When you’re a Leftist politician and you’ve lost the Washington Post, what’s left? The Post editorial board chided Old Joe Biden and his henchmen on Tuesday for blaming their catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan on their all-purpose whipping boy, Donald Trump. “Instead of admitting errors,” the Post wrote about the White House assessment of the withdrawal, “the 12-page document mostly repeats familiar talking points and shifts the blame to Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump.” This wasn’t Fox News or the Daily Caller. This was the Washington Post. And whatever implications the Post’s editorial may have for Old Joe’s 2024 chances and the overall survival of this misbegotten regime, one thing is certain: they’re right.
Emblematic of the mishandling of the entire withdrawal from Afghanistan was the fact that the Islamic State jihadist who murdered 13 American service members and numerous Afghans in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in August 2021 had just been released from prison at Bagram Air Base, the center of American operations in Afghanistan until the U.S. precipitously and irresponsibly abandoned it in July of the same year. That release took place on Biden’s watch, at the orders of his military, which also ordered Marine snipers not to take out the same jihadist when they had him in their sights.
Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri had been held in the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base, along with around 5,000 other prisoners, including several hundred members of ISIS, as well as Taliban and al-Qaeda jihadis. In July 2021, according to the Associated Press, “the U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left.” Did Trump tell Biden’s handlers to do that?
This was a catastrophe that was brought on by a lack of planning and foresight. On August 30, 2021, then-Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) tweeted: “As the Afghan government fell, the Taliban gave US officials the option to take control of Kabul. They PASSED and instead opted to willingly surrender the city to the Taliban and control only the airport till 8/31! HOW MANY MORE COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED?!?”
We’ll never know. Yet before the disaster, the Biden regime assured us that it had matters well in hand. In June 2021, CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie gave an interview to Military Times in which he declared confidently: “We have workable plans to evacuate any scale of people that we would be directed to do. That’s one of the things that we have done. I’ve talked to the secretary about it.” Given the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, either no such plans ever really existed, or they were never implemented.
The military had other matters on its mind. In June 2021, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) questioned Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Congressional hearing about an ongoing effort to saddle U.S. military personnel with mandatory readings and briefings on the topic of Critical Race Theory. Milley bristled at the question and answered, “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
The general situated his interest as part of an investigation of the causes of the alleged January 6 alleged “insurrection,” taking for granted the highly tendentious assumption that the Capitol incident and support for Trump in general, was rooted in “white supremacism”: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”
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Milley and the rest of the woke military brass could have spent less time studying Critical Race Theory and imposing it on the troops as a way of weeding out Trump supporters from the ranks and more time doing their actual jobs. Had they done so, they might have realized how foolish it was to steal away from Bagram in the dead of night. They could even have used the base as a rallying point for Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave the country, getting them out in a safe and orderly manner instead of the Saigon-on-steroids nightmare that a horrified world witnessed at Kabul airport in August.
Milley clearly learned nothing from the Afghanistan debacle. As Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Army officers were forced to sit through an official and mandatory presentation entitled “Policy on the Military Service of Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, the presentation gives “training on gender pronouns and coaching officers on when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery.”
That’s what led to the Afghan catastrophe, not Donald Trump. And the Washington Post has now made it clear: Old Joe will not escape the verdict of history.
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