https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-afghanistan-debacle-looks-worse-and-worse/#slide-1
The more we learn about the administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, the more it becomes clear that its decisions were driven by political considerations and panic.
A s the Biden administration’s chaotic and inept withdrawal from Afghanistan was unfolding in August 2021, a suicide bomber murdered 13 American servicemembers, and at least 170 Afghans, at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. It was one of the deadliest attacks on our troops in our 20 years in that nation.
“Know this,” Biden said after the bombing. “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” This turned out to be face-saving political theater. Three days later, an air strike killed ten Afghans, seven of them children. Not one of the dead, as far as we know, was an “ISIS facilitator,” as the administration had alleged.
In fact, the Pentagon now says that the bombing was the work of a lone terrorist rather than a “complex” network, as the Biden administration had initially maintained. At the time, General Mark Milley not only referred to the strike as “valid” and “righteous” — let’s concede for a moment that he was basing this on the best available information — but went further to describe a “secondary explosion” and a supposed plethora of evidence justifying the bombing. None of that, it seems, was true. It seems increasingly likely that Biden was going to blow someone up to project his toughness.
