, anti-Western, anti-Shiite misogynists can seize power in Kabul, why can’t they do the same in Islamabad? At least one homegrown Pakistani jihadist group, the Tehreek-e-Taliban, is comprised of fighters already at odds with the Pakistani government.
In a phone interview from Islamabad, Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani senator and Pashtun-rights activist, points out that Pakistan houses some 36,000 madrassas, or religious seminaries, some of which are militant. “The same places producing the Taliban are producing similar people in Pakistan,” he says. “They will contest for power in Pakistan too.”
In early 2009, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai pressed Vice President-elect Joe Biden to crack down on Taliban safe havens across the border, Mr. Biden reportedly rebuffed him by pointing out that “Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.” As president, Mr. Biden may have ensured that Pakistan is 50 times more dangerous to the U.S. and the world as well.
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Democrats Run From Afghanistan
Unlike Republicans last year, few are willing to challenge the president.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Joe Biden handed out plenty of blame for his Afghanistan mess Monday, though he notably left out a core group of enablers. The Democratic Party owns this American humiliation and is already worried about the political fallout.
It’s hard to find many Democrats willing to comment on Mr. Biden’s debacle. A few have stepped up with criticism, including New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski, who in April opposed the president’s proposal to remove all troops from Afghanistan, and who this week has been sharp about the administration’s failure to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who served as a Marine officer in Iraq, called the situation nothing “short of a disaster” as well as “avoidable.” A few Senate chairmen are making noises that they might investigate why the U.S. wasn’t better prepared for the Afghan government’s collapse.
Yet most of the party is either in hiding or in damage control. Many haven’t even issued statements, tweeting instead about healthcare or the Haitian earthquake. Some are expressing frustration over the lack of evacuations, with a clear eye to dodging bigger questions about the withdrawal fiasco. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cosseting Mr. Biden’s delusions of heroism, with a statement hailing “the difficult decision to not hand over this longest of American wars to a fifth President.”
When Donald Trump in February 2020 forged his “historic” deal with the Taliban, some Republicans were enthusiastic, but important voices remained doubtful. Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said he had a “healthy amount of skepticism.” Rep. John Katko, then a member of the Armed Services Committee, warned not to “give away the store” to get out. Rep. Joe Wilson, who sat on both committees, rejected a proposed prisoner swap as “dangerous and irresponsible.”
And when the lame-duck Mr. Trump in November announced a more rapid and ill-considered drawdown, Republican leaders slammed him. Mr. McCaul said it was “premature” and would “endanger U.S. counterterrorism interests.” Mac Thornberry, then the top Armed Services Republican, said the Taliban had “met no condition” that justified a further reduction. Sen. Mitch McConnell, then majority leader, warned Mr. Trump a drawdown would “hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm.” Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Rounds, John Cornyn, John Barrasso, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse —the list of critics went on. They were joined by Democrats who pronounced the plan “haphazard” and “dangerous.”
Compare this with the near-universal Democratic acclaim that met Mr. Biden’s announcement in April that he’d pull out all troops by the end of summer—in contravention of military advice, and despite the Taliban’s flouting the deal. The rare Democratic senator ( Robert Menendez, Jeanne Shaheen ) voiced concern, as did Mr. Malinowski. But most Democrats applauded. The same people who scored Mr. Trump’s haphazard plan cheered on Mr. Biden’s even more haphazard decision. The party rolled out its latest crop of elected veterans for cover. It’s “time to bring our men and women home,” insisted Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, a retired Army Ranger.
The Democratic Party has some serious national-security voices, but few hold office. The party has moved left, even as it has methodically run out the Blue Dogs, centrists and defense hawks who used to keep the radicals in check. Swing-state Democrats live in mortal fear of primary challenges, and most are unwilling to call out or oppose party leaders. And so the party as a whole has mostly indulged Mr. Biden’s misguided decisions, even those (on energy, crime, the border) that are having serious consequences for their home states.
A media that has mollycoddled Mr. Biden is now belatedly questioning his decision to ignore warnings from diplomats and generals. Expect more Democrats to join the criticism. But it’s a little late. Elected leaders who get used to getting a pass grow arrogant and reckless. Leaders, say, who foolishly think the Taliban will also wink at a president’s mistakes.
The political cost of Democrats’ indulgence of this president are yet to be seen, especially as the images from Afghanistan will likely get worse. But the public mood is already shifting. A Politico/Morning Consult Poll conducted Aug. 13-16 showed support for military withdrawal in Afghanistan plummeting 20 points from April, to 49%.
This could impair Democratic priorities in Congress. The Afghan collapse offers a vivid picture of the cost of U.S. disengagement and may make it harder for progressives to transfer more military spending to domestic priorities. A weakened White House could have a harder time marching members into line behind its $3.5 trillion budget blowout.
As for next year’s midterm elections, both parties often make the mistake of confusing war-weariness with indifference. Voters might gripe about “forever” conflicts, but they also don’t like losing and want to feel safe. National security and foreign policy have been overshadowed in recent elections, but Mr. Biden’s Afghanistan train wreck may change that. One question is whether Republicans will re-embrace their role as advocates for a muscular and engaged foreign policy, after Mr. Trump’s more scattershot and populist approach.
Democrats have certainly given them the opening.
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The Taliban Capture Joe Biden
Kabul’s conquerors hold the leverage in defining the terms of a postwar status quo.
By Daniel Henninger
Meet the next member of the United Nations General Assembly: the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. New York City’s commercial real-estate sector soon will be showing space available for the Taliban’s U.N. delegation. This, in the world according to Joe Biden, is what normalcy looks like.
The Taliban, despite their earned reputation for homicidal insanity, are playing Barack Obama’s former vice president with the rational cunning of an Iranian foreign minister.
Kabul is in chaos. Mr. Biden said the city would never look like the fall of Saigon, but it is worse than that because this time the whole world is watching the humiliation of America in real time on TV.
The evacuation crisis in Kabul is the pivotal event of the final scene in the Afghan drama. The Taliban, having consolidated control of the country, had two choices this week: Give some 15,000 remaining U.S. citizens safe passage to Karzai International Airport, or refuse safe passage and risk combat with American forces, though even the U.S. promise of retaliation might not be certain with Mr. Biden.
Because of the evacuation crisis, the Taliban hold nearly all the leverage against the U.S. in defining the postwar status quo. In his press briefing Tuesday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Taliban “have to prove to the international community who they will end up being.” Imagine how easy this call must be for the Taliban, as it luxuriates in dealing with the U.S. as an equal negotiating partner in plain view of every actor in global politics.
Mr. Sullivan announced that “the Taliban informed us they are prepared to provide safe passage of civilians to the airport.” So far they have, despite intense Taliban checkpoints and random beatings. U.S. military transport planes are landing at the Kabul airport and departing with Americans, other Western nationals and a smattering of Afghans.
Make no mistake: The Taliban aren’t doing this as an act of hors de combat, or mutual respect for captured enemies. They’re doing it because they know the Biden administration will be “grateful” to them for this show of forbearance.
The Taliban will attain legitimacy without firing another shot at an American or blowing up another Kabul high school, as in May, killing 92, mostly girls. Further “diplomatic efforts”—Mr. Biden’s comfort zone—will be initiated with the U.S., joined by the European Union, followed soon with recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan by the U.N.
What has happened in the past week is almost a carbon copy of the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, with the Taliban leadership, perhaps before their release from Guantanamo and other prisons, concluding that a hostage crisis would not serve their interests. Given the U.N.’s historically low criteria for membership in the “world community,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iranian government entered the body without a hitch and was soon expanding commercial ties with Europe.
The world will do business with Taliban-run Afghanistan. Russia’s ambassador in Kabul said Tuesday he had a “positive” meeting with the Taliban. The emirate’s interests will be attended to on the bloodless U.N. Security Council.
In 1979 Iranian women demonstrated against forcible compliance with Islamic rules. Some 40 years later, Mr. Biden, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and Speaker Nancy Pelosi warn the Taliban not to, I believe the word is “violate,” the human rights of Afghan women.
As for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who flew to safety in the United Arab Emirates, Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar fled to France in 1979. He was assassinated there by Iranian agents in 1991. Once the U.S. is gone and Kabul is off the world’s TV screens, the Taliban will methodically identify and execute their opponents, including the thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. and don’t escape before Aug. 31. That is when, both Mr. Sullivan and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby made clear, the U.S.’s post-collapse effort inside Afghanistan ends.
Soon, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will join the sovereign nations of Iran, North Korea, Syria, China and Russia, plus the Islamic terror groups in northern Africa that comprise a rough network of staging grounds, financing, transit points, shell companies and cyber communications used daily to undermine the interests of the United States, and worse.
Unavoidably, there is another unseemly image at play in Kabul now, as when Saigon fell in 1975. It is the spectacle of the West moving heaven and earth to evacuate Americans, Britons, Germans and Australians while Afghans who worked for them in subordinate roles are prevented from leaving by the Taliban.
Left behind, Vietnam’s “boat people” dispersed across Southeast Asia, with many arriving in the U.S., where they rose rapidly in business, law and medicine. Sunisa Lee, the Olympic gold-medal-winning U.S. gymnast, is the daughter of Hmong refugees from Laos. Paul Wolfowitz argued on these pages for creating an “underground railway” to get our abandoned allies out of landlocked Afghanistan.
In a cold speech Monday, President Biden threw Afghans under the bus. He should spend the next 3½ years pulling them out.
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The Return of ‘America Held Hostage’
Some 15,000 U.S. citizens and residents are behind Taliban lines. There’s no easy way to get them out.
By Walter Russell Mead
As Taliban forces consolidate their control of Kabul, the nature of the new regime remains somewhat veiled. On the positive side, the jihadist group issued a general pardon to all government workers, some female broadcasters have returned to the air, and prominent ex-officials like former President Hamid Karzai appear to have elected to remain in the country. On the other side of the ledger, Taliban spokesmen would say only that Afghan women will enjoy their full rights under Shariah; girls’ schools have been shut down in parts of the country; teenage girls have been forced into marriage with Taliban fighters; and residents report that armed soldiers are searching apartments and taking names. A widely circulated video purports to show the jihadist group’s soldiers executing 22 unarmed Afghan army commandos after their surrender.
One thing, however, is clear: The Taliban hold the lives of thousands of U.S. citizens—and the future of the Biden administration—in their hands. The collapse of the Ghani government left as many as 15,000 Americans and permanent residents along with an unknown number of other Westerners and foreigners trapped behind Taliban lines. Tens of thousands of Afghans employed by the old government, allied military commands and Western-oriented nonprofits are, with their family members, also desperate to leave. While U.S. forces control the Kabul airport, American citizens—and Afghans with U.S. visas—must run a gantlet of Taliban roadblocks and checkpoints to reach the American perimeter.
As for the thousands of Americans, citizens of allied nations and endangered Afghan nationals stranded in other parts of the country, at press time U.S. officials had no plan in place to bring them to safety. Congressional offices report being deluged with pleas for help from Americans behind enemy lines and from veterans seeking help for Afghan contacts and friends.
While 1,100 U.S. citizens, permanent residents and family members were evacuated Tuesday, there were reports of people being beaten and turned back from the airport. U.S. officials are in contact with Taliban and attempting to resolve these incidents as they occur, but national security adviser Jake Sullivan said cooperation is “hour by hour.” The U.S. military deserves great credit for launching the Kabul airlift so swiftly, but the safety of the Americans left behind by Washington’s precipitous retreat is by no means assured.
President Biden vowed that his Afghan withdrawal would not lead to a Saigon moment. That ship has sailed, but Saigon 1975 is far from the worst-case scenario for Afghanistan today. With thousands of unprotected U.S. citizens scattered across the country, Mr. Biden should worry about a repeat of Tehran in 1979.
While Americans and allied citizens remain on Afghan soil, a major crisis can break out at any time. During the Iranian revolution, the captured U.S. diplomats and citizens, who numbered 52 at crisis’ end in 1981, became the center of political firestorms in both Iran and America. In Iran, radicals used the hostage crisis to discredit and defeat moderate forces and cement their control over the emerging Islamic Republic. In the U.S., the crisis engulfed Jimmy Carter’s presidency and played a major role in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election.
The Taliban, some of whose leaders President Obama released in exchange for captured American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, understand the politics of hostage taking as well as anybody. But even if national Taliban authorities want to avoid a confrontation, with thousands of unprotected U.S. and other foreign citizens scattered around a chaotic country, authorities in the capital may not be able to control radical factions or ransom-hungry groups of local fighters and criminal gangs.
Nothing is more important than getting American citizens to safety as quickly as possible, but the U.S. doesn’t control the process. Mr. Sullivan said Tuesday that Washington “will hold” the Taliban to their commitment to allow safe passage to the airport if they try to stop Americans. But the U.S. options for doing so aren’t great. If our threats could deter or our promises entice, the Taliban would have given up the war long ago. The Taliban are in charge and without their help we cannot bring our people home.
In the event of an Afghan hostage crisis, the Biden administration, already thrown off balance, could well find itself negotiating from a position of weakness under intense domestic pressure. While Americans would likely rally behind the president in the short term, as they initially did during the Iran hostage crisis, an extended standoff would likely be as damaging to Mr. Biden as it was to Mr. Carter.
Social media could turbocharge Mr. Biden’s woes. In 2014 videos of ISIS beheadings and atrocities stirred American opinion powerfully enough to persuade Barack Obama to intervene in Syria and Iraq. Images and videos of beheadings and mutilations in Afghanistan, coupled with agonized pleas from trapped Americans, could pose extraordinary challenges to Mr. Biden’s authority and standing at home and abroad.
Until and unless the evacuation is finished, the U.S.—to say nothing of Mr. Biden’s political future—is a hostage not only of the Taliban, but of the chaotic conditions in a war-torn country undergoing a revolutionary upheaval. By failing to prevent or at least to slow the Taliban conquest long enough to get our people home while the getting was good, Washington not only put American lives at risk; it gave some of our most bitter foes a powerful weapon against us.
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Biden’s Eyes-Open Debacle
For better or worse, the gaffe-prone president’s Afghan choice was no gaffe.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
As with many adventures in decolonization, the 1974 coup in Portugal that led to the independence of Angola and Mozambique worked out better for the colonizers than the colonized.
The Portuguese got an end to the Salazar dictatorship, a start down the road to democracy and modernity. Their African colonies got an exodus of most of their professional and technical experts, followed by an economic collapse and decades of violence and poverty.
Other colonial powers found at least somewhat less nakedly cynical ways of leaving. The British kept up Commonwealth ties with their ex-colonies; the French maintained many financial and institutional links. America’s departure from Afghanistan is a lot more like Portugal’s. However much Washington wants to see a failure of the Afghan state, the U.S. long ago became the state in Afghanistan. It supplied a social infrastructure Afghans were never likely to build on their own, pluralistic, wearing its Islam lightly.
True, 155 million Americans voted in 2020 for presidential candidates who favored withdrawal. Voters might or might not have felt differently if told a new truth. We weren’t just holding off terrorism. We had given half of Afghans (median age 18) the only order they had ever known. We had birthed an unlikely experiment in modernity that might prove useful in our long confrontation with militant Islam. Now we’ll never know.
President Biden at one time exhibited wisdom about a transitional presidency: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.” Then he discovered himself to be a transformative FDR-like president. He detected a sweeping mandate unseen by anyone except his White House toadies. (Perhaps it was tucked inside all those mail-in ballots.)
This week he’s back to being transitional, taking on himself the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, which it was destined always to be, and relieving future presidents of this particular dilemma.
Mr. Biden willed this end. Give him this much credit at least. The shock at seeing on our television screens what his choice made inevitable would not be landing so hard, and prompting so many remembrances of an unflattering quote from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, if Mr. Biden had not also incautiously guaranteed that America’s conspicuous surrender would somehow not translate into conspicuous chaos on the ground.
Was Mr. Biden running his mouth ill-advisedly, as his wont? The intelligence may have been bad. But even when throwing out excuses on Monday, he never pretended he wasn’t deliberately handing the country over to the Taliban, the inevitable consequence of his decision.
The unplanned debacle that came with this planned debacle goes to the continuing question of the strengths and limitations of Mr. Biden. If you want evidence of shrewdness, it’s not impossible to find. He gave himself an insurance policy in the 2024 nomination contest, sticking fellow Democrats with Kamala Harris as the likely alternative. Or take the White House’s ludicrous-seeming intervention in Hunter Biden’s painting career. Was this not a way of acknowledging the truth of the Hunter laptop without acknowledging it? By admitting the obvious, that everything the younger Biden does must be treated as an attempt to cash in on influence, his father made it safe for the mainstream media to continue covering up for him and his son. And so far the media has complied.
For millions of Americans, Mr. Biden was the closest thing to a conventional, confidence-inspiring authority figure in the 2020 race next to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump. Sure, it was more a result of longevity and résumé than any personal qualities of a man who, when he started talking, once led a fellow senator named Barack Obama to pass a note to a colleague saying “shoot me now.”
Yet the torrent of criticism falling on him today is criticism for the inevitable and predictable consequences of a choice he made with eyes wide open. Mr. Biden knew the outcomes could only be bad. There’s a reason the U.S. kept at it for 20 years: The alternative always seemed worse, as events may prove (and soon if U.S. troops and the Taliban end up disputing for control of Kabul airport and evacuation flights).
But if being 78 years old is good for anything, it teaches that what’s a big deal today can be forgotten tomorrow. Mr. Biden was recently heard predicting a summer of freedom from Covid too. A wild card in his pocket is the apparent inability of the U.S. political system to throw up a candidate at the presidential level whom a broad swath of Americans can truly respect. Of course Mr. Biden would have to rethink everything if Donald Trump weren’t reliably spraying a blanket of herbicide over any worthwhile Republican field.
So a question sometimes asked about Mr. Biden doesn’t apply this time. When he consigned Afghanistan to its fate, he knew exactly what he was doing.
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Afghanistan Reveals All the President’s Weaknesses
Biden says Kabul isn’t another Saigon. It may be more similar to Tehran in 1979.
By William McGurn
Joe Biden became Jimmy Carter on Sunday. On Monday he confirmed it in a speech doubling down on the decision that has given us the debacle unfolding in Afghanistan.
Years after President Carter departed the Oval Office, his name still remains a synonym for weak and inept. This reputation was cemented forever on Nov. 4, 1979, when Islamist students overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American hostages. One year later to the day, Mr. Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan.
For President Biden and his team, the analogies to President Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis might be even more unsettling than the obvious parallels to the 1975 fall of Saigon they are working so hard to deny.
When the rescue mission Mr. Carter ordered in April 1980 ended up aborted with five airmen and three Marines killed—and the wreckage of U.S. aircraft lying in an Iranian desert—it only made him look more pathetic. A New York Times headline two weeks before the election summed up the Iranian crisis as “a metaphor for American weakness.”
Mr. Biden now owns the weakness. Yes, Donald Trump wanted out and negotiated a deal with the Taliban. But Mr. Biden is president, and the problem isn’t simply the withdrawal but the shockingly naive way he carried it out. All done, moreover, so he could score political points by using the coming 20th anniversary of 9/11 to portray himself as the man who ended America’s longest war.
But the Taliban understand metaphors too, and they have always invoked Vietnam as evidence that the U.S. doesn’t have the stomach for the long haul. Going forward, 9/11 will be their day of victory and celebration over America. And just as Americans still cringe at Mr. Carter’s errors when they hear the name Islamic Republic of Iran, they will remember that Mr. Biden presided over the rebirth of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Weakness unfortunately begets weakness, and Mr. Carter’s problem wasn’t limited to the Iranian students. Everyone walked all over him. Less than two months after the students had taken the Americans hostages, the Soviet Union surprised Mr. Carter by their Christmas Eve invasion of Afghanistan.
The greatest difference between Mr. Biden and Mr. Carter is that it took the latter years to earn his reputation for lacking spine. By the time the Iranian students acted, Mr. Carter was already low in the polls, looking impotent in the face of inflation and gasoline lines. Though his standing nearly doubled to 61% in a Gallup poll taken right after the embassy seizure—likely thanks to an initial instinct to rally around the president—it steadily declined as the hostages remained in Iran and Mr. Carter’s negotiations proved fruitless.
Before Kabul’s fall, Mr. Biden’s approval was polling at roughly 50%. When he started down the road of withdrawal, he did so believing that the American people, tired of 20 years of war, wouldn’t care much about what happened after we left. But public opinion can change quickly. Americans don’t like looking pathetic before the world, and any rerun of the barbarities visited on the people the last time the Taliban held power will be held against him.
For now the Biden effort is focused on denying that this is anything like the devastating loss of U.S. credibility and disaster that was the 1975 Saigon. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted on Sunday.
His words echo those of his boss from only a month ago, when Mr. Biden denied any parallel to Vietnam and declared: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.” One suspects that the one unequivocal order amid this weekend’s chaos was to direct U.S. helicopter pilots evacuating people at our Kabul embassy to land anywhere but the rooftop, lest the press get a photo that would say it all.
No doubt the next few days will see more Biden administration officials shoved before microphones to deny any talk of a “Saigon moment.” But it is likely to have the opposite effect, with Americans hearing those words as they watch images of helicopters hovering over the embassy in Kabul, Taliban troops lounging in the Afghan presidential palace, and crowds of desperate Afghan allies who had placed their trust in Uncle Sam.
The more common reaction to this disaster is likely to resemble that of Ryan Crocker, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan: “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about [Mr. Biden’s] ability to lead our nation as commander in chief. To have read this so wrong—or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
In the history books, the stink of our second Saigon will hang over Mr. Biden’s legacy. But with more than three years left to his presidency, the idea that we have another Jimmy Carter at the helm may be even scarier. Especially if that is the read in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran.
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