The Taliban is going door-to-door killing people who helped American forces in the war effort. They’re making kill lists. They’re going to brutalize women again. We all know this. They haven’t changed. They’re terrorists. We knew the parade of horribles awaited the citizens of Afghanistan as soon as the Taliban retook the country. They rolled into Kabul last weekend. They set up checkpoints all around the Hamid Karzai airport in the city. This is the only place where Afghans desperate to flee can roll the dice and hope to get out. We abandoned Bagram Air Force base a month ago. We didn’t commence evacuations sooner. This is on Joe Biden. Did we know the Taliban could take over? Yes. A reconquest this fast is up for debate for some, but a State Department memo from July said that the situation was rapidly deteriorating. It was obviously ignored by the Biden White House who now must deal with finding the evacuating 10-15,000 Americans still trapped in the country.
We’re trusting the Taliban to not kill anyone pretty much—which is shows the level of disorganization from the top down here. Biden apparently didn’t care about the chaos that could ensue. He went back on vacation after some brain-dead remarks about the situation on the ground, how he was so awesome about the exit, and how it was everyone’s fault but his own. Jen Psaki was going to take this week off. This administration thought that a massive foreign policy collapse like this could be ignored. The adults are in the room, they said. Leadership is back. Diplomacy is back. The entire basis of the Biden presidency, their selling points, have all been torched in less than five days.
Now, with chaos engulfing Kabul, the airport was a scene of chaos. Thousands of troops have been redeployed to provide security. Still, scores more are behind the Taliban’s checkpoints. We have images of babies and toddlers being hurled towards soldiers as Afghans become more desperate. CNN, for all its faults and there are many, did a good report from Clarissa Ward who noted that this whole debacle is a failure in planning and towards our allies. That’s the keyword: failure.
The Biden administration knew Afghanistan was crumbling and they didn’t accelerate evacuation plans. They had no strategy to get everyone out apparently. When were these 10-15,000 Americans going to get picked up? We were leaving on August 31. The Taliban rolled into Kabul on August 15. Could we have located all of them within two weeks’ time? There was obviously no exit plan there. We’re scrambling.
I guess you can call this a make-up segment for Ward who did a ridiculous street report noting that chants of ‘Death to America’ sounded friendly.
