{"id":240866,"date":"2021-08-16T07:21:03","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T07:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=240866"},"modified":"2021-08-17T13:02:27","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T13:02:27","slug":"bidens-afghanistan-horror-a-well-intentioned-miscalculation-with-disastrous-predictable-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=240866","title":{"rendered":"Biden’s Afghanistan horror: A well-intentioned miscalculation with disastrous, predictable results"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction — Aug 16, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Amazingly America’s senile President Biden is trying to blame President Trump<\/a> for a foreign policy disaster that future generations will forever associate with his administration. For just five weeks ago the president said Americans would never be evacuated from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Five weeks later and U.S. military helicopters were shuttling in and out of Kabul, to evacuate remaining U.S. diplomatic staff.<\/p>\n

Yet the Biden administration seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge the magnitude of this debacle. Only yesterday U.S. Secretary of State was saying that Kabul was \u201cmanifestly not Saigon<\/a>\u201d. He said this even as U.S. military helicopters were evacuating diplomatic staff from Kabul in scenes that were reminiscent of those that played out in Saigon nearly fifty years before.<\/p>\n

USA Today Editorial \u2013 Aug 16, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

A US Chinook flies out of Kabul as the Taliban begin to enter the city. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Few American presidents have had their blunders so spectacularly validated in real time as Joe Biden in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” the 46th president told<\/a> reporters in July after a decision to end U.S. military involvement there.<\/p>\n

Taliban fighters entered<\/a> Kabul Sunday demanding unconditional surrender after wresting\u00a0nearly the entire country from government control in a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n

Biden had just\u00a0pledged\u00a0<\/a>support for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other leaders “as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement.” But by Sunday, Ghani had fled the country.<\/p>\n

It seemed all that was left for the Biden administration at that\u00a0hour was damage control. “This is not Saigon,”\u00a0U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued on CNN<\/a>\u00a0Sunday morning, rejecting comparisons to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 two years after U.S. troops were pulled out. But even as he spoke, helicopters were rushing to evacuate <\/a>personnel\u00a0from the U.S. embassy in Kabul<\/p>\n

And behind the broad news of bedlam were voices of thousands reduced to living in abject fear with the Taliban’s arrival; many, if not most, of them\u00a0women who face a crushing and uncertain future of subjugation under a famously mysogynistic regime.<\/p>\n

“Keep us in your prayers,” a terrified woman\u00a0hiding in Kabul texted her sister, an Afghan-American living in the United States, as terrorists raged through the capital. That was her last message<\/p>\n

It didn’t have to be this way<\/h2>\n

A brief history of Biden’s Afghanistan decision-making since taking office makes one thing abundantly clear \u2013 the disaster that unfolded Sunday didn’t have to happen.<\/p>\n

After 20 years of war, there was palpable frustration by most Americans with the failure of\u00a0three successive presidents to achieve anything other than a stalemate\u00a0in Afghanistan. George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 drew valuable military resources away from the Afghan fight.<\/p>\n

One outside chance for peace, however, was a pledge<\/a> by Taliban leaders last year to open negotiations with the Kabul government. President Donald Trump used this as an excuse to pull all but a few thousand troops out of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Biden could have conditioned any further drawdown on good faith efforts by the Taliban to reach a peaceful settlement with Kabul. But over the objections<\/a>\u00a0of military leaders who warned that the Afghan government would collapse without U.S. security assistance, Biden decided in April to end<\/a> military involvement by September.<\/p>\n

He promised troop withdrawal wouldn’t be hasty. But, in fact, most were gone by early July. (The largest U.S. airbase was abandoned so suddenly that Afghan troops couldn’t even figure out <\/a>how to turn the electricity back on.)<\/p>\n

It was a choice with disastrous consequences. Any incentive for the Taliban to negotiate peace was gone. A security umbrella of U.S. air cover that had staved off battlefield defeats for Afghan troops evaporated. (A small Afghan air force with pilots overworked and targeted for assassination has not been up to the task.)\u00a0And crucially, the morale disintegrated among frontline Afghan troops\u00a0already poorly fed, denied pay and deprived of bullets and fuel. Hundreds surrendered<\/a> without\u00a0firing a shot.<\/p>\n

“Brother, if no one else fights, why should I fight?” one Afghan soldier said, according to a Washington Post report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No ambiguity about disastrous results<\/h2>\n

A Taliban offensive that began with vacuuming up countless district centers manned by small numbers of security personnel in July\u00a0accelerated in August<\/a> to the capture of all major cities north, south and west\u00a0until insurgents reached the gates of Kabul.<\/p>\n

Shortly before those fighters reached the city, Biden had ordered\u00a05,000<\/a> U.S. troops into Kabul to assist evacuating U.S. personnel, and it was unclear Sunday just exactly what was developing on the ground there.<\/p>\n

But here is where there is no ambiguity:<\/p>\n

\u25ba Since the Taliban offensive, a growing humanitarian crisis has unfolded with 250,000<\/a>\u00a0people fleeing their homes, all in the midst of a pandemic. And there are troubling reports<\/a>\u00a0of Taliban\u00a0atrocities and score-settling.<\/p>\n

\u25ba The White House said\u00a020,000<\/a> Afghans were seeking special immigrant visas\u00a0fearing for their lives\u00a0because of working\u00a0with Americans.\u00a0They have\u00a0tens of thousands of family members. How many got out and how many were left behind?<\/p>\n

\u25ba Others in danger include women activists<\/a>\u00a0who also should have been included in any evacuations.<\/p>\n

\u25baBiden’s “America is back” foreign-policy pledge to the world after years of Trump’s global fecklessness\u00a0now lies in ruins.<\/p>\n

The president may have decided in April to militarily abandon Afghanistan to avoid further U.S. troop casualties. But he may wind up with the blood of U.S. friends and freedom activists\u00a0on his hands, not only because of his decision to so rapidly exit,\u00a0but because of his ensuing failure to carry out that mission before the Taliban aggression he unwittingly unleashed changed everything.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only yesterday U.S. Secretary of State Blinken was saying that Kabul was \u201cmanifestly not Saigon\u201d. He said this even as U.S. military helicopters were evacuating diplomatic staff from Kabul in scenes that will forever be linked with the Biden administration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":240875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Afghanistan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=240866"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240878,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240866\/revisions\/240878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/240875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=240866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=240866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=240866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}