Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
It takes a lot for the editorial board of a major liberal paper to shred you. As a Democrat, you have to have screwed up royally. For Joe Biden, his chaotic and utterly shameful Afghanistan exit was just something that not even The Washington Post could defend. We’re out now. America’s longest war in Afghanistan is over. The last planes left yesterday. After two decades of war, we replaced the Taliban with…the Taliban. The national army we helped train collapsed in less than two weeks. The government we propped up evaporated in the same timeframe. A lot of lies were sold to us and we’ll get to the bottom of those, but now Biden has to contend with the fact that he left Americans behind. He left key Afghans and their families behind. The number of folks we promised to get out has soared into the thousands. This is a “moral disaster,” and the publication did no hold back ripping the Biden administration for strategic and tactical missteps that created this catastrophe. Oh, and they’re not impressed with the Biden team’s ‘we’ve conducted the most awesome and bestest airlift ever ’talking point either (via WaPo) [emphasis mine]:
Enormous as it is, the number of people evacuated by air from Kabul since the end of July — about 122,000 — is not large enough. Thankfully, many thousands of American citizens, third-country nationals and Afghans who worked directly for U.S. and allied military forces or embassies made it out. But many thousands of people did not, including former U.S. interpreters and their families, and Afghans classified by President Biden and his administration as “vulnerable” — such as staff for U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations and women’s rights activists. As security worsened in the wake of a horrific terrorist attack at the airport last Thursday, and as U.S. troops prepared for their own departure on Monday, time and space ran out for these people. This is a moral disaster, one attributable not to the actions of military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul — who have been courageous and professional, in the face of deadly dangers — but to mistakes, strategic and tactical, by Mr. Biden and his administration.Oh, and they go on about the abandonment of those at the American University in Kabul. At least 600 students and other personnel tried to get to the airport before the US left. They were turned away—and the Taliban has a list of all their names. The Biden White House is not just trusting the Taliban to keep their word on not harming these folks, but also to create an inclusive government and—get this—conduct counterterror operations. Is this a joke? Their core philosophy is not inclusive at all. Women’s rights are dead. And they’re hanging people from the Black Hawk helicopters we left behind. We’re told we have leverage to ensure the safe passage of those left behind. I very much doubt that especially from Antony Blinken, our secretary of state, who is a deer in the headlights. Biden is also disengaged, aloof. He met with Gold Star families. It did not go well. He bristled at one father of a dead US Marine. He’s going through the motions because he wants to move past this, and he can’t. We have dead American troops. Our exit was a disaster. We still have Americans stranded and as Afghanistan becomes more unstable, and it will since the Taliban is about to fight a civil war of their own in a throwback to their time in power in the mid-1990s—there’s no way we can get all our people out. Joe doesn’t care. He never did. And he has an unhealthy animosity towards the military. Oh, I know about Beau. The man has used his dead son as a shield, those days are over. Biden hates the brass, the military, and seems angrier at the fact that Afghanistan is something he now must deal with daily instead of COVID and the economy.