RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://news.yahoo.com/afghanistan-blame-game-shifts-u-112954023.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

-Secretary of State Antony Blinken beat back criticism of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on Monday at a contentious congressional hearing where at least two Republicans called on him to resign.

In five hours of often testy exchanges with lawmakers, Blinken defended President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out and pushed back on accusations that the State Department should have done more to help Americans and at-risk Afghans to be evacuated, blaming the previous administration for lacking a plan.

He repeatedly noted that Republican former President Donald Trump had negotiated the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, and said Biden’s administration could not renegotiate because of threats from the group to resume killing Americans.

“There’s no evidence that staying longer would have made the Afghan security forces or the Afghan government any more resilient or self-sustaining,” Blinken said.

“We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan,” Blinken said, referring to the Trump administration’s agreement to remove all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1.

Members of Congress – Biden’s Democrats as well as opposition Republicans – have pledged to investigate since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan last month after a rapid advance.

Blinken appeared on Monday before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and was to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first Biden administration official to testify publicly to lawmakers since the Islamist militant group’s takeover.

Fireworks had been expected, given the amount of finger-pointing over how the two-decade-long war ended. Many Republicans, particularly those closely allied to Trump, interrupted or even shouted over Blinken during the House hearing, a departure for a committee known for bipartisan cooperation.

Others offered harsh criticism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17724/afghan-fallout-india-china

If Washington is going to deter a militant China, it needs the support of democratic India. Unfortunately, India looks like the country most immediately — and perhaps most adversely — affected by the Biden-created debacle. As a result, New Delhi could decide to side not with America but with a Chinese ally, Moscow.

India saw the Afghan government as a friend in blunting extremism in neighboring Pakistan, which has always defined itself as India’s enemy.

The Biden administration may in fact be willing to defend Taiwan, but that is not all that counts at this crucial time. What also counts are perceptions, and the perceptions that especially count are those in Beijing. Chinese propagandists promoted two narratives as Kabul fell: The United States will not defend Taiwan and an America unable to deal with the Taliban cannot hope to stand up to China.

Those two narratives appear to in fact reflect Chinese thinking, especially because the withdrawal from Afghanistan signaled to Beijing a complete failure of the U.S. intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the White House national security apparatus. Chinese exercises in areas adjacent to Taiwan in August and an August 13 simulated attack on Taiwan with a short-range missile are, in this context, ominous.

India’s close ties with Vietnam are an indication that India perceives its security as dependent on an open South China Sea and even East China Sea. Taiwan, which sits at the intersection of those bodies of water, is essential in keeping sea lanes there open.

President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has ruined, perhaps for decades, America’s most important bilateral relationship of this era.

If Washington is going to deter a militant China, it needs the support of democratic India. Unfortunately, India looks like the country most immediately — and perhaps most adversely — affected by the Biden-created debacle. As a result, New Delhi could decide to side not with America but with a Chinese ally, Moscow.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2021/09/the-greatest-victory-since-napoleon-left-moscow/

Maybe someone should hire Joe Biden to teach philosophy, or at least be in the classroom. You don’t have to be Ludwig Wittgenstein to appreciate the important philosophical lesson that our understanding can be bewitched by language. This can happen in a number of different ways, many of them illustrated daily by the President of the United States.  One lesson revolves around the unpalatable truth that saying something is so does not make it so. Joe Biden gave a sterling illustration of that lesson the other day at one his weirdest press conferences to date.  His withdrawal from Afghanistan, he barked madly at the cameras, was an “extraordinary success.” 

Yes, he really said that.  It was a success more or less in the same sense that Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow in 1812 was a success, that is to say, it was so extraordinary a success that it was an abject failure.  It was not quite so bad as the withdrawal of Maj. Gen. William Elphinstone from Kabul in 1842, perhaps—the only European to make it out alive from that debâcle was a badly wounded army surgeon—but it was certainly nothing to brag about.  

It will be many years before we get a full and accurate measure of the repercussions of this humiliating event. It has gravely damaged the already tottering administration of Joe Biden. It has disconcerted our friends. It has emboldened our enemies.  And it is marked another waypoint on the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of American power.  

The world has been especially stunned by two things the Biden administration left behind in Afghanistan.  The first was the huge armory of military hardware and supporting matériel. Estimates of the value of that gift to the Taliban have varied widely from many hundreds of millions to $80 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a lot.   

According to one assessment, the US left scattered in seven Afghan army garrisons across the country, from Kabul and Kandahar to Herāt, Mazār-i-Sharīf, and Kunduz, 22,174 armored Humvees, 42 pickup trucks and SUVS, 64,363 machine guns, 162,043 radios, 16,035 night-vision goggles, 358,530 assault rifles (the real ones, not the “assault rifles” that Joe Biden warns about in the United States), 126,295 pistols, and 176 artillery pieces. There was also plenty of ammunition to go along with all of that loot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/international-puzzle-trust-and-deception-dr-shmuel-katz/

The United States controls the NSA and many other intelligence agencies. This fact on its own makes it incomprehensible that the current US leadership had no clue about what was happening in Afghanistan. The rumors are that they wanted it to unfold in a certain way for a variety of reasons. But it’s more likely that they have over played their hand with this last move.

This recent event clearly seems to be part of an intentional plan to weaken the United States. Let’s look at the following recent problematic policy changes – Open borders, energy dependence, inflation, decimated military, defunding the police, population control, limits on flow of information, indoctrination in the schools, rewriting of history, racial unrest, gender confusion, selective implementation of laws, undermining US international standing, etc.

This overall situation forces a serious question: Can the United States be trusted under these circumstances?

Good people must wake up if they want to have a free and democratic republic in the United State or in any other free country across the globe!! Independence, freedom, and self-reliance are imperative to be able to run a stable country. Terrorists and their supporters should not be trusted, as they will break any promise or agreement when they feel strong enough to do so.

Therefore, people must understand that giving away national treasures – or even simple assets of value – will never appease unreliable operatives with malicious intentions!! Eventual durable peace and reconciliation will be possible only if a solid long-term education of mutual respect and recognition is implemented in all educational institutions and media outlets. In addition, terror infrastructures must be dismantled, and incitement and misinformation must be stopped.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-friends-the-taliban-biden-administration-al-qaeda-haqqani-network-afghanistan-11630954075?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Taliban claimed Monday to have conquered the last major opposition to its takeover of Afghanistan, routing remnants of the former Afghan military and others in the Panjshir Valley. No doubt the abandoned U.S. military equipment helped. Let’s hope the Talibs feel grateful—because the Biden Administration plans to depend on them for years to come.

The White House hopes Americans forget about all this as it focuses on domestic affairs. But this is one of the more extraordinary political transformations in U.S. history. The Taliban, the sponsors of Osama bin Laden and killers of Americans for 20 years, have overnight turned into a courted U.S. partner.

“A new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun. It’s one in which we will lead with our diplomacy,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared recently, almost as if he was announcing a triumph like the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The military mission is over. A new diplomatic mission has begun.”

Mr. Blinken says the U.S. will now work with the Taliban to get the remaining Americans and Afghan allies out of the country, and he’s optimistic. “The Taliban has committed to let anyone with proper documents leave the country in a safe and orderly manner. They’ve said this privately and publicly many times,” said the Secretary of State.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17709/china-crime-of-the-century

The President of the United States does not need perfect knowledge to act.

The failure to share information when it has an obligation to do so is enough reason to impose severe costs on Beijing, but there are two additional reasons — both sufficient in and of themselves—to do so.

First, for at least five weeks, Chinese officials first covered up and then lied about the human-to-human transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, telling the world COVID-19 was not contagious when they knew it in fact was…. Second, China’s military is working on the next generation of pathogens.

If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next microbe, virus, or germ from China could end non-Chinese societies. This will be Communist China’s civilization-killer.

The next pandemic, therefore, could be the one that leaves China as the world’s only viable society. The world, therefore, needs something far more important than justice or compensation. It needs deterrence.

Beijing’s determined campaign to collect genetic profiles of foreigners while preventing the transfer to recipients outside China of the profiles of Chinese is another indication that the Chinese military, in violation of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention, is building ethnic-specific bioweapons.

Up to now, Biden has shown little — and sometimes no — interest in holding China accountable…. So far, Biden, with his feeble reaction, has shown Xi Jinping that Beijing can, without cost, kill millions of non-Chinese with a pathogen. Xi, unless stopped, will certainly do so again.

On August 27, the Biden administration released an unclassified summary of the intelligence community’s report on the origins of COVID-19. The IC, America’s 18 intelligence agencies, could reach only a few definitive conclusions. The agencies said they needed more information, but the world now knows enough to begin imposing severe costs on China.

America and other nations must impose those costs to prevent China’s Communist Party from releasing a civilization-killing disease. Yes, the People’s Liberation Army is now developing pathogens to destroy non-Chinese societies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/democracy-and-foreign-policy-bruce-thornton/

On Tuesday August 30, the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on the last plane, a few days after the terrorist murder of nearly two hundred people, including 13 U.S. military personnel. The fate of untold numbers of Americans who have been left behind remains uncertain. This bloody and shameful ending of 20 years of U.S. engagement in that country has confirmed the feckless incompetence and rookie mistakes of the Biden foreign policy team. Biden and his advisors both civilian and military should be held accountable for this disaster, the consequence of partisan politics, careerist mediocrity, and stale foreign policy paradigms.

Yet we also need to acknowledge the responsibility that we the voting people have in shaping foreign policy decisions, a role sanctioned by our rights to deliberate on policy, choose our leaders, and hold them accountable. In other words, the very institutions and rights that create political freedom paradoxically can also endanger that freedom by compromising our national security.

From Thucydides to Winston Churchill, this weakness of democracies in conducting foreign policy has been a constant theme in the history of war. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed about foreign affairs, “A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.” Similarly, in his 1946 The Gathering Storm, Churchill highlighted “the structure and habits of democratic states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and conviction” necessary for national security, and in which “even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years.”

“Structures” like regularly scheduled elections, for example––which voters can use to punish leaders for unpopular policies, and reward those who promise to gratify the voters’ preference for “butter” over “guns”–– ensure that every two years any policy is hostage to the self-interested or sometimes irrational vox populi. In matters of foreign policy, civilian control of the military through a president, who is also commander-in-chief, creates accountability that often for elected policy-makers an exorbitant political risk that can inhibit necessary policies out of fear of electoral retribution.

Equally important, the President and Congress can propose policies that also carry risks that aren’t always made apparent, or aren’t adequately explained to the voters, many of whom pay no attention to foreign affairs anyway. Dubious ideals and assumptions about what complexly diverse foreign cultures believe or value can lead to policies and aims doomed to fail.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/insanity-the-u-s-reportedly-handed-a-list-of-americans-to-the-taliban/

General Kenneth McKenzie told the press today that Americans “share a common purpose,” and counterterrorism intel, with the Taliban — a military group we were bombing only a few weeks ago. Politico now reports that U.S. officials had handed the Taliban a list of “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies” so that they could be granted entry into the U.S.-controlled airport at Kabul.

Andrew McCarthy has already hit Joe Biden for his capitulation to the Islamic group earlier this week. Still, it’s worth noting that we just apparently provided this useful list of names to the same Taliban that says there’s no proof that bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11, that threatened Americans only days ago, and that is reportedly already hunting down and executing Afghans who partnered with the U.S. If Biden holds to his August 31 deadline and leaves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans behind, the Taliban now have a list to work off of. “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” an anonymous defense official said. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”