August 2021 Archives

How can this possibly be true?

"We're dealing with Kabul. There's 7 buses of female American citizens. The CG refused to open the gate. We have a congressman with us and he had the state department reach out. MG Donahue refused. 10 minutes ago the females were taken by the Taliban. They are likely dead now."

— Emily Miller (@emilymiller) August 30, 2021

The American Chargé d'Affaires Ross Wilson (formerly Ambassador, but hey, we don't have an embassy in Afghanistan anymore) says that Americans are not being denied entry to HKIA.

This is a high-risk operation. Claims that American citizens have been turned away or denied access to HKIA by Embassy staff or US Forces are false.

— Chargé d'Affaires Ross Wilson (@USAmbKabul) August 30, 2021

We pray for peace and safety in Afghanistan, and that everyone who wants to leave is able to.

NEW - Toddler pulled over wall by U.S. soldiers as desperate crowds gather outside #Kabul airport.pic.twitter.com/NUDYAViOcb

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 19, 2021

America's incompetent abandonment of Afghanistan and the instant collapse of the government we built, supported, and funded for 20 years is a humiliating failure for our ruling class. The disaster that unfolded over the past month belongs to President Biden, but the foundation was laid by our "smart" political, military, and intelligence leaders over the past two decades.

Every four years, a Democratic presidential candidate pops up and reminds us that he -- or, one cycle, she -- represents the smart party when it comes to foreign policy. These Democrats boast that they're not isolationist, like Donald Trump, and they're not unilateralist cowboys, like George W. Bush. They, and their top advisers, assure us that they are right, tough, smart, nuanced, and sophisticated. And every four years, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment -- think-tank wonks, retired diplomats, columnists and authors, certain retired generals -- almost uniformly swoons at these Democratic presidential candidates' keen grasp of a complicated and dangerous world.

And these top Democrats are not shy about telling us how they understand the world better than anyone else does. ...

In the worldview of the Democratic foreign-policy cognoscenti, Americans should expect foreign-policy crises during Republican presidencies, because GOP presidents and their foreign-policy teams are either crazed warmongers or ignorant, selfish isolationists, or some combination of the two. They just don't understand the world as well as the self-identified "smart" Democratic foreign-policy thinkers.

But something odd happens whenever the self-identified "smart" Democratic foreign-policy thinkers come to power. Somehow, randomly -- through no fault of their own, they insist -- disaster strikes.

Jim Geraghty lists numerous examples for your edification.

Mark Steyn takes a wider-angle view that highlights the utter incompetence of American leadership.

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? ...

One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket - including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that's an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn't won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on "white rage", I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for[.] ...

I'm in favor of razing the Pentagon and salting the earth - or, at the very least, firing Milley and the massed ranks of "parade generals" (a useful Commonwealth term) and moving the few guys left to a new HQ in a strip-mall on the edge of Cleveland. The bigger your armed forces get, the more they become a racket - as the US-created "Afghan National Army" "300,000-strong" (and now down to, oh, twenty-seven maybe) has just conveniently demonstrated. As for where all the money wound up, the Taliban's tour of American "ally" and former Afghan vice-president "Marshal" Dostum's palatial spread provides a clue.

Yeah, those golden thrones were bought with American blood and taxes. Needless to say, Dostum and his forces surrendered to the Taliban without a shot fired.

President Biden argued there was no point in America spending more time in Afghanistan. Biden is correct about many things, but was incompetent in his execution. He said:

So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.

If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

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.

There's some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers, but if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that 1 year -- 1 more year, 5 more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would've made any difference.

The problem here is that none of these events was inevitable. Afghanistan could have turned out differently if our political, military, and intelligence leaders had been competent over the past two decades. What's more, the withdrawal itself could have gone differently if President Biden had been competent over the past seven months. We didn't have to close Bagram Air Base and make ourselves dependent on Kabul's commercial airport. We didn't have to delude ourselves that the Afghans would fight when they wouldn't. We could have projected the Taliban taking Kabul in 90 hours rather than 90 days. These were all bad decisions that weren't inevitable; they were the result of incompetence.

We pray for peace, safety, and security in Afghanistan. We pray that Afghan women and girls will be protected. We pray that refugees will be provided for. We pray that Americans and our allies who are trapped in the country will be evacuated safely. We pray that evil will be restrained. We pray that American and global leaders will have wisdom and courage to protect the powerless.

Many conservatives are upset by President Obama's 60th birthday party, even calling it the "height of elite hypocrisy".

Here was our climate czar, John Kerry, flying in private. His mode of travel was preferred by a host of left-leaning eco-warrior celebs, all Obama's "close friends," of course, descending on an already understaffed and emotionally depleted Vineyard.

"His birthday party is insane," one of Obama's caterers told The Post last week. "What is he thinking?" ...

"This outdoor event was planned months ago in accordance with all public health guidelines and with COVID safeguards in place," Obama spokesperson Hannah Hankins told the press last week. "Due to the new spread of the delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends."

That, we now know, was a lie.

The Obamas hosted hundreds of guests, all free to go unmasked, while their 200 servers were reportedly forced to mask up. The tiny island's residents, meanwhile, endured "a s--t-show" of traffic and sudden road closures enforced by the Secret Service.

Is there a more disgusting display of elitist "Rules for thee, not for me" than this?

As is said, hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue. Obama and his guests were simply acting on what they and I believe: we should all be free to make our own choices about risk, whether that's pandemic risk or climate risk.

I, for one, am grateful to Obama for setting this example of individual liberty and responsibility.

"A fourth law enforcement officer who responded to the Capitol on Jan. 6 has died by suicide" according to The Hill.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention the annual suicide rate in America is 13.93 per 100,000. The Metropolitan Police Department has "over 4,000 sworn and civilian members". So, doing some rough math, since January 6th the MPD has had an annualized suicide rate of over 170 per 100,000 -- over 12 times the national average.

According to the AFSP, men have a suicide rate of 3.63 times the rate of women, and all four MPD suicides were by men. All else being equal, and assuming that MPD is all-male (certainly not true) we'd expect approximately 0.25 suicides over the past seven months, not four.

We pray for the health and safety of our law enforcement personnel and all our leaders in government.

(HT: Vodkapundit.)