Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for the presidency was based on the dubious notion that he would bring competence, trust, and calm back to the government following the presidency of the incendiary Donald Trump.
Where Trump was a wrecking ball, Biden would be a builder. Where Trump was an arsonist, Biden would play the firefighter. Where Trump was a divider, Biden would be an uniter.
So how’s Joe doing so far, America?
The nation has lurched from crisis to crisis with little evidence of competence except perhaps Biden’s uncanny ability to screw things up. Before the ink was dry on the hundreds of executive orders he signed, the nation was plunged into a crisis on our southern border. Biden’s “competent” response? He first ignored it, then he tried to hide it from the media, then he tried to dismiss the massive increase in illegals as a normal, seasonal surge until finally being forced to admit he had a problem. He has yet to admit the crisis is of his own making.
And in case you missed it, the pandemic is still with us. We haven’t “turned the corner” on anything as hospitals are once again seeing a scarcity of ICU beds and unvaccinated people refuse to take the advice of someone who said that any vaccine created by Donald Trump’s administration must be suspect.
Now, it’s Afghanistan’s turn to receive the “competent” treatment of the Biden administration. As usual, Biden is trying to blame others for his own mistakes.
Biden conceded that his administration was caught off guard by the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan and the ensuing chaos, and he declared that “the buck stops with me,” yet he used his remarks to cast blame in multiple directions for the bungled U.S. withdrawal.
He claimed that he had to abide by agreements made by Trump. He said Afghan President Ashraf Ghani failed to live up to several commitments he made in July. He blamed Afghan forces for not fighting harder against the Taliban, recounting how much money and training the United States provided over the years.
“We gave them every chance to determine their future,” he said. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”
Joe Biden is a sniveling liar. He almost certainly knew the quality of national leadership in Afghanistan before he took office. The political battles at which Ghani eventually prevailed showed how fractured and disunited the anti-Taliban leadership was.
He knew the perilous state of the Afghan national army. Anyone who was able to read a newspaper knows that even the so-called “elite” units of Afghan commandos were heavily dependent on U.S. airpower and mastery of artillery to hold their own, much less take back territory. He also has known for months that army units were easily bought off by the Taliban.
He also should have known that an army isn’t going to fight unless it’s led well. And the Afghan army had few leaders capable of taking men into battle.
Abandoned at home by an incompetent, cowardly, and corrupt government and abandoned abroad by allies more terrified of the “optics” of losing than in a Taliban takeover, you have to feel pity for the Afghan grunt. In the end, he played it smart and ran away.
This is not about “who lost Afghanistan.” All of us who supported the war for years bear some responsibility for the ultimate debacle, including Democrats like Biden and his old boss Barack Obama, who gave eight years of support for the U.S. occupation. This is about an embarrassingly incompetent withdrawal made worse by a president who refuses to take responsibility for the debacle that began when he announced a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops to be completed on September 11, 2021, and ended in chaos and blood at the Kabul airport.
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