I have no doubt that Joe Biden set September 11, the 20th anniversary of the worst attack on American soil, for his botched bug out from Afghanistan thinking it would be a triumphant conclusion to twenty years of war in Afghanistan.

Doesn’t look like that plan was worth following.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who should have been evacuated first are now hostage to murderous barbarians there.

Doesn’t look like that plan was worth following.

Billions of dollars of military equipment were left behind to be used by these same enemies of western civilization.

Doesn’t look like the plan was worth following.

China eyes for itself the well-fortified and equipped Bagram airbase which it will likely use to manage the exploitation of Afghan’s rich rare earth deposits which are essential to modern living. Instead of a grateful nation applauding a move most wanted -- an end to the war there -- the way in which it was done, including the terrible timing for an anticipated boost to his popularity, instead has caused support for Biden to tank.

I highly recommend a new book by Toby Harnden if you want to see how we got there: First Casualty. Harnden’s a wonderful chronicler of military history, and this book is exceptional. It focuses on the eight-member CIA team Alpha. They were the first Americans to be dropped behind Afghan lines after 9/11. They had U.S. air support and help from Green Berets, Afghan allies, and the British Special Boat Service. Operating as insurgents they defeated the much larger Taliban force. That force faked a surrender and hundreds of them were imprisoned in Qala-i-Janga where two Alpha Team members, Mike Spann and David Tyson (the latter a skilled linguist who had spent years studying in Uzbekistan) interrogated the prisoners, one of whom, it turned out, was Marin County Californian John Phillip Walker Lindh, who following a troubled family dissolution, declared himself on the side of the Jihadists.

Spann, as you may recall, was murdered by the inmates. Tyson shot the killers and against difficult odds, made it out of there. Spann is dead with a young family left behind. Lindh, on the other hand, cut a plea deal that the government offered to avoid defending his claims of a tortured confession. He served some time in U.S. prison and was released on May 23, 2019, before the end of his 20-year sentence. He still seems to adhere to the jihadi cause.

Harnden’s narrative recounts how once the astonishingly successful Alpha team left Afghanistan, the U.S. military took over, and instead of the insurgent tactics which served us so well, the military operated as occupiers and poured troops and munitions into the country. It built fortified bases and its mission was no longer checking the activities of the jihadists. It turned to a fantastical notion conceived by its civilian leaders of converting this backward, fractious group of tribes (which Harden exquisitely details) into a modern democracy. In Harnden’s words, “early success became a long, drawn-out failure.” It’s also worth noting that both the British and U.S. operatives on the ground there were successful in certain significant parts because they had free (or freer) rein from the constraints of the bureaucrats in the various government agencies of both countries.

The horror of 9/11 in which thousands lost their lives at the hands of jihadists is gradually being erased by the same nitwit culture that tied our hands in waging battle against such evil and turned our military into some sort of therapeutic social work task force. On the anniversary of 9/11, Rutgers University and San Francisco State University featured speakers with terrorist affiliations.

College students interviewed by Campus Reform indicated that we should omit the “gruesome details” and “avoid placing blame.” for the events of that day.

Students also told Campus Reform that they agree that teachers shouldn’t mention or promote American exceptionalism in lessons about 9/11.

“We don't need more nationalism in this country... we need more healthcare,” one student said. “I think they should focus on America's faults, not how amazing we are and how we need to be superior, because we're not.”

“In terms of propagating this idea that our nation is the best no matter what... I would agree that that should be avoided,” another student said.

Students didn’t seem to agree with the idea of American exceptionalism.

“It’s rooted in a lot of colonist and imperialist notions of how we should treat other people,” one student said.

Another student said, “I think it's a dangerous mindset to teach young people that because I think that's the reason why a lot of people grow up to be extremists and really nationalistic.”

No better example of the educational rot could you look for than this.

In Fairfax County, Virginia the daughter of the leader of the mosque to which some of the 9/11 hijackers belonged sits on the school board and opposed a resolution honoring the victims. The President himself issued an absurd statement referring to the Taliban as “businesslike and professional” at the very moment the Taliban were searching house to house, beating and killing those who were our allies. He added insult to his countrymen to this absurdity:

“‘We also witnessed the dark forces of human nature. Fear and anger. Resentment and violence against Muslim-Americans -- true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion,’ Biden said in a prerecorded video published for the occasion."

Like the now thoroughly discounted Trump Collusion with Russia, the evidence of Islamophobia is evidence-free poppycock.

Looking over the Taliban leadership we are reminded that President Obama handed them over in exchange for another misguided American idiot, Bowe Bergdahl, a military deserter.

Four of the five Taliban members released from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration in 2014 in exchange for admitted US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl are part of the Islamic fundamentalist group’s new hardline government in Afghanistan, according to local media reports.

The four members of the so-called “Taliban Five” who have joined the new government are Acting Director of Intelligence Abdul Haq Wasiq, Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs Norullah Noori, Deputy Defense Minister Mohammad Fazl, and Acting Minister of Information and Culture Khairullah Khairkhah. The fifth member of the Taliban Five, Mohammad Nabi Omari, was appointed governor of eastern Khost province last month.

Afghan outlet TOLOnews published a list Tuesday of members of the new “caretaker” government, which features several familiar faces who helped run the war-torn country between 1996 and 2001 -- when the Taliban were forced from power by US-led NATO forces following the 9/11 attacks.

Wasiq, Fazl and Khairkhah all held positions in the former Taliban government -- Wasiq as a deputy intelligence chief, Fazl as army chief of staff and Khairkhah as interior minister.

I don’t mean to suggest that everything done in that 20-year period was a failure. I agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal who observe there were some notable successes even in the face of unwarranted criticisms.

Start with the fact that America hasn’t been struck with a comparable attack on the homeland since 9/11. As the 9/11 commission report noted, the jihadists had been at war with us for years, but we had refused to recognize it. There was every reason at the time to believe that our lack of vigilance had made us vulnerable to more such attacks, especially when the anthrax envelopes from an unknown source began arriving in mailboxes a week later.

The Bush Administration mobilized public support for an extraordinary response that went well beyond toppling the Taliban. U.S. intelligence was revamped so the FBI and CIA actually talked to one another. Terrorists were killed or, better, captured and interrogated to gain information that could prevent the next attack. The al Qaeda network that planned the 9/11 attacks was largely broken up.

The supposed excesses of U.S. surveillance are vastly overstated. The privacy of Americans hasn’t been threatened, while the Patriot Act has provided the feds with tools to break up domestic terror cells. The biggest intelligence failure concerned weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The worst surveillance violation of recent decades had nothing to do with terrorism. It was the FBI’s 2016 spying on the Trump campaign and lying to the FISA court.

It’s also dogma to deride the prison at Guantanamo, but the alternative was handling hundreds of enemy combatants in civilian courts under rules that made extended interrogation far more difficult. The hindsight brigade forgets how much we didn’t know at the time about the jihadist threat, its relation to state sponsors, and where they might strike next.

The Department of Defense’s strategy for overwhelming force and a big footprint, however, did fail us for twenty years and the bug out only made more obvious the military brass’s incompetence to adapt to new circumstances. Even its lies are so weak and transparent they cannot overcome minimal scrutiny. After the devastating videos of desperate people on the tarmac and at the gates of Kabul airport we were told by Major General William Taylor that one of our drone airstrike targets was “known to be an imminent ISIS-L threat” and that there had been “secondary explosions” that “indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material” that “was going to be used in a high profile attack.” Obviously, the idea was to allay any thought that since we had left, we were defenseless against jihadist activities there. At the time, it occurred to skeptics like myself that it was odd that we weren’t told who this “imminent ISIS-L threat” was. That Taylor fantasy was pricked by the New York Times:

Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence, including extensive interviews with family members, co-workers and witnesses, suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.

We’re not in Afghanistan any longer. We seem to have destroyed any meaningful on-the-ground intelligence and no amount of bluster and errant drone strikes can hide that.

Nor is it easy to dismiss that we are being more hamstrung by government fiat than the now back in power Taliban are. It’s hard to argue with the poster I’ve dubbed “The Great Iggy”:

The Taliban are back in power but it's us who have to be humiliated to get on a plane, have to wonder if what we're typing in our own homes will be used by our government to harm us, are publicly shamed if we even suggest Islam might have even a tiny bit to do with jihad, are practically forced to repeat the prog doggerel about Islam being a religion of peace, are routinely called the Taliban and domestic terrorists by people who at the same time perversely defend Islam and condemn us even though Islam is in opposition to almost everything they claim to believe in.

And to top it off, George W Bush, the neo-cons and the Cheney family, all of whom we more or less supported back then have not only either turned their backs on us when we tried to defend ourselves from the progs or have outright attacked us and sided with the progs, but they set in motion much of the above that now plague our country.

Aside from the easy-to-discount blather from the White House and Departments of State and Defense to spackle over the cost of the incompetent bug out, the President tried to deflect from the disastrous coverage by issuing a clearly unconstitutional vaccine mandate for federal workers and employers of over 100 people. As Mark Wauck chronicles, the likelihood of the obviously unconstitutional mandate passing judicial muster is small. It’s another displacement tactic -- like “look, a squirrel!” Biden is, in effect, saying the Taliban aren’t the problem, those unvaccinated Americans are. He says that at the same time as he admits without much vetting or vaccination thousands of Afghans and over our wide-open borders hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated people from countries all over the world.

Cartoon courtesy of Michael Ramirez

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