Biden passes the buck on Afghanistan
Joe Biden's speech last week about his decision to surrender to the Taliban and order a hasty, chaotic retreat was an embarrassment. Biden immediately threw shade on President Trump, basically blaming him for the "obligation" to withdraw. Biden had no such obligation, and he knows it. He could have changed course on Trump's agreement as he has changed a number of other Trump policies. Biden was simply lying.
Biden also lied when he claimed the Afghans were not willing to fight. Afghanistan has lost 66,000 soldiers and police fighting the Taliban - far more killed than the United States. One could argue the Afghan army did surrender too quickly, but to say they were not willing to fight is an outright lie. It is also important to remember that the Afghan army was dependent on U.S. air support and logistical support.
The fact of the matter is that this was not an "endless war" with massive amounts of American combat deaths. We were in an advisory and air support role and have been since 2015. Here are the U.S. forces killed in the war over the last fourteen years:
2007 - 117
2008 - 155
2009 - 317
2010 - 498
2011 - 415
2012 - 310
2013 - 128
2014 - 55
2015 - 22
2016 - 13
2017 - 15
2018 - 14
2019 - 24
2020 - 11
Joe Biden also claims there was no way to leave Afghanistan "without chaos ensuing." This was another lie, and it is utterly shameful. Of course this could have been done in an orderly manner, at least getting all Americans out. Who cares if the Afghan government was worried it would undermine confidence in them if we started a much more gradual withdrawal months earlier? Does Biden really think the polling numbers of the Afghan government mattered more than American and allied lives?
The consequences of this action are predictable and could have been predicted a decade ago. We will see massive amounts of gang rape, forced "marriages" (sex slavery), rampant child rape, and the brutal torture and massacre of people who worked with us because of Biden's hasty and irresponsible surrender to the monsters who murdered 3000 Americans on September 11.
Nation building was never going to work. It was a foolish expansion of the mission. American democracy is based on Christian principles, so trying to build a western-style democracy without that foundation was like building a house on sand. The mission was to exterminate al-Qaida war criminals, depose the Taliban for harboring them and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for further 9/11 style war crimes. By Biden's logic, we would have to pull our troops from Germany, Japan and South Korea.
We are involved in many places where we do not have a national security interest. We should not have intervened in Yugoslavia, Libya or Syria. The invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Afghanistan is not and never was in that category. This was a classic war of self-defense.
Yes, eventually we had to let the government of Afghanistan stand on its own. Perhaps that process has taken too long. But for Biden to claim that the choice was between a hasty surrender and retreat or a massive surge is an outright lie. This was not a binary choice, and Biden made the worst possible decision. The cost of that surrender will be measured in mass murder, war crimes, gang rapes and sex slavery. For this man to claim that American foreign policy is based on "human rights" is laughable.