President Biden will address the nation today, supposedly on the chaotic collapse of a US-supported government in Afghanistan. As has been his wont, he will lie.
He will follow the Anthony Blinken script on our scramble to withdraw from that tortured country, denying that it is “like the fall of Saigon.” Which I suppose is half-truth: Saigon took two years to fall to North Vietnam following Richard Nixon’s withdrawal of US military forces. The Taliban took about three weeks to sweep to victory in Afghanistan.
He will also argue that our withdrawal is “orderly” which is laughable to anyone who has the ability to search the Internet for “Kharzai international airport chaos.” Note that while US diplomats have been moved to the relative safety of the airport pending evacuation, they are still demanding extensive paperwork – in triplicate, one supposes – to grant emergency visas to those Afghans who, for twenty years risked their lives to aid our efforts as translators and go-betweens. Bureaucracy is slow, after all… Most of these allies will be abandoned to a grisly death at the hands of the Taliban.
Finally, Joe Biden will blame Donald Trump for his failure to execute a decent withdrawal. He will claim that he was “burdened” by his predecessor’s attempts to negotiate a deal with the Taliban, which is a quarter-truth at best. Twenty years and billions of dollars on, it was time to leave Afghanistan. But Trump’s agreement with the Taliban was situational and included a no-takeover-by-force clause. So if anyone can imagine a Trump Administration presiding over a catastrophe of this magnitude, they need professional help to find their way back to reality.
What is happening today in Afghanistan is a complete and unmitigated disaster for US foreign and security policy. It exposes profound weaknesses in our intelligence services, which were either unable to see this fiasco coming, or lacked the ability to convince our political leadership to pay attention to the implications of the looming collapse. Because implications there are, and they are not good. Our rout from Kabul will undermine what is left of our national prestige and create doubt about our abilities and will in the minds of our allies and associates. It will give encouragement to our enemies, because vacillation, weakness and lack of planning is an invitation to adventurism.
The collapse of Kabul has made the world a more dangerous place. And it’s Joe Biden’s fault.
