Ozzy Man to cheer you up (language warning, of course):
Roundup
(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
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?
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.
Open thread 8/19/21
Meet Bella and Mango. You’ll be glad you did:
Roundup
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
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.
Whose decision was the precipitous and disastrous nature of our Afghan withdrawal?
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:
The below note went out this afternoon to American citizens requesting to be evacuated from Afghanistan, @alanacbs reports. It instructs people to come to Hamid Karzai Intl Airport in Kabul, but says the US govt cannot guarantee their safety as they make the trip. @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/rgEyjGup4K
— Sara Cook (@saraecook) August 17, 2021
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
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
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?”
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
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.