On the weekend of August 14-15 the situation in Afghanistan and particularly Kabul was dire. The Taliban had taken over most of the country and more importantly captured the Presidential Palace and the American Embassy.
The Afghan National Army had cut and run, leaving the Taliban to take over the former American stronghold of Bagram Air Force Base.
People were frantically trying to get to Hamid Karzai International Airport, which is wholly unsuited for the evacuation of large numbers of people and is almost indefensible.
The President and other officials told us that everything was in control, but clearly it wasn’t.
In the almost two weeks we’ve found out the following.
Billions of dollars of high tech US military equipment has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Reports are much of it is flowing to Pakistan where it will be safe from US bombs and missiles. From there it will be sold or given to nations that are clearly not our friends and are in fact likely to be enemies in the near future. Those nations will be able to reverse engineer all of that technology and then build their own.
Good work General Milley. Well, he’s not alone in this stupidity.
Then, we found out that staff at the American Embassy gave the Taliban a list of American citizens and Afghani allies who they would like to be allowed to access the airport for evacuation. Yes, you read that right, someone from the US State Department handed a “hit list” to our sworn enemies.
American military have been expressly ordered NOT to go outside the airport to help or rescue Americans and Afghanis trying to get to the airport. On the contrary, British, French, and Canadian military personnel went out into the streets of Kabul to rescue their people and even rescued a few Americans along the way.
The Secretary of State and official spokesmen have all tried to hide the fact that they don’t know where many of the American staff of the embassy or Afghani allies are. Nor do they know if and how they will be able to find and extract them. Despite this they insist that those people are not “stranded.” In fact, they are trying to sell the story that people were told to evacuate weeks ago and decided not to.
If any of those people make it out alive, it will be interesting to hear what they say.
To make things worse, now everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.
I apologize to my fellow Three Stooges fans for using this picture.
No one is willing to accept responsibility for closing Bagrarm AFB in the middle of the night. No one is willing to accept responsibility for cutting off technical support to the Afghan military, including aircraft maintenance by civilian contractors.
No one is willing to accept responsibility for removing US Military personnel BEFORE evacuating vulnerable civilians.
No one is willing to accept responsibility for allowing high tech military equipment to fall into the hands of our sworn enemies.
The President claims that no one could anticipate the astoundingly fast collapse of the Afghan military and civilian leadership.
Except he was warned back in July that exactly what happened was likely to happen. Instead of planning for the worst case scenario, they la de dahed their way into the worst US defeat since, uh, I don’t know when. People have compared this to the fall of Saigon, but I don’t think that’s accurate.
The closest intelligence failure I can think of was not anticipating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although this wasn’t so much a failure of intelligence as it was a failure to appreciate the intelligence and plan for it in advance.
All of that was bad enough. A complete fail on every level by the President of the United States and the stooges he appointed.
Then came yesterday. Terrorists attacked the points of access to the airport and killed numerous people, both military and civilian. 12 US Marines and one US Navy Corpsman providing medical support were killed and 18 were wounded. An untold number, but probably close to 200 civilians were killed a well.
That’s more US military members killed in one day than in the past several years combined.
After hours of hiding in his basement and eating his favorite ice cream, the Prevaricator in Chief went on TV and incoherently read a prepared statement heavily plagiarized from Bill Clinton.
He promised that the US military would hunt them perpetrators of the attack down and bring them to justice. Of course he has no idea how that will be accomplished, but it sounded like he was in charge.
Sure it did.
He then mentioned that he had a list of which reporters to call in what order. Even though he didn’t say that, it was because he had prepared answers for scripted questions. Even at that, he went off script and off the rails.
Of course White House Press Secretary Raggedy Ann Psaki said that “This is not a day for politics,” as if there is a day without politics being first for this White House.
I don’t know how it can get worse, but I’m afraid it will.
Nor will the United States be immune from this. I fully expect some terrorist attack or attacks around the upcoming 20th anniversary of the 9/11/2001 terror attacks.
I hope that the featured image for this post makes you as angry as it makes me. The President should fire his Cabinet Secretaries and others responsible for this disgrace and then resign.
He won’t of course, because he has a small brain and a large ego and no one around him will tell him he must do the honorable thing. Well, it’s not like anyone around him knows about that either.