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Lara Logan Gets It Right in “Sacrificing Afghanistan”, aired Sunday, 8/22/21

Lara Logan interviews Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh in “Sacrificing Afghanistan” on Fox News.

Below is guest Lara Logan on Fox Business from Friday, 8/19/21.

This is my review of the current scene in light of her insights:

Yes, we are horribly, horribly governed, and have been for quite some time. 2016 brought in the orange man and his wretched rhetoric of “forever wars”, while getting some things right. I’ll give him that. But the guy wanted out, trying to peremptorily get out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan as if by doing so, we’ll cure the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. 2020 brought us a mentally incontinent and doddering fool, beholden to the powerful and growing neo-Marxist wing of the Democratic Party. The only real difference on Afghanistan between the two administrations is the difference between a smoother and impulsive bugout. The big, big question, heartily avoided, is the one over the wisdom of a pull out in the first place, no matter how conducted.

To be clear, I don’t get my cues on issues from celebrities on Fox News or talk radio. Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham chanting a common line matter not a twit to me when it sounds like so much nonsense.

And nonsense is everywhere in today’s political cauldron. The reason is obvious: our political discussion is dominated by cultists. Chirping hackneyed lines like “forever wars” or “respect of the world community”, they bring catastrophes in tow. We are experiencing it now, and will in the future in grotesque episodes when scenes from Kabul fade from the news cycle.

Cultists are famous for denying reality in the service of an imaginary one. For instance, the Democratic Party’s neo-Marxist cult has embarked on a great smear job of the country: it’s systemically racist. It’s easy to bug out of Afghanistan if you believe the country is evil, love and reciprocity lie in the heart of fanatical jihadists, and the revolution at home is far more important. At root, that’s how we get to the abandonment of Bagram Air Base and our Afghan allies in the middle of the night and the chaos begins to pour down on Kabul and the rest of the country.

The Trump cult has its own dispiriting lunacies. Cultists wanted a personality, not policies, and got one in the bravado and bombast of the man from Mara Lago. As long as he remained in your face, he was loved by a zealous following to the ends of the earth. So, the loaded jargon of “forever wars” filtered from his microphone to the broadcast studio and became a mysteriously accepted doctrine.

His appointees, having to translate his rhetorical burps into policy, engineered the Doha Agreement (Feb. 2020). Now, they’re trying to clean the fingerprints from the established policy in paper by hitting the airwaves to say, “We were tough”. Tough about what? Agreeing to get out, which was the great prize for the jihadists while fully disheartening to our Afghan allies? The scenes of Pompeo hobnobbing with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, speak volumes. It, like Biden’s horrendously precipitous skedaddle, shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

Combine Logan’s program with Levin’s on Sunday night and we get a fuller picture of the debacle. Levin interviewed Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan. He insists that there’s enough blame to lap on everyone involved, including the Europeans. Kemp justly reserves special contempt for Biden: Biden’s behavior is deserving of a court martial. But he also rebuts the rubbish coming out of the mouths of telegenic anchors and hosts from one end of the spectrum to the next. He has great respect for the Afghans, for many fought bravely until air and logistical support vanished in the abrupt surrender of Bagram upon, amazingly, the insistence of the Taliban according to Logan

Discussion between Mark Levin (l) and Colonel Richard Kemp on Levin’s show.

Kemp’s dire warnings about the future clearly draw into question the more fundamental insistence of pulling out to begin with. The damage to America’s reputation will reverberate on America’s global allies as they seek cover under less hospitable umbrellas. Now, chew on that for awhile.

RogerG

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A Butt-Protection Exercise

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Now that Afghanistan is collapsing into what it was before – a terrorist Disneyland – the administration responsible for the bugout is in hiding like the thousands of Americans stuck in Kabul, and the people from the previous one are all over the airwaves in a butt-protection exercise. The question before the house isn’t only the wisdom of Biden’s wholesale surrender and run for the hills. It’s also about all that led to the bugout, including the sanity of any kind of pullout, smooth or otherwise. Everyone from Trump’s hawking of the rhetoric of “never-ending wars” in 2015-20 to Biden and his abrupt skedaddle should be in the dock for cross-examination. Admittedly, Biden and his people should be under the most scrutiny, but save some for Trump.

Look, I voted for Trump twice because the Democrats are too despicable, and in the hope that his worst bombast could be mitigated to get the big things right. He did right on borders, taxes, judges, energy, and ending the careers of al-Baghdadi and Soleimani. But troubling signs were in the air. The infantile abuse heaped on John McCain in 2015 (“I like people that weren’t captured.”), who was tortured in the Hanoi Hilton as Trump was busy filling out deferments, was absolutely repugnant, and a sign of things to come.

John McCain spent 5 and a half years in Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton”. Here he is with a broken arm being examined by a prison medic.

As it turned out, the “never-ending wars” lingo wasn’t empty political rhetoric for the man from Mara Lago. He wanted to bug out of Syria and turn over the north to Erdoğan’s Turkey so they could rebuild the Ottoman Empire, only to be dissuaded by people with a better grasp on reality. He was chomping at the bit to jump ship on Afghanistan, only to be held back by the adults in the room once again. The guy seemed to be hell-bent on rebuilding an 18th-century fortress America, a time when it took a month after the Battle of New Orleans (fought Jan. 8, 1815) to deliver notice of the signing of the Peace of Ghent ending the war (signed Dec. 24, 1814). Pan-Am and underwater cables ended the era of defense starting at the edge of the continental shelf. Not so in Trump’s stunted mind.

Au contraire, Tucker Carlson, “oceans matter” . . . only in the 18th century. In an age of satellites, fiber-optics, vibrant international trade and travel, and when a missile only requires a booster, oceans only carry a warning not to swim alone across one. Heck, oceans haven’t even inhibited the flood of migrants from the rest of the continents at a time when our southern border is an open sieve.

Butt-protection is the order of the day when a Biblical calamity is taking shape in the land that time forgot. Biden and his people only further soil themselves every time they come out of hiding. Trump and his people show up in friendly venues to hawk the line, “It wasn’t us. We would have conducted a better bugout”.

For instance, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday, 8/20. I listened to the whole thing. It was pure butt-protection.

He made assurances that Trump threatened the Taliban if they broke the Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 2020), which might have worked since no American soldier had been killed since early 2020. That just means that the hooligans were biding their time waiting for the American skedaddle. It’s what all scheming thugs do when the good guys agree to abandon the field on date certain. They wait for the date certain, plan and stockpile arms in the meantime, and then pounce. Doha wasn’t about leaving behind a country absent the terrorist Disneyland. It was about getting us out, period. It was the announcement that we were reverting back to 9/10.

The throw away line of leaving behind a residual force upon leaving office wasn’t particularly reassuring. Remember, the deadline concerned getting everyone out – granted, with our equipment and civilians in tow. The Taliban should be good with that. They’ll be free to hobnob around in parts of the country under their control, maybe the whole country, with their Al-Qaeda friends after date certain to terrorize girls, boys, women who wear makeup, and eventually get around to killing the bountiful infidels beyond their borders.

Pompeo in the interview made many utterances on the untrustworthiness of the Taliban so much so that threats of slaughtering the villages of Taliban leaders if they broke the agreement were thought necessary. Question: If they were that dishonest, why were you negotiating with them in the first place? Answer: Trump wanted us out. Doha was recklessness on paper.

In that, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, and H.R. McMaster agree. It was recklessness on paper. In an age before the mean tweets and the hawking of isolationism, these people were considered wise on the right. Then came the pop jargon of “neo-con” as a pejorative by Mick Jagger, Donald J. Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. If you’re wondering, here’s a sample from Jagger’s “Sweet Neo-Con”:

“You call your­self a Chris­t­ian, I call you a hyp­ocrite/ You call your­self a pa­triot. Well, I think your [sic] are full of sh*t!… How come you’re so wrong, my sweet neo-con.”

I wonder if Carlson and Ingraham downloaded the tune with excitable, trembling fingers.

All the stipulations in the Doha Agreement are meaningless if the gangsters can’t be trusted and are simply waiting to pounce. Conditions like the Taliban reaching agreement with the Afghan government and promises to prevent ISIS and Al-Qaeda from taking root in the country would be worthless. Remember, today’s catastrophe hadn’t happened yet and Trump clearly wanted out at the time. Today’s after-the-fact assurances by Trump, Pompeo, et al, of toughness ring hollow. It sounds like so much of a butt-protection exercise.

Others warned Trump at the time of Doha. UN ambassador Nikki Haley resigned during the negotiations saying, “Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.” Lisa Curtis, former national Security adviser who sat alongside our envoy Zalmay Khalilzad during the negotiations said, “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban.” During negotiations, Trump frequently called for troop pullouts. That’s right, get your deadly foe to agree by disarming yourself. That won’t end well.

Bolton and McMaster are scathing in their indictment of Trump, and rightly so. McMaster: “Our secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” Bolton: “Had Trump been re-elected, he’d be doing the same thing. On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”

Bolton (l) and McMaster

Drop the lefty jargon of neo-con-as-pejorative. It gets us nowhere because political rhetoric is no substitute for sound policy. A real America First strategy realizes that some of our enemies don’t wear uniforms and are hell-bent on killing us, all of us. The killers don’t reside here, but can, plan and coordinate mass-casualty operations in safe redoubts in countries that we abandoned, are well-stocked with weapons that we abandoned to them, and now no one is safe. We’re back to 9/10. Thank you, Biden . . . and Trump.

RogerG

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Our Punditry Is Just as Bad as Our Ruling Class

CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)
MSNBC anchors
Fox News anchors

Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.

First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.

Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.

Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.

Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.

If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.

A chilling final image of Mihdhar and fellow hijacker Majed Moqed, captured on a surveillance camera at Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport the morning of September 11th. (© 2009 WGBH Educational Foundation)

After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.

Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.

All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.

Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.

In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.

Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.

The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.

Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.

If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.

Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.

How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?

RogerG

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We Are Horribly Governed

Hot in the news is the flight from Afghanistan – not flight as in air travel but as in skedaddle. It’s so bad that only explanatory expletives do it justice. Simply put, we apparently have some of the world’s worst blank slates running the show in DC. In addition to the botch taking place in Afghanistan, this group of mediocrities is attempting to strangle the country in perpetual mutilation of life with unending COVID-variants as the excuse. It’s insane.

As we watch in real time the bungle in Kabul, Biden goes out Wednesday before cameras to announce threats to governors for refusing to countenance the suffocation of children behind masks. Vaccine ID papers are beginning to be required everywhere. Businesses not big enough to function in a warehouse (Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.), that haven’t already gone defunct, will be pushed over the edge this time around. Terms of employment are being rewritten to conform to the hysteria. So, our “best and brightest” from the White House to the Pentagon to the CDC abandon us to the fate of psychotic killers in Kabul while those of us still at home face an existence that is beginning to resemble life under the jackboot in the waning days of the Soviet Union or the CCP’s hyper-surveillance state.

UC San Francisco researcher conducts COVID testing as part of neighborhood-wide testing and vaccination program in San Francisco.

The lunacy of the approach to the virus was apparent early on. We dither over fatalities rates – whether 1% or 1.5% – and transmissibility R factors and completely miss the obvious: bugs evolve because they will always find a host to incubate despite your best efforts at perfection, as in perfect compliance with the demands of our overseers. It’s impossible with 330 million people . . . and counting since our borders are open sieves. Variants bust out and off we go into the world of sci-fi fantasy.

The thing that transpires before your eyes as you walk outside in many locales is Franz Kafka’s imagination made real.

Scene from Orwell’s 1984: the Two minutes of Hate.

The rescue plan from this Kafkaesque existence was mistakenly based on a vaccine. Now it’s coming to light that the jabs have a shelf life of only six months. The booster becomes the next front in the campaign for coerced compliance. Of course, this will only be true till the next edition of the bug erupts. And it’s back to what didn’t work before. Remember the definition of insanity?

When will we grow up and realize that some periods require more perseverance than others? At a certain point, life must go on. Mitigate wherever practical, develop and utilize therapeutics, and balance the mitigations with the acknowledgement that humans can’t be stopped from being human. Safety-obsession leads to a life not worth living.

From Biden’s brain to Fauci’s and Gen. Mark Milley’s mouths, incompetence rules. How many times can a great country continue to take body blows and still stand? Our allies are running from us as fast as our citizens are running from our “experts”. Amazing, absolutely amazing, that things have come to this pass.

Pres. Biden, Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Gen. Mark Milley

Just think, a majority voted for this. This is popularly-elected incompetence.

RogerG

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A Bi-Partisan Bugout

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and major Taliban leaders in Doha.

Larry Elder said it best: “We have forever wars because we have forever enemies.” The aphorism is lost on many talking heads and politicians across the political spectrum, including Biden and . . . Trump.

Last night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The Fox News primetime lineup were all in for a bugout. The only difference them and Biden on the abandonment of Afghanistan is the pace. They wanted a scheduled bugout and Biden carried out a precipitous one. Lost in all the barking was something Elder quickly understood. Our forever enemies hate us, want to extinguish us, and are in it for the long haul to construct a worldwide caliphate. The belief is central to their identity. Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders have repeatedly said, even during the negotiations,

“One day mujahedeen will have victory and Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”

They won’t be satisfied till we are like them in burqas, beards, prayer rugs, sandals, and the 8th century. I was so disgusted that I flipped to the Smithsonian Channel.

Let’s clear away some deadwood to logic. One is the chimera of the Taliban and A-Qaeda as distinct entities. They aren’t for practical and operational purposes. One 2020 UN report put it succinctly:

“Relations between the Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network, and Al-Qaida remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage. The Taliban regularly consulted with Al-Qaida during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honour their historical ties.”

I’m not a fan of much that comes out of Turtle Bay, but this got it right, probably because it’s too well known in intelligence circles to refute. Think of Al-Qaeda as the Taliban’s Quds Force (of Islamic Republic of Iran fame, and once headed by Soleimani, now dead, thank God).

That’s who the Trump people were negotiating with. Many of the people sitting across the table from Trump’s negotiators in 2018 to 2020 were Al-Qaeda under the Taliban flag, which was well known throughout. Many of our adversaries wear two hats than can be switched with a flick of the wrist.

Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, August 13, 2021.

Good faith gestures in negotiations with people who want to kill, convert, and replace you is the height of folly. Leading up to the Trump/Taliban/Al-Qaeda “peace” agreement in Doha on February 29, 2020, was an officially-sanctioned jailbreak of 5,000 Taliban/Al-Qaeda prisoners. All returned to the fight to kill Americans and friendly Afghans. Two examples among many should suffice. The Taliban commander of Helmand province, Mawlavi Talib, was one of those set free. Even worse, the Taliban head, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was in custody for years in Pakistan till Trump asked for his “good faith” release in a bribe to the Taliban to let us bugout. Today, word is that Baradar is residing in Kabul’s presidential palace.

Mawlavi Talib (center) in Kabul, August 15, 2021? I can’t tell.

Trump consummated the diplomatic abortion, and Biden carried it out precipitously and with gusto. Despicable, absolutely despicable.

Most despicable was the collective amnesia over the real reasons for the 2001 invasion. It wasn’t only as our incontinent president put it yesterday when he limited the justification to removing the Taliban from power and the killing of Osama bin-Laden. Preemption was on the lips of officialdom in DC in the heady days after 9/11. Preemption means to forestall this from happening again: take over the rats’ nest, clear it out, and continually hunt down those foolish enough to be later recruited to kill Americans. Like them, we have to be in it for the long haul, something not well understood by our last two presidents, if not the last three if the myopic Obama is included.

So, we’ve come to this pass. The Taliban/Al-Qaeda are back in the seat of power, ready to continue their bloody evangelism. India, Taiwan, our allies, the signers of the Abraham accords, and Israel must be wondering if they’re going to be the next victim of an American bugout. The goatherders-with-a-cause will be emboldened, and get fresh video for recruitment of the next generation of suicidal killers.

Thank you, Biden . . . with Trump as your enabler.

RogerG

*Thanks to the reporting of Jim Geraghty and Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review.

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The Great Bugout

Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moves down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug.16. 2021. Thousands of Afghans have rushed onto the tarmac at the airport, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto the American military jet as it took off and plunged to death. (Verified UGC via AP)

Kabul has fallen. President Biden followed in the footsteps of his mentor, President Obama, in abandoning a fight. Obama did it to the Iraqis and we got ISIS; Biden repeated the ignominy and we’ll get a reinvigorated Taliban/Al-Qaeda. Expect a return of the 1990’s: the near sinking of the USS Cole, the bombing of our Kenya and Tanzania embassies, and escalations to grander slaughters.

Damage from the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden harbor, Oct. 2000.
Scene from the 1998 bombing of US embassy in Nairobi

Both parties were at fault in stirring the pot against “forever wars”. Trump tried to implement a bugout in Syria and had been laying the rhetorical groundwork for the same in Afghanistan. But at least he was amenable to common sense and could be dissuaded from the worst of his instincts. Not so with Biden.

Biden’s “gut instincts” seduced him to turn his back on what was already a light footprint. Clearly by 2018, US forces were reduced to a level that resembled the overthrow of the Taliban: reliance on indigenous forces, CIA operatives, special forces, and US air power. The 100,000 troop levels ended over a decade ago. Biden decided even that wasn’t enough. The bugout was fully on.

A member of the Taliban stands outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 16, 2021. (Stringer/Reuters)

The parallels with the 1975 Fall of Saigon are tempting. But the worst parallel is the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform who suffered so much for an ignominious ending like this. They were brave, and abandoned by politicians childishly patronizing crowds who had gotten used to thinking of wars ending like World War II.

Our light footprint could have worked, not at nation-building, heaven forbid, but at killing the thugs who would turn jet airliners into missiles. Intelligence gathering, a base in the country and a few in the surrounding region, special forces scurrying around the country at a moment’s notice, and tactical and strategic killing of the ringleaders and their henchmen would have worked. Israel’s Mossad pointed the way. But no, Biden forsook that possibility for a bugout.

The vaunted pivot to Asia and the China threat will now be diluted by worries over Pashtun tribesmen infiltrating a Lollapalooza or college student union to blow it up. Today, our future just became darker.

RogerG