Tuesday, August 17, 2021
To: Friends & Supporters
From: Gary Bauer
Biden's Afghan Disaster
After horrifying images of Afghans and Americans running for their lives in Kabul stunned the world, President Biden decided to interrupt his vacation and address the nation. His speech was too little too late, and it was filled with lies.
If you think I'm being too harsh, CNN's Jake Tapper said Biden's speech was "full of finger pointing and blame." Former Obama CIA Director Leon Panetta compared Biden's Afghan debacle to the Bay of Pigs disaster, and said that Biden needs to "take responsibility."
While Biden said the buck stops with him, he blamed everybody but himself. He blamed President Trump, who managed the Afghan conflict without a glitch for four years. (Trump knew exactly how to deal with Islamic supremacists.)
Biden blamed President Obama, saying he opposed Obama's troop surge in 2009. Biden even blamed Afghan refugees for not leaving sooner. Biden was tough on everyone except the barbaric Taliban, to whom he just surrendered the entire country.
Biden lied when he said he had no other choice except for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops. No one was asking for that. After 20 years, Americans overwhelmingly want to get out of Afghanistan. But no one wants to leave like this.
The wise course would have been to provide the air cover necessary for an orderly withdrawal. But Biden had already removed our air power. Even worse, he grounded what little air power the Afghan government had.
Here's the really bad news: This isn't just a temporary disaster. Because of Biden's stupidity, we left behind much of our military equipment. The Taliban will now be one of the best supplied military forces in the region.
They have American Humvees, personnel carriers and our guns. All the things you paid for Biden just left to our enemies. If Joe Biden was working for the Taliban, he couldn't have done more to help them and hurt America.
I worked for Ronald Reagan who believed in "peace through strength." Another wise man once said, "America risks being seen as a harmless enemy and a treacherous friend." That is the ongoing disaster Joe Biden has created. (See next item.)
Communist China Celebrates
The official Chinese communist newspaper celebrated America's "complete humiliation." But what should concern everyone is that Beijing aimed a specific message to the people of Taiwan, warning, "If [America] can make such a huge miscalculation and suffer such a catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, then who is going to trust its judgement in East Asia, or the South China Sea?"
Today, communist China launched massive assault drills off the coast of Taiwan, putting an exclamation point on their previous warning.
It's likely there's something else going on behind the scenes. Communist Chinese officials may be telling Taiwanese leaders in private communications, "Our patience is running out. You see how weak and unreliable the Americans are. You see how strong we are. You've got a very short window of time to make a deal with us."
If such a deal happens, I won't be surprised if Biden runs to a microphone and blames the Taiwanese.
Lessons Still Not Learned
For two decades now, many conservatives have warned that America's foreign policy elites at the State Department and the Pentagon fundamentally do not understand the religious motivations of our enemy.
The leaders of both institutions have graduated from our elite universities, all dominated by left-wing secularism. They cannot understand the concept that millions of people are willing to die for Allah, who they believe they has given them a religious obligation to kill infidels.
Even after 9/11, we were told this was "a war on terror," instead of a war on radical Islam, Islamic supremacy or Islamic extremism, however you want to phrase it. And while we can acknowledge that this in fact a war against Islamic supremacy, we can also acknowledge that there are millions of Muslims who want freedom, and who can be allies in the war against the Islamist barbarians.
But as I have noted, terrorism is an illegal method of warfare. It is not an enemy. It is a tactic of our Islamist enemy. It would be like declaring war on kamikazes instead of declaring war on Japan, or declaring war on blitzkriegs instead of declaring war on Nazi Germany.
If you can't identify your enemy, you can't defeat your enemy.
After 9/11, many Americans answered the call of our country and volunteered to serve in the military. What we largely ignored is that hundreds of thousands of Muslims all over the world, including here in the United States, also rushed to the banner of the jihadists.
They saw in 9/11 that the day of the West's demise was approaching. In the years that followed, we did much to disabuse them of that belief. We drove Al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan. We eliminated Osama bin Laden. We crushed the ISIS caliphate.
But what Joe Biden has presided over in the last 96 hours has erased much of that progress. This is a disaster that will continue bearing bitter fruit.
Meanwhile, at this very moment, the Biden Administration is negotiating with the greatest supporter of Islamic terrorism in the entire world – the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are undermining sanctions against Iran so the ayatollah can send even more money to Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. How does that make any sense?
The Obama/Biden Connection
Speaking of bitter fruit, you may recall that Obama/Biden Administration was committed to rescuing Bowe Bergdahl – a U.S. Army traitor who defected to the Taliban. They were so committed to rescuing this one traitor that they gave up five Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo Bay prison for Bergdahl. Barack Obama and Joe Biden assured us that these five would not return to the battlefield.
Well, one of the five, Khairullah Khairkhwa, was seen in the group of Taliban fighters occupying the presidential palace in Kabul. He will be one of the primary leaders of the new Taliban regime.
Maybe Biden will appoint Bowe Bergdahl as our new ambassador to the Taliban caliphate.
Random Observations
- Western media reports suggest that tens of thousands of Americans still remain trapped in Afghanistan, with the Taliban controlling access to the Kabul airport.
- Many are rightly expressing concern about the fate of Afghanistan's women and girls. Zarifa Ghafari, one of the first female mayors of Afghanistan, said she was at home with no way of escape, just waiting for the Taliban to kill her.
- Rashida Tlaib accused the U.S. of supporting the Taliban years before it even existed.
- Ilhan Omar, who recently compared the U.S. to the Taliban, lectured us that "War and conflict never produce peace and stability. . . Violence only produces trauma . . . vengefulness and a continuing cycle of violence." Tell that to the Islamic terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and then study the history of World War II.
- Take a look at this picture – more than 600 Afghan refugees packed into a Boeing C-17 hoping to come to America. I suppose it's too much to hope that this photo and the events of recent days might wake up young Americans to the reality of the world and the decency of their own country. Millions of people around the world are not desperately trying to come to a "systemically racist" nation.
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