Whose decision was the precipitous and disastrous nature of our Afghan withdrawal?

The New Neo Posted on by

Success has many fathers but defeat is an orphan. Thus it is with our withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan after twenty years. Even Joe Biden, who said in a speech that he stands by his decision, spent most of the speech blaming a host of others for it.

This WSJ article – not behind the paywall – describes who supposedly tried to talk Biden out of it and who did not. Some of this may be mere CYA, but it also may be true:

The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited, while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability.

In a series of meetings leading up to his decision, military and intelligence officials told Mr. Biden that security was deteriorating in Afghanistan, and they expressed concerns both about the capabilities of the Afghan military and the Taliban’s likely ability to take over major Afghan cities.

Other advisers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, raised the possibility of Taliban attacks on U.S. forces and diplomats as well as the Afghans who for two decades worked alongside them. Ultimately, neither disagreed with the president, knowing where he stood.

So those last two disagreed but offered no significant pushback (if you believe this report). If so, it’s fitting that they now are spokesmen for the administration in facing the press, and have done an abominable job.

I’ve said from the start that I think this actually was Biden’s own decision, despite the fact that he is cognitively challenged and that it’s very likely that a lot of other people generally “assist” him in making his decisions. But this one – this one has his fingerprints all over it. In it I see his arrogance, his impulsiveness, and in particular his bad judgment. In addition, he has a long history of wanting to end this engagement with Afghanistan coupled with a history of not caring what happens to those left behind when the pullout occurs.

You can see some of that history described here:

“By the time Biden became vice president in 2009, the disastrous war in Iraq, the endemic corruption of the Afghan government, and the return of the Taliban had made him a deep skeptic of the American commitment. He became the Obama administration’s strongest voice for getting out of Afghanistan. In 2010, he told RICHARD HOLBROOKE, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. According to Holbrooke’s diary, when he asked about American obligations to Afghans like the girl in the Kabul school, Biden replied with a history lesson from the final U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia in 1973: ‘Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’”

Did Biden actually say that? If he did, it certainly would be consistent with what’s happening now. It’s also typically Biden that he gets his facts wrong, because of course it wasn’t Nixon or Kissinger who finally pulled the plug on South Vietnam, it was the Democratic-led Congress (granted, there was some bipartisan approval).

Those famous Saigon helicopters on the roof occurred in late April of 1975; Nixon had resigned in August of 1974. He had earlier presided over the drawdown of forces, but it was Congress about two years later that drastically reduced support and greatly embolded the North and demoralized the South:

In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974: “The Americans have withdrawn…this is what marks the opportune moment.”

The NVA drew up a two-year plan for the “liberation” of South Vietnam. Owing to South Vietnam’s weakened state, this would only take fifty-five days. The drastic reduction of American aid to South Vietnam caused a sharp decline in morale, as well as an increase in governmental corruption and a crackdown on domestic political dissent. The South Vietnamese army was severely under-funded, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the support of the American allies with whom they were accustomed to fighting.

The NVA began its final assault in March of 1975 in the Central Highlands. Ban Me Thout, a strategically important hamlet, quickly fell to North Vietnam. On March 13, a panicked Thieu called for the retreat of his troops, surrendering Pleiku and Kontum to the NVA. Thieu angrily blamed the US for his decision, saying, “If [the U.S.] grant full aid we will hold the whole country, but if they only give half of it, we will only hold half of the country.” His decision to retreat increased internal opposition toward him and spurred a chaotic mass exodus of civilians and soldiers that clogged the dilapidated roads to the coast. So many refugees died along the way that the migration along Highway 7B was alternatively described by journalists as the “convoy of tears” and the “convoy of death.” 6 On April 21, President Thieu resigned in a bitter televised speech in which he strongly denounced the United States. Sensing that South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse, the NVA accelerated its attack and reached Saigon on April 23. On the same day, President Ford announced to cheerful students at Tulane University that as far as America was concerned, “the war was over.” The war officially concluded on April 30, as Saigon fell to North Vietnam and the last American personnel were evacuated.

But of course, we can’t expect Joe Biden to know all that. After all, he wasn’t around – oops, my bad, he actually was [emphasis mine]:

From The Atlantic:

“In the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese with connections to the U.S.—soldiers, officials, spies, interpreters, drivers, bar girls, cooks—begged their American friends and colleagues to help them find a way out. But the embassy in Saigon and the Ford administration in Washington were slow to face the gravity of the situation and reluctant to prepare an evacuation for fear of panicking the population into chaos. In mid-April, President Gerald Ford finally realized that the government of South Vietnam might fall, and he asked Congress for $300 million in emergency aid, including money to evacuate the remaining 2,500 Americans and their dependents along with up to 175,000 South Vietnamese.

“Some of the most strenuous objections came from the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.

“I feel put upon in being presented an all-or-nothing number,” Biden said at a rare White House meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 14. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

…”In a Senate speech on April 23, Biden argued that the president lacked the authority to rescue any Vietnamese. ‘I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals’ other than diplomats of third countries, Biden said. ‘The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.’”

So in 1975, Biden was willing to rescue Americans but not a single South Vietnamese who had helped us. How many of them died as a result? Reliable statistics are hard to come by in a quick search, but you can see some answers here, and there’s no doubt that many died. And here’s a description of the suffering in the re-education camps that housed millions.

These days Biden is more of an equal-opportunity rejector of rescue. Nowadays he doesn’t seem all that concerned about even the Americans in Afghanistan. At least, the speed of his withdrawal indicates callous disregard of their fate, and they are in deep trouble at the moment:

There are thousands of Americans still trapped in Afghanistan. According to the Biden team, 5,000-10,000 are still trapped near Kabul, but John Kirby said they didn’t have a real count, showing more ignorance.

According to a former Bush official, it’s far more than that, spread across the country — with up to 40,000 Americans still in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Taliban has ringed the airport, the last area that the Americans are holding.

So how is the Biden team going to get them out?

First, they caused some of the problem by telling Americans near Kabul to shelter in place on Sunday which was probably the last safe day to get to the airport. Now, if Americans or allies are going to get to the airport, they have to go through the Taliban who are blocking all the entries. While the Biden team is claiming there is an uneasy agreement to let people through for the next two weeks, there are also reports of the Taliban beating people trying to reach the airport.

In the face of all this, here’s what the American government has sent out to citizens. Imagine getting this after they told you to stay in place on Sunday.

That is followed by this tweet:

If you saw this in a movie you would think the incompetence exaggerated. But no, this is actually happening.

As I said, in my opinion this debacle has Biden’s fingerprints all over it. But he’s hardly alone in this. He’s not composing a note like that, for example. As many have suggested, one thing we are seeing here is the overwhelming incompetence of the so-called “elites” – that is, the people in charge of these things, be it the military or the State Department. It may not be all the people in those agencies, of course. Some people may be objecting, but if so they are apparently being overruled by others.

We kept saying during the Trump administration, witnessing the mendacity and collusion involved in the efforts to remove him, that at least the awful proceedings were revealing the depth of the rot in the government. The same is true here. Unfortunately, the cost is very very high.

[NOTE: More here on the situation Americans in Afghanistan face.

I will add here that, if Generals Milley and Austin actually objected to this “plan” strenuously and were overruled, why didn’t they resign in protest? I can think of several possible answers. The first is that they didn’t actually object, at least not strongly. The second is personal ambition.]

Open thread 8/18/21

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this just might be my favorite live rock performance ever. Knopfler’s guitar work is stunningly melodic and inventive, and the drummer and the keyboard player add immensely to the mix.

The first time I ever heard this song it was the studio version, but it was one of those songs that immediately made me stop what I was doing, pick up my head, and say, “What? What is that great sound?” I loved the studio version from the moment I heard it, but this live version is even better. It that possible? Yes. As one YouTube commenter says: “The solo is the only reason aliens haven’t destroyed earth yet.”

Obama and the release of the Gitmo prisoners in exchange for Bergdahl: coming home to roost

The New Neo Posted on by

As if America’s stupidity and humiliation were not already enough, we now learn this:

When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.

Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile…

Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

The outrages of the Obama administration are so numerous that it can be hard to keep them all in awareness, but Bergdahl and the Gitmo releases were big news at the time. I, like so many others, covered the story in quite a few posts. In one of those posts I wrote this, for example:

I don’t pretend to know all that much about what Qatar plans to actually do with [the five released Gitmo prisoners], but the country is both a Wahabi stronghold and a dictatorship. Chuck Hagel had the following to say on the subject:

“The United States has coordinated closely with Qatar to ensure that security measures are in place and the national security of the United States will not be compromised. I appreciate the efforts of the Emir of Qatar to put these measures in place…”

Reassured? I’m not…

If the released prisoners—who have not been officially identified yet—are in fact the five men on the above list, I can’t imagine that they’ll be stopped from doing a lot of damage unless they are kept for life in another highly secure prison, and maybe not even then. But it sure doesn’t sound as though that’s going to happen.

In that post, written in May of 2014, one of the five on the list was “Khairullah Khairkhwa, who served in various Taliban positions including interior minister and had direct ties to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.” That is the man described in today’s article this way: “The mastermind of the regime change is former detainee Khairkhwa, the Taliban mullah whom Obama released from Gitmo even though the Pentagon classified him as too dangerous to release.”

This was entirely foreseeable, and I don’t think that Obama failed to understand what he was doing. It’s even worse that this was done in order to free deserter Bergdahl, who himself was culpable. Why did Obama do it? Because he wanted to:

In 2015, Obama tried to cover Bergdahl in the glory of a war hero, even inviting his parents to the Rose Garden to celebrate the news of his release. The former president maintained he only freed five Taliban leaders to free a soldier who, in the words of his National Security Adviser Susan Rice, served “the United States with honor and distinction.”

But they knew better. They had to have: The Pentagon itself refused to list Bergdahl as a POW. That’s because an internal 2009 Army report found he had a history of walking off his post and more than likely deserted. It also found he shipped his laptop back home to Idaho, and left a note expressing his disillusionment with the war, before ending up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obama had access to this intelligence long before he made his Taliban deal. So why did he trade a known deserter – and likely enemy sympathizer, if not collaborator – for five enemy commanders whom he acknowledged posed a national security risk? Simple: To justify the release from Gitmo of five “forever detainees,” who otherwise would never have been released and would have delayed achieving his promise to antiwar liberals to withdraw from Afghanistan and empty Gitmo.

He wanted to release them and was determined to do so. Bergdahl was an excuse. By any rational determination, the price paid by the US was way too large. I can only assume that Obama wanted to pay it.

“Who will ever trust the US again?”

The New Neo Posted on by

My answer is: no one.

And that’s a well deserved distrust. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – the trifecta, the hat trick of reasons to distrust us.

Who will ever enlist again? I think that’s another good question. Now that the military is mostly involved in being woke, I suppose its mission is changing and the people it attracts will be different.

It’s darkly ironic that the press and the Democrats kept saying that Trump’s presidency made the rest of the world mock us and distrust us. I think that was always a lie, although perhaps some of them believed it was true. And I don’t doubt there was some mockery – just as there was here – but Trump engendered a different kind of respect, the respect earned by being somewhat unpredictable and creative in his approach to solving problems, and keeping his word (for the most part) when threats were issued. In other words, there was some fear that he wasn’t just a paper tiger.

The Biden administration is completely the opposite. Obama was, too, but the Biden administration begins to make the Obama administration look competent in comparison.

This pendulum nature of American foreign policy is relatively new – the swings having gotten wilder in the 21st Century. And such instability leads to distrust. If things can change that way on a dime, best not to rely on our word at all.

Joe Biden wanted to be able to point to having pulled out of Afghanistan for the big 20-year anniversary of 9/11. The haste and the lack of planning and the terrible execution of the withdrawal now ensures a heightened sense of danger from terrorism for that anniversary instead.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an example, entitled ” Disbelief and betrayal: Europe reacts to Biden’s Afghanistan ‘miscalculation’.” It has the subtitle, “‘This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West,’ says senior German lawmaker.” The article appeared in Politico, so you’ll see the usual Trump-bashing garbage. It’s the rest of it that’s of interest:

Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy.

Sit on that for a minute. How abysmally stupid and unobservant are they, if they actually honestly and truly thought that (which is by no means certain; it’s possible they knew the truth and ignored it)?

More:

Now, the American president’s decision to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is supposed to stand for in the world.

That’s the obligatory Trump-hate.

More:

Across Europe, officials have reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.

“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”

True, but it’s not the first time.

Then there’s this:

Röttgen, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, is no flamethrower. He has known Biden for decades and was optimistic about his prospects.

How could one know Biden for decades and be optimistic about his prospects? If this is true – and again, I have no way of knowing if it’s just blah-blah-blah or if it really is the case – then Röttgen is as big an ass as Biden. Maybe bigger, because I doubt Röttgen has the excuse of age-related cognitive decline.

I imagine these feelings are not in any way limited to Germany. And the article goes on to describe how widespread the perceptions are of shock and betrayal. Well, then it’s time they woke up to the truth, and so in that way these recent events have accomplished something – getting Europe to at least temporarily and in some small way remove the blinders from their own eyes.]

Afghanistan: random and not-so-random thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

In no particular order:

How much of this terrible situation has been engendered by our elected and/or appointed and/or installed officials’ (or call them “elites,” or call them “leaders,” but make sure you put those scare quotes in) incompetence?
How much was stupidity?
How much was naivete?
How much was ignorance?
How much was arrogance?
How much was mendacity, including mendacity to themselves?
How much was purposefully desiring the destruction of America and the West?
How much was a lust for their own power for power’s sake?
How much was about money and what they stand to earn from China or elsewhere? In other words, simple corruption?

Did I leave anything out? Probably. And the total can certainly add up to more than 100$.

What’s more, how many people who voted for this administration – and there are plenty of them, whether Biden won by fraud or not – are thinking “What have I done?”
How many are quite content with the events?
How many don’t care?
How many are paying attention?

Now let’s go to this question: how many Americans are left in Afghanistan right now? The military doesn’t seem to know:

The Biden administration’s Department of Defense spokesperson admitted in an interview with CNN on Tuesday that it does not know how many American citizens remain in Afghanistan.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told CNN that there are “certainly thousands of Americans … we don’t have an exact count.”

“Best guess … between five and ten thousand that are near Kabul,” he continued. “

They don’t have an exact count? It sounds as though they actually don’t have a clue.

More:

On Sunday, as the situation in Kabul deteriorated markedly, the State Department issued a security warning to all Americans remaining in the country, telling them to avoid coming to Kabul airport and, instead, shelter in place until their security could be guaranteed. On Monday, amid the crush of thousands of Afghans flooding the military runway at Kabul’s airport, trying to catch a flight out rather than live under Taliban rule, the U.S. suspended evacuations.

Evacuations began again Monday night.The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin noted on Monday that there could be as many as 10,000 Americans still trapped in and around Kabul, many struggling to reach safety. It is also not clear whether the airport is in American control. Just 700 people were evacuated on Monday.

It occurs to me – and I certainly hope nothing even remotely like this happens – that more Americans could die trying to evacuate than died in twenty years of the Afghanistan war. This may be as good a time as any to state that I think describing the conflict as twenty years of war is somewhat of a misnomer. In its later years it was closer to an occupation that included attacks from terrorists and saboteurs, but not really what is traditionally thought of as war.

Who is responsible – or, most responsible, because I think there’s plenty of blame to share – for the abominable way the withdrawal was handled?
Biden and/or whoever is in charge of him?
The State Department?
The military?
The “intelligence” community?
Again, that first list of questions comes into play: incompetence, stupidity, malice, etc.?

Biden’s attempt to say his hands were tied by Trump would be risible if it weren’t so awful and so transparently false: with record speed he reversed nearly everything Trump did and could easily have changed this, plus of course the exact manner of the retreat was not determined by Trump.

Meanwhile the world laughs at us, and rightly so. This nation has become a mockery of what it once was, and it’s not just on the presidential level but it’s on a host of important other levels as well. For this post I’ve left out agencies and branches of government such as the DOJ and the CDC and the FBI and the IRS and the courts and Congress, because they don’t seem to be especially involved in this particular debacle. But they are to be included in the larger scheme of things. Is there a single part of the federal government that is actually competent, or that has America’s well-being at heart? I don’t think so.

If you want to watch Joe Biden’s speech on Afghanistan…

The New Neo Posted on by

…here it is.

ADDENDUM 5:45 PM:

It occurs to me that, if Biden (and/or whoever is managing this administration) thinks he can get away without this doing too much damage, it is probably because Obama got away with the Iraqi pullout and seemed not to suffer too much from the subsequent rise of ISIS. Of course, the most serious ISIS push to power occurred after Obama’s re-election, so he didn’t have to subsequently face the ballot box. But still, only the right seemed to really blame Obama, who had also hugely underestimated ISIS by calling it the “JV.”

Looking back at Afghanistan

The New Neo Posted on by

Thinking about the last twenty years in Afghanistan, it occurs to me that I’ve been blogging since the fall of 2004 and I wondered what I’ve written about it over the years. My recollection is that I wrote very little about it, and when I checked I saw that right now I only have a total of forty-six posts (although I’m not sure that includes all of them; the “category” designations weren’t there in my earliest posts). And that includes quite a few posts written during the last few days, and also quite a few earlier ones about Bowe Bergdahl. That’s in contrast to 219 on Iraq.

Afghanistan had reached a sort of homeostasis for many of the years of this blog. Although the situation there was far from good, it was relatively stable. The most relevant post of mine I found in a quick perusal was this one from March of 2012. In it I summarized the Afghan situation as I saw it at the time:

The larger question is what our mission in Afghanistan is accomplishing at this point, or is even meant to accomplish. Initially it was obvious: defeat the Taliban. Help set up an alternative government. But it was clear that anything more would require a societal, economic, and cultural transformation that might be beyond our powers, especially with the resources we were willing to commit to the project, and even if we were willing to do more and become a de facto colonial power there. It’s the dilemma we face in many countries around the world, Iraq being one of them: how to foster the growth of liberal democracies in places that seem unready for them (and may never be ready for them), and what to do in the meantime if their present-day governments threaten us?

That encapsulates why we went in – to defeat the Taliban who were harboring the 9/11 architect and al Qaeda and had set up large training camps there for terrorists – and how futile any nation-building transformative mission had obviously become, as well as why it was nevertheless so hard to leave. It doesn’t cover how to leave, though.

At that same post, this was the very first comment in the thread, by “Daniel”:

I really think that Bush had this one right. Kick the Taliban out and maintain just enough of a presence that we can interdict any problems from them or Al Quaeda in the future. It’s a stone age country without a middle class or democratic institution and nation building is just too long term of an issue for us to be involved there. We shouldn’t leave en masse now, though as that sends a bad signal to what trusting allies we have left and will also set up a massacre of huge proportions. It’s a bit of a mess.

More than a bit of a mess, I’d say.

I was always somewhat puzzled about why Obama set Afghanistan up as the “good war” versus the “bad war” in Iraq, although it seemed it was for political reasons. In other words, the aim was to criticize Bush without making Obama look wimpy or pacifist.

But right at the outset Afghanistan represented a conundrum. We demanded that the Taliban surrender Bin Laden and his confederates; they refused, and we went to war to root the Taliban and al Qaeda out. The hot war – which was not all that long – was successful in toppling the government and ending the camps, but not in eliminating Bin Laden or al Qaeda.

Then we were left with the question of what to do next to prevent the swift return of the Taliban and the terrorists. There was no good solution, but we chose one that seemed less bad. However, it had no foreseeable end except withdrawal. It was clear quite early on that there would be no real transformation of Afghanistan. It was also clear that some day we would need to leave, and that the Taliban almost certainly return then. But when to leave? And most importantly, how to leave?

It just may be that the Biden administration has chosen one of the worst possible ways to leave, and perhaps the worst possible way.

Kabul: where to run, where to hide?

The New Neo Posted on by

I went to bed last night feeling very agitated and having my own small version of Vietnam PTSD. I can only imagine what it’s like for so many of those who served there, or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or who lost loved ones in those countries – as well, of course, as refugees from Afghanistan, or those who know people who have helped us and cannot get out in time.

Afghanistan is a land-locked country. So we won’t be reading about boat people. And Afghanistan’s neighboring countries aren’t exactly the sort that might be seen as sanctuaries. For example [emphasis mine]:

Iran said it will provide temporary refuge to Afghans arriving at its borders as the Taliban advance on Kabul, prompting thousands of people to flee the city.

Accommodation will be built in Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan and Sistan-Baluchestan provinces along Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said Sunday, citing Hossein Ghassemi, deputy for border affairs at the Interior Ministry.

Fleeing Afghans are expected “to return when the situation improves,” Ghassemi said, adding that some of them, including members of the military as well as government and customs officials, had already been sent back.

And this [emphasis mine]:

Uzbekistan has detained 84 Afghan soldiers who crossed the border, the government said on August 15, adding that another group of soldiers had amassed near a border checkpoint on the Afghan side.

Uzbekistan provided the detained Afghan soldiers with food, temporary accommodation, and medical treatment, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The government is also providing humanitarian aid to a group of Afghan soldiers who have amassed on the Afghan side of the of the bridge at the Termez-Hairatan border crossing, the Foreign Ministry added. The bridge is a car and railway link between the two countries…

Uzbekistan is in talks with Kabul on returning the troops home and resolving the situation at the bridge, it said.

And Pakistan seems to be allied with the Taliban.

Some western European countries (Germany, for example) are also having their own problems with this. Were they even warned ahead of time how abruptly the withdrawal was about to happen? I have no idea, but my guess is that the answer is no:

“We need to make sure that the many people who have big worries and concerns, even though they have not worked with German institutions, have a secure stay in countries neighbouring Afghanistan,” Merkel said.

“We should not repeat the mistake of the past when we did not give enough funds to UNHCR and other aid programmes and people left Jordan and Lebanon towards Europe.”…

Merkel had earlier told a closed meeting of the CDU that those needing evacuation included 2,500 Afghan support staff as well as human rights activists, lawyers and others whom the government sees as being at risk if they remained in the country, up to 10,000 altogether.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany was seeking to evacuate as many people at risk as it could, adding that NATO allies had misjudged the situation when they thought Afghan government forces could hold back the Taliban unaided.

That story is datelined today.

Many news outlets and bloggers have covered the horrific events occurring in Kabul. This one from Ace has compiled quite a few reports and videos. Prepare yourself; it’s profoundly disturbing. The title of the post is “Kabul ’75: Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out.”

Biden to address nation

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently Joe Biden will be emerging from his hiding place to address the nation at 3:45 Eastern Time. I predict that his message will be some combination of “it’s not that bad” and “Bush and Trump made me do it.”

The spin must be dizzying for those writing his speech. And it’s almost possible to feel sorry for those trying to prepare him – almost, but not quite.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that this approach to the Afghanistan exit is one decision that Joe really did make himself. It has that quality of attempted self-aggrandizement – the timing being motivated by the vision of himself celebrating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 by being able to brag that he finally got us out of there when no one else could. It also apparently encompasses self-delusion, because all reports are that his military advisors said that this way of withdrawing from that country was ill-advised. They may not have known exactly how they should have done it, but this extremely precipitous and abrupt departure, leaving so many vulnerable people (and their families) to be tortured and murdered, was especially bad and it was especially obvious. But Biden knew better, right?

And the idea that our “intelligence” had no idea about Afghan surrender to the Taliban being likely is preposterous:

The Biden administration seems implacably determined to gravely damage this country and so many others in record time – except for our enemies, who are sitting pretty. It’s a good example of how hard it is to build and how easy to destroy.

Amateur hour

The New Neo Posted on by

What a difference 5 weeks [see NOTE below] makes:

Notice that, among other things, he did not answer the question. The question wasn’t, “How did the Taliban overrun the country so fast?” It was essentially, “Why did you fail to predict it?”

[NOTE: That first clip is dated with two different dates in that tweet, July 7th and June 7th. So it either was said 5 weeks ago or 9 weeks ago. I think the earlier date may have been correct, but he may have repeated it on July 7th. Hard to tell.]