Afghanistan and the Surrender-Monkey-In-Chief: what’s really going on here?
President Biden on Tuesday said he will stick to an Aug. 31 deadline for removing US troops from Afghanistan after the Taliban said it would not allow him any additional time to evacuate US citizens and refugees…
He was scheduled to brief the US public with a noon speech, but his remarks were repeatedly delayed as criticism mounted.
I have come to dread the news. I assume, and usually correctly, that it will rouse in me a very familiar sense of impotent rage. There are so many infuriating actions (or sometimes inactions) taken by the Biden administration in its precipitous surrender-retreat from Afghanistan that mentioning them all would make a lengthy list.
And that’s one of the odd things about it. It’s as though the “plan” was designed by a madman (certainly possible), an abysmally stupid person (also possible), or a saboteur (another possibility) – or a person or group of people having some combination of those characteristics (possible as well).
I have no military training or knowledge except what a person of reasonable intelligence would figure out through common sense. Certain things are so basic as to be obvious, such as the order of one’s withdrawal actions. For example, don’t leave your citizens in the country that you are abandoning to the enemy; get them out first. If you think you will have enough time to evacuate them safely because you calculate that the enemy will take a certain estimated amount of time to reach the capital city, and then you see that the enemy is advancing and taking territory ahead of your assumed schedule, beef up defenses and get those vulnerable citizens out of there, pronto. In other words, don’t leave before the task is complete, no matter how much you’d like to do so.
And don’t prematurely abandon your vital air base and leave it in the care of an armed forces you have trained to rely on your close air support, while at the same time withdrawing all that air support. Don’t expect them to be able to fly planes that they are unable to maintain, as you simultaneously withdraw maintenance crews (without telling them in advance). In other words, if you are relying on those forces to hold the line against the enemy, don’t make it impossible for them to do so.
And yet these are just some of the things the US seems to have done in Afghanistan. We have not been told why this administration has made these choices; all we hear is lying obfuscating gobbledygook, and then another heaping helping of the same.
It seems, as Paul Mirengoff wrote in this post, Biden chose to lose this war. It was stalemated prior to that with a very small force that really was more of a policing action, casualties had been very low for years, and the enemy we were keeping out of power was a particularly cruel one. So there was no special intense rush to get out and there was no obvious reason for the reckless speed other than the idea that Joe wanted to brag about the withdrawal in a speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
It’s one thing for us to believe that a single addled, stupid, narcissistic old man might plan something this bad. But why would so many people go along with it? Are they all merely dumb? I doubt it. Frightened of Joe? I doubt it. The proper remedy, if they couldn’t change his mind or stop him, would have been to resign en masse – or begin to invoke the 25th Amendment. Or was this level of destructive stupidity intentional, in order to harm this country and keep it from ever being a world leader again? To get it to join the international world order chastened, its tail between its legs, a country on a par with any other, its people ready to meekly follow?
That is a sobering thought, and it’s not the sort of thing I usually believe unless there really are few alternatives that make sense. Ordinarily I do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity and/or ineptitude. And large conspiracies are difficult to control without leaks from someone.
But it’s hard to escape the thought of a planned takedown of the US from inside, as an actual working theory about the truly shocking level of seeming ineptitude and cowardice displayed here. It would explain what looks like a literally unbelievable level of destructive stupidity on the part of way too many people.