The Biden White House has been doing everything it can think of to turn the debacle in Afghanistan into a victory, or rather, something that looks enough like a victory to allow the establishment media to run with it and try to fool the rubes. Press Secretary Jen Psaki notoriously said (with a straight face) on August 24 that the catastrophically mismanaged evacuation operation could not be termed “anything but a success.” On Saturday, the appallingly woke Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, claimed (also with a straight face) that “there was an extensive amount of planning in this.”
Milley did admit that “the collapse of the Afghan Army happened at a much faster rate and very unexpected, by pretty much everybody, and then with that is the collapse of the Afghan government. So, that was definitely a surprise.” Nevertheless, he insisted that “there was an awful lot of planning done, ROC [Rehearsal of Concept] drills, rehearsals, etc.”
They rehearsed this calamity? So Milley would have us believe. “What you saw unfold with this noncombatant evacuation operation,” he asserted, “was one of the contingency plans.” Despite the fact that Americans are still stranded in Afghanistan while Biden’s handlers actually block efforts to get them out, the woke general didn’t hesitate to boast: “And the speed at which it was executed, the flow of the aircraft, we had planes taking off every 30 to 45 minutes or so. We had — we brought in 7,000 — or 6,000 U.S. troops, and then there [were] about a thousand or more or so Afghan troops that secured HKIA [Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul].”
Not everything went swimmingly, mind you: “The first day, it was clearly chaotic, no question about it. You saw that on video, etc. But within about 24 hours, that settled down and it became a much more orderly process. The security of HKIA was challenging to say the least, and we saw the bombing. But that would have happened no matter where it was. People talk about Bagram, wherever there’s a perimeter, if there’s no outside force, if there’s no Afghan force securing it, and there wasn’t any, then there’s going to be U.S. forces on the perimeter, on the edge. And they were doing what they were asked to do, which is go out and screen and process people.”
Wait a minute. “Screen and process people”? Yet Defense One reported in late August that “security screeners at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar have detected that at least one of the Afghans who was evacuated from Kabul Airport has potential ties to ISIS.” Even worse, “the Defense Department’s Automated Biometric Identification System has flagged up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients of Special Immigration Visas as potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists.”
Related: Afghan Evacuee Complains About the Quality of Meals He is Getting for Free at Fort Bliss
Despite the shoddy screening, Biden’s handlers have been much more concerned with bringing Afghans to the United States than rescuing Americans in Kabul. As far back as August 15, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said: “Once we get more airlift out of Kabul, we’re going to put as many people on those planes as we can. There will be a mix…not just American citizens, but perhaps some Afghan SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] applicants as well. We’re going to focus on getting people out of the country, then sorting it out at the next stop. It’s not going to be just Americans first, then SIV applicants.” Biden’s handlers plan to bring 30,000 Afghans to the United States. You don’t expect entitled Afghan evacuees to vote Republican, do you?
Those Afghans are here now and are being resettled in American communities, so maybe Gen. Milley was right: The whole thing went just the way Biden’s handlers wanted it to go. Americans stranded and hunted, Afghans here — mission accomplished! Is that it, General? After all, probably a lot of the Americans trapped in Afghanistan are white, and so they have it coming, right? But Milley wants to assure us that the military has learned from what happened in Afghanistan: “So, were there — there’s a lot of lessons learned. And I think we’re going to go through that in a very systematic way. I know we are on the Joint Staff. I know Central Command will. And I’m sure the other departmental agencies will. From a military standing point though — military planning standpoint…those plans were done in detail. … There was an extensive amount of planning in this.”
Sure there was. Nothing seems more certain, in any case, than the likelihood that the military will not learn the real lessons of the Afghan debacle: that in any competition for the attention of the relevant officials, strategic planning should take precedence over woke social engineering, and that Wilsonian attempts to make the world safe for democracy in Sharia states with no democratic tradition are foredoomed. Milley and company will keep on making the same mistakes over and over again, with no accountability. If any lessons were actually being learned, Milley and his woke colleagues would be long gone. The fact that they still occupy positions of authority demonstrates that Biden’s handlers are still indefatigably committed to ideological agreement over competence.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member