Widespread anger has broken out against the Biden administration as it becomes clear that thousands of American citizens and Afghan allies will be left behind during the evacuation of Afghanistan. NBC News. Biden has agreed to abide by the Taliban's August 31st deadline for US troop withdrawal. Without US presence further evacuations will be impossible without the Taliban. This has caused massive outrage in the intel community who feel they have an obligation to get their assets out. However, at this point little can be done. US troops are in a vulnerable position at the Kabul airport as they are surrounded by Taliban fighters and would likely not be able to fight their way out. Evacuations are expected to slow by Friday to give the military enough time to withdraw.
My Comment:
This is without a doubt the biggest foreign policy disaster since 9/11. Thousands of Americans will be left behind. America has a week to evacuate them but not even that as they have said that evacuations will be reduced after Friday. So instead we only have three days. That isn't anywhere near enough time to get everyone out in Kabul that needs to leave.
Of course the elephant in the room is the fact that thousands of Americans aren't even in Kabul. The fast pace of the advance of the Taliban cut a lot of people off who were in the other cities. Those people have no way to evacuate and will not be able to reach the Kabul airport in time even if the Taliban let them leave.
What happens to these folks if they are left behind? I think the Afghans who worked with America are probably dead. The Taliban have been holding back a bit but they have been killing a few people who worked with the United States. The rest of those people are only alive because the Taliban are trying to play nice. Once the international community withdraws I am guessing they will be killing almost all of those people.
What about the Americans and other foreign nationals? That's the big question. I don't think anyone knows, perhaps not even that Taliban. If they want to they can probably kill these people with immunity and there isn't much the Biden administration could do about it. Hell, I am not sure that the Biden administration will admit that a large number of people are being left behind. The hope is that the Taliban will let these people leave or at least take them as hostages. But there is no guarantee whatsoever.
I do think that Biden is in more serious trouble than he or anyone else seems to realize. President Trump proved what happens to Presidents who anger the intelligence community. They undermined his presidency from day one and fed the media with a steady stream of leaks and lies that did great damage to his agenda.
But Biden has gone far beyond what President Trump did. Trump just disagreed with them and tried to reverse some policies. Biden has done much more than that. Not only did he essentially end the war in Afghanistan, an intel community priority, he did it in a way that utterly embarrassed the intel community. He's made the entire region go dark in terms of intel gathering and I don't doubt that the CIA and defense community are furious that we are leaving a lot of interpreters and other assets behind.
I think it was Chuck Schumer that said that the intel community has a million and a half ways to get back at you and I think Biden will find that out soon. If he is lucky he will just face the kind of crap that President Trump had to deal with, leaks, lies and so on and so forth. If he's not lucky? I probably shouldn't say...
But even if the intel community doesn't punish Biden for his failures, I think the US voter will. I don't think Biden is going to run for a 2nd term but there is the 2022 midterms. Though it is kind of far away, I do think voters will remember the scenes of people getting evacuated from the embassy and Afghanis falling off of planes. But if things go really bad then I can't see the Democrats winning in 2022. And that could mean that Republicans could get enough votes to impeach him.
I really do think that there should be a reckoning here. Though Afghanistan would have probably fallen to the Taliban eventually, it didn't have to end like this. We could have begun evacuations as soon as the Taliban offensive began. And if Biden had just kept to the timetable that President Trump had made with the Taliban we would be out of there now, with very few people left behind. It was never going to be easy but it didn't have to be like this...
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