August 17, 2021
Joe Biden and his media acolytes call him Mr. Empathy and Mr. Compassion. His Afghanistan speech yesterday told a different story, and should end that phony spin forever.
My takeaway was how cold, and hard, and compassionless Biden was as he sought to extricate himself from the catastrophe of his own making. He blamed everyone but himself for his failure, starting with the Afghan army. He smarmily assured terrified Afghanis left behind he'd now speak out for their human rights instead of actually protect them. He effectively told U.S. servicemembers their service was for nothing. It was appalling. Biden came off as a man without a soul.
First, he blamed our Afghan allies for the collapse of the country, effectively calling them cowards.
In the previous year, the U.S. pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Supposedly, that was a peace offering. Actually, that was like releasing Gitmo terrorists onto U.S. soil to make the terrorists like us. The unjailed terrorists did what injailed terrorists do, and joined the Taliban as reinforcements for their final battle. That ought to have been a real morale-builder to the Afghani army seeing the 60,000-strong enemy get 5,000 fresh recruits.
Joe then kept on sending the signals to them, all the way to the bitter end.
According to this Wall Street Journal editorial:
Anybody notice how cold and heartless Biden was in his Afghanistan speech?
By Monica ShowalterJoe Biden and his media acolytes call him Mr. Empathy and Mr. Compassion. His Afghanistan speech yesterday told a different story, and should end that phony spin forever.
My takeaway was how cold, and hard, and compassionless Biden was as he sought to extricate himself from the catastrophe of his own making. He blamed everyone but himself for his failure, starting with the Afghan army. He smarmily assured terrified Afghanis left behind he'd now speak out for their human rights instead of actually protect them. He effectively told U.S. servicemembers their service was for nothing. It was appalling. Biden came off as a man without a soul.
First, he blamed our Afghan allies for the collapse of the country, effectively calling them cowards.
It was some amazing chutzpah to say that, given the thousands of Afghanis who gave their lives to the conflict. He showered them with money, see, sounding like a heartless martinet father figure. But the Brookings Institution has compiled a list from 2013-2017, which is just four years of the 20-year-conflict, showing 24,000 dead. More Afghanis lost their lives fighting the Taliban over the past 20 years than Americans or allies. But to Joe, they're just cowards glomming off the Americans and unwilling to fight. Biden continued the string of insults to people who lost thousands: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 spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
As H.R. McMaster, former National Security Advisor to President Trump, but no Trump ally, noted in this Wall Street Journal op-ed today here -- there hadn't been a single U.S. casualty on the Afghanistan front in more than a year and a half, because the Afghanis were doing the fighting. Biden's mendacious claim:Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.
Worse still, McMaster notes that it was Biden who destroyed their will (emphasis mine)....insults the memory of tens of thousands of Afghans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against our common enemies and underestimates the psychological blow from America’s sudden abandonment.
Biden was the guy who demoralized the Afghan army. in handing the Taliban a handy schedule so they could focus and strategize. But that was hardly all.On April 14, ignoring predictions of dire consequences, President Biden announced that all U.S. forces would depart by Sept. 11—20 years to the day after jihadist terrorists used their safe haven in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to launch the deadliest terrorist attack in history.
As U.S. forces departed, the Taliban seized the initiative and launched an offensive on Afghan cities, taking control of the large majority of provinces in 11 days. The takeovers in the north exposed the Taliban’s plan, along with al Qaeda, to isolate and overthrow the elected government in Kabul and subjugate the country under its brutal form of Shariah. The fall of Kandahar on Thursday gave the Taliban a major symbolic victory in the ideological center of the antimodernist and misogynist movement. The fall of Ghazni, Laghman, Logar and Paktia provinces on Kabul’s doorstep enabled the disaster we are now seeing in the capital.
In the previous year, the U.S. pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Supposedly, that was a peace offering. Actually, that was like releasing Gitmo terrorists onto U.S. soil to make the terrorists like us. The unjailed terrorists did what injailed terrorists do, and joined the Taliban as reinforcements for their final battle. That ought to have been a real morale-builder to the Afghani army seeing the 60,000-strong enemy get 5,000 fresh recruits.
Joe then kept on sending the signals to them, all the way to the bitter end.
According to this Wall Street Journal editorial:
As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Mr. Biden sent a confirmation of U.S. abandonment that absolved himself of responsibility, deflected blame to his predecessor, and more or less invited the Taliban to take over the country.
With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed. Taliban fighters captured Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country while the U.S. frantically tried to evacuate Americans.