From one of the few newspapers that tell it like it is — the Wall Street Journal. Make no mistake about it parents and grandparents, your children are at risk
The attorney general is compiling a steadily lengthening register of “society offenders who might well be underground and who never would be missed,” as Ko-Ko, the hypervigilant lord high executioner, sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.”
Mr. Garland’s list of society offenders is compendious. At the top are right-wing extremists who’ve been officially designated the greatest domestic threat to U.S. security, but whose ranks seem, in the eyes of the nation’s top lawyer, to include some less obviously malevolent characters, including perhaps anyone who protested the results of the 2020 election. Then there are police departments not compliant with Biden administration law-enforcement dicta, Republican-run states seeking to regularize their voting laws after last year’s pandemic-palooza of an electoral process, and state legislatures that pass strict pro-life legislation.
They’d none of them be missed.
Oddly, the list doesn’t seem to extend to the hundreds of thousands of people who have crossed the southern border so far this year and are now presumably at large somewhere in the U.S. without a legal right to be in the country. Nor to those benevolent folk who have reduced several of the nation’s urban centers to crime-infested wastelands.
But, let’s be fair. With limited resources, Justice has to prioritize. Mr. Garland and his federal henchmen must ensure that only the gravest threats to the republic are neutralized.
Which is presumably why the latest names on his roll are those parents who have had the temerity to challenge local school boards about the mandates they are imposing on their pandemic-ready classes and what the children are learning.
That wasn’t how the attorney general presented it when he announced the news. Citing a “disturbing trend” in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school-board members, teachers and other school employees, he declared that he was directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with local and state law enforcement to develop “strategies” for dealing with the problem.
The announcement looked as though it had been carefully coordinated with the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had asked the Biden administration to do exactly this.
Decent people everywhere acknowledge that violence is intolerable—whether perpetrated by Black Lives Matter agitators torching buildings, Trump supporters smashing federal property, or parents who throw projectiles at school board members.
But the letter from the NSBA contained barely any evidence of actual violence. It cited mostly antisocial behavior and threats, and some of the offenses referenced—such as a parent making a mock Nazi salute to a school board—are, however offensive, constitutionally protected speech.
And, as has been widely noted, when acts of violence occur, they can and have been dealt with by local or state law enforcement. There is no federal interest in any of these infractions.
All this merely underscores what the real objective of the attorney general’s action was—and we don’t need to engage in speculation because it was recently spelled out to us by another leading member of President Biden’s party, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia.
In a rare moment of honesty from a politician, Mr. McAuliffe made clear, in a television debate with Republican Glenn Youngkin, the Democrats’ conception of the role that parents should have in their children’s education: none whatever.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Aside from the jaw-dropping disdain for families, Mr. McAuliffe’s prescription is at odds with Article 26.3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the sort of grand multilateral pronouncement the Democrats usually fetishize, which states: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
This flagrant attempt to intimidate parents into handing their children over to the mercies of the state is as sinister as anything the modern progressives who now control the Democratic Party have done.
The message is clear, and it has been the character of education in totalitarianism systems through history: These are not your children; they are wards of the state, and the state (in this case through the teachers unions that fund the Democratic Party) will determine what they learn and how.
Democrats like Mr. McAuliffe insist that pernicious racial doctrines teaching the ubiquity of white supremacism and the inherent racism of American society and encourage racial segregation aren’t actually taught in schools. But this is laughable. The same Democrats have spent the last year insisting on racial “equity” as the defining objective of their social program. Why would they leave it out of the schools they mostly control?
Mr. Garland’s brazen attempt to intimidate will likely backfire as more parents—including many who aren’t especially conservative—become alarmed by what they see and hear in their children’s schools. By placing them on his little list, he may have done us all a favor.
Returned last night from the only Marine reunion I attend — the RACPAC. If you know not of whom I speak, shame on you as you’ve not read “The Book.” If you have but don’t remember, go to chapter 46 and refresh. This one was special as Lt Tim Armstrong USMC was there for the first time, but he is now Col, USMC (Ret). What a joy it was to see Tim again. Anyway, it was, as always, a grand time to see these Marines again; it’s always great joy to see how every one of them turned out, not a dammed liberal among them!!! All very successful in their afterlife, especially the young enlisted Marines who were not careerists, but chose to take their hard learned knowledge to the civilian world and succeed!
I’ve often asked myself over the years since retirement, especially every September as I fly to Virginia Beach, what did I do to deserve to serve alongside such giants of our Corps. As my coxswain and I were cruising down the Appomattox River one sunny afternoon, he asked, “Popeye, can you believe the Marine Corps is actually paying us to do this ?” Of course, my reply was, “No Crazy I can’t, but they sure are!” Having said that, do not dismay as this was a grueling and very demanding eighteen months with no guidance from MCDEC or HQMC, often working under arduous weather conditions and usually six and sometimes seven days a week. And here they are in all their glory.Lord, what memories!!
Now to the sad state of affairs of our once great nation. Another good one from my friend Greg; thanks Greg, I love your missives, and so do my followers.
By: G. Maresca
Hooking off the jab
In the sweet science, a skilled pugilist will be able to hook off their jab. The same holds for COVID era politicians and their obsession with vaccine mandates and boosters.
President Biden leads the mandate vaccine charge yet allows tens of thousands to pass through the southern border daily who have not been tested let alone vaccinated.
Initially, “if vaccinated, you are not going to get COVID,” has devolved to “people who got vaccinated remain at risk.” Infections are increasing among the vaccinated as a plethora of evidence highlights how the vaccine’s efficacy is waning.
For those who were vaccinated but plan to refuse the booster shot will find themselves back at square one because COVID is here to stay, just like any other influenza virus.
Quite the bioweapon China unleashed.
Democrats politicized COVID by refusing to acknowledge that China covered up and lied about the virus. They then used the pandemic as an excuse to lockdown the country and change election rules.
A study from the University of California San Diego highlighted how the vaccine’s effectiveness dropped from 94% in June to 65% in July with a 19-fold increase of those already vaccinated. Israeli data said Pfizer’s vaccine went from a 95% effectiveness to 39% by July. Apparently, Delta is more contagious but less lethal, according to English data and runs at 0.2% ⸻ the same as the seasonal flu. The CDC said those vaccinated who contract COVID have as high a viral load in their nasal passages as those who are unvaccinated.
It is not the unvaccinated that are driving COVID’s mutations.
In February even NPR reported, “vaccines can contribute to virus mutations.”
National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins’s blog ridiculed a study his agency financed that said by December 2020, at least 100 million Americans were infected – five times the official count.
The pro-vaccine army that permeates government, the pharmaceutical industry and the mainstream media have cross-pollinated into a universal censorship android that prevents any information that conflicts with their narrative and balance sheets. They conveniently ignore the adverse health conditions and deaths resulting from the jab.
Texas is being sued by the Biden administration to protect a woman’s right of choice to an abortion. Yet, when it comes to a woman’s right to choose to vaccinate – forget it. It is only a choice when it can stop a baby’s beating heart.
Cells from an aborted fetus were used to test and produce the vaccine. Biden’s support of abortion only manifests itself in his vaccine mandate.
If this is about saving lives, access to every resource should be a given. The leftist media ignores or simply denies that Hydroxychloroquine has any efficacy in treating COVID when it has. Moreover, natural antibodies are a nonfactor even though studies say they provide greater immunity, both in breadth and duration. For those with immunity, vaccination is unnecessary and potentially grievous. However, there is no money or control in natural immunity underscoring how this is not about health care.
COVID conveniently removes the spotlight from the Afghanistan debacle, while Democrats would love to extend COVID through an unverifiable 2022 midterm mail-in ballot election. Initially, boosters were needed after eight months, then five, and arguably now for just susceptible groups like the elderly. With so many different versions and timelines, it is no wonder what the government and politicians say has no meaning.
Just months ago, Biden said he “would not demand that it be mandatory.” However, in Biden’s recent COVID vaccine mandate address, he flipped-flopped declaring: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.”
Since Biden is so impatient, perhaps he should resign.
Patience with Biden’s poor decisions from Afghanistan to the southern border is what is truly “wearing thin.” Apparently, unable to help himself or the nation, Biden compounded the issue by rejecting the Constitution he swore to uphold saying, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
Mandates are not only unconstitutional but polarizing and inherently un-American.
Mandates underscore how the left’s default position is always force.
What happened to unifying the country? Biden would rather lay blame while mandating vaccine compliance or lose your livelihood.
If it is your prerogative to jab your way into oblivion, knock yourself out.
Received the following from a highly resected Brother Marine referred to as “Mustang,” which many of you know what that moniker means. Anyway, I don’t watch TV except Netflix and Amazon Prime. Would enjoyed watching this episode however. Enjoy and thank you Mustang, it is definitely blog worthy! Really there isn’t much to enjoy as it is all so true and scary as hell.
“Real-Time” host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by sounding the alarm on China’s growing dominance over the United States. Why are Americans sleeping?
We aren’t sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls! And, if we aren’t busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the ‘commander’ in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant ‘soldiers’.
“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people,” Maher began the monologue, alluding to a “Lawrence of Arabia” quote.
Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China,” he said. “All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying f— because they’re not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”
Maher acknowledged that China does “bad stuff” from the concentration camps of Uyghur Muslims to its treatment of Hong Kong. But he stressed, “There’s got to be something between an authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
“In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa,” Maher said, pointing to China’s global Silk Road infrastructure initiative.
He continued: “In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. We’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are such silly people.
“Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn’t kick in for 10 years,” Maher explained. Then the half-assed bill is forgotten.
“China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
The HBO star cited how it took “ten years” for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and how it took “16 years” to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, comparing that to a 57-story skyscraper that China constructed in only “19 days” and Beijing’s Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in “43 hours.”
“We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease,” Maher said. “They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We’re not losing to China, we LOST. The returns just haven’t all come in yet. They’ve made robots that check a kid’s temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide.” Our teachers unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. WAKE UP AMERICA! That means ALL of YOU.
Maher then blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, accusing him of degrading school standards by eliminating merit and substituting a lottery system for admittance to schools for advanced learners. Our country is going down the toilet.
“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher continued. “Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”
A somber message, isn’t it? But, where is Maher wrong? I guess the good news is that unlike the Chinese our young people have free text messaging and iPhone games.
Failure in Afghanistan Has Roots in the All-Volunteer Military
For the past three decades, careerism among senior officers coupled with the disconnect between the American public and the All-Volunteer Force have led to failed and unnecessary overseas military interventions.
By Paul Cavallo
September 2021
Proceedings
Vol. 147/9/1423
The tragedy that unfolded over the past several weeks in Afghanistan began with the creation of the “all-volunteer” military in 1973 and the self-promoting careerism that has stalked the Pentagon ever since. Too few leaders have been willing to speak truth to power and say no to overseas military adventurism that had little bearing on the safety and security of this nation. And it goes without saying that those in charge when the war begins are never those who have to finish it.
We saw this most clearly when, in 1990-91, America sent its young warriors into the deserts of the Middle East. We called it “The Gulf War” and “Desert Storm,” but it was, in reality, America’s first mercenary war. The Bush administration cut a deal with the Saudis and Kuwaitis: our men, their money. Kuwaiti “princes” lived large in hotels from Saudi Arabia to Paris while our young soldiers and Marines dug fighting holes in the desert under a searing sun.
U.S. Marines in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Naval Institute archives)
The peacetime, all-volunteer military, after all, was a good job with benefits and perks. And that “war” went relatively well and quickly with few American servicemembers killed or injured, to the high praise of the U.S. public who were entranced, awed, and seduced by the lethality, performance, and accuracy of our high-tech weapons, while forgetting that the troops on the ground, in the desert, held it all together and made the irrefutable success of the war possible. Yet it was also the start of the forever wars. Saddam Hussein remained in power after the war and the U.S. military remained in the Middle East—enforcing no-fly zones and oil embargoes on Iraq with naval forces in the Persian Gulf and air and land forces based in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.
While it might be a “chicken or the egg” argument, it is hard not to see that the permanent increase of U.S. military presence in the Middle East went hand in hand with the rise of militant Islam and anti-American terrorism. How many Americans remember the 1996 terrorist bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia? Nineteen U.S. servicemembers were killed and 498 wounded. Two years later, the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya killed 12 Americans and hundreds of civilians and wounded 4,500 people. Then came the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring dozens of others. Less than a year later came the 9/11 attacks, answered shortly by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A little over a year later, under the false pretense that non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be used against the United States, came the invasion of Iraq.
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. servicemembers and injured nearly 500 more.
By the end of 2003, U.S. special operations forces had completed much of their mission in Afghanistan to capture or kill senior leaders and high-value targets within both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pentagon, however, rather than putting their “swords” away somehow decided to “nation build” a medieval land of warring tribes into a Western-style democracy, ignoring the fact that our democracy took centuries and many great wars to achieve.
For the past 31 years, the brunt of the cost has been borne by the all-volunteer force. The majority of American citizens have not served (none were required to), and most know few who have. A few dozen—or even a few hundred—servicemembers killed per year was the cost of doing business. But where were the generals and admirals who should have stood up to the civilian leaders, without compromise, to say “enough,”—that foreign wars too often leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines dead and forgotten, and for what? Were the military’s senior leaders just following along in-line, waiting for their moment, their chance for another star, or a richly coveted post-retirement job with a “vendor.” Were they just inured to the burdens of the profession? Unable to see the giant machine in which they were cogs—the failed foreign policy that resulted in the spilling of blood and national treasure for questionable (if any) gain.
It is no surprise that the “war” in Afghanistan eventually became a bottomless money pit. More than a trillion dollars was spent; did it make our nation safer, or did it just make Washington-connected corporations rich? Some of that money was funneled back to Congress through campaign donations and favors, all the while young Americans were being killed and wounded. Walk into any Veterans Administration hospital and see first-hand the reality that was brought home.
So, with the most recent deaths and injuries at Kabul International airport—clearly caused by a lack of planning, foresight, and courage at the top—we witness more evidence of the ongoing tragedy and travesty that is American “foreign policy” and the willingness of senior military leaders to go along with it. Will we ever learn? History suggests, no.
Postscript: While some commenters on the actual article disagree with the author, I do not. I understand where he is coming from and follow his line of thought completely. The disconnect between the American public in general and the military and their assigned missions is indeed relevant. A quick “war story” if I may.
Serving as a temporary Chief of Staff at a command when the actual made a quick decision to retire, I had to handle my job as well for a few months while the Corps had to find a colonel for the billet. After a few months of this double duty my general, a fresh-caught BG, comes in my office with a cup of coffee to shoot the bull. Out of the blue he calmly says, Jim you know you will never make general.” To which I laughed telling him all I ever wanted to be was a Gunny. He asked if I wanted to know why, and of course I knew he wanted to tell me so I said yes.
He told me he knew several generals who would jump at having me as their COS because I had a knack of letting seniors (and juniors) know that if they cannot handle your answer they should never ask me the question. He said generals cannot do that. They must always speak the party line or they will never move above one star, which is why so many generals retire as a BG. They spoke outside the party line once and were passed over, or they want nothing to do with it and retire.
Personally, I took his comments as compliment as that philosophy helped me to rise from private to colonel, and I was not about to change it. When a general speaks, understand he is never telling you what he truly believes in his heart. He is simply a mouth piece for the admisntration at the time.
Who is Bing West? In case you do not know of him here is a quick rundown from Wikipedia of his early life as a Marine and shortly thereafter:
West was an infantry officer in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. He led the mortar platoon of 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. Later, he served with a Combined Action Platoon that fought for 385 days in a remote village. He was also a member of the Marine Force Reconnaissance team that initiated “Operation Stingray”: small unit attacks behind enemy lines. He authored a study at the RAND Corporation entitled “The Strike Teams: Tactical Performance and Strategic Potential”. This paper was the featured event at the 1970 Department of Defense Counterinsurgency Research and Development Symposium. The RAND Military Systems Simulations Group implemented a classified model of West’s concept. This doctrinal innovation was directly opposed by Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), which favored the Army’s concept of Air-Mobility “Fire and Thunder Operations”. By way of rebuttal, West wrote The Village, chronicling the daily lives of 15 Marines who protected Vietnamese villagers by living among them in their hamlets. The book became a classic of practical counterinsurgency and has been on the Marine Corps Commandant’s Required Reading List for five decades. (One of only three books I have ever read about the Vietnam War – great read if you’ve not).
Our disaster in brief
By Bing West
Following 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.
The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.
Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.
Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”
On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.
In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.
Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.
The strategy aimed to clear villages of the Taliban, then leave Afghan soldiers — askaris — to hold them and to build infrastructure and governance linked to the Kabul central government. In a 2011 book titled “The Wrong War,” I described why this strategy could not succeed. In Vietnam, I had served in a combined-action platoon of 15 Marines and 40 local Vietnamese. It had taken 385 days of constant patrolling to bring security to one village of 5,000. In Afghanistan, there were 7,000 Pashtun villages to be cleared by fewer than a thousand U.S. platoons, an insurmountable mismatch. Counterinsurgency would have required dedicated troops inserted for years. President Obama offered a political gesture, not a credible strategy.
My experience was different. In trips to Afghanistan over ten years, I embedded with dozens of U.S. platoons. When accompanying our grunts, the askaris did indeed fight. But ten years later, it remains a mystery to me why our generals refused to acknowledge what our grunts knew: namely, that the Afghan soldiers would not hold the villages once our troops left.
This wasn’t due to the structure of their army. The fault went deeper. The askaris lacked faith in the steadfastness of their own chain of command. Afghan president Hamid Karzai reigned erratically from 2004 through 2014, ranting against the American government while treating the Taliban with deference. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, a technocrat devoid of leadership skills, antagonized both his political partners and tribal chieftains. Neither man instituted promotion based upon merit or imbued confidence in the security forces. Familial and tribal patronage pervaded.
From the Kabul capital to province to district, from an Afghan general to a lieutenant, positions and rank depended upon paying bribes upward and extorting payments downward. We were caught on the horns of a dilemma caused by our political philosophy. Because we wanted to create a democracy, we chose not to impose slates of our preferred leaders. On the other hand, the askaris had no faith in the durability or tenacity of their own chain of command.
In contrast, the Taliban promoted upward from the subtribes in the different provinces. While decentralized, they were united in a blazing belief in their Islamist cause and encouraged by Pakistan. The Afghan army and district, provincial, and Kabul officials lacked a comparable spirit and vision of victory.
Phase Three. 2014–2020. From 2001 to 2013, one group of generals — many of them household names — held sway in the corridors of power, convinced they could succeed in counterinsurgency and nation-building. That effort, while laudable, failed.
But that did not mean that a Taliban victory was inevitable. Quite the opposite. A second group of generals came forward, beginning with General Joseph Dunford. The mission changed from counterinsurgency to supporting the Afghan army with intelligence, air assets, and trainers. President Obama lowered expectations about the end state, saying Afghanistan was “not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again.” U.S. troop strength dropped from 100,000 in 2011 to 16,000 in 2014. With the exception of Special Forces raids, we were not in ground combat, so there were few American casualties.
Battlefield tactics shifted to what the Afghan army could do: play defense and prevent the Taliban from consolidating. By 2018, U.S. troop strength was lower than 10,000. Nonetheless, General Scott Miller orchestrated an effective campaign to keep control of Afghanistan’s cities. Afghan soldiers, not Americans or allies, did the fighting and dying. The last U.S. combat death occurred in February of 2020.
Nevertheless, narcissistic President Trump, desperate to leave, promised the Taliban that America would depart by mid 2021. He cut the number of American troops in country to 2,500. With those few troops, General Miller nonetheless held the line. The U.S. military presence, albeit tiny, motivated the beleaguered Afghan soldiers. When the Taliban massed to hit the defenses of a city, the askaris defended their positions and the U.S. air pounced on targets. In addition, our presence provided a massive spy network and electronic listening post in central Asia, able to monitor Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran. At a cost of no American lives and 5 percent of the defense budget, Afghanistan had reached a stalemate sustainable indefinitely at modest cost.
Phase Four. Bug-out in 2021. President Biden broke that stalemate in April of 2021, when he surprised our allies and delighted the Taliban by declaring that all U.S. troops would leave by 9/11, a singularly inappropriate date. As our military packed up, the miasma of abandonment settled into the Afghan psyche. In early July, our military sneaked away from Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, which triggered a cascading collapse. Once Afghan units across the country grasped that they were being abandoned, they dissolved. What followed was a chaotic evacuation from the Kabul airport, with the Taliban triumphantly entering the city.
Asked why he had pulled out entirely, President Biden said, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” That stunning fabrication was a denial of reality: Al-Qaeda are commingled with the Taliban in Kabul. As the world watched, America had to rely upon Taliban forbearance to flee. President Biden had handed America a crushing defeat without precedent.
Evacuees wait to board a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 23, 2021.
President Biden has claimed that the ongoing evacuation occurred because the Afghan army ran away instead of fighting. In truth, the Afghan soldiers did fight, suffering 60,000 killed in the war. Their talisman was the American military. No matter how tough the conditions, somehow an American voice crackled over the radio, followed by thunder from the air. Those few Americans were the steel rods in the concrete. When that steel was pulled out, the concrete crumbled. The spirit of the Afghan army was broken.
During the month following the abandonment of Bagram Air Base, the Pentagon remained passive. In contrast, a month before the abrupt fall of Saigon in 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was concerned about the North Vietnamese advances. As a former grunt in Vietnam, I was his special assistant during that turbulent time. He informed State and the White House that he was ordering an air evacuation; 50,000 Vietnamese were rescued before Saigon fell. In the case of Kabul, the Pentagon took no such preemptive action.
Worse, selecting which Afghans can fly to safety has been left to State Department bureaucrats, although State has an abysmal ten-year record, with 18,000 applicants stuck in the queue. Each day approximately 7,000 undocumented immigrants walk into America; about 2,000 Afghans are flown out daily from Kabul. In the midst of an epic foreign-policy catastrophe, the priorities of the Biden administration remain driven by domestic politics and constipated bureaucratic processes.
What comes after the botched evacuation finally ends?
(1) A course correction inside the Pentagon is sorely needed. Our military reputation has been gravely diminished. The 1 percent of American youths who volunteer to serve are heavily influenced by their families. About 70 percent of service members have a relative who served before them. The Afghanistan War spanned an entire generation. What they took away from this defeat will be communicated from father to son, from aunt to niece.
To avoid alienating this small warrior class, the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs must put aside their obsession with alleged racism and diversity in the ranks. Former secretary of defense Mattis said that lethality must be the lodestone of our military. Sooner or later in the next six months, we will be challenged. Instead of again waiting passively for instructions, the Pentagon should recommend swift, decisive action.
(2) President Biden’s image as a foreign-policy expert is indelibly tarnished. As vice president in 2011, he vigorously supported the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Three years later, U.S. troops were rushed back in to prevent Iraq from falling to the radical Islamists. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote at the time, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”
President Biden bragged that under his leadership, America was “back.” Instead, while denying that our allies were upset with his performance, he has destroyed his credibility. Perhaps there will be changes in his foreign-policy team, but President Biden himself will not be trusted by our allies as a reliable steward.
(3) In his Farewell Address, Washington wrote, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
As Washington warned, due to extreme partisanship, the American presidency has accumulated the powers of a king or a despot. In matters of war, over the past several decades one party in Congress or the other has gone along with whatever the president decided. This tilts power decisively in favor of the White House. Congress has abdicated from providing either oversight or a broad base of public support. The White House as an institution has become regal and aloof — the opposite of the intention of the Founding Fathers.
Afghanistan, from start to finish, was a White House war, subject to the whims and political instincts of our president. The result was an erraticism that drove out strategic consistency and perseverance. A confident President Bush invaded Afghanistan, blithely expanded the mission, and steered a haphazard course from 2001 through 2007. Presidents Obama and Trump were overtly cynical, surging (2010–2013) and reducing (2014–2020) forces while always seeking a way out divorced from any strategic goal. President Biden (2021) was a solipsistic pessimist who ignored the calamitous consequences and quit because that had been his emotional instinct for a decade.
(4) Our Vietnam veterans were proud of their service. The same is true of our Afghanistan veterans. In both wars, they carried out their duty, correctly believing their cause was noble. After nation-building was designated a military mission, our troops both fought the Taliban enemy and improved life for millions of Afghans. With the Taliban now the victors, it hurts to lose the war, especially when the decision rested entirely with one man.
Who are we as a country? Who will fight for us the next time?
This article appears as “Who Will Trust Us the Next Time?” in the September 13, 2021, print edition of National Review.
Postscript. I have not always been a great fan of West. As a Marine in RVN he served courageously, and I loved his book The Village. However, it is always easy to be an armed chair QB and on Monday morning outline everything Tom Brady did wrong, despite his seven Super Bowl rings. He is obviously a good friend of the former Marine about whom I have nothing good to say. I’ll let you decide who that may be, albeit Bing mentions him several times in the diatribe.
Despite all that I do believe and agree with much he says, but then that’s Bing’s way, I mean it is Monday morning right?
