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* Gwythian Prins: Biden's Appalling Mistake is a Watershed for the West
* Con Coughlin: Biden's Afghanistan Disaster Has Left the West Defenseless against Islamist Terrorists


** Biden's Appalling Mistake is a Watershed for the West ([link removed])
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by Gwythian Prins • August 19, 2021 at 5:00 am
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2Fwww.gatestoneinstitute.org%2F17657%2Fbiden-appalling-mistake&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=Biden%27s+Appalling+Mistake+is+a+Watershed+for+the+West [link removed]
* The main mission was and should have remained one of self-defence. Once this was forgotten, muddle and a sapping of will set in. Moral ambivalence about our values and ourselves, which our enemies do not have about themselves, expressing itself as an embarrassment about using force in our self-defense, meant that softer edges were attached.
* We needed strategic patience of the sort that has kept US forces on the Korean peninsula, or British forces in Cyprus, for a lifetime of decades. Our leaders, and mainly one, lacked the vision to have that patience and we shall pay a heavy price.
* This withdrawal is therefore a set-back for the Free World as we square off to defend our way of life against Xi Jinping's communist command group which, like the Taliban, does not understand win-win. "We win, you lose" is the next game.
* [O]ur political class ... was utterly naïve at "12/11" when the PRC was let into the WTO, expecting it to become like us. This was like letting the fox into the hen-house in the expectation that it would behave like a hen.
* What is needed now is a swift cold shower of geo-strategic reality in our political classes. The time for self-harming distractions with "wokus pocus," obsessing about sexual dysmorphia, Marxist "critical race theory" and "climate catastrophism" ... -- all of which the Chinese Communist Party is glad to encourage -- must end.

We needed strategic patience of the sort that has kept US forces on the Korean peninsula, or British forces in Cyprus, for a lifetime of decades. Our leaders, and mainly one, lacked the vision to have that patience and we shall pay a heavy price. Pictured: US and South Korean soldiers stand guard in the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea on September 16, 2020. (Photo by Park Tae-hyun/AFP via Getty Images)

Of course we, the Western Alliance, were going to withdraw from Afghanistan sometime. But not now and not like this. The twenty-year expedition in Afghanistan has been a litany of strategic and tactical errors starting with the failure to follow through on the success of Task Force Dagger to crush the Taliban when we most easily could have done so. The operationally brilliant first intervention by the Green Beret Special Forces "Horse Soldiers" of Alpha 595 (known to cinema-goers from the film "Twelve Strong" and now immortalised in an equestrian statue at 9/11 ground zero in New York), partnered with the Northern Alliance at the end of 2001, vectoring in modern Air Force fire-power from horse-back.

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** Biden's Afghanistan Disaster Has Left the West Defenseless against Islamist Terrorists ([link removed])
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by Con Coughlin • August 19, 2021 at 4:00 am
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an+Disaster+Has+Left+the+West+Defenseless+against+Islamist+Terrorists [link removed] [link removed]
* The fear now is that, as Western intelligence agencies are no longer able to monitor the activities of Islamist extremists both in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Iran, the West will find itself increasingly vulnerable to high profile terror attacks as a direct consequence of Mr Biden's disastrous withdrawal plan.
* An important first step for the security of the United States would be immediately to shut its southern border.
* The alarming implications, in terms of Western security, of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan are clearly an issue the Biden administration failed to take into consideration when deciding to abandon Afghanistan to its fate. It is an oversight that adds to the scale of the disaster that Mr Biden has just inflicted on the security of the Western alliance.

The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration's catastrophic decision to end America's military involvement in Afghanistan. Pictured: A Taliban patrol on a street in Kabul on August 17, 2021. (Photo by Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)

The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration's catastrophic decision to end America's military involvement in Afghanistan.

One of the most notable achievements of the US-led coalition's presence in Afghanistan during the past two decades has been its relentless campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Islamist terror groups such as Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation.

In the years immediately following the September 11th attacks in 2001, American and other intelligence agencies estimated that around 80 percent of Islamist-inspired terror plots against the West originated from Afghanistan or the lawless tribal territories on the Pakistani border.

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