RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taliban-withdrawal-biden-blinken-dictate-11629664446?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The ugly, chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan continues despite Biden Administration attempts to spin it as a triumph of logistics and planning. More Americans and Afghans are getting out. But some have been beaten by the Taliban, and the pace is too slow for confidence or safety as President Biden’s Aug. 31 evacuation deadline nears.

The worst humiliation continues to be President Biden’s deference to the Taliban on how and when U.S. citizens and allies can get to the airport. So far he won’t let the Pentagon create corridors into Kabul city where the State Department last week told people to shelter in place, and as far as we know won’t send the military beyond Kabul so Americans around the country can find refuge and escape.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, host Major Garrett asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken : “Someone in our audience might listen to you, Mr. Secretary, and say, ‘Oh, so we have to ask the Taliban for permission for American citizens to leave.’ True or not true?”

Mr. Blinken replied: “They are in control of Kabul. That is the reality. That’s the reality that we have to deal with.”

Yes, but this isn’t the reality the U.S. has to accept. The U.S. military has more than enough force to dictate better terms to the Taliban, but the other reality is that Mr. Biden is too risk-averse to do it. Instead, the U.S. evacuates on the Taliban’s terms. Over the weekend the Taliban put the Haqqani network in charge of security in Kabul. In 2012 the U.S. designated the Haqqani network as a “foreign terrorist organization” because of its attacks on U.S. personnel and close ties to al Qaeda.

https://www.dw.com/en/us-kamala-harris-visits-asia-amid-afghan-crisis/a-58949210

Kamala Harris will become the first US vice president to Vietnam. Her visit, however, comes at a time of a humiliating withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

US Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Singapore on Sunday, kicking off her trip to Southeast Asia where she is expected to offer reassurances of Washington’s commitment to the region.

The vice-president’s visit come just days after the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent takeover of the country by the Taliban.

The return to power of the hardline Islamists in the conflict-ridden country has dented the United States’ credibility and cast a shadow over its resolve to defend its values.

During her visit, which began on Friday and includes stops in Singapore and Vietnam, Harris will likely seek to allay concerns about US dependability.

A foreign policy novice?

The trip will also provide Harris, an Asian-American whose mother was of Indian-origin, a forum to assert herself directly in foreign affairs.

The longtime district attorney and former senator is largely untested in diplomacy and foreign policy.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/08/22/david_brooks_reproaches_elites_recycles_cliches_about_the_people_146288.html 

“The left still has a long way to go to understand the right and what ails America.”

To grasp the left’s rage and the right’s embitterment, it is useful to keep in mind a major asymmetry that marks the nation’s long-standing culture wars: The right tends to know the left better than the left knows the right.

Notwithstanding the occasional risible protestation, progressives dominate the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, the K-12 education establishment, and the universities. This means that progressive ideas, progressive sentiments, and progressive tastes pervade the culture. Denizens of red America need only turn on the TV, watch Hollywood movies, listen to popular music, follow major league sports, or send their kids to public schools and most any college or university in the country to encounter progressives’ flattering self-portraits and their airbrushed depictions of the progressive spirit in action. In contrast, residents of blue America generally only know of red America through the condescending lens of progressive reporting, opining, and imagining.

In the absence of unusual exertions, blue America operates based on a caricature of red America. A dramatic expression of progressives’ unfamiliarity with the interests and outlook of roughly half of their fellow citizens was the failure of the elite news media — whose job, it was long thought, was to inform the nation—to anticipate even the possibility of a Donald Trump victory in the 2016 Republican primaries and his subsequent defeat of Hillary Clinton in the general election. Another prominent example was their inability to explain how, despite a global pandemic and his manifest shortcomings, President Trump was able to increase his total number of votes in 2020, attract more African American and Latino votes than he had four years before, and come within 44,000 votes in three states of winning the Electoral College a second time.

Early in 2016, as Trump emerged as the favorite to win the Republican nomination, New York Times columnist David Brooks honorably recognized the limitations of his understanding of the nation he had covered for more than three decades. In March of that year, in a column headlined “No, Not Trump, Not Ever,” Brooks offered a mea culpa. Along with most of the experts, he had “expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough.” Although Brooks conveyed the obligatory contempt for Trump in that column, he also pledged to listen more carefully and learn more about America: “For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/08/22/taliban-sets-woman-on-fire-for-bad-cooking-n1471797

There’s more at stake in Afghanistan than U.S. prestige or the future of Joe Biden’s presidency. Millions of women in Afghanistan who were just starting to assert their rights as females are now condemned to being sent back to the Middle Ages under the Taliban’s notion of “women’s rights.”

Admittedly, the Afghanistan version of women’s liberation, even with the presence of thousands of American troops, was unrecognizable to most western women. Strictures placed on female behavior as well as opportunities for employment had been dictated by the Islamic religion. And there are other Muslim countries with almost as severe rules and regulations women must abide by as they will be forced to in Taliban Afghanistan.

But freedom of any kind must be nurtured and encouraged. The Taliban would destroy any hope of a future for Afghan women and girls.

As an illustration of what Afghan women are in for, one activist tells what happened to a woman forced to cook for the Taliban.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/08/22/biden-addresses-afghanistan-and-tropical-storm-henri-says-the-august-31-deadline-may-be-extended-n1471872

Joe Biden emerged at the White House Sunday afternoon, about 20 minutes after the 4 PM Eastern time he slated, to address the crisis in Afghanistan and the Tropical Storm Henri as it batters the U.S. east coast.

Biden opened his remarks discussing Henri, and stumbled badly over the name of the current head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and said he has spoken with each of the governors in the storm zone. He read off a list of things the federal government is doing to deal with the storm.

After spending several minutes on the storm and urging Americans to get vaccinated, Biden turned to the situation in Afghanistan. He claimed the U.S. has evacuated 11,000 individuals out of the country he abandoned, and which then fell to the Taliban a week ago, triggering the massive crisis there.

He promised that “Any American who wants to get home will get home.” He also promised to remove Afghans who worked with the U.S. and NATO, and then said a total of over 30,000 have been evacuated since August 14.

He said the evacuation would have been “hard and painful” no matter when it began, “It’s just a fact.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/remember-what-they-did-to-daniel-pearl/

On January 28, 2021, the Pakistan Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Omar Sheikh, the man previously convicted of playing a role in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Domestic politics obscured the story for most Americans. But now that thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan—some on the wrong side of the tiny bubble of protection offered by our retreating troops—it’s worth remembering what happened to this unarmed civilian reporter.

Pearl risked his life to give the Islamists the opportunity to put their best face forward to the world. The radicals used the opportunity to show us who they really  are. 

The description of the video I’m about to provide is from memory as I am unable to locate the original on the internet. Pearl’s captors recorded a video of Daniel Pearl begging for his life. The journalist readily confessed to his Jewish ancestry and offered no resistance nor demonstrated any hostility to his captors. The captors then stabbed Pearl to death. They then used a knife to slowly sever his head from his shoulders with a sawing motion. When they finished they held the head by the hair as a trophy while shouting for joy. A few stills from the video remain available here.

Before disappearing, Pearl was last known to be in Karachi, Pakistan. On January 23, 2002 he let the Wall Street Journal know that he was on his way to interview a prominent figure in the Islamic movement—likely a Taliban leader or a related movement. Four days later, the group sent an email with pictures of Pearl in chains. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/the-rotten-edifice-revealed/

Doubtless you have read or heard comments like those of the TV journalist Jen Griffen about Joe Biden’s brief remarks on Friday regarding Afghanistan. “I’m having a hard time digesting what we heard,” she said, “because I couldn’t fact-check it fast enough in real-time because there were so many misrepresentations of what is happening on the ground.” Bottom line: “This was just an alternate reality that was presented to us from the White House.” 

I presume what she had in mind were statements by Biden like this: “We know of no instance where the Taliban are not letting our citizens through the checkpoints freely.”

Or, in response to a question from the Associated Press, that he has seen “no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” 

The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

For the last week, chaos has ruled, notwithstanding Biden’s assurance on July 8 that the (supposedly) 300,000-man-strong Afghan army was among the best equipped and trained in the world and would be able to handle the 75,000-man-strong Taliban (which, for some reason, he pronounces “tally-bahn”). Pentagon spokesman John Kirby echoed his sentiment a few days later: “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban,” he said on August 14.  

“Imminent” is such a relative concept. 

A Crisis of Legitimacy 

One word has been repeated again and again, all along the ideological spectrum, in the reporting on the disaster in Afghanistan: “incompetence.” 

Incompetence there has been aplenty, and its display is both depressing and ubiquitous. It turns out that the technocratic elite to which we have entrusted our lives, not to mention the lives of the Afghans, is technically maladroit and incapable of effective governance. Our preposterous and “woke” Secretary of Defense epitomized the incapacity a few days ago when he admitted that the United States does not have the “capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” Hello? 

But incompetence is only a surface presentation of a much deeper malady, which revolves around the question of legitimacy. 

I mean this in the deepest sense.  It’s not just a matter of whether certain rules have been followed in putting various people in office or securing their government sinecures. 

That’s one sort, perhaps an essential but ultimately superficial sort, of legitimacy.  

What is happening here is something much deeper, more existential, if you will.

What just happened—what is happening still—in Afghanistan is an unfolding horror for the Afghan people.  

For the United States, it is a rude snatching away of the curtain of legitimacy. 

That curtain concealed a rotting edifice. 

Many people have known this for some time. Some are only now, suddenly, aware or half aware of it.  

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

It’s not clear yet how many people attended Trump’s rally in Cullman, Alabama, but it was a lot. AL.com wrote that authorities were expecting 40,000 to attend. However many tens of thousands ultimately attended the rally, Trump gave them a show. He raged against Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco and offered a vulgar, but accurate, quote for the ages about the wokeness that has swamped America.

The photos and videos of the crowd gathered in Alabama on pastureland are stunning

Before Trump appeared, the audience was treated to the George C. Scott version of Patton’s famous speech about America being a winning nation:

And speaking of generals, Trump chose the earliest possible opportunity to castigate the “woke generals” who “move our military out before they move our civilians and before they move $83 billion worth of equipment. Let’s move ‘em out. And the Taliban looks, and they say, ‘I can’t believe it. This could only happen to us. I can’t believe it.’”

As Trump clearly knew, the Taliban, who are very attuned to America, have been rubbing America’s face in the fact that the retreating American military gave them enough advanced weaponry to wage war for years:

Even CNN was compelled to report that the “Taliban celebrate their new American arsenal”:

The Taliban’s newfound American arsenal is likely not limited to small arms, as the group captured sizable stockpiles of weapons and vehicles held at strongholds once controlled by US-backed forces, including modern mine-resistant vehicles (MRAPs) and Humvees.

Initial estimates suggest the Taliban may now also possess several Black Hawk helicopters and other US-funded military aircraft, according to a congressional source familiar with early assessments provided by defense officials.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17670/western-diplomacy-imploring-terrorists

Born in the years of the Cold War, the German Army was the backbone of NATO forces in Europe. Today, it is… “a quasi-humanitarian organization, a kind of Médecins Sans Frontières with guns”.

Meanwhile…. American officials, not humiliated enough, were trying to obtain assurances from the Taliban that, in exchange for aid, they would not attack the US Embassy in Kabul.

Afghan feminists counted on the solidarity of their German colleagues. But the Green Party was apparently too busy deleting male politicians from official photos for their own feminist propaganda. Well, what about the Swedish Army, then? It was busy waving the LGBT flag.

Meanwhile, the US military was busy teaching “critical race theory” at West Point. All great on the Western front …

In the so-called “free world” there is the thick, unhealthy air of betrayal.

“What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote. “America cares more about pronouns than the fate of Afghan women.”

You could see it from the Western diplomatic response after the Taliban conquered Kabul without firing a shot and arrived in the capital as tourists.

“The Afghan government should engage with the Taliban to reach an inclusive agreement”. Even before Afghanistan had fallen into hands of the Taliban, that intrepid EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was already begging the Afghans to reach an agreement with the Islamists.

The same day, the Associated Press was reporting what now awaits millions of Afghan women. In a park of Kabul, which was turned into a refuge for displaced people, girls returning home were stopped and whipped for… wearing sandals. Since then, there are reports of women being raped, sold to terrorists as sex slaves, murdered for not wearing a burqa, having their eyes gouged out, and girls as young as 12 being hunted door-to-door and “dragged out as sex slaves” or forced to marry fighters in the terror group. Associated Press added:

“Borrell warned that the Taliban would face non-recognition, isolation, lack of international support and the prospect of continued conflict and instability in Afghanistan if they take power by force and re-establish an Islamic Emirate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/the-forever-war-isnt-over/

The Afghan debacle just marks a new, more murderous phase.

‘I‘m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans,” President Biden said during his speech on August 16. “I will not pass this responsibly on — responsibility on to a fifth president.” He needn’t have corrected himself. He did indeed irresponsibly bequeath to his successor a terrible situation in Central Asia.

The best-case scenario, according to Biden, would look like this: Afghanistan’s reversion to Islamofascism fades from the international headlines. The Taliban understands that its continued rule depends on its ability to prevent terrorists from launching attacks from its territory. America goes back to fighting over masks and vaccinations and “building back better,” or whatever.

But the best-case scenario is an illusion. Why? Because the war isn’t over. Afghanistan is just one front in a global conflict that the United States did not initiate and cannot wish away. The Cold War did not end when the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Nor will the war on terror or the “Long War” or the “Forever War” cease with Taliban control of Afghanistan. When participants in the worldwide Salafist-jihadist movement look at the developments of the last week, they don’t see reasons to quit their mayhem. They see the chaos, panic, violence, disorder, and American retreat as a vindication of their ideology and a spur to further action.

It’s happened before. North Vietnam’s victory over the South did not make communism less expansionist or revolutionary. On the contrary: Laos fell to the Communists, Cambodia was subjected to the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, Cuba sent advisers to the pro-Communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the Sandinistas overthrew the anti-Communist Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and a pro-Communist insurgency took root in El Salvador. The relentless humiliations that followed America’s defeat in Vietnam ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency. They did not stop until Ronald Reagan shifted the nation’s course.

Or try a more recent example. When America removed its troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 and failed to enforce its red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013, the Middle East did not become less violent or pathological or dangerous. It was only a matter of time before ISIS overran the Iraqi cities of Falluja, Ramadi, and Mosul. On June 29, 2014, the terrorist army’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the formation of a caliphate. Then ISIS moved toward Baghdad and enslaved and massacred Iraq’s Yazidi population along the way.