On Thursday, 11 Marines, an Army soldier, and a Navy corpsman were killed by a suicide bomber near the Hamid Karzai International Airport. More than a dozen service members were injured and over 100 Afghan civilians were killed.
That evening, our commander-in-chief gave another one of his meandering speeches.
Old and frail, defeated and deflated, Biden wandered through a speech that praised our troops, mourned his dead son, repeated several of the lies he’s told repeatedly, and added a few new ones to try to justify the chaos he has created in Afghanistan.
He repeated that he had to choose between withdrawal and escalating the war. This is comprehensively false. This column and others have illuminated far better alternatives. He said that the terrorism that has metastasized around the world is a greater threat than the one we face in Afghanistan, which is the only place where Americans are under attack right now. More airport attacks are expected before the evacuation ends tomorrow.
Biden added a few new lies to tie things together. He said that it was in the Taliban’s interest to see us get out by tomorrow, so there was no error in relying on them to provide security near the airport in Kabul. If that were true, the ISIS-K suicide bomber could not have passed through Taliban checkpoints.
Biden keeps saying that ISIS-K, the perpetrators of the Thursday suicide bomb attack, are the Taliban’s “archenemy.” Why is it that, after we snuck out of Bagram Air Base in the dark of night, the Taliban freed all the prisoners we’d held there, including dozens (hundreds?) of ISIS members? Maybe it’s because ISIS would rather kill Americans than their supposed Taliban “archenemies.”
On Thursday, Biden went on to make a few statements that were both startling and depressing.
Biden said, “And we will continue, after our troops have withdrawn, to find means by which we defined any American who wishes to get out of Afghanistan. We will find them and we will get them out.”
Think about that for a minute. By saying what he did, Biden admitted that he knows and accepts the fact that some number of U.S. civilians will not be evacuated. They will be left for the Taliban, al-Qaida, ISIS-K, and whatever other terrorists happen to be around to be murdered, held hostage, or enslaved and displayed for the world to see in a Taliban media triumph.
The State Department says there are still about 350 Americans in Afghanistan who want to leave. The commander-in-chief is intentionally abandoning those Americans. How dare he?
And it’s another lie because it can’t be done. How can you locate and extract any Americans when you don’t have on-the-ground intelligence operatives, special operations teams performing extractions, and air power orbiting above to make sure that anyone who tries to interfere gets vaporized instantly? You can’t. Biden refuses to leave any of those assets in Afghanistan.
Biden said the same thing about our Afghan allies. We won’t try to get them out because he won’t leave in-country the assets we need to do so. They’ll be hunted down and murdered.
On Wednesday night, just before the Thursday attack, Ross Wilson, Biden’s temporary ambassador to Afghanistan, tipped us to the Biden administration’s position on those who will be left behind. He said they had been warned repeatedly to leave and “chose not to.” He added, “That’s their business, that’s their right.”
In other words, if you’re stuck in Afghanistan, it’s your own fault. Wilson made this statement despite the fact that the State Department has been warning U.S. citizens to not go to the Kabul airport unless they’d been told to do so by the U.S. government.
Politico reported that we had been giving the Taliban lists of people, Americans and Afghans, who we wanted to get to the airport. These lists literally provided the Taliban with the identities of those they most want to hold hostage or kill. After Biden’s Thursday speech, in which he said that some short lists had been given to the Taliban, the State Department said that no such lists had been provided.
The Taliban, meanwhile, are using captured U.S. equipment and databases on peoples’ biometric data to hunt down Afghans who cooperated with U.S. and Coalition forces.
It’s worth noting that the man placed in charge of security in and around Kabul is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s deputy commander. The Haqqani network — of which he is the apparent leader — is one of the most violent terrorist networks anywhere. (There is a conflicting report that names Khalil Haqqani as the security chief. He has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head for terrorism. Not that it matters who it is. The Haqqani are fungible terrorists.)
Whoever he is, it’s the guy Team Biden trusted to screen out terrorists who wanted to attack the airport from which we were evacuating people. It’s no wonder that the Thursday suicide bomber reached one of the airport gates and succeeded in killing our troops and Afghan allies.
More incompetence was reflected in Biden’s Thursday statement that, “There has been complete unanimity from every commander on the objectives of this mission and the best way to achieve those objectives.”
That is a perfect condemnation of Biden’s generals. According to that statement, every military commander has agreed to:
If Biden’s statement was true, every military officer and Pentagon civilian who participated in the discussions with Biden — or who prepared their superiors for those discussions — should be fired for incompetence.
On Saturday, the Pentagon announced that it was beginning to withdraw our troops from the airport. Evacuation flights are winding down. At some point, the Taliban will have effective control of the airport while the last of our troops and aircraft are trying to flee. If they succeed in cratering the airport’s single runway, our people could face the same sort of devastation that Travis, Bowie, and Crockett faced at the Alamo.
Biden lied, Americans died. More may die because of other terrorist attacks before the last aircraft flies out of Kabul. Many will be left behind. And Biden is just fine with that.
It is a bitter experience to have to sit by and watch a man govern our nation who has no regard for the fate of his fellow Americans and who is so incompetent in every aspect of his job.
