Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Can it be that the delusional White House believes that the scenes of carnage in Afghanistan won’t prevent Americans from supporting the administration’s actions in Afghanistan? This article says so:

“The public opinion is pretty damn clear that Americans wanted out of the ongoing war and don’t want to get back in. It’s true today and it’s going to be true in six months,” said one Biden ally. “It isn’t about not caring or being empathetic about what’s going on over there, but worrying about what’s happening in America.”…

But White House officials believe Americans’ horror over graphic images of the chaos in Kabul and pleas from Afghans who fear they will be killed by the Taliban will morph into support for the president’s decision to pull troops from the country by Aug. 31 after a 20-year war.

Do they actually not understand that support for the pullout is not the same thing as support for their stunningly incompetent and destructive version of the pullout? And are they that cynical about the attention span of Americans? Of course, they may be correct on that. But in this case I don’t think so. If they are, then we are in even worse shape than I think we are – and I already think we are in exceedingly bad shape.

(2) So now the FBI tells us? I guess it’s okay to do so at this point, because the lies have served their purpose. But still, this is quite an admission from one of our favorite federal agencies:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials…

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

I think their motive for leaking this information to Reuters has something to do with damping down lefties’ expectations that the trials will result in convictions (or, at the very least, charges) for some sort of conspiratorial insurrection, although they, the Democrats, and the press have been leading the public to believe that such charges would be filed. The disclosure also may have something to do with protecting the FBI’s own undercover agents who probably were the actual ringleaders and organizers, to the extent that such organization existed.

(3) Biden broke promises to our allies, and they are livid with anger, although Biden denied anything of the sort in his “press conference” yesterday. To Europe I say hey, you wanted this treacherous liar in office, now you’re got him. Unfortunately, we’ve got him also.

(4) Osama bin Laden had Biden’s number:

Osama bin Laden once warned al Qaeda not to target Joe Biden because he believed that his inheriting the presidency if something were to happen to Barack Obama would “lead the US into a crisis,” a resurfaced letter [from May 2010] shows.

Biden is the weak horse.

How Biden stiffed the Afghan military

The New Neo Posted on by

This story is over two weeks old. I didn’t see it at the time, but it took on more significance once Biden compounded all his other errors by excoriating the Afghan military for not fighting:

Airpower is important to military operations in Afghanistan because forces attempting to capture and hold territory will have to mass together to do so, said Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies…

Air dominance also provides the Afghan military and national police with rapid transportation. Coalition and Afghan helicopters and transport planes can drop hundreds of troops and tons of supplies in remote locations that are otherwise inaccessible because of difficult terrain or Taliban presence…

To keep its aircraft flying, the AAF relies on hundreds of private civilian contractors brought in to train AAF personnel and maintain the aircraft until they are ready to do it themselves…

Those contractors are expected to leave around the same time that the last US troops withdraw, which President Joe Biden has said will be by the end of August.

According to the SIGAR report, the NATO command that oversees the training and build-up of the AAF concluded in January that “without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months.”

The training still needed and the shrinking timetable has made Zoom training a reasonable alternative despite challenges of such a hands-off instruction method, but the Afghan military also has to make sure that the AAF continues to receive the spare parts, engines, fuel, ammunition, replacement aircraft, and other material it needs…

The AAF is expected to play a key role in Afghanistan’s fight against the Taliban. The Biden administration understands its importance and has promised to continue funding and supplying it.

We all know that’s not what occurred. They didn’t even have till the end of August.

This is one thing that happened (that story is datelined July 6th):

The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said…

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said.

U.S. military spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett did not address the specific complaints of many Afghan soldiers who inherited the abandoned airfield, instead referring to a statement last week…

“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” said Afghan soldier Naematullah, who asked that only his one name be used.

Within 20 minutes of the U.S.’s silent departure on Friday, the electricity was shut down and the base was plunged into darkness, said Raouf, the soldier of 10 years who has also served in Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The sudden darkness was like a signal to the looters, he said.

If you want to know why Afghan forces surrendered quickly to the Taliban, take a good look at that statement: In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did.

It’s as though The Joker designed our exit strategy there.

And you probably already know about this:

I assume that the Biden administration would claim they did this because the Trump agreement with the Taliban included the departure of contractors. But that argument would be ruined by two inconvenient facts. The first is that Biden wasn’t irrevocably bound by such an agreement, and the second is that Trump’s agreement contained contingencies that the Taliban had to fulfill before any of this would occur. The Taliban has not met its part of the bargain – and I suspect Trump knew they would not – and so the whole agreement should have been considered by the Biden administration to be moot.

Afghanistan roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

No doubt there are other things happening in the world, but right now Afghanistan is front and center.

(1) Here’s how Joe Biden, our stalwart Commander-in-Chief, indicated in his Stephanopoulos interview that he is unaware that we have US military stationed in Syria:

Most intelligence analysis has predicted that al Qaeda would come back 18 to 24 months after a withdrawal of American troops,” Stephanopoulos said. “Is that analysis now being revised? Could it be sooner?”

“It could be,” said Biden. “But George, look, here’s the deal. Al Qaeda, ISIS, they metastasize. There’s a significantly greater threat to the United States from Syria. There’s a significantly greater threat from East Africa. There’s significant greater threat to other places in the world than it is from the mountains of Afghanistan. And we have maintained the ability to have an over-the-horizon capability to take them out. We don’t have military in Syria to make sure that we’re going be protected.”

Um, yes we do, Mr. President! There are currently about 900 U.S. service members stationed in Syria.

In fact, it’s a major scandal that there are U.S. troops over there at all. Former President Donald Trump ordered their withdrawal in 2018, declaring, “We have won against ISIS.” The then-commander of the military repeated the order again in 2019, only to have nameless bureaucrats lie to their superiors and simply undermine his order.

Biden’s statement represents an alarming degree of ignorance, but unfortunately it’s less alarming than most of what he’s been doing lately and most of what comes out of his mouth.

But I have a theory about his Syria ignorance, and I’m only being a little facetious. I think “they” (whoever is in charge of briefing him) are keeping the news about Syria from him because if he finds out they fear he’ll do some crazy thing like in Afghanistan that will draw additional attention and ire – although not as much furor as with Afghanistan, where the length and scope of our commitment and the number of our people there is far greater.

(2) I am surprised that CNN is covering this with any degree of honesty:

If you listen to the clip, you’ll hear Ward say that the troops there feel guilt. No need for them to feel guilt, though, although some of them probably might describe it that way. They have been betrayed by their leaders, who have also betrayed the Afghan people who trusted them, and who have indeed betrayed every American who fought there, the American people, and our allies as well. What the military members there should feel and probably do feel is rage at that betrayal, and at the fact that they (and all of us) have been shamed by the behavior of this administration.

(3) Absolutely dreadful:

(4) Here’s the full interview transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, if you can stomach it. In the video they showed, they apparently edited out the worst parts of Biden’s performance.

Later than scheduled, Biden gives a speech on Afghanistan

The New Neo Posted on by

Is the Biden charade finally collapsing? Or not? How long can the Democrats and the MSM delude themselves? Indefinitely?

Of course, there’s always the theory that they want the country to collapse into flailing incompetence. If so, perhaps they’ve already gotten their wish.

Here’s his appearance. I plan to read about it, but you’re welcome to watch:

UPDATE 2:50 PM:

Bonchie at RedState writes:

Biden did finally speak, though, and what transpired only made matters worse. Instead of offering a coherent response to his failures, he made excuses, passed the buck, and flashed his patented anger as reporters pressed him for answers.

So, more of the same.

In the end, he only took four questions from far-left outlets and for the first time in his presidency, the anger in the room from the press was palpable. As Biden turned his back on the world again, shouts began to ring out from those in the rooms, heckling him for walking away.

In the aftermath, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News noted that there were so many lies in what Biden said that there wasn’t enough time to fact-check them all in real-time.

Here’s one of the lies. Or, is it a lie if you don’t know it’s a lie? It’s really hard to separate out Biden’s usual lying from his apparently-increasing cognitive dimness:

For example, Biden claimed he has seen no criticism from our allies of how he withdrew from Afghanistan and the resulting disastrous situation. Further, the president went so far as to claim he had received praise from our allies. But that’s flatly untrue. In fact, things are so bad that the UK Parliament held Joe Biden in contempt two days ago. The Germans have also expressed wide displeasure with how this went down and an EU leader called it a “catastrophe.” Our allies were left in the dark and now they are incensed and scrambling to save their people.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that his handlers are keeping the news from him, thinking it might further derail him psychologically. Does he only read what they provide?

Bonchie closes with this:

At one point, he also forgot who his Secretary of Defense is. In short, we have no president.

Ah, but we do have a president. Unfortunately, it’s Joe Biden – who is grossly incompetent, destructive, addled, mendacious, malicious, and getting worse by the day. And the people who conned the American people (and/or committed vote fraud) to put him there should all be deeply ashamed and say so. But they’re not, and I won’t sit on a hot stove until they do.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) On the genius decision to abandon Bagram prematurely:

Gen. Milley took up answering the question of why Bagram was abandoned after Austin acknowledged that some U.S. military aircraft have been piloted out of Bagram by the Taliban. Milley carefully said the plan was driven by Washington, designed on the ground in Afghanistan, and then briefed all the way up the chain.

Trying to decipher that, I come to the conclusion that it may mean that they were given the orders (from Biden? someone else?) and part of those orders was to draw down the military presence as soon as possible and not even add anyone temporarily for the purpose of securing the country while the leavetaking occurred, and therefore that meant one of the airports had to be closed due to lack of personnel.

Why the military would think it was almost arbitrary which airport of the two was the one that should be closed is impossible for me to understand (except the old “fool plus knave” answer). As the reporter points out, Bagram would seem better because it had two runways. It also was more easily defended militarily, and – if I understand the situation correctly from what I’ve read – if kept open and functioning for a while, then the military material there would not have to be abandoned and could be removed or destroyed before the airport was closed.

(2) Remember the 2020 election? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? But the wheels are still grinding, and this article explains that there were about sixteen million mailed ballots unaccounted for:

By “unaccounted for,” PILF means that EAC reports the ballots “were not returned as voted, were undeliverable, or were otherwise ‘unable to be tracked.’” Nobody knows whether someone actually tried to vote with those ballots only for the Postal Service to lose them or whether would-be voters decided not to bother or whether the ballots were mishandled by “ballot harvesters” (including well-intentioned ones) or whether some were part of a fraud scheme.

(3) Glenn Reynolds says, about Afghanistan, fire them all:

To begin with, Milley must resign or be fired. And the same for our triple-masking defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. This was a failure that happened on their watch, and it happened through bad management. We could have pulled out without nearly the level of chaos, confusion and terror. Of course, it’s not going to happen, but it should…

Likewise, the intel agencies and officers who provided the bad, er, intelligence need to go. Many others who failed, from contractors to lower-level officers and bureaucrats, need to go, too. You punish a bureaucracy by shrinking its staff and cutting its budget. That needs to happen here.

The brass and agencies will complain that it was Biden who ultimately made the call. Indeed, they are already furiously leaking to that effect to the press. Maybe they’re right. But it’s up to voters to fire the president at the ballot box.

Yes, but that can’t happen till 2024; we have no presidential recall provisions. Of course, there’s the 25th Amendment, but that’s not in the voter’s hands. Nor is impeachment and conviction, another available remedy.

Reynolds says – and I agree – that they will not be fired. Of course, they could all resign, but that won’t happen either.

(4) Biden was supposed to make our European allies love us again. It certainly isn’t happening right now. In particular, Britain is very angry at not even being told what the “plans” were:

MPs and peers from across the political spectrum, including Boris Johnson, put some blame for the Taliban’s takeover and the chaos that followed on Britain’s closest ally.Mr Biden was accused of “throwing us and everybody else to the fire” by pulling out US troops, and was called “dishonourable” for criticising Afghan forces for not having the will to fight.

Former defence chiefs who led British troops in the Middle East were among those to speak out, while there were warnings that the West’s withdrawal would embolden Russia and China.The interventions mark a deterioration in UK-US relations almost exactly 20 years after Britain joined America in invading Afghanistan to root out terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

But it was not just Mr Biden who faced criticism, with Mr Johnson and his ministers told they had overseen the worst disaster in British foreign policy for 65 years.The Prime Minister was accused of not doing enough to rally allies to support Afghanistan as the US departure became apparent, including by his predecessor, Theresa May…

“The West could not continue this US-led mission – a mission conceived and executed in support and defence of America – without American logistics, without US air power and without American might,” the Prime Minister said in a clear swipe at Washington.

MPs from all sides of the Commons were forceful in their criticism…

(5) Biden says the Taliban are “going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the int’l community as being a legitimate government.” Earth to Biden: that’s not an existential crisis; it’s not even a crisis. It’s a tactical decision about how much to calibrate their public image until the US is gone and their control is firm and unimpeded.

It’s the West that’s going through a crisis, a grave one. But that’s been true for quite some time, and your election (or “election”) is a symptom of it.

Joe Biden, time, and making decisions

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that this is telling:

“But we’ve all seen the pictures,” Stephanopoulos said. “We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling…”

Biden interrupts, livid. “That was four days ago, five days ago!”

That was two and half days ago, but yes, Joe, it still matters, you can’t skate past it. But this is his attempt to do an Obama: Ignore scandal for several days, then say it’s “old news, move on.” It doesn’t go over well.

A lot of pundits are concentrating on the fact that Joe got the number of days wrong. It’s true that he did, and it’s true that it’s symptomatic of his cognitive difficulties with numbers and his lack of attention to detail. But the deeper problem is that I believe Biden truly believes that something that happened days ago is of no particular importance. Obama would not have implied that something was “old news” after just a few days (whether it be two days or five days), nor would he have believed it even had he tried to sell the idea to the American public.

I think Biden is giving us a glimpse into his actual thought process, which increasingly lives in the moment and lives on impulse. I think one of many reasons for his calamitous decisions on this is that he was operating like a child wanting a cookie and wanting it now. He had decided to get out of Afghanistan and he was too impatient to wait for the proper safeguards to be put in place. And unlike the child and the cookie, he was in charge and he got to order other people around. It must have been heady, after all those years of having to work with other senators, and of being Obama’s vice president and having to abide by Obama’s decisions whether he believed they were correct or not.

As for any counsel the military offered to him that explained the bad consequences of his decision, he was demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect:

In 2011, Dunning wrote about his observations that people with substantial, measurable deficits in their knowledge or expertise lack the ability to recognize those deficits and, therefore, despite potentially making error after error, tend to think they are performing competently when they are not: “In short, those who are incompetent, for lack of a better term, should have little insight into their incompetence—an assertion that has come to be known as the Dunning–Kruger effect”. In 2014, Dunning and Helzer described how the Dunning–Kruger effect “suggests that poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance.”

Biden is especially unlikely to have ever recognized his own shortcomings, because the world has rewarded and promoted him to the highest office in the land. So why would he not value his own judgment above that of others?

[NOTE: And yes, as I’ve explained elsewhere, I assume that this decision actually was Joe’s. There may have been other people facilitating it and encouraging it, and certainly there were many others who were willing to carry it out. But the decision is very much in line with Biden’s history regarding Vietnam and Iraq, as I wrote in this post.]

What sort of “incompetence” explains the decisions made by the US in the Afghanistan withdrawal?

The New Neo Posted on by

This post is basically a variation on the old “fools or knaves?” question, only on steroids.

Our precipitous and disastrous leave-taking from Afghanistan – which is still ongoing – is obviously incompetent, but incompetent on a level that even a five-year-old child of modest intelligence could have foreseen and avoided. The premature closing of Bagram (please read that link; it’s important), the abandonment of armaments and vehicles, the failure to remove Americans and Afghan interpreters in a timely fashion, the previous jettisoning by the Biden administration of a plan to evacuate safely, all bespeak of planners who are either ignorant and amateurish on a scale previously undreamt of, or have malign intent. Or perhaps both.

This goes beyond – way way beyond – the more ordinary poor decision-making and subsequent second-guessing that usually follows any operation gone wrong (such as, for example, the decision in Iraq to disband the Iraqi Army). Human beings are fallible, but this seems to be more than that. The question is: what is behind such abysmal failure?

It can’t be explained merely by Joe Biden’s addled, impatient brain, and the fact that he’s commander-in-chief. His generals should have resigned rather than obey such orders. They did not, nor are they doing so now. So at the very least, the rot goes all the way through the upper echelons of this administration (but we already knew that) to the military and beyond. We sort of knew that, too, prior to this episode, but I don’t think we knew how bad it had gotten and how even the most basic principles of the military had been abandoned.

But again, we are left with the same fools vs. knaves dilemma, restated this way: are they all just looking out for the own careers, the gaining of more power, and the furtherance of their leftist/woke politics? Or is it worse? Are they criminally treasonous, out to utterly destroy this country rather than merely transform it into some leftist establishment?

That I have to ask these questions is unutterably sad. But events dictate them.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes the best way to deal with rapidly incoming news is the roundup. So here goes:

(1) Biden gives a speech – on COVID:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.

The threat of the withdrawal of federal funds is the way the feds get their foot in the door of ordering things they would otherwise have no power to order.

[ADDENDUM: After his speech on COVID and with no mention whatsoever of Afghanistan, Biden turned his back on reporters’ shouted questions and exited the room. Reports are that he’s now going to Delaware. Speculation abounds about his condition.]

(2) This is horrific:

Day and night families – often with tiny children – have risked their lives, ducking past gunfire at the gates of the civilian side of the airport; passing aggressive Taliban fighters, who occasionally beat and harass them.

In the night, the paratroopers blockaded the road with cars and razor wire.

A senior officer told me they had no choice because the situation was out of control, but said the blockade will live with some of his soldiers for the rest of their lives.

“It was terrible, women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them, some got caught in the wire,” he told me…

[A woman trying to get out] explained they were living in Herat but escaped to Kabul. Her uncle was part of the Taliban.

She said: “They want to obligate us into forced marriage. I am a doctor and my sister was working with women’s rights, she studied, and my mother is a teacher, my mother was a teacher…”

More at the link.

(3) China may position itself to exploit Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals.

(4)

A top U.S. diplomat said on Wednesday the United States expects the Taliban to allow Afghans who wish to leave Afghanistan to depart safely, following reports that the group now in control of the country was blocking airport access.

That’s an interesting “expectation.” I have thought that it’s at least possible that the Taliban might allow the Americans in Afghanistan to leave with little or no violence, if only because it suits the Taliban’s purposes if they are gone and because it might draw too much criticism if they harm them. But the Afghans who have helped those Americans? It seems risible to me to “expect” any such thing.

Who was it who said this? Why, none other than Wendy Sherman, who apparently is currently Deputy Secretary of State. More:

“We have seen reports that the Taliban, contrary to their public statements and their commitments to our government, are blocking Afghans who wish to leave the country from reaching the airport,” Sherman said.

U.S. officials were engaging directly with the Taliban “to make clear that we expect them to allow all American citizens, all third-country nationals, and all Afghans who wish to leave to do so safely and without harassment,” she said.

This exit has been in the works for many months, and they had plenty of opportunity to organize it, but apparently were too callous, too hubristic, too stupid, too destructive, too compromised, too weak – take your pick – to do so.

You may not remember Sherman, but I do, because I wrote a long post about her back in 2015. At the time, she was the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal and had been one of the negotiators for Bill Clinton’s ill-fated North Korea deal. And what a resume she had, even before that (for example, head of the DC office of the Dukakis presidential campaign) . This woman has gone from debacle to debacle and on to higher posts.

(5) And then there’s this:

Joe Biden’s State Department moved to cancel a critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” – which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas was paused by Anthony Blinken’s State Department earlier this year. Notification was officially signed just months before the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.

I’ll stop here for now.

Let’s hear it for the fearless alligator rider

The New Neo Posted on by

What a scene:

An animal trainer was saved by a Good Samaritan on Sunday after an alligator clamped onto her hand.

Scales and Tails in Salt Lake City hosted a 5-year-old’s birthday party over the weekend, KUTV reported, and trainer Lindsay Bull was attacked during a routine feeding of an 8 ½ foot male alligator, video shows…

Watching on, a Good Samaritan, identified as Donnie Wiseman, is heard asking Bull if he could help, to which she replied, “If you can get on his back, go on his back.” The trainer later told the NBC affiliate she only allowed Wiseman to enter because he said he had worked with an 18-foot python before…

The onlooker quickly jumped on Darth Gator’s back and after a minute, Bull was able to free her hand and another Good Samaritan, identified as Todd Christopher, pulled her out of the enclosure.

With careful instruction, Wiseman was able to safely exit as well…

Scales and Tails owner, Shane Richins, echoed “I hope no one thinks it’s a good idea to just run out and hop on a gator because they saw it, but they probably saved her arm and possibly her life by running in and stabilizing him so he couldn’t keep rolling on her, and then they just held him still until he relaxed and let her go.”

I think I can safely assure Richins that, if I’m ever there, I will not be riding any alligators.