As you are certainly aware, Afghanistan is falling apart. In the past few days several district capitals have fallen, hundreds of Afghan troops have surrendered, sometimes without a fight, and now even the capital is being threatened. It is a major crisis and one that does not seem to being handled well by Joe Biden.
Indeed, Joe Biden is on vacation this weekend. He traveled to Camp David with his wife, Jill Biden. He will be there all weekend and there is little indication that Biden will be working on the problem at all. Though I know that a President's vacation bears little resemblance to a normal person's vacation the optics here is terrible.
Some would argue that there is little left to be done in Afghanistan and I would disagree. Right now we need to evacuate our people from the country and make sure our embassy gets protected and then evacuated. Right now Biden got that process rolling but is no longer monitoring it directly. This is not a good outcome given how many of our troops he has put into the country to try and save and evacuate the embassy.
Right now I am worried that the capital of Kabul will fall before those troops even get there. The Taliban advance has been stunning and I have seen no indication that the remaining Afghan troops have any will to fight. Today the "gateway to Kabul", Qalat fell and the Taliban now control 18 provincial capitals, in just eight days. At this pace Kabul could be isolated by this weekend and may even fall before the weekend is up. That puts the lives of the embassy personal and the soldiers defending it in extreme danger.
With this being the situation, I think it's terrible that Biden is taking a vacation. He should be in Washington DC to helm this situation and at least be giving media briefs on what is going on. Instead he took a vacation with his tails between his legs. It's like the fall of Afghanistan is not even happening for Biden. It's a disaster in terms of optics as people will always remember that when Kabul fell Biden was hiding.
And yes, Biden owns Afghanistan, as much as he would like to blame President Trump, it's on Biden for mishandling the withdrawal. As I have said many times now if he had kept his word with the Taliban the offensive would not have happened as soon as it did and it may have even bought enough time for some kind of peace deal to be made. Now though? The Taliban are going to win and we are getting embarrassed globally.
Finally, I have to say that Biden risks a repeat of the Iraq withdrawal. In that war we pulled out troops but because of the absolute quagmire that was Syria, ISIS arose and we had to bring our troops back to defeat them or risk having Iraq fall yet again. This time the fall is already happening and everyone is afraid that ISIS or al-Qaeda could make a comeback in Afghanistan as well. There is no love lost between the Taliban and ISIS but their links to al-Qaeda are deep and important. We could end up with another 9/11 eventually as Biden has done nothing to ensure that the Taliban won't let al-Qaeda reestablish itself in Afghanistan...
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