RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17673/afghanistan-dreadful-consequences

Most of the Afghan army, after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, might understandably have decided not even to try to fight. The “trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” with “advanced weaponry” has led to that US-provided “advanced weaponry” falling into the hands of terrorists it was meant to fight — a donation from US taxpayers to what is now the world’s best-armed terrorist state.

[T]he US has had troops in Germany and South Korea for about 70 years – a relatively modest “insurance policy” that never seemed “forever.” Ironically, by handing over Afghanistan to the same Taliban that hosted Al Qaeda, which murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, the US is not only making a mockery of these victims; it will soon find itself having to fight at an even greater cost in life and treasure as countries trying to eliminate America can now do it without American troops nearby, and with America’s military equipment.

The French, British, Germans, Australians and Czechs have been venturing behind enemy lines to rescue their stranded citizens hiding there; Americans have not. The Pentagon and the State Department have admitted that they do not even know how many Americans are in the country; how could they know where they are?

Trump reportedly expected to leave a residual troop force in place, and apparently had a plan for an orderly military withdrawal — based strictly on conditions on the ground. These presumably included not departing in the middle of the Taliban’s summer fighting season, but in winter, when they shelter in Pakistan; not neglecting to consult with America’s European allies, and not surrendering the main US air base, Bagram, before evacuating Americans and their allies, whom they had promised to rescue should plans not work out.

Trump seems to have understood what the Biden administration ignores: that terrorists are probably not all that susceptible to diplomacy, but to strength — as Osama bin Laden put it… to “the strong horse”.

After days of silence, Biden read a 19-minute speech saying that he stood behind his decision to leave Afghanistan, and even accused he Afghan security forces, which had sacrificed an estimated 66,000 men. Biden left the press conference without answering questions and returned to Camp David where he resumed his vacation”. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi praised his “strong leadership”.

Pakistan is more deeply linked to the Taliban’s victory than the United States might care to admit.

“Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include…. soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support…, arranging training for Taliban fighters…, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support.” — Human Rights Watch.

China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and the Taliban have different worldviews, but do possess three things in common: they are enemies of the United States and the Western world, they want to see the United States humiliated and defeated, and they want to eliminate the United States from the region. The United States has been humiliated, defeated and eliminated from the region. Its enemies have won.

Those who love the United States, however, believe that without its strength and power, American liberty and freedom would quickly vanish from creation. Seeing what the Biden administration has done in just seven months to weaken America and strengthen its enemies has been nothing short of shattering. One can only hope for a change of course, a return to real leadership, before more damage is done.

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a debacle for the United States; the consequences will take shape fast. The Biden administration and President Joe Biden himself have an overwhelming responsibility for what is taking place and what will follow; they have shown a degree of incompetence unseen in the United States since the calamitous Carter years.

On July 8, President Biden said, “the Afghan troops have 300,000 well equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban”. A Taliban takeover of the country, he added, was “not inevitable”. He was wrong. Most of the Afghan army, probably after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, understandably decided not even to try to fight.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/us-out-afghanistan-will-iran-move-hugh-fitzgerald/

Analysts now suggest that with the American forces completely out of Afghanistan, Iran’s forces may be tempted to move in. This was the subject of speculation several weeks ago, before anyone contemplated the magnitude of this weekend’s debacle in Afghanistan: “Experts fear Iran will move in after US leaves Afghanistan,” by Tara Kavaler, The Media Line, July 16, 2021:

With the US set to complete its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of August, regional analysts fear Iran will fill the void.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies already exercise a powerful influence in the region, be it in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or the Palestinian territories.

In all of those countries, however, the Shi’a are much more in evidence than they are In Iran. In Yemen, the Shi’a are 50% of the population; in Iraq they are 70%; in Lebanon they are 40% of the population; in Syria the Shi’a are close to 15% of the population, and in addition, they also control the Alawite-officered army. But in Afghanistan, the Shi’a are only 10% of the population and, unlike the Shi’a (Alawites, Ismailis, Twelvers) in Syria, do not control the military. The Shi’a in Afghanistan are ethnically distinct: almost all of them belong to the Hazara tribe, while the Sunni population consists of Pashtun, Tadjiks, and Uzbeks.

Iran is trying to use the situation in Afghanistan both to present itself as a mediator between the Afghan groups, and in the future, as Iran has always done, trying to turn every threat into opportunity,” Dr. Raz Zimmt, an Iran specialist at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told The Media Line.

“And if we see what happened in the Arab Middle East over the last decade, where the chaos and the civil wars actually provided Iran with opportunities to be more engaged and more involved, I can’t rule out the possibility that this will happen as well in Afghanistan,” Zimmt said.

The Taliban and the Iranian leadership are not obvious bedfellows, as the former are Sunni extremists, and the latter are radical Shi’ites.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/after-america-melanie-phillips/

Much deserved opprobrium has been heaped upon US President Joe Biden for his shameful recent remarks justifying his decision to cut and run from Afghanistan. He blamed everyone but himself for the Taliban’s expedited return to power, and accused the Afghan army — who have lost almost 70,000 soldiers fighting the Taliban — of having 

collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight… American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves… We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

The Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat subsequently made an emotional and blistering speech in the House of Commons emergency debate. You can watch his speech here.

Tugendhat served in Afghanistan both as a soldier and as an adviser to the governor of Helmand province. He spoke about the soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, the good men he had watched going into the earth and who had taken with them “a part of all of us”. He said how proud he had been to be decorated by the American 82nd Airborne Division after the capture of Musa Qala in 2006. Making an effort to compose himself, he went on:

To see their Commander-in-Chief call into question the courage of men that I fought with, to claim that they ran; it’s shameful. Those who have never fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.

He went on to raise the issue that must now be preoccupying all who have depended upon the United States as the principal defender of the free world. For as I wrote here, the US has now shown itself to be a faithless ally and the weak link in that defence. 

As a result, said Tugendhat, there was now a need to 

reinvigorate our European NATO partners, to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we  can work together with with Japan and Australia, France and Germany, with partners large and small and make sure that we hold the line together.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/australia-begins-mass-vaccination-children-katie-hopkins/

The video clip below is hard to watch. It is the Prime Minister of Australia giving a press statement regarding the ‘mass vaccination’ of 24,000 Australian children.

Scott Morrison is talking about children in Year 12 — usually aged 16 and 17.

You will hear him say they are planning to “get through” 24,000 kids “this week.”

You will hear him say that mums and dads are NOT permitted to be present.

You will hear him say the children will be ushered to their jabs by members of the Youth Command and Police.

And he goes on to liken this mass injection of children as an opportunity — an opportunity to be grasped with both hands. He even tries to draw a parallel with Olympic athletes (presumably because this mass event is happening at the Olympic Park), inferring that Olympic athletes would also tell parents to grab this opportunity, like their child might win a gold medal for compliance.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17671/afghanistan-night-falls

Rival Islamist groups are already present, controlling chunks of territory. The so-called ISIS is planted in Konar and Loghar while another outfit known as Khorasan and promising to create a new caliphate covering parts of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is also busy recruiting. The Taliban itself is a far from united outfit with Pakistan, Islamic Republic in Iran and, it seems even Turkey, China and Russia having their respective “contacts” in the movement.

More importantly, Taliban may face an urban people-based opposition that was often absent in Afghan politics. The experience of the past four decades, especially the past 20 years, cannot be wiped out with a stroke. Millions of Afghans have had a taste, albeit furtive, of a different way of life and are unlikely to put the clock back 1,400 years as Taliban demand.

In other words, Taliban are doomed to fail, leaving Afghanistan as an ungoverned land. And that is bad news for the whole world, as an ungoverned land is ideal location for terrorist groups of all denominations.

With President Ashraf Ghani’s hasty flight from Kabul, we are now witnessing the fall of the second of five regimes that label themselves “Islamic Republic” in just over two years.

The first to fall was the Islamic Republic of the Sudan and what we have left are Islamic Republics in Pakistan, Iran and Mauritania. If we include the Islamic State created in parts of Iraq and Syria a few years ago and still lingering as a bad smell, we might conclude that, despite Taliban’s latest success, the label “Islamic” is not as invulnerable as some suggest.

The difference is that in Sudan the Islamic Republic was replaced by a timid, though no less sincere, attempt at democratization while the Islamic Republic in Afghanistan signals the return of the Islamic Emirate or a more radical version of Islamism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17653/iran-obtaining-nuclear-weapons

The Biden administration… has made no efforts to pressure the Iranian regime into answering the International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions about three undeclared clandestine nuclear sites found in Iran.

“For objectivity’s sake, I should say that the Iranian government has reiterated its will to engage and to cooperate and to provide answers, but they haven’t done that so far. So I hope this may change, but as we speak, we haven’t had any concrete progress.” — General Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency, Seattle Times, June 7, 2021.

It seems — worryingly, especially after failures of both intelligence and planning in the Afghanistan debacle — that the Biden administration is again standing idly by while the mullahs of Iran comfortably keep enriching uranium to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal.

We have seen what they do to their own people and the region when they do not have one. Just look at what has been called “the world’s greatest sponsor of state terrorism” has done when they have no nuclear weapons — both domestically to their own people, and internationally to Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and even Venezuela and larger South America… What then can the Free World expect that Iran will do after they have nuclear weapons?

The Iranian regime appears just a few months away from obtaining nuclear weapons, all while the Biden administration is completely silent and has not articulated any clear policy for preventing this dangerous and predatory regime from becoming a nuclear state like North Korea.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz told ambassadors from countries on the United Nations Security Council during a briefing at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on August 4, 2021:

“Iran has violated all of the guidelines set in the JCPOA and is only around 10 weeks away from acquiring weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon… Now is the time for deeds – words are not enough. It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds, otherwise the attacks will continue.”

The Biden administration has been insisting on reviving the disastrous Obama nuclear deal and the theocratic establishment of Iran has evidently seen this as a perfect opportunity to buy time and inch closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Biden administration first showed its desperation by making it clear to the Iranian leaders that the US wanted to return to the nuclear deal and was willing to lift all sanctions re-imposed by the Trump administration.

As nuclear talks began, the Iranian regime began advancing its nuclear program at a faster pace as the negotiations went on. The Biden administration not only remained silent in the face of Iran’s violations, it also started offering even more concessions to the mullahs. The Biden administration, for instance, announced not only that it was willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it was considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions.

Iran first began increasing uranium enrichment to 20% in January 2021. On January 9, the Iranian parliament passed a law requiring the government to expel the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear inspectors. In April, the regime raised its uranium enrichment level to 60%, edging closer to weapons-grade levels. While his government was holding indirect nuclear talks with the Biden administration, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, bragged:

“The young and God-believing Iranian scientists managed to achieve a 60% enriched uranium product. I congratulate the brave nation of Islamic Iran on this success. The Iranian nation’s willpower is miraculous and can defuse any conspiracy.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17659/afghanistan-disaster-biden

The fear now is that, as Western intelligence agencies are no longer able to monitor the activities of Islamist extremists both in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Iran, the West will find itself increasingly vulnerable to high profile terror attacks as a direct consequence of Mr Biden’s disastrous withdrawal plan.

An important first step for the security of the United States would be immediately to shut its southern border.

The alarming implications, in terms of Western security, of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan are clearly an issue the Biden administration failed to take into consideration when deciding to abandon Afghanistan to its fate. It is an oversight that adds to the scale of the disaster that Mr Biden has just inflicted on the security of the Western alliance.

The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration’s catastrophic decision to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

One of the most notable achievements of the US-led coalition’s presence in Afghanistan during the past two decades has been its relentless campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Islamist terror groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-islamic-world-christianity-afghanistan-war-taliban-american-founding-11629402268?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.

The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.

The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.

Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.

This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-joe-biden-broke-nato-allies-boris-johnson-angela-merkel-emmanuel-macron-11629406300?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Remember when candidate Joe Biden said America “needs a leader the world respects”? Apparently President Biden forgot. Of the many consequences of his misbegotten Afghanistan withdrawal, one of the more serious is the way it has damaged America’s relationships with its allies, especially in Europe.

Afghanistan was an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and America’s NATO allies have invested significant blood and treasure in the conflict. That includes tens of thousands of troops over 20 years, more than 1,100 of whom were killed, and billions of dollars spent on the military operation and reconstruction effort.

This was a fulfillment of their obligations after the Sept. 11 terror attack led to the first invocation of the mutual self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty. European allies also have a stake in preventing a nation of nearly 40 million people from collapsing into a failed state that could trigger more mass migration to Europe, or become a new breeding ground for terrorism.

Yet everything about Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal has been a slap to those allies. They didn’t want the U.S. to leave, but he did. The botched execution has left them scrambling to airlift out thousands of their citizens and thousands more Afghan translators and others who assisted each nation’s war effort.

And the snubs keep coming from Washington. In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

No wonder European leaders are apoplectic. U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the Trump -Biden agreement with the Taliban “a rotten deal,” in an interview this month after the Taliban started capturing chunks of the country. In Parliament on Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat —chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who served in the British forces in Afghanistan—called Mr. Biden “shameful” for blaming the retreat on a supposedly pusillanimous Afghan military. Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Mr. Biden for following President Trump’s lead in a “unilateral” negotiation with the Taliban.