Why the Afghanistan Withdrawal Was the Perfect Storm of Bureaucratic Incompetence

Why the Afghanistan Withdrawal Was the Perfect Storm of Bureaucratic Incompetence

Amber Smith

It’s been nearly one year since the world witnessed the worst foreign policy disaster to occur in generations. One year since thousands of Afghans rushed a C-17, resulting in bodies falling from the sky. One year since a suicide bomber made his way through a Taliban-controlled checkpoint to the Kabul airport gates, killing 13 U.S. service members who were helping Americans and Afghan nationals trying to flee Afghanistan. One year since 10 Afghan civilians (seven of which were children) were targeted and killed in a U.S. drone strike after the Pentagon tracked and wrongly identified a vehicle they suspected was an ISIS-K threat. One year since hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans were left behind to fall victim to Taliban brutality. 

President Biden wants you to forget about what happened in Afghanistan. He wants you to forget about the bureaucratic incompetence and incompetent decision-making by nearly every senior leader. To this day, no one has been held accountable. Accountability, even verbally, would mean admitting failure and taking ownership, something the Biden administration refuses to accept.

The botched withdrawal wasn’t a mistake or a one-time bad call. The catastrophe occurred due to consistent and specific inept leadership failures at the Department of Defense, Department of State, the White House, and the Intelligence Community. Failure to plan. Failure to be realistic about the strength and capabilities of the Taliban. Failure to adequately prepare and vet people to get them out of the country before the U.S. military departed. The Biden administration failed to connect the dots and keep agencies in sync. Pentagon leadership downplayed the truth about the shell the Afghanistan government and military was, as well as the reality that without the U.S. dollar and military propping them up, they would all come crashing down. Washington was hoping for an Afghanistan that they wanted - that should have been after 20 years of war and $2 trillion - but wasn’t. The withdrawal wasn’t a mistake - it was a catastrophic failure of epic proportions. 

But aside from the long-term strategic failures, the single operational decision that put the nail in the coffin was the Pentagon’s decision to pull out all remaining troops from Bagram airbase in early July (aside from those 650 service members protecting the embassy). Nearly 3,500 troops left overnight with little notice to their Afghan counterparts. The decision to close Bagram set off a domino effect for the chaotic evacuation. It was a strategic airbase. It was a former Soviet airbase with multiple runways that had 20 years of upgrades since the U.S. military’s arrival in 2001. Tactically, it was much easier to defend than Kabul. Logistics and security were in place. The geographic terrain surrounding the base made for a capable defense. Once Bagram was closed, the U.S. military was left with only one, horrible evacuation option: Kabul.

Kabul International Airport was the only airport left to get people out of the country. It is surrounded by the city of Kabul, is plagued with many choke points, and has only one, very vulnerable runway. The State Department’s plan was to keep the U.S. embassy open with 1,400 Americans, secured by 650 Marines, setting the stage for a monumental and deadly hostage situation.

Apparently no one at DoD, State, IC, or the White House considered the possibility that the Taliban might take control of the perimeter of the airport. Nor the fact that if the U.S. no longer controlled access in and out of the airport they’d likely have to send in thousands of troops from the 82nd Airborne. Contingency planning has always been a significant part of mission planning in combat regardless of mission priority, but in this case, it clearly wasn’t given the time or attention it deserved. The U.S. was without a plan with no time to react. Mayhem ensued. People were stranded. People were beaten. People were killed. Scenes were eerily similar to the fall of Saigon as U.S. military helicopters rescued American diplomats off of the roof of the U.S. embassy and left many angry about how history could so perfectly repeat itself. 

The failures of the withdrawal of Afghanistan show significant flaws in our national defense decision-making. When the disconnect gets so great between decision-makers in Washington and those commanders on the ground in war zones, it creates impossible situations with impossible expectations. Things that brief well in Washington in SCIFs two stories underground don’t always equate to real-world situations on the battlefield or for those tactical commanders who are left trying to accomplish the impossible.

CENTCOM commander General McKenzie testified in front of Congress that the “Bagram option went away” once President Biden ordered all military troops to depart Afghanistan. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, contradicted him by stating that using Kabul to evacuate civilians was the plan all along - not Bagram. Political appeasement and bureaucracy killed any chance at winning the 20-year war and in that same vein led to the failed withdrawal that got 13 Americans killed. There has been no responsibility, no accountability. 

We will not forget. And the families of the 13 U.S. service members killed during withdrawal operations as well as the thousands of families of those that were killed during Operation Enduring Freedom will not forgive.

Amber Smith is the bestselling author of Danger Close. She is a former Pentagon official and U.S. Army Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot and combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Visit OfficialAmberSmith.com for more and follow her on Instagram and Twitter @AmberSmithUSA.

https://townhall.com/columnists/ambersmith/2022/08/15/why-the-afghanistan-withdrawal-was-the-perfect-storm-of-bureaucratic-incompetence-n2611606

"Build Back Better Bill" stands at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Dec. 14, 2021. (Leigh Vogel/Getty Images)

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Biden Has Sunk the ‘Progressive’ Option

Conrad Black

 

Commentary

The Biden administration is turning into the funeral pyre of the American left. Historians of the future will deduce who was responsible for converting the Biden–Sanders unity program, designed as the most socialistic that could be sold to the voters, into an outright, far left, suicide note for the Democratic Party as it had been known since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The kamikaze candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, although President Richard Nixon had almost entirely withdrawn from Vietnam, demanded peace terms that, as the New York Times stated, were harsher for America than what the North Vietnamese government was seeking. That was an aberrant moment: The candidate returned to inconsequential obscurity, as Nixon was reelected by what still stands as the greatest plurality in American history despite a doubling in the size of the electorate—18 million votes, carrying 49 states.

Apart from that mad excursion, the Democrats have held to the old Roosevelt coalition of the working class, the working press, the African-Americans, Latin Americans, and any other voters identified with ethnic minorities, the academics including the teachers, and a healthy chunk of the middle class.

After only 14 months, the Biden administration has insulted almost all of the core elements of its support and discredited all of its principal “progressive” policies.

Citizenship is held to be unnecessary to vote; mere physical presence in the country will suffice and immigration has been reduced to the tawdry flood across the southern border, more resembling the barbarians pouring across the frontiers of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. than any considered and sincere determination to come to America to adapt and espouse the American ethos. The fatuous ideal of open borders and refuge and haven for anyone in the world seeking to enter it for whatever motives, appalls the country. It’s personified in the nodding head of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas as he declares “The border is closed” while on the other side of the split television screen, unrestrained masses of unauthorized foreigners flood into the country with no recognition that they’re crossing a national border.

The administration has waffled badly on the whole issue of race relations, has effectively promoted critical race theory in the education system, the armed forces, and among civilian employees of the federal government, and has shown a grossly undeserved respect for the theories that have been floating around the Democratic intellectual entourage that proclaim that the United States was initially a slaveholding enterprise that has not begun to compensate African-Americans for what President Abraham Lincoln called “the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil,” followed by a century of segregation and 50 uneven years of the Great Society. Biden’s negligent tolerance of racial extremism is tarnishing and weakening the powerful consensus for enabling African-Americans to achieve a position of equality in American society that has been faithfully followed by both parties for nearly 60 years.

There’s probably a consensus for more professional rules and training for police, but there was never the slightest support for the disparagement and intimidation and shrinkage of police forces that occurred in most large Democratic governed cities in the last two years. The Democrats are finally coming to regret blaming the 2020 summer of “peaceful protests” (in which more than 50 people were killed and $2 billion of property damage inflicted) on racist police. The whole party was cowed by Black Lives Matter, which was threatening to “burn down America” if it didn’t receive everything that it sought. Black Lives Matter has since been substantially exposed as an alleged tax scam, but the Democrats have done almost nothing to distance themselves from these harum-scarum radical and charlatan movements that have alienated the great majority of Americans.

Most Americans were tired of unending war in the Middle East, particularly when the principal effect of the 2003 Gulf War was to raise Iran’s influence in Iraq. But the catastrophic departure from Afghanistan, in which thousands of Americans were left behind along with billions of dollars worth of sophisticated military equipment, and tens of thousands of completely unevaluated Afghans who had had no connection with the United States were admitted to the United States, has justly shaken faith in the military and splintered any foreign policy consensus.

For the first time since the battle of Kasserine Pass in 1943, America’s allies are seriously questioning the efficacy of the U.S. armed forces. It’s now clear that despite the colossal funds allocated to rebuild American defense by the Trump administration, the senior military staff have failed to provide adequate protection for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers that are the principal means of projecting American power in the world, and have completely failed to grasp the significance of hypersonic weapons.

The further the United States gets from a successful war in its past, the more absurdly decorated and bemedaled its senior officers become. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, sports more ribbons than the combination, at the heights of their careers, of Generals Washington, Grant, Sherman, Lee, Pershing, Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower. Faith in every branch and activity of government has largely evaporated, for good cause.

The initial Biden reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was very ambiguous, as if there were any relativism possible where one sovereign state is simply invaded and its civil population is smashed up from the air and by artillery. Again Milley so grossly misjudged the correlation of forces that he predicted the Ukrainian capital of Kiev would fall to the Russians within three days, and the daring act of solidarity offered by Biden in the early days was a guaranteed safe headlong flight of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family out of Ukraine.

The United States had been instrumental in training and supplying the Ukrainians, and the joint chiefs should have known how dangerous and motivated their armed forces could be. The administration seems painfully committed to trying to assure Ukrainian survival while avoiding Russian defeat: a cowardly policy of appeasement while Ukrainians die at the hands of unprovoked invaders. And while the Pentagon spokesman John Kirby contradicts the Secretary of State, saying that furnishing Ukraine with 13-year-old warplanes would be “escalatory,” the president has sought to distract the nation with a lot of unutterable nonsense about transsexualism.

This presidency has failed so badly and so quickly that it has made the Democratic Party synonymous with bad policies. The demented extravagance of Build Back Better—like the attempted coup d’état of the electoral changes that would have eliminated any process of verification and turned elections into 30-day harvested ballot-stuffing contests, and a packed, overtly political Supreme Court—could not even be brought to a successful vote.

Everything the administration could do to discredit the “progressive” agenda, from ambivalence about the naked aggression against Ukraine, to maintaining defenseless 5-year-old children in masks, to skyrocketing inflation and urban crime, it has done. Biden has sunk the “progressive” option. And for that, and probably only that, the country will be grateful to him.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-has-sunk-the-progressive-option_4380196.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-04-05&utm_medium=email&est=WcWvwUWXNDGrIv3LLp8vXYm%2BUDQRPI2Qf9FoOh3jfQDGDWJ1QtGyAwQtKg1%2B

REPORT: TEAM BIDEN RESISTED MILITARY’S KABUL EVACUATION PLAN

REPORT: TEAM BIDEN RESISTED MILITARY’S KABUL EVACUATION PLAN

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AFGHANISTAN, BIDEN FOREIGN POLICY, JOE BIDEN

According to the sworn testimony of military commanders involved in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, senior White House and State Department officials failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital and resisted efforts by U.S. military leaders to prepare the evacuation of embassy personnel and Afghan allies weeks before Kabul’s fall. The result was the perilous, chaotic, and ultimately deadly withdrawal that stunned America.

This indictment is contained in a 2,000-page Army investigative report that the Washington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The report also includes previously unreported disclosures about the violence American personnel experienced in Kabul.

But the key point is the Biden administration’s failure to realize how imminent a threat the Taliban posed:

Military personnel would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander on the ground during the operation, told Army investigators, “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.” He did not identify any administration officials by name, but said inattention to the Taliban’s determination to complete a swift and total military takeover undermined commanders’ ability to ready their forces.

(Emphasis added)

Responding to questions about the report, Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, hemmed and hawed about the evacuation before finally admitting:

[There] might have been other plans that we would have preferred, but when the president makes a decision, it’s time for us to execute the president’s decision.

Even when the president is Joe Biden, who has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security matter for as long as anyone can remember.

And even when the president is relying on foolish national security advisers:

During an Aug. 6 meeting, a National Security Council official, who is not identified in the report, appeared to lack a sense of urgency and told others involved that if the United States had to execute an evacuation, it would signal “we have failed,” [Brig. Gen. Farrell] Sullivan recalled. “In my opinion, the NSC was not seriously planning for an evacuation,” he said.

(Emphasis added)

It was Gen. Sullivan who oversaw the Marines who participated in the Kabul evacuation.

Readers will recall that a Taliban bomb killed 13 U.S. service members at the airport in Kabul. Last week, U.S. officials said another 45 were wounded in the blast, and that some of them are suffering from brain injuries.

The detailed report obtained by the Post finds, in effect, that these casualties could have been avoided if Team Biden had recognized the imminent threat the Taliban posed and had not resisted efforts by U.S. military leaders to prepare the evacuation.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/report-team-biden-resisted-militarys-kabul-evacuation-plan.php

THE BETRAYAL

THE BETRAYAL

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AFGHANISTAN, BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, JOE BIDEN

That’s the title of a long article in The Atlantic by George Packer about the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even if you’re already as disgusted as I am by the betrayal — Donald Trump’s decision to turn over the whole country to the Taliban and, especially, Biden’s scandalous handling of the pullout — the article is well worth reading in full. It should be required reading for any Democrat who still has confidence in Biden.

David Von Drehle provides a good summary of the non-anecdotal portions of Packer’s piece. He writes:

[Packer’s] indictment takes aim at the apparently willful failure to offer an orderly exit from Afghanistan for combat interpreters, embassy support staff, intelligence informants and so on. Many of these individuals have been denounced as traitors and are at risk of death — if they haven’t been killed already.

Biden is quoted saying more than once that the United States had no duty to protect those who relied on or worked beside us. And so advocates of honorable assistance met one brick wall after another. A proposal to relocate Afghans to the U.S. territory of Guam while processing their visa applications went nowhere. Bipartisan delegations of U.S. veterans beseeched the White House for action — but concluded that they were being ignored. Further, they surmised that, considering the multitude of humanitarian policy promoters at senior levels in the administration, the cold shoulder could only be coming from the very top.

Von Drehle continues:

Though no one from the White House would say so on the record, Packer reports that Biden’s people continue to claim there was no way they could have foreseen how quickly the Taliban would complete its takeover. But it was foreshadowed, notably by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker in March of last winter.

His report portrayed a robust Taliban and an Afghan government already collapsing. The Taliban controlled Afghanistan’s highways, operated de facto governments in the provinces and maintained an open, armed presence even in the capital, Kabul. Meanwhile, the Afghan army couldn’t fill its ranks even by dangling money, and the public had given up on the corrupt administration of feckless Ashraf Ghani, the former president who fled the country.

Failure to plan equals planning to fail, the saying goes — and it was true. Biden’s failure to plan for an honorable, orderly retreat from Afghanistan produced the very scenes of chaos and abandonment he had hoped to avoid.

Packer acknowledges that Kabul fell faster than anticipated. However, he condemns the Biden administration’s failure to plan for a worst-case scenario.

What about the administration’s claim that however ugly it might have been, the airlift from Kabul was ultimately a great success? It’s nonsense:

By one estimate [that of Human Rights First]. . .90 percent of Afghans eligible for relocation were left behind. Most of those who did get out were rescued only by the initiative of conscience-stricken troops and diplomats in Kabul, and by a loose network of tireless volunteers working around-the-clock stateside.

In other words, had matters been left solely to Team Biden, the failure rate probably would have exceeded 95 percent.

Von Drehle concludes with this:

Biden’s approval rating plunged during the days so grippingly recounted in Packer’s article. So far, it hasn’t recovered. The more one learns about the pullout from Afghanistan, and the willful betrayal of our friends, the more perceptive and just that judgment appears.

Right. But unfortunately the stain of the pullout extends beyond Biden. In my opinion, it’s a stain on America’s international reputation and, above all, our honor.

The last word goes to Packer:

The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/the-betrayal.php

Biden Knew Afghan Air Force Would Collapse After U.S. Withdrawal

Biden Knew Afghan Air Force Would Collapse After U.S. Withdrawal

BY RICK MORAN 

AP Photo/Kathy Gannon

It’s amazing how quickly and how thoroughly Joe Biden’s Afghan withdrawal debacle has disappeared down the memory hole. It’s equally amazing how our incurious media missed so much of the story at the time.

Even now, as facts continue to dribble out about just how much Biden bollixed up the withdrawal, we are beginning to see the brazen lies and falsifications told by the president. He was covering up what we now know American intelligence thought would happen when the U.S. pulled out after 20 years in Afghanistan.

The Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, submitted his report in January of 2021. It was classified, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual, says the IG office, is that it took a year to release a declassified version of the report.

Associated Press:

The inspector general’s office told The Associated Press on Monday that it is rare for SIGAR reports to be classified but when they are, a declassified version is issued by the Pentagon in under two months. The office said it did not know why it took the Defense Department more than a year before declassifying this particular report, or why it did so now, five months after the Taliban took power.

That report went into great detail about the sorry state of the Afghanistan air force and how it was wholly dependent on the U.S. military and private contractors to keep the planes flying.

The significance of this is that during the entire 20-year conflict, the Afghan army leaned heavily on the air force — an air force largely maintained by U.S. military technicians and American private contractors. When they left during the Taliban’s final offensive, the Afghanistan air force collapsed, followed quickly by their ground defenses.

But at the same time this was happening, Joe Biden was telling the nation that the Afghan army was not South Vietnam.

National Review:

And Biden infamously guaranteed that, “The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

We knew Biden’s assurances meant nothing. What we now know is that he had been warned by the intelligence community, and in an effort to delay and defer the blame, this special-inspector-general’s report was kept under wraps.

In the immortal words of the Wicked Witch of the West, “These things must be handled delicately.” Biden needed to wait for an opportune political moment — or a time when the political damage would be blunted — before revealing his spectacular failure to the American people.

For Our VIP Subscribers: Don’t Trust the Biden Admin to Be Honest About the Number of Americans Still in Afghanistan

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air offers some thoughts on why this is still important a year after the fact.

But many of his supporters still seem to cling to the idea that it was “an honest mistake” and an intelligence failure or whatever. This report deflates such ideas entirely. An office that was positioned to know better warned the Pentagon that a disaster was on the way eight months before the collapse took place. And Joe Biden moved ahead with the plan anyway. As many of us had already suspected, the decision to evacuate from Afghanistan was a political one, not a military one. Biden had promised to end the war in Afghanistan and he didn’t want to be seen as failing to live up to that political talking point. And we continue to pay a heavy price for that completely avoidable blunder.

“Avoidable blunder” it may have been, but on the scoresheet, it comes out as “Biden lied and people died.” That’s the bottom line, and a less cynical and partisan media might have recognized that and responded with the same outrage it would have shown if a Republican had done it.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/01/19/biden-knew-afghan-air-force-would-collapse-after-u-s-withdrawal-n1550826

The moment Joe Biden finally lost his credibility

The moment Joe Biden finally lost his credibility

by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter

If President Joe Biden’s disorderly and lethal Afghanistan withdrawal was the moment that fractured voters' regard for him, then his vicious Atlanta speech last week may be the moment that defines his presidency.

Speaking Tuesday at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, Biden uttered venomous, brutal accusations lacking factual basis. His shouting-in-the-wind delivery was inexplicable, and his decision to lash out at members of his own party — Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — appears to have only strengthened their resolve not to give in to his demands.

Biden called those who disagree with his political views on legislation “domestic enemies.” He compared them to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and former Alabama Democratic Party Committeeman and ardent, violent segregationist Bull Connor. In American politics, that is about as divisive as one can get — at least he didn't mention Hitler.

Biden bears no resemblance today to the man who ran for president, pledging over and over again to unify the country and restore a sense of calm and normalcy to politics. From the day he was sworn in to office and signed executive orders putting thousands out of work in the energy industry, he ceased to be that guy from Scranton that people thought he was.

He has not been that guy since he invited, through ill-considered policy changes, untold numbers of illegal immigrants across our borders. He has not been that guy since he miserably failed the troops and the nation's image during his catastrophic tail-between-his-legs retreat from Afghanistan.

Biden, despite having no mandate and only the barest legislative majority for his party, has turned divide-and-conquer politics into the solution for everything, including the pandemic.

You don’t warn a nation that a winter of "severe illness and death" is coming for the unvaccinated because your aim is to bring people together; those words are intended as a threat and a slight, just like his resurrection of George Wallace in last week's speech to score cheap political points.

The scope of Biden's fall from grace — from glib middle-class Pennsylvanian to venomous, lying politico who will say anything to please left-wing activists — has been staggering.

This has not gone unnoticed by voters. Last week's Quinnipiac poll showed that a plurality of voters (49%) now believe Biden is doing more to divide the country than to unite it.

Biden's approval rating among adults was at an abysmal 33% points; independents gave him 24%; Hispanics a bit more at 28%. His approval rating within his own party has fallen 12 points since November.

The media tried to write off his fall as temporary last August, when a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed the public disapproving of his incompetent performance in Afghanistan by a 2-1 ratio. At the time, this event marked the first time in his presidency his approval rating was net negative.

But in the time since, Biden has only kept losing support.

This moment and the associated loss of credibility that Biden is suffering will have lingering effects in the American psyche. They might not remember all of the words, but they will remember Biden's vicious, nasty, bad-faith accusations, his flagrant falsehoods, and his petulant tone.

As with Afghanistan, the media and the people who surround Biden will dismiss the public reaction, and Biden will be worse off for it.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/the-moment-joe-biden-finally-lost-his-credibility

Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel -- along with 14,000 Americans

Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel -- along with 14,000 Americans

ED MORRISSEY 

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

We found out about the 14,000 abandoned Americans almost two months ago, of whom the State Department only shows 900 exfiltrated thus far. We also knew that the US had abandoned tens of thousands of Afghan allies in Joe Biden’s haste to retreat from Afghanistan in August, but we didn’t have an exact count. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that State now estimates that number to be 62,000 (via Andrew Malcolm and John Ondrasik):

More than 60,000 Afghan interpreters and others who have applied for visas to seek shelter in the U.S. after working alongside American forces still remain in Afghanistan, a State Department official said Thursday.

About 33,000 Afghans, including principal applicants and their families, have already cleared the more-onerous vetting requirements and could be eligible for immediate evacuation. This is the first time that the State Department has provided a number on those left behind since the Afghanistan government collapsed this summer.

A total of 62,000 Afghans are believed to have been left behind, the official said.

This figure does not include family members of those interpreters and other workers who supported US efforts in Afghanistan. The true number of people at risk of reprisals from the now-ruling Taliban (or others) may well go into six figures. And that also doesn’t include the 13,000 Americans — citizens and legal permanent residents — that remain stuck behind Taliban lines months after Biden’s bug-out.

But wait, readers may interject, we pulled out tens of thousands of Afghans during the pull-out! True enough, but those were mainly people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The US under Biden’s leadership didn’t have a plan for getting Americans out, let alone Afghan allies. Biden only left enough time for a mad rush across Taliban-held Kabul to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, which Biden had to re-secure after first pulling all troops out of Kabul. Both the Biden and Donald Trump administrations had deprioritized the processing of exit visas too, meaning that many of these would have been left behind even if a more orderly process had been in place in the final days anyway. In the event, however, the rapid collapse of the American position — especially after abandoning Bagram a few weeks earlier — meant that only the intrepid got out, whether they qualified for the flight or not.

With at least 76,000 people abandoned by Biden, what are the plans to get them out? At the moment, it’s limited to a couple of commercial flights a week … maybe:

The U.S. is co-organizing a couple of flights a week, but scheduling depends on conditions at Kabul airport—which is only partly operational—and the weather. It could take until well into 2022 to complete the evacuation of those who already qualify for flights. If the other 29,000 visa applicants pass vetting, they too would become eligible for evacuation along with their immediate family members.

“Well into 2022,” eh? If each flight carries 300 people, that would be 600 a week, assuming that the weather and security at HKIA held up reliably at all times. At that rate, it would take 126 weeks to complete the exfiltration/evacuation, which would put us well into 2024, not 2022. Even if this represented 1200 a week reliably getting out, we’re still looking at January 2023. And that doesn’t count the family members of the visa holders, numbers not included in State’s estimates.

This is an utter disgrace, and it all goes back to Biden and his leadership team. And apart from occasional updates as State sees fit to give, it’s also an utter disgrace by our national media, which has chosen to ignore these abandoned Americans and allies rather than hold Biden accountable for his cowardly actions. Disgrace barely touches on it, in fact.

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2021/12/17/disgrace-biden-abandoned-over-60000-afghan-interpreters-support-personnel-along-with-14000-americans-n436105

U.S. FALTERS UNDER BIDEN. CHINA AND RUSSIA NOTICE.

U.S. FALTERS UNDER BIDEN. CHINA AND RUSSIA NOTICE.

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AFGHANISTAN, AFRICA, BIDEN FOREIGN POLICY, CHINA, RUSSIA

Since Joe Biden took office, it’s been one bad thing after another on the domestic front. A surge in coronavirus cases and deaths (even with the vaccine), a supply chain crisis, runaway inflation, rising violent crime, etc.

There have also been a series of setbacks internationally, and these are directly attributable to Biden. The debacle in Afghanistan was the worst and most important one. It pretty much settled the question, if there was one, of whether Biden is competent to be president and of whether, during his presidency, America has any credibility internationally.

There was also Biden’s mishandling of Australia-US-UK defense pact which caused a deterioration in U.S relations with France, an important ally. And let’s remember that Biden decided not to stand in the way of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will aid Vladimir Putin’s European power plays.

Here’s one more — the situation in Yemen. In the early days of his presidency, Biden decided to remove Yemen’s Houthi rebels from the list of foreign terrorist organizations. He also withdrew weapons support for the coalition aiding Yemen’s government.

Biden hoped to appease Iran and show goodwill towards the Houthis. Perhaps he also wanted to poke Saudi Arabia, leader of the coalition backing Yemen’s government, in the eye for the sin of being cozy with the Trump administration (the friend of my enemy is my enemy).

That’s just speculation on my part. But we need not speculate about how the Houthis have responded to Biden’s Jimmy Carteresque concessions.

The Wall Street Journal points out that Houthi forces have made substantial territorial gains and, emboldened by them, have intensified their offensive in Marib province, the last northern stronghold of the internationally recognized government.

Marib is an oil-rich region. Its capture would be a huge victory for the Houthis.

Houthi forces have also attacked Saudi Arabia itself. They target the kingdom’s airports and oil production facilities.

Then, last week, the Houthis stormed the U.S. embassy compound. We had long ago removed our personnel to Saudi Arabia, but the Houthis took U.S.-employed security personnel hostage.

State Department spokesman Ned (“look on bright side”) Price says “the majority of those who have been detained are no longer in custody.” Yeah, and the majority of Americans in Afghanistan seem to have gotten out. But what about the others?

Under Joe Biden, the U.S. is on its way to becoming “a pitiful, helpless giant,” to borrow Richard Nixon’s description.

Our enemies have noticed. China has become increasingly menacing towards Taiwan. Russia has become increasingly menacing towards Ukraine (remember when Democrats pretended to care about that county?). Indeed, Douglas Murray, in a scathing article about Biden’s failure to lead the West, notes that the U.S. government has warned the EU that it thinks Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. Certainly, Russia is amassing the troops needed to carry out an invasion.

These things didn’t happen when Donald Trump was president. Why? Because under Trump, America didn’t behave like a pitiful helpless giant.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/u-s-falters-under-biden-china-and-russia-notice.php

Biden Abandoned U.S. Military Families in Afghanistan

Biden Abandoned U.S. Military Families in Afghanistan

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

AP Photo/Gulabuddin Amiri

Originally, the Biden administration claimed there were 100-200 American citizens left behind in Afghanistan. We were assured that they were working on getting them all out, but as the weeks passed, the number of American citizens the Biden administration acknowledges is trapped in the Taliban-controlled country has gone up, not down.

And now the Pentagon is admitting that immediate family members of U.S. service members are among them. According to a report from NBC News, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl issued a memo asking “any U.S. military personnel and DOD civilians with immediate family members who need help leaving Afghanistan to email his office.”

For our VIPs: Don’t Trust the Biden Admin to Be Honest About the Number of Americans Still in Afghanistan

The memo, which was obtained by NBC News, “instructs service members and Defense Department civilians to email a specific address with the subject ‘immediate family member.'”

“There are still several dozen immediate family members of U.S. service members in Afghanistan,” NBC News reports. “Those include children, sisters and brothers, and parents. There are well over 100 extended family members still in Afghanistan.” However, defense officials say it’s not clear how many of them want to leave the country.

That any American was left behind is tragic, but the Biden administration somehow manages to keep making it worse. First by lying about it, and now by admitting that even the family members of U.S. troops were abandoned.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/11/09/biden-abandoned-u-s-military-families-in-afghanistan-n1531310