It didn’t have to happen this way. The chaos. The terror. The abandonment of friends – allies. The total takeover of Afghanistan by the brutal, murderous Taliban.
This is a debacle of epic proportions. And it is history repeating itself. Because when Joe Biden was his vice president, Barack Obama did the same thing in Iraq. Against the advice of virtually all his military advisers, Obama pulled all US troops out of Iraq. This led to the birth of ISIS, countless innocent deaths, the near overrunning of the country by that death cult, and the US having to go back in and save the day.
President Biden recently promised we’d “not see people being lifted off the roof of the US Embassy in Afghanistan.” Then of course we saw people being lifted off the roof of the US Embassy in Afghanistan, and then deposited into the chaos at Bagram Air Base. People were so desperate to escape from the Taliban that some grabbed onto the undercarriage of US military planes and fell hundreds of feet to their deaths.
Biden says it’s not his fault – Trump made him do it. He was only following Trump’s policy. But of course Biden hasn’t thought twice about reversing virtually every other Trump policy of any significance: the Keystone Pipeline, the southern border policy, the Iran Deal, the Paris Climate Accords, and on and on. So this excuse is as phony as a three-dollar bill.
A screen capture from a video taken at Kabul International Airport shows people scrambling on to planes to escape Afghanistan.
Biden claims that it’s not his fault – it’s the Afghan troops who wouldn’t fight‘s fault. But in the last year the Afghan military forces fighting the Taliban have suffered over 3000 casualties. The US over the last year-and-a-half hasn’t suffered a single death in combat. Biden’s pointing the finger of blame at the Afghans, rather than at himself, is victim-shaming (a term progressives/liberals like to toss about.)
Taliban fighters posing with US weapons in a base they just captured easily.
What Biden HAS done by this dash-for-the-exits, is give up a forward base of operation against Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups who still want to kill Americans in the region, across the globe, and here in America. Now they will once again have a safe haven to plan those attacks. And they’ll have tons and tons of equipment of the most sophisticated nature which was abandoned in the chaos to use against us: planes, drones, tanks, explosives, weapons, etc.
And as for the “endless wars” argument, we still have 53,000 US troops in Japan; 34,000 in Germany; and 27,000 in South Korea. We had 2,500 in Afghanistan. We have more US troops in Spain, 3000, than we had in Afghanistan for God’s sake.
And for those brave men and women in uniform, or in many cases not in uniform, who left the United States and risked their lives in this far away place, they may be asking themselves whether it was worth the sacrifice. Well, for two decades, the last 20 years following September 11, their sacrifice prevented another major attack from occurring here on our soil for all that time. We honor all those and their families for their service, and can never thank them enough.
In conclusion, whereas Americans may differ on whether now was the time to fully withdraw from Afghanistan, few will disagree that this wasn’t how to do it.