He CANNOT blame anyone but himself no0 matter how he might try….
“I just don’t know if he’s clueless at what’s really going to happen to these people or there’s some distinction in his mind that he just doesn’t care,” Waltz said. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
Biden monitored the debacle on Sunday from Camp David in Maryland, where he held a video conference with national security advisers. White House officials briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Sunday. Biden has not spoken about Afghanistan in public since Tuesday.
The White House line was firm. There is no military solution in Afghanistan and Biden will not allow more Americans to die in that cause, U.S. officials said. That is a view supported by public opinion polling, and it bears echoes of former president Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda….
…
Biden may not be as insulated by public opposition to the war as he thinks he is, critics said. Nor is it a given that Trump’s support for a withdrawal transfers immunity to Biden, said Nathan Sales, the State Department counterterrorism coordinator under Trump.
“The Biden administration owns this because they have taken the Trump administration conditions-based approach and replaced it with a determination to leave no matter what the circumstances are on the ground,” said Sales, now affiliated with the Atlantic Council.
Biden initially supported the invasion but changed his mind as the war settled into a stalemate with the Taliban, while efforts to establish a functioning elected government repeatedly foundered. He opposed the expansion of the war under President Barack Obama, when Biden was vice president, and entered office determined to close it down….
…
Throughout his political career, Biden has spoken in searingly personal terms of a strong, even sacred, obligation to cushion American soldiers and their families from the costs of America’s wars.
…
As a presidential candidate last year, Biden was asked whether the United States had a responsibility to Afghan women and girls in light of a possible Taliban takeover. “No, I don’t!” Biden said. “Do I bear responsibility? Zero responsibility.”…
…
Rarely in modern presidential history have words come back to bite an American commander in chief as swiftly as these from President Biden a little more than five weeks ago: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan.”
Then, digging the hole deeper, he added, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
On Sunday, the scramble to evacuate American civilians and embassy employees from Kabul — the very image that Mr. Biden and his aides agreed they had to avoid during recent meetings in the Oval Office — unfolded live on television, not from the U.S. Embassy roof but from the landing pad next to the building. And now that the Afghan government has collapsed with astonishing speed, the Taliban seem certain to be back in full control of the country when the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is commemorated less than a month from today — exactly as they were 20 summers ago.
Mr. Biden will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, as the president who presided over a long-brewing, humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan. After seven months in which his administration seemed to exude much-need competence — getting more than 70 percent of the country’s adults vaccinated, engineering surging job growth and making progress toward a bipartisan infrastructure bill — everything about America’s last days in Afghanistan shattered the imagery….
Ron Gunzburger
A RARE POLITICAL EDITORIAL FROM ME: The United States shamefully leaving all those behind Afghan translators (and their families) is the one thing that truly reduces American standing and reliability in the world. Everyone knew Afghanistan would collapse quickly to the Taliban. Everyone. But us breaking our word (or simply incompetent planning and not being prepared) to evacuate them is the real tragedy. We need to load as many of our Afghan translators/helpers and their families as we can onto C-17 and C-5 military cargo jets and get them out NOW. Screw the visa process — sort them out another day at bases in other countries….
Facebook…
Think of all the groups that fought along Americans, often losing their lives or health, only to find the U.S. (or her allies) either unable or unwilling to help them survive or escape, beginning with the Free Poles in 1944-45, and including the Hmong and Vietnamese, the Marsh Arabs and the Sunni Arab alliances that fought Saddam Hussein, the Kurdish militias in Syria, and now the Afghans who helped the Allies fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The French very bitterly asserted, especially after incidents like the evacuation via Dunkirk in 1940, that Perfidious Albion (England) was “willing to fight to the last Frenchman”.
American guarantees to those who help them will be worth little if they can’t or won’t be honoured.
Yes….
Indeed….
This WILL have repercussions in the future on American Foreign Policy…..
Again?
It’s NOT about leaving….
It’s about the way Biden choose to leave…..
U.K. lawmakers are furious with the U.S. over reports that U.K. senior military commanders were left in the dark on the United States’ plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, according to reports.
Senior U.K. military commanders were not included in discussions between the U.S. and the Taliban and were not given warning about when they could be forced to pull out, according to The Times.
Politico London Playbook confirmed the report, saying a U.K. government official said the U.S. did not communicate to its ally how it planned to withdraw, nor did it share details about the pace of its withdrawal.
Meanwhile, Biden reportedly ignored U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to contact him earlier this week. Johnson first requested a call with Biden on Monday morning, though a call did not take place until 10 p.m. on Tuesday evening, according to the Telegraph.
One U.K. Cabinet minister told The Times that Biden’s actions over the past week “shows that the U.S. is looking inward and is unwilling to do even a modest amount to maintain global order.”
“The U.S. remains by far and away our most important ally, but we are not the U.S.’s most important ally by some stretch,” the Cabinet minister reportedly added.
During an emergency meeting of the U.K.’s parliament on Wednesday, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said she recognizes that the decision by the U.S. to withdraw its military presence “created an impossible situation for the U.K.” and that NATO’s intention was always to withdraw.
However, she added that NATO’s intention was to withdraw in a planned and orderly fashion, a reality that has failed to come to fruition and has created “an unparalleled moment of shame” for the U.K. government.
Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell similarly noted that after 20 years of British and American involvement “this is not the outcome we had expected.”
“Our presence in Afghanistan may not have continued indefinitely, but it needed to be handled in the right way – it has not been,” he said. “President Biden must be held to account for his actions.”…
By BRITTANY BERNSTEIN
National Review Online
August 19, 2021 2:47 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-k-military-reportedly-left-out-of-discussions-of-u-s-afghanistan-withdrawal/
DSD’s link only proves even more MY point that Biden just went at this with little forethought …..
AGAIN?
I and most believe that America and NATO SHOULD have left Afghanistan…..
It was NO DAMN secret that that Afghan’s where only half assed in the concept of a centralised government as Jack has pointed out here…
But the call to book out?
That was made Joseph R. Biden the President of the United States of America
Everything THEN followed ….