Biden Reeks of Afghanistan Failure

USA needs radical change to war planning

Biden’s Saigon?

As the Taliban surges toward Kabul, Afghans have seemingly declined our dotard president’s admonition to fight. “Afghan leaders have to come together. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” implored 78-year-old Joe Biden before departing for summer vacation.  

No one wants to die in war, but one especially does not want to be the last person to die in a war.

Many analyst have likened the collapse in Afghanistan to the fall of Saigon in 1975, two years after President Nixon withdrew the military from the destroyed country. There are also shades of the fall of Phnom Penh, capital of neighboring Cambodia, absent from American history, which also fell to communist forces in that terrible year of 1975.

Like Vietnam, Cambodia was a basket case former French colony, as most former French colonies were, with corrupt generals who would at times fight the enemy, and at other times trade with him. The ease with which Afghans change sides as the winds have shifted is reminiscent of this factor. Maybe there is no “nation” to fight for in Afghanistan.

Did Afghanistan’s central government leaders know this all along? Was that why they spent most of the last year lobbying Washington to keep wasting troops and money on Afghanistan after two decades instead of trying to reach a deal with the Taliban? And if they knew, did our generals know—the same generals who have been saying for more than a decade that Afghanistan’s military and police were poised for greatness. How about warmongers like Lindsey Graham and Liz Cheney?

Joe Biden and our $80 billion-per-year intelligence bureaucracy also failed the withdrawal. Biden’s global weakness—his empty threats to Russia and China and attempted appeasement of the Iranian mullahs, and fist-bumping at the G7 with the weaklings who run Old Europe—expedited the failure. All were encouragement to the Taliban. Weakness is provocative.

Now the panic is on, especially with too many diplomats still stuck in Kabul—thousands and thousands emailing each other and accomplishing little else these past years. An apt passage from John le Carre’s book, The Honorable Schoolboy, about the fall of Phnom Penh:

“Yet is was not the shelling but the silence that held the greatest fear. Like the jungle itself, silence, not gun-fire, was the natural element of the approaching enemy. When a diplomat wants to talk, the first thing he thinks of is food and in diplomatic circles one dined early because of the curfew. Not that diplomats were subject to such rigors, but it is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example—to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know.”

More tragic than the diplomats’ looming discomfort is the human catastrophe unfolding in Kabul: thousands and thousand of refugees, mostly women and children, streaming in and sleeping in the streets and mosques, just trying to survive. At this late point, it would be best for the government to declare Kabul an open city and retreat to the airport to spare as much life as possible.

There must be consequences for this failure. And there will be.

For starters, Biden is toast. As General George Patton said to his Third Army in 1944 on the eve of D-Day—a speech so magnificently captured by George C. Scott in the 1970 movie Patton—"Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.” This may seem old-fashioned in the year when our elite culture celebrated a loser like Simone Biles, who quit the Olympics due to emotional self-absorption, but the sentiment is still there in the USA. It’s just not reported or reflected by Hollywood and the media. Biden and his national security team are all on borrowed political time. Hopefully they go before the next crisis they have invited arrives.

Steve Yates, Deputy National Security Advisor at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, notes being ‘half involved’ in Afghanistan is very dangerous for USA. Video: https://bit.ly/3jQKpSw

In Afghanistan, we will soon see if the Taliban of 2021 is different than the Taliban of 2001. The State Department’s pencil-neck spokesman thinks the globalist glee club will influence this trajectory, saying Wednesday:

“This is the international community, as you see represented in the consensus that has emerged today, regarding this very simple point. Any force that seeks to take control of Afghanistan with the barrel of a gun, through the barrel of a gun will not be recognized, will not have legitimacy, will not accrue the international assistance that any such government would likely need to achieve any semblance of durability.”

One wonders if he sees such Kennedy School nonsense for what it is, or if he really believes it.

First of all, there is no “international community.” Never has been and never will be: just good guys, bad guys, and a whole lot of lemmings. Second of all, there is no greater guarantor of “durability” and de facto “legitimacy” than the “barrel of a gun” he deprecates. Reality is often unpleasant.

But who knows. The fact that triumphant Taliban administrators are giving interviews to BBC reporters instead of beheading them offers dim hope. The bloom has come off the rose of global jihad in recent years, thanks in no small part to the obliteration of al Qaeda and ISIS. Afghanistan has been at war for roughly 50 years, and stability, while regrettably under the yoke of religious law tyranny, might offer some benefit. Or it could end up like the Killing Fields after the fall of Cambodia.

In Washington, no one knows what the long-term impact will be. Will Republicans stop shilling for the military-industrial complex and the national security deep state that has let us down? Even adjusted for inflation, the military budget today is higher than the peak Reagan-buildup defense budget. Will we actually have serious and limited priorities in our national security: ideally deterring China and Iran, rather than playing Cowboys and Indians in backwaters and funding the defense of wealthy Europeans who disdain us? Can we dump obsolete alliances like NATO, and buttress ones that matter today like those with Japan and Taiwan?

Let’s at least learn something from the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, and adjust to reality.