The consensus was that the Afghan Security Forces and the Afghan Government would not collapse in 11 days. This is what President Joe Biden said earlier in the afternoon on the day these words are written, Friday, August 20, 2021.
Either this is true or it is not. It cannot be both and it cannot be a little bit of each. It is either all one, or all the other.
But before we get to whether it is true or false, how is it an excuse for delayed response to the need to evacuate?
I hesitated a long time before I wrote this column. I do not want to give ammunition to those who seek to do harm to the Biden Administration. The Biden Administration is a breath of fresh air after the former guy. Before now, they have shown an ability to pull rabbits out of a hat, they have been so successful in my judgment.
So what explains this apparent failure to get people out of harm's way? We are not talking about 11 days. We are talking about three, four, or five months.
Not acting during that time is only part of the problem.
- We have reports about the Department of State sending EMails to people in Afghanistan telling them to show up at the Kabul airport, but after these people risk life and limb to get to the airport passing through territory and checkpoints controlled by the Taliban, no-one is at the airport who will let them in and they are turned away.
- Update And a Repeat: President Biden told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News "that chaos was in fact always inevitable." If this was known, why then was it not planned for?
- We have other reports of French and British military and police units rescuing their nationals by going out beyond the airport perimeter, finding the people, and successfully bringing them back to the airport to be evacuated. What is stopping the American military from doing the same thing?
- Update: The Pentagon reported that the United States military does not have the capacity to extract people from downtown Kabul like the French and the British. This report may have been meant as a distraction for security purposes. See the Update immediately below.
- Update: U.S. helicopters under the command of various agencies including the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency are operating like the French and the British to travel to downtown Kabul and to other parts of Afghanistan, piek up evacuees, and return to the Kabel airport for eventual evacuation.
- Worst of all, perhaps, we have reports of concerned private citizens in the U.S. contacting sources, raising money, and chartering aircraft to get their Afghan friends and former colleagues out of Afghanistan. Their conduct is inspirational, but why do they have to do it?
- Doesn't the U.S. Government know how to evacuate people?
- By rights, shouldn't it be the one to do them? What is "American exceptionalism" all about, if not that?
If it is true that the consensus was that the Afghan Security Forces and the Afghan Government would not "collapse" so soon: How was this the consensus view in the face of the facts?
- FACT: The U.S.-built and U.S.-funded Afghan Government was incurably corrupt. Few Afghans, and I mean very few, were willing to die for it.
- FACT: The U.S.-funded and U.S.-equipped Afghan Security Forces -- army, air force, and police -- were mostly unwilling to fight and die for the Afghan Government. Some units were special. In the end, they were nowhere near enough to stop the Taliban takeover.
- FACT: Reports are clear that there were rumors and hard evidence available that local officials and local commanders were cutting their own private deals with the Taliban. The deals were that the Taliban would not kill them, and the local officials and commanders would not fight the Taliban. With many rumors and a lot of hard evidence, why did the "consensus" fail to reflect them? And why did the Administration fail to learn the truth?
If it is false that the consensus was that the Afghan Security Forces and the Afghan Government would not "collapse" so soon: Why then would the U.S. Government be pretending otherwise?
Why, indeed?
- Update: Unnamed "aides" of President Biden reportedly echo his view that Americans do not care about what is happening to people in the Taliban chaos of Afghanistan, so long as Americans are not the ones being injured and killed. Well, of course they do. They obviously do not know how to handle the current situation. All they know is what they call "the bigger picture." By that they mean the old, discredited failure of so-called "Centrists" who are more arrogant than competent, more failure than flexible. If they were boxers -- a thought which makes many of them shudder -- they would be caught flat-footed. They do not know how to get out of the way.
PHOTOS: 1. Afghans with Afghan flag face Taliban fighters with guns in Kabul. (Victor J. Blue / New York Times).
2. (Jim Huyelbroek/New York Times).
Updated to reflect recent developments.
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