Townhall Review | Commentaries

Ever since the last airplane left the airport in Kabul, the White House has tried to change the subject from Afghanistan. With Americans, green-card holders, and Afghan allies abandoned by Joe Biden and trapped behind Taliban lines, the administration has labored to shift attention to anything else. Joe Biden scolded Texas over its abortion law, the White House offered updates on the infrastructure debate, and the media has dutifully stopped reporting on the hundreds or thousands still needing rescue.

That hasn’t fooled most Americans who are disgusted by Biden’s actions, and it’s not even convincing fellow Democrats. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a progressive Democrat, declared himself “furious” over Biden’s delay and inaction in helping Americans get out of Afghanistan. “We cannot leave them behind,” Blumenthal declared at a moment when the White House is trying to pretend they don’t exist.

Blumenthal’s surprising rebuke sets a red line for Biden. No one will “move past” his despicable abandonment of our citizens and allies until they all get out. Perhaps national media outlets should demonstrate as much fortitude as Blumenthal. 

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Sirhan Sirhan, the man who brutally murdered Robert Kennedy has been granted parole. But in all the media coverage of this shocking outcome there’s one topic that has remained largely unmentioned: the killer’s motive. We live in a world where every high profile killer immediately has mass media looking for indicators of ideological motivations, especially conservative ones. But Sirhan was a Palestinian extremist who saw his brother killed by a Jordanian vehicle in a battle with the Israelis. He killed RFK because he hated JFK, and he hated JFK because JFK supported Israel. NBC news called Sirhan “a Christian-born Jordanian”, but that’s pretty misleading. Yes, he was born to a Christian family but later he became an apostate from Christianity and joined a New Age group.

The story of the murder of the Kennedy brothers has been ill-served by a media which keeps forgetting to tell us that the first was murdered by a Communist and the second by a Palestinian terrorist.

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Recently, Senator Ben Sasse said that America, after a proper vetting process should grant refugee status to the roughly 70 thousand Afghanis who stepped up and believed our promises and answered our call to fight alongside the US against the Taliban.

If we leave our friends cowering in their homes waiting for Taliban rape and death squads to cut off their heads because they allied with us, we are without honor. Critics point to the electoral implications of this, but do we really think that 70 thousand refugees are going to overwhelm our political system? The Cubans, who were also betrayed by feckless American policy certainly didn’t. But either way, whatever the political cost, it pales in significance next to the cost of lost honor and a message to the freedom fighters of the world – that practically screams “Don't count on us!”

Refusing genuine refugees from Biden’s debacle is both a cruel and a short-sighted policy of abandoning friends and allies. Bottom line: Vett 'em and let 'em. That's the only decent policy.

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As people across the United States watch the debacle in Afghanistan, there's virtually unanimous agreement on two points. First, no American who wants to come home should be left behind. Second, we must ensure the safety of the Afghans who helped us. But given the frenzied haste with which the Biden administration is flying tens of thousands of Afghans into the country, hard questions are in order. How carefully are these new arrivals being vetted? 

It's been reported that some of the new arrivals have turned up on terror watch lists. One man flown into America, reportedly works for ISIS. 

It would be a tragedy if our commitment to the safety of our Afghan friends were exploited by terrorists and enabled by the incompetence of our own government. What we've seen of the Biden administration's ineptitude or worse, both in Afghanistan and on our Southern border hardly inspires confidence. 

It's time for some answers on exactly who's coming here. America's security depends on it. 

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President Biden's refusal to commit to staying in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to rescue Americans, our NATO allies, and Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas and Priority 2 Visas is a shameful collapse of national purpose and deeply scarring moment of American weakness. 

While the death toll of that awful day on 9/11 was higher, at least it was higher as of today, the cut and run from Afghanistan is actually a greater crisis. 

For here, the president is intentionally abandoning thousands of Americans to their fate at the hands of a terrorist regime and splinter groups even more violent. It is worse than a shock, worse than an embarrassment. It's a collapse of the American ideal that we would never give up on an American, never leave an American behind. And shameful conduct by the White House will never not be associated with President Biden, Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin. Indeed, everyone in the executive branch. It marks them forever as cowards.

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A decade ago, the Barack Obama/Joe Biden administration put hundreds of firearms into the hands of the drug cartels in Mexico and failed to track them. Operation Fast and Furious resulted in those weapons being used against the Border Patrol, with at least one agent killed, as well as a number of crimes within the US.

That pales in comparison to Biden’s rout from Afghanistan. The US abandoned $85 billion in materiel, including well over 400,000 automatic weapons and 126,000 pistols. We also left behind hundreds of aircraft, armored vehicles, and thousands of trucks which the Taliban are already using to oppress our Afghan partners and make their emirate even stronger than it was before 9/11.

Those firearms won’t stay in Afghanistan for long. The Taliban will sell those to terror groups around the world, regardless of philosophy. They will gain hard currency in those black-market sales, and their clients will gain significant firepower. And just as in Fast and Furious, we can expect them to target Americans and our allies with those weapons for years to come. 

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Every patriotic American is appalled by our botched retreat from Afghanistan. Equally hideous is the dawning realization that lives and treasure have been squandered, and that we may be leaving Afghanistan even worse than we found it.

As horrified as we are, our distress is nothing to that of our soldiers and their families. Imagine sacrificing your youth, your limbs or a loved one’s life now to suspect it was all in vain.

I hope our rank-and-file soldiers and their families know: What you did has mattered to us; we are grateful beyond measure. Because of your sacrifices, we slept peacefully for the last twenty years. Because you were willing to endure long separations from your children, our children grew up relatively insulated from the fear of domestic terrorism.

The Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.” To the fighting men and women of our armed forces: We return that love in full measure.

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American credibility and prestige has suffered an unmitigated defeat in Joe Biden’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. By pulling out the military ahead of American civilians, allies, and Afghan partners, Biden and his team created a security situation in which it is now impossible to extract them all.

Despite this catastrophic failure, the White House and Democratic Party insist on spinning it into a strange victory by turning it into an expectations game. Flacks at the White House and Pentagon focus solely on the numbers escaping as evidence of success. The DNC even went so far as to hail Biden for having “defied expectations and exceeded even his own administration’s goal.”

The basic expectation of any president is to not abandon American citizens behind enemy lines. Biden’s pursuit of a deadline has made it all but certain that his administration will force hundreds and perhaps thousands of US citizens to either escape or end up as hostages of the Taliban. Even Biden’s sharpest critics never expected that level of incompetence.

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The ruthless Taliban, the very Islamist and terrorist movement the United States went to Afghanistan to oppose is fully back in charge. Their boots on the table in the former presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan. The constitutional government constructed and supported by Americans at the cost of billions upon billions of dollars and with the infinitely more precious cost of American lives collapsed like the proverbial house of cards.

The tribal forces linked to circle upon circle of terrorist activities are back in control. The state in Afghanistan has effectively ceased to exist. Its former leaders have left the country. What explains this? A legitimate and national government requires a nation and Afghanistan is not in any real sense a nation. Loyalty is to the tribe, not to the nation. The government security forces were unwilling to fight for Afghanistan. The Taliban basically marched into Kabul and humiliated the fleeing Americans. Now they can boast of defeating the most powerful nation on earth and make no mistake, they will make that boast. 

This is the sad truth, but it is the truth. Afghanistan is a failed state, perhaps because it never was a real state. America had better learn the lesson both at home and abroad. 

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President Biden is defending his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. But the problem is not that he pulled out, but rather how he pulled out. 

Americans overwhelmingly wanted out of this war, and yet 70 percent of us disapprove of Biden’s action. Why? Because it was bungled. After offering confident assurances to the press about the ability of Afghan forces to resist the Taliban, the nation fell in a single week. The bad news is likely to keep rolling in as America rolls out: refugees, violent vendettas against anyone who cooperated with us, and a nation awash with millions of new guns paid for by American taxpayers in the hands of stone age warlords. 

This debacle will haunt not just President Biden, but more importantly, it will haunt America for a long time. 

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