With the twentieth anniversary of September 11 drawing near, Joe Biden and his advisers thought it would be a brilliant idea to yank American troops out of Afghanistan, leaving the way free for the Taliban to sweep through the country, murdering, raping, and enslaving as they went.  Trump says this wouldn't have happened on his watch, and I believe him.

The bloody fiasco in Afghanistan has riveted the world's attention and turned America into a carcass ripe for the picking by geopolitical enemies.  The Chinese have already moved on Afghanistan and will almost certainly attack Taiwan.  Meanwhile, you can almost feel the ripple in the Earth's energy as the world's jihadist Muslims gear up for 9/11-esque terrorist attacks in America and throughout the West.  We can expect massive instability around the world as bad actors rush to fill the vacuum Biden just created.

Speaking with Miranda Devine at the New York Post, Donald Trump explained what he would have done:

"We were going to not let people get slaughtered," Trump said flatly. "I wanted to get out. But you have to get out safely and you have to get out with respect[.] ...

"We had all sorts of conditions[.] ... All civilians were going to come out before the military. Everyone should have been out before they took our military out[.] ...

"I was going to close this ridiculous embassy they spent a billion dollars on and move everybody out[.] ...

"I was going to blow up every military base [before we left]. I was going to take out every single piece of equipment. I said, 'I don't want anything left [apart from] leave each soldier a gun[.]' ...

"Plus, I had a relationship with the Taliban where they knew they weren't allowed to do this. They understood they were going to get hit very hard[.] ... What I had was conversations with the [Taliban] leadership where I said, 'If you do anything,' we were going to hit them like they haven't been hit before."

(Read the rest of Devine's interesting article here.)

This is not Monday-morning quarterbacking.  Trump is nothing if not a good manager.  He knows what he wants and how to delegate big projects.

Trump also showed during his presidency that he fully understands the huge stick one needs to deal with the world's bad actors.  He was willing to negotiate with the bad guys, but he always let them understand where he was coming from:

Who can forget how Trump decided to bomb Syria while he was meeting with Xi Jinping?  And there was his decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, one of the world's worst actors.  The man who quickly reduced ISIS from a major regional threat to a rump on the run understood how to handle the Taliban.  (With the Taliban resurgent, so is ISIS.)  Again, when Trump explains that he would have done better, believe him.

What's depressing is that, while journalists who must cover the story, even if they're leftists, are appalled by what happened, the rank-and-file Democrats, if I go by the many who populate my Facebook page, are ignoring this episode entirely.  They're still demanding mask and vaccine mandates and celebrating what a civil and unifying person Biden is.  Although perhaps I'm deluding myself when I seem to detect a frantic insouciance to their higher-than-usual number of posts showing themselves hanging with friends and eating fun foods.

Image: Donald Trump.  Gage Skidmore.  CC BY-SA 2.0.

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