As we watched the Taliban march into Kabul last weekend to take control of Afghanistan's capital city in a desperately poor and politically chaotic and corrupt country where we had been fighting the Taliban for 20 years, I thought back to a prescient statement made by ex-President Obama's Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, in 2014.
"Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past 40 years," Gates, a highly respected career diplomat, wrote in his 2014 memoir, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War." Asked five years later whether he still held the same opinion, Gates replied, "I think I stand by that statement." Adding insult to injury, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser, Ben Rhodes, once called then-Vice President Biden "an unguided missile" on foreign policy.
So now, it's President Biden's debacle as the U.S. delivers Afghanistan to the brutal, cruel Taliban, who will continue to behead their enemies and put women and girls in burkas and make sure they can't go to school, thereby forcing them to live their miserable lives between the bedroom and the kitchen. Meanwhile, nearly 7,000 Americans, including military personnel and civilians, have lost their lives in Afghanistan and more than 1 trillion taxpayer dollars have been wasted trying to prevent a Taliban takeover.
On Monday, a defiant Biden told a national TV audience that he accepts responsibility for the Afghan debacle. "I stand squarely behind my decision," the president said. "The buck stops with me." That's admirable as far as it goes because most Americans support a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, but Biden's words don't support his precipitous withdrawal, making Kabul look a lot like Saigon in 1975. "This is Saigon on steroids," said one irreverent observer as he watched the chaotic scene at Hamid Karzai Airport, where desperate Afghans clung to the landing gear of taxiing aircraft.
In short, the terrorists won and America lost on President Biden's watch. The Wall Street Journal called it "Biden's Afghanistan Surrender," because that's what it was. "The world has seen an American president portraying surrender as an act of political courage, and retreat as strategic wisdom." How sad.
Last weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to explain what went wrong. Unsurprisingly, he blamed everyone else, including former President Donald Trump, for the debacle. Blinken blamed Trump and cowardly Afghan soldiers who threw down their weapons, tore off their uniforms, and fled instead of defending their country after we had spent tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars training them to fight the Taliban.
Without doubt, that was a major reason for the Taliban victory, but another obvious reason is our president's failed strategy. "Mr. Biden could have maintained the modest presence his military and foreign policy advisers suggested," the Wall Street Journal noted. "Instead, he ordered a rapid and total withdrawal in time for the symbolic target date of 9/11. … The jihadists the U.S. toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden will now fly their flag over the U.S. Embassy building on the 20th anniversary of 9/11," representing a humiliating defeat for America and a tremendous military and propaganda victory for the terrorists who attacked us. Joe Biden was wrong again.
"Biden owns this Afghanistan debacle," the Washington Examiner opined. The president "is presiding over a disorderly withdrawal far worse than Vietnam, with beheadings already underway … as Biden is trying to pass the blame to anyone but himself." I think the president and his fellow Democrats will pay a high price at the polls for this preventable foreign policy fiasco in next year's midterm elections.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal's senior political columnist.
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