Biden Couldn’t Have Screwed Up the Afghan Exit More If He’d Tried

By Derek Hunter

Is there any issue on which Joe Biden and his team of left-wing advisors have been right? You’d think, if only by accident, they’d get something right, after all, a stopped clock is right twice a day. But you’d be wrong. The economy, COVID, the border…considering they’ve been on nearly every side of all these issues, the odds of them not getting anything right by default seems impossible. Yet they have achieved the impossible. And nothing exemplifies this like the absolute mess the Biden administration has created in Afghanistan. 

Right now, as you read this, people are being brutalized in a country where just last week they were safe. They weren’t safe because there were no threats against them and their liberty, they were safe because the United States military was there to protect them. Women were free to engage in life by working and going to school, pre-teen girls were not under threat of being stolen away into sex slavery. Now, none of that is true. It didn’t have to be this way and it’s all the fault of Joe Biden.

I’ve been a fan of the concept war in Afghanistan, it was completely justified when it started, but the execution was terrible. But we should have gone in there with no holds barred on the military and the orders to kill every al Qaeda and Taliban fighter they came across, no matter where they were hiding or what they were hiding behind. A fully unchained U.S. military with a singular mission could have killed the vast majority of those monsters in a few weeks.

But the Bush administration made the fatal mistake of embedding reporters with the troops, thinking they could both win a war and a PR battle at the same time. You can’t. The PR battle, as always happens, became more important – bad stories at home could mean bad polls – and the military focus shifted from killing the enemy to nation building.

We should have left Afghanistan after six weeks, after killing as many terrorists as possible and leaving them to rot in the mountains. Whatever came next for the country was not our concern. It’s never been a stable part of the world, why we thought we could bring stability to people who’ve never known or wanted it (if they did, they could have created it) is the arrogance of the west’s thinking everyone wants to be free. Most of the world has no concept of freedom, especially as we know it. They just want to be left alone by outside influences; to herd goats the way they always have.

As odd as it is to say, the Taliban will leave these people alone a lot more than we did. Their girls won’t be able to go to school, and may be dragged off into marriage, but if that really bothered the majority of the men in Afghanistan they would have fought the Taliban’s return. They didn’t, which means they don’t give a damn. So why should we?

The only surprising part of the fall of Afghanistan is the speed at which it happened. Just last month, Biden was assuring the public that it not only wouldn’t happen fast, but that it wouldn’t happen at all. He assured us we hadn’t wasted 20 years and a trillion dollars, that we’d trained 300,000 troops who would defend their country. That was a lie.

Either the President of the United States lied to the American people, or his advisors lied to him. If it was the intelligence community, people need to be fired, publicly and quickly. If Biden knew better and lied, well, expect someone else to be blamed and fired, publicly and quickly.

How can you tell this administration knows the Afghanistan failure is theirs? By the speed with which their various appendages are scrambling to find someone else to blame. 

Former President Donald Trump is, of course, the favorite target, with leftists pathetically taking an 18 second clip from a speech and trying to spin it to protect Joe.

Washington Post bridge troll Jennifer Rubin blamed anyone who thought 20 years was more than enough time to be at war. 

The takes were flying hot and fast, as happens in desperation. But the worst, and dumbest, falls to pundit Tom Nichols. Nichols became famous for being broken by Trump, one of the early victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome. His TDS is still raging, manifesting itself in the attack on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. 

Retweeting a photograph of Noem at the Sturgis motorcycle festival riding a horse while flying the American flag, Nichols said, “How does something like Kabul happen? It happens when you are no longer a serious country - when you cannot even deal with a pandemic and you think this nitwit waving a flag is a great idea. This is not a public that will engage in reasoned debate about the future of Afghanistan.”

If only everyone could be as smart as he…

Unlike Biden, who’d spent days in hiding before finally giving an empty speech, Nichols spent the next 24 hours trying to defend himself. “Somewhere, someone is mad about my Kristi Noem take, and probably writing a Twitchy story about it, because MAGA world is whining,” he said. He then followed it up with a piece in The Atlantic blaming everyone. “Biden owns the messy retreat - which will be case study in policy screw-ups (sic) for years to come - but who made the decision to pull out of Afghanistan? We did. And whether it was a good or bad idea, that's on us,” he tweeted.

Shifting from casual misogyny against Noem to group guilt for the failed leadership of a senile old man, Nichols won the “stupid of the week” on its first day. 

Meanwhile, the people of Afghanistan lost everything. They lost it so quickly and thoroughly that you have to wonder if they ever really wanted to win in the first place. If they did, the Biden administration didn’t care. If they didn’t, the Biden administration did everything they could to give them what they wanted.

And the real losers, the people who will never be given a chance thanks to Biden’s indifference, are the thousands of people who worked with the United States while we were there (they’ll be hunted to extinction by the end of the year), and every girl in the country. Biden likes to claim he wrote the Violence Against Women Act, yet his indifference toward the women of Afghanistan caused what is likely the greatest act of mass violence against women in history. 

There were a million different and better ways to leave Afghanistan, none of which were utilized by the Biden administration. He’d have to care, or be aware of what is happening, for that to have happened.