We’re gone. The Taliban is back. They assembled an all-male, exclusionary government. Terrorists now occupy top positions. All of this is unsurprising except to the Biden State Department who thought the Taliban would form an inclusive government. You cannot say or write that without spitting out your coffee in laughter. The naiveté is appalling. We left on August 31 because President Dementia is weak and didn’t want to anger the terrorists. So, we trusted the Taliban to not attack our citizens and allow safe passage. We all saw the airport in Kabul. It was not easily accessible. The Taliban did beat our citizens. Passports were seized, and al-Qaeda and ISIS-K were on the hunt. There was no way we were going to get our people out, so Biden made an empty promise to stay until all Americans were out. He decided to leave at least 200 of our citizens behind. Man, he left military dogs behind in the hangers as well. It was a humiliating exit.
And for weeks, the Biden administration had intelligence reports and State Department memos that warned of the rapidly deteriorating conditions on the ground. Throughout the summer, some in government knew Afghanistan was going to fall—quickly. Biden just wanted out; he doesn’t care. And here’s the other mandate he scuttled that could have offered him key intelligence on the Afghanistan situation to Congress (via Free Beacon):
President Joe Biden waived a mandate in June that would have forced the Pentagon to provide a detailed report to Congress about the risks of leaving Afghanistan.
Under the federal statute, the administration was barred from reducing troops in Afghanistan below 2,000 without first briefing Congress about the expected impact on U.S. counterterrorism operations and the risk to American personnel. Biden waived the mandate in June, arguing that providing this information to Congress could undermine "the national security interests of the United States."
The Biden administration spent months assuring Congress that the U.S.-trained Afghan forces would be able to forestall a Taliban takeover when American troops left the country on a pre-determined deadline. That assessment was proven wrong days after the withdrawal, when the Taliban overran the Afghan National Army and seized control of Kabul, forcing a chaotic evacuation of U.S. personnel and allies.
National security experts and Republican lawmakers told the Washington Free Beacon that the waiver blocked Congress and the public from reviewing the administration's internal national security assessments prior to the withdrawal—details that could have been used to prevent or minimize the catastrophe currently unfolding in the war-torn country.
"If we had answers to these questions we might not be in the horrible debacle we're in now," said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who in April wrote about the statute and the likelihood that the administration would try to dodge it.
"I think the fact that they used the national security waiver to refuse to answer these questions in the light of day tells me their answers could not have stood up to scrutiny," Bowman said.
And people wonder why Democrats are trusted less on issues of national security than Republicans. It’s not that hard. These people are simply bad at it. Joe Biden is especially bad at it—being wrong on every major foreign policy decision for the past 40 years. It’s why he’s a bad commander-in-chief. Now, with his brain eaten by worms, we have no one in charge. Not even the reagent from Howard West could revive anything with Biden. We could have had another extensive report on troop withdrawals and their consequences in Afghanistan. Now, some would argue for permanent occupation. I disagree. The thing with Joe is that yes, Americans wanted out of Afghanistan but leave in a dignified and non-shambolic way. There was a path. It might have taken longer than August 31, but we could have evacuated more of our people out.
Nope. Biden wants to move onto other things like the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill that now has no shot of passing since Sens. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) are against it. That means Joe can devote more time to getting Americans he stranded in Afghanistan out, right?
H/T RedState
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