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“President Joe Biden on Tuesday defiantly rejected criticism of his decision to stick to a deadline to pull out of Afghanistan this week, a move that left up to 200 Americans in the country along with thousands of U.S.-aligned Afghan citizens.” Reuters
Watch the full speech here. C-Span
Many on both sides are critical of Biden claiming success:
“If nothing else, President Joe Biden can claim to have had the courage to end US involvement in a war that his predecessors all knew was going nowhere. But his erratic handling of the trauma of the last two weeks shredded his reputation as a foreign policy expert and safe pair of hands, and left millions of Afghans again in the hands of the fundamentalist Taliban and their even more extreme adversaries in the country's ISIS franchise.”
Stephen Collinson, CNN
“The Biden administration wants credit for the Afghanistan evacuation as measured by the sheer number of people it flew out amid a security and humanitarian crisis of its own making… The president contributed to the collapse of the Afghan military by denying it air cover, gave away Bagram Air Base for no good reason, pulled out US troops before our diplomats and civilians and local allies, drastically underestimated the gathering Taliban offensive, and then, caught unawares by the fall of Kabul, scrambled to jerry-rig a desperate rescue that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place…
“We left hundreds of Americans behind who wanted to leave — a squalid betrayal that was unfathomable before the Biden team began to try to prepare the public for it a week or so ago. It’s hard to imagine any prior American commander-in-chief, perhaps with the exception of Jimmy Carter, abandoning Americans behind enemy lines. Theodore Roosevelt mustered the naval might of the United States to save one American who had been kidnapped in Morocco in 1904. Barack Obama traded five Gitmo detainees for Bowe Bergdahl in 2014… [Biden] chose defeat and disgrace.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
“The administration was warned early and often about the 600 or so employees, contractors and family members who worked for U.S.-sponsored news organizations under the umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a federal agency funded by Congress. They include journalists working for the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio LIberty (RFE/RL) who have worked in Afghanistan for years — at great personal risk. The Taliban has killed four RFE/RL journalists since 2016 through suicide bomb attacks, and the company’s journalists routinely receive death threats from the extremists…
“The USAGM journalists and staffers had every connection a group of potential evacuees could wish for, and their expectations were correspondingly high. After all, the U.S. government had moved heaven and earth to get Afghan journalists from private U.S. news organizations to safety. Surely, they assumed, it wouldn’t abandon the reporters for whom it was directly responsible. But they were wrong. The RFE/RL journalists and their families made several independent trips to the airport, often spending long days and nights waiting just outside the gates, but never managed to get inside…
“To call the mission a success is an insult that adds to the injury of the tens of thousands of Afghans who didn’t make it out and remain there now in fear for their lives.”
Josh Rogin, Washington Post
“Biden's speech was an imaginative presentation of reality. The president insisted that Americans in Afghanistan had been warned 19 times that they could and should leave. I suspect that many Americans in Afghanistan will not recall receiving such warnings…
“‘I respectfully disagree,’ the president said, with those who argue that the evacuation could have started earlier. But if he was ‘ready’ and this withdrawal was the only way to evacuate, why was the embassy abandoned in such a rush? Why did the U.S. have to literally beg the Taliban for its modicum of perimeter security? Why were Americans and so many of our allies abandoned? Why did Afghans fly off the wings of our planes? Biden said his policy reflected a collective ‘recommendation’ by the Joint Chiefs of Staff… if so, it's just more proof of a rot in the general officer ranks.”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
Other opinions below.
“No one expected him to be Winston Churchill rallying the British after Dunkirk nor Abraham Lincoln consoling the nation after the slaughter at Gettysburg, nor did anyone expect something like Ronald Reagan’s eulogy at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier a decade after the tragic Vietnam War…
“But he could have at least been straight with us. Instead of speaking to a nation in pain, President Biden made this speech all about himself. He dodged and weaved, blamed others, and even claimed our evacuation from Afghanistan was a great success, while most everyone else saw it as an unmitigated disaster…
“We needed our president to rise above the petty politics of Washington’s ‘swamp’ and speak directly to the men and women who fought and bled in Afghanistan, to the Gold Star families whose loved ones gave their lives, and to the world bracing for what will come next in Afghanistan and the region. We needed him to reassure us that their sacrifices were not in vain… President Biden may not have intended to, but his remarks personified the failures of 20 years of the war in Afghanistan. Our leaders made mistakes that cost people their lives, but those leaders were never held accountable.”
K.T. McFarland, Fox News
“Most dishonest—and dangerous—was the President’s assertion that ‘the war in Afghanistan is now over.’ No one in the jihadist movement believes that. The Taliban have won a major victory in the long war that Islamic radicals are waging against the U.S. They have secured Afghanistan for what is likely again to become a refuge for recruits for al Qaeda, ISIS-K and the Haqqani network…
“Mr. Biden wants Americans to believe that the U.S. can counter this from ‘over the horizon,’ by which he means drones and satellites. But now the U.S. has no military in the country, and no CIA listening post in Khost. It has no friendly government or allies to locate and gather intelligence on terror camps. The U.S. has all of those assets to counter terrorists in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Every expert we know says Mr. Biden’s claims of easy over-the-horizon capability are a fantasy.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“We agree with the difficult, essential decision to end this war… The U.S. was legally obliged to withdraw under the February 2020 deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban. Moreover, an earlier evacuation would have only accelerated the collapse of the Afghan government. War, sadly, is messy…
“Are we fearful of another catastrophic terrorist attack — like the suicide bombing that ISIS-K, an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, launched last week outside the Kabul airport? Of course. But we agree with what Biden said Tuesday: ‘The best path to guard our safety and our security lies in a tough, unforgiving, targeted, precise strategy that goes after terror where it is today, not where it was two decades ago.’”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
“Biden seems to be embracing a belief now shared across ideological lines: America’s international role has been an exercise in overreach. For more than a decade, in fact, this has been a more powerful current than the foreign-policy establishment might like to admit. This message was one of the less-appreciated strengths of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 (muddied though it was by a heavy dose of nativism)… But in making this argument, Biden left a larger question unanswered: what are we to do about the immense global military machine that remains very much in place?…
“The United States has a military budget of some $700 billion a year, supported by a web of multibillion-dollar procurement contracts that turn members of Congress into enthusiastic lobbyists for weapons that do not work and drain the treasury. We have 800 bases in dozens of nations around the world. Our spending, on armed conflicts and more generally on preserving this empire, staggers the imagination…
“After three-quarters of a century, and tragic misadventures from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, I wonder if Biden’s speech today, with its clear caution that we cannot remake the world based on our illusions, may be the start of a larger debate about the U.S. military — a debate this country has never really had but is long overdue.”
Jeff Greenfield, Politico
An Afghan perspective
“I worked on USAID-funded projects to support and observe Afghanistan’s electoral process for nearly three years. I am now employed by an international nonprofit. My former employer submitted the paperwork for my special immigrant visa and then for the P-2 visa program, for Afghans who worked for American contractors, nonprofits and news outlets. A U.S. lawmaker wrote a letter urging that I be granted immediate access to the airport and put on a flight…
“I waited and hoped to be put on a flight list. The call never came. I heard stories of people with no documents or improper documents making it onto planes. The erratic and mismanaged evacuation was disappointing and heartbreaking for me and many other Afghans who served in the toughest conditions with their U.S. partners… When the last U.S. plane left Afghanistan, celebratory Taliban gunfire rang out through the night in Kabul. The sound told me that all hope was lost.”
Rasheed, New York Times
Stunning midair dog photographs.
Moss And Fog
