RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/running-away-afghanistan-jamie-glazov/

The Biden administration’s feckless withdrawal from Afghanistan is sending the worst possible message to our enemies across the world. Our rivals are already convinced of our lack of morale and our fear of the consequences from a response serious enough to concentrate their minds. Twenty years after 9/11, and we still haven’t figured out the nature and aims of those who for decades have in word and bloody deed told us we are an enemy they want to destroy.

Instead we cling to our shopworn belief that “diplomatic engagement” can deter and stop a fanatic enemy, hoping words can substitute for deeds. But all we’ll achieve is further damage to our already fraying national prestige.

The plans to withdraw the last of our forces began during the Trump administration, which thought it could negotiate in good faith with a foe that has already demonstrated that agreements and covenants are mere “tactical adjuncts,” as Robert Conquest said of the Soviets, to their actual strategic intentions to be realized with violence. Here’s failed lesson number one: “diplomatic engagement” works only when those sitting across the table truly believe that if they violate the terms, as the Taliban have done with the Trump agreement, they will suffer serious consequences.

But in just six months Biden has shown that his team has no interest in any response other than timid diplospeak and maybe some showy cruise-missile fireworks. His cringing solicitude for the Iranians and obvious desperation to rewrite the nuclear deal––signaled by his removal of some sanctions without any reciprocal concessions––have made it clear throughout the region that he, like his boss Barack Obama, can be had. No one in the Khamenei cartel or among the Taliban fears or respects this administration or our power.

Why should they? Biden announced a date-certain withdrawal without any conditions, the same error Obama made when he skedaddled from Iraq in 2011. Worse, Biden abandoned our military bases and withdrew the in-country air support that gave the government in Kabul a fighting chance against the Taliban. Pocketing these gifts, the Taliban started their march through the country two weeks later, and since then have been rolling up region after region and city after city. According to the Pentagon, they could be in Kabul in a month. (In fact, on Sunday Taliban fighters were seen in Kabul, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the Afghan National Reconciliation Council was left to negotiate the transfer of power to the Taliban.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/joe_bidens_afghan_fiasco.html

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted that the Afghan situation is “manifestly not Saigon.”  This has been suggested because helicopters are being used to evacuate embassy personnel.  Perhaps it is more like Benghazi.  In both cases, the commander-in-chief left the scene: Obama to bed and Biden to Camp David.  Americans have been advised to “shelter in place” and fill out a Repatriation Assistance Request.  Civilians are advised not to come to the embassy or airport.  There has been no mention of the archaic notion of “women and children first.”

The president was confident that Afghanistan would not fall to the Taliban.  He claimed this because the Afghan government has “300,000 well-equipped” troops. He said they were “as well-equipped as any army in the world.” The United States spared no expense in equipping the Afghan army:  Airplanes, helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, night-vision goggles, a flight simulator, and even the latest Black Hawk attack helicopters.  The president claimed, “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more—more competent in terms of conducting war.”  With the rapid surrender of government forces it now seems that the Taliban is “as well-equipped as any army in the world.”

The first explanation for this fiasco is that it was a total surprise.  The AP reported Biden was “stunned.” “This Week” co-anchor and chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz said Sunday that the U.S. was “caught unaware and completely off guard” by the Taliban’s rapid advance in Afghanistan. She said that there was a “massive intelligence failure.”  A earlier U.S. intelligence assessment said Kabul could be encircled in 30 days and could fall to the Taliban within 90 days, but the insurgents captured most of Afghanistan’s major cities in less than a week and entered the capital on Sunday.  NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel disagreed.  Engel was asked whether it is surprising “not that it is happening, as much as how fast it is happening,”  “No. everyone keeps saying that. I’ve been listening all day: ‘oh my God, we’re shocked at how fast’ — I’m not shocked at all! I thought Kabul was going to fall about now. And lots of people I spoke to believed that . . . It was well known that the security forces were collapsing, a month, two months, three months ago.”

The administration is attempting to spin that as a victory.  The president stated, “We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. [Osama] Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.” Secretary of State Blinken claimed, the United States’ original mission in Afghanistan, launched to oust al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been fulfilled.  Washington had prevented further attacks by militants harbored by the Taliban.  Richard Engel viewed the situation differently.  Engel reported that “many will see this as a humiliating exit” for the United States. My only quibble would be to ask, “many”? Who doesn’t see this as a humiliating exit?”

https://www.steynonline.com/11598/the-scale-of-humiliation?fbclid=IwAR1881cNi_fEzOQEDQwjU0Rqrral052ftbIJH3o4MrEO96lSk_Hxthij0sc

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:

Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise

You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?

But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:

Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours – which is close enough for US intelligence work.

Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election – and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?

Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency – most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.

To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?

Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.

So what’s the point?

Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-humiliation-in-afghanistan

HUMILIATION IN AFGHANISTAN. The government of Afghanistan is falling fast in the face of a new Taliban offensive. The United States is urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately.” The Biden administration has sent a small force of troops to speed the evacuation. In a particularly telling development, the U.S. is asking the Taliban — pretty please! — not to target the American embassy when they take over the capital of Kabul.

At the Pentagon Wednesday, a reporter asked spokesman John Kirby, a retired Navy admiral, whether the Defense Department “could have done a better job…in articulating what the goals were in Afghanistan and what things were supposed to look like or what they’re not expected to look like when we leave?”

Kirby’s answer was painfully revealing. He began by saying he couldn’t speak for the entire 20-year history of the Afghan war. He conceded that “the goals did migrate over time.” And then he said: “It would be wrong for us not to acknowledge that we did help enable some progress in Afghanistan. More children in schools, including girls, economic and political and social opportunities for women. A democratically elected government — not saying it’s not flawless, but a government. And living conditions that are much better, including life expectancy.”

Kirby echoed a statement made nearly five years ago, in October 2016, by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the war began, Kerry said, “maternal mortality in childbirth in Afghanistan has gone down by 75 percent. Average life expectancy has risen from 42 years to 62 years. Access to basic health care has skyrocketed from nine percent to 67 percent. In 2001, there was only one television station, and it was owned by the government. Now, there are 75 stations and all but two are privately owned. Back then, there were virtually no cell phones, zero. Today, there are 18 million cell phones covering about 90 percent of residential areas connecting Afghans to the world.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/afghanistan-illustrates-bidens-disastrous-foreign-policy-instincts/

He’s usually wrong, and he’s never called to account for his policy flip-flops.

” The problem is that his instincts are complete garbage.”

T he unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, trans-administrational failure. It is a humiliation.

Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives and hundreds of billions spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure and education, the country is likely to fall to radicals in less than 20 days. As of this writing, the Taliban are routing Afghan troops with seeming ease, taking Kandahar, Herat, and closing in on Kabul. The United States has been forced to send 3,000 troops to evacuate Americans to avoid another Fall of Saigon moment.

And for the past 20 years, Joe Biden has been on every side of nearly every position on Afghanistan — usually the wrong one at the wrong time. It’s surreal that a person so uncannily incompetent, so tenaciously wrong on foreign policy, could rise to the presidency, but here we are.

It’s true that support for invading Afghanistan after 9/11 was overwhelming. In October 2001, a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 88 percent of Americans backed military action abroad, and 66 percent supported “sending large numbers of ground troops into combat in Afghanistan.” The United States was going in to weed out those who attacked us. What about the aftermath?

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/moment-of-truth-for-the-biden-doctrine/91615/

Only a month ago President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and assured the American people that “there is going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” Today, the State Department announced that several thousand additional military personnel will be sent to Kabul to provide security as we airlift our civilians from our embassy.

That’s because President Biden’s strategy for withdrawal of our GIs from Afghanistan has become a debacle. We are not saying that Mr. Biden is to blame for this war. That blame attaches to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet in his first major war decision — to refuse, as our enemies are on the march, to adjust his plan of appeasement but rather to insist on withdrawing our troops — he has proven himself to be a catastrophe as a war leader.

And one who can’t give his own countrymen straight talk. The news today is that Mr. Biden is rushing something like 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to “help,” as NBC reported it, “secure the withdrawal of most staff from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul” amid “growing alarm over a Taliban military offensive.” NBC cited “officials.” The NBC quoted the Pentagon press secretary as saying one Army battalion and two Marine battalions will head to the airport at Kabul.

The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, is quoted as telling reporters: “We are further reducing our civilian footprint in Kabul in light of the evolving security situation.” What diplomatic malarky. The State Department cited the Taliban’s advances and rising violence, NBC reported. That’s been plain to Democrats and Republicans for weeks, as Mr. Biden insists on getting our GIs out of Afghanistan whatever enemy advances are occuring.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-will-withhold-aid-if-the-taliban-attacks-embassy-in-kabul/

The Biden administration is dangling the possibility of U.S. aid to a potential future Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan, in a last-ditch bid to prevent an assault on its embassy in Kabul.

The situation in the country is in free fall. Since the start of a blitz last week, Taliban fighters have now taken eleven provincial capitals, as U.S. efforts to negotiate a political solution and a desperate plea to the group to negotiate a power-sharing agreement founder. The deadline for the completion of the U.S. withdrawal is August 31, and the White House and Pentagon have demonstrated little interest in significantly higher levels of air strikes to stop the Taliban’s advance.

Washington is now placing its hopes in a diplomatic push, one feature of which is to convince the Taliban not to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, if the Afghan capital falls, the New York Times reported today.

As the Times reports, part of this push includes preventing a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy by saying that keeping it open is the only way a government the group runs can possibly receive future financial assistance from Washington.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Afghanistan envoy and a veteran of the Bush and Trump administrations, has spearheaded the U.S. diplomatic effort.

Earlier this week, as Khalilzad traveled to Doha to meet Taliban negotiators, he and other administration officials faced criticism for saying that the Taliban would fail to gain international legitimacy if it came to power by force.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/11/the_un_makes_out_big_with_americas_checkbook-97_billion_per_year_788959.html

The United States gives $9.7 billion annually to 58 United Nations (UN) accounts.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com compiled these findings in a new oversight report on U.S. foreign aid. The UN system, through 58 funding streams, received taxpayer money that included:

UN peacekeeping: $1.5 billion in FY2021 for dues, $10.3 billion over the last six years
UN regular budget: $685.5 million in FY2021 for dues, $2.5 billion over the last 3.5 years
World Food Program: $2.6 billion in FY2019
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: $1.7 billion in FY2019
United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund: $833 million in FY2020, $5.9 billion in U.S. funding over 14 years
World Health Organization: $230 million so far in FY2021, $4.1 billion in U.S. funding over 14 years
United Nations Relief and Works Agency Palestinian aid: New $150 million in restarted aid announced in 2021, $6.3 billion sent from U.S. taxpayers since 1953

We launched our report on The National Desk at Sinclair Broadcast Group — reaching 190 ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliated TV stations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/trading_with_the_enemy_is_wrong.html

The Navy and Marine Corps have kicked off their two-week Large Scale Exercise 2021, a massive effort that spans 17 time zones, to test their vision of how to conduct war on a global scale against peer competitors. Such an operation is reminiscent of the Cold War, but then we are in another Cold War facing a coalition of powers who want to dominate the international order. That coalition is lead by the People’s Republic of China with the strong support of a Russia seeking to recover from its defeat in the first Cold War. Both powers have been strengthening their ties with Iran at the intersection of Europe and the Indo-Pacific. In response, the U.S. has reenergized its alliances and expanded them, most importantly in partnership with India. The Trump administration recognized the danger of renewed Great Power competition, and the Biden administration is continuing many of its policies because the change in the White House has not changed what is going on in the outside world.

The most prominent flashpoint is the South China Sea, where China has created artificial island bases backed by a naval buildup to support its claim to imperial sovereignty over this vital maritime realm in defiance of international law. China and a U.S.-led coalition are both conducting rival air and naval exercises in this sea demonstrating their ability to defeat the other. Beijing has complained to the UN that “The US has been stirring up trouble out of nothing, arbitrarily sending advanced military vessels and aircraft into the South China Sea as provocations.” Washington is not acting “unilaterally.” Great Britain has sent is new Carrier Strike Group to the region. Dutch and German frigates are there, along with a French task force to show NATO unity. Beijing’s state media outlet Global Times made a direct threat “We advise US allies to be particularly cautious…They must be bluntly told that if their warships rampantly behave as the U.S. military does in the South China Sea, they will more likely become an example of China defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity — just as a popular Chinese phrase indicates: To execute one as a warning to a hundred.”

India has sent a task force into the South China Sea as part of the Quad, which includes Japan and Australia along with the U.S. China claims to have the largest fleet of warships in the world. Beijing’s full spectrum military buildup and militant rhetoric have been the real provocations that has brought forth a powerful response.

Yet, in the midst of this very evident confrontation that actually goes back to the Obama administration “pivot” to Asia which saw the escalation of naval exercises during 2010, corporate lobbyists in Washington are still pushing for closer commercial ties with the Beijing regime. On August 5, nearly three dozen business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Semiconductor Industry Association sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, claiming Beijing had met “important benchmarks and commitments” in the so-called Phase One agreement negotiated by President Trump, including “opening markets to U.S. financial institutions and reducing some regulatory barriers to U.S. agricultural exports to China.” The aim of the letter was to cut tariffs and expand trade with China while ignoring its aggressive behavior in the larger context of world affairs.

The letter purposely missed the real point about the “trade war” with China, which is to correct past “public policy choices” which President Biden has accurately blamed for allowing American firms to create “fragile supply chains across a range of sectors and products. Unfair trade practices by competitor nations and private sector and public policy prioritization of low-cost labor, just-in-time production, consolidation, and private sector focus on short-term returns over long-term investment have hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, siphoned innovation from the United States, and stifled wage and productivity growth.”