Commander in Chief Joe Biden and his top military leaders have ignobly surrendered the fate of Americans and Afghan supporters as hostages to Taliban warlords who have closed all doors on allowing the administration to escape its own fecklessly reckless and arbitrary August 31 withdrawal deadline.
That deadline became very deadly yesterday when ISIS-K terrorists in two vehicles exploded bombs that killed 13 American servicemen at gates of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, the only U.S. air evacuation center not already abandoned.
Premature U.S. force reductions have allowed the Taliban to take control of evacuation routes to Kabul.
Added to that, the inexplicable abandonment of key U.S. air bases at Bagram and Kandahar eliminated any alternate air escape options from other regions.
If that wasn’t tragically bewildering enough, the Biden administration entrusted Kabul airport access to Taliban fighters managing perimeter checkpoints who have turned away Afghans holding U.S.- issued travel documents that outed their identities as American or government collaborators. Doing so, marked them for retribution after our troops leave.
The Taliban had escalated the failed planning debacle last Tuesday by barring Afghans from even going to the Kabul airport. Their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said they were asking the U.S. to stop “inviting” Afghans to leave the country because Afghanistan needs its skilled citizens at home.
Mujahid said during a press conference, “Our people, our engineers, our doctors, professors and those who have been educated. The country needs their talent, and they should not be taken to foreign countries.”
Although as recently as last Sunday, President Joe Biden suggested delaying the full withdrawal of troops from the country to evacuate more Americans and allies who worked with the U.S., he impotently backed off after Taliban threatened "consequences" if U.S. troops remained in the country after the deadline.
The Taliban, through direct talks with the U.S. in Kabul, said it wouldn’t recognize any extension, nor would it assure that forces that stay in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31 wouldn’t be subject to attack.
No one seems to know how many Americans are currently stranded in-country, plus the roughly between 10,000-15,000 Afghans who supported us.
Biden’s hasty retreat has made little time available for “rigorous vetting” of those relatively few very fortunate Afghan U.S.- supporters and their families who managed to board flights bound for America.
State Department spokesman Ned Price confirmed that “[this] vetting, by and large, is taking place [in] third countries.”
Meanwhile, The U.S. continues a desperate struggle to find welcoming destinations for refugees in Qatar, Germany and other locations.
By folding to Taliban demands like a nomadic goat-herder’s tent, Biden rejected pleadings of such G-7 leaders as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron of France to stay longer to get more people to safety before abandoning their citizens along with thousands of Afghans who supported the U.S. and NATO forces over a two-decade-long period.
Biden’s arbitrary date-certain red line in the sand has now left America and our U.N. allies cornered in a catastrophe of his own creation, a demand to have everyone either exit the country by a date certain, be held hostage … or far worse.
A New York Post front page feature sarcastically referred this frantic last-ditch evacuation chaos as Biden’s “Dumkirk,” ironically contrasting it to the World War II rescue mission by hundreds of private boats that saved more than 330,000 Allied forces trapped on a French beach by Nazi forces.
Although E.U. Council President Charles Michel reportedly said the Europeans called on Biden to secure the airport as long as necessary to complete the evacuations, that request has been ignored.
Now, with the airlift for American civilians coming to an end, the U.S. military will focus its final days to exiting its own troops. Others left behind will be abandoned at the “mercy” of Taliban, and by extension, to al Qaeda and ISIS captors.
The Biden administration’s self-inflicted disaster in Afghanistan has also done great harm to America’s global position.
As concluded by Wall Street Journal editors, “The Afghan withdrawal is one of the sorriest American failures in decades. Its consequences will play out for years, if not decades, as friends and foes recalibrate their views of U.S. political will in general, and Mr. Biden’s in particular.”
The article continues: “The President may want Americans to forget the last two weeks, but the world will remember. The Taliban and al Qaeda will use it as a recruiting ad for young jihadists. China, Russia and Iran are already considering how they can exploit a weak America.”
Here, I will add that even in the event that Americans forget Afghanistan – its Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists are not likely to soon forget America.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 10 books, "What Makes Humans Truly Exceptional," (2021) is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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