Afghanistan Blows Up Because Biden Blows It

This could have been prevented by the President of the United States simply doing nothing.

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There have been multiple bombings in Kabul. There was clear intelligence that an attack was in the works. Overnight, the State Department and Pentagon began telling people to evacuate the area. Many people did not get out of the area because they knew they would not be able to get back, so they stayed. Yesterday, a suicide bomber exploded a bomb at the airport, and then a subsequent bomb exploded at a hotel where Americans were being held up pending evacuation. This is not a good situation.

The U.S. military is shutting the airport gates and the casualty numbers are growing. There will not be a last-minute evacuation now. It appears the White House is saying that the vice-president has been briefed on the situation in Kabul. The President was in the situation room meeting with his advisors as the situation was unfolding. The top story at Politico after the attack was “GOP faces hurdles in push to make Afghanistan matter in midterms.” Yeah, that's the top story a short time ago.

Here's what's going on here. Let me bring you all up to speed. This is ISIS, not the Taliban. ISIS has already taken credit for the explosion. What you need to understand, your key takeaway here needs to be that ISIS is an enemy of the Taliban and the United States. The Taliban would very much like for us to leave Afghanistan and never come back. ISIS wants to kill everyone. Everyone is an infidel to ISIS, including the Taliban. ISIS wants to fight the Taliban for Afghanistan, but they can't wait.

Now the problem with the narrative to some degree, what complicates it is, how did ISIS get into Afghanistan? Many of them were there already and in prison. The Taliban released them from prison when they took over. The Taliban opened the prisons and allowed out even ISIS. Now ISIS is killing us as the Taliban is trying very hard to get us out. This is the problem that we're dealing with. It becomes more and more complicated the closer we get to August 31st, the deadline for us to evacuate the premises. It makes it harder for us to evacuate the premises when the people cannot get to the gates of the airport to get through to us.

Delta Airlines, among others, is operating charter flights out of Afghanistan, trying to get as many people out. Multiple flights out of Afghanistan from various airlines have been nearly empty because the American personnel on the ground are not clearing people to get on the planes, nor are the Taliban allowing people out. So this bellyaching over two members of Congress going into Afghanistan and then leaving Afghanistan in the middle of the night, sight unseen, no one knew they were there until they got home and said what was going on, is nonsense. The complaint is that they deprived people of seats on the planes. One, they used jump seats in the cockpits, and two, no, they didn't because a lot of these planes are leaving empty.

The state department will still not acknowledge the number of people who are evacuating from Afghanistan, and they're setting some dangerous standards. Here's Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State.

Antony Blinken:
We're taking every precaution, but this is very high risk. As the president said yesterday, we're on track to complete our mission by August 31st, provided the Taliban continue to cooperate and there are no disruptions to this effort.

Well, there are disruptions to the effort and now Nora O'Donnell on CBS has interviewed a stop diplomat from the state department about this. Listen to this very carefully.

Norah O'Donnell:
The question has been raised, why didn't the U.S. get out Americans and our Afghani friends before the Taliban were able to take control of Kabul? You warned about this in a cable. Were you ignored?

State Department:
We put out repeated warnings every three weeks to American going back to, I think, March or April, each one in stronger terms. Leave now, leave immediately. Never in my 40 years of working ... since I began working at the state department, have I seen such strong language used. People chose not to leave. That's their business. That's their right. We regret now that many may find themselves in a position that they would rather not be in.

Notice how they're blaming the Americans. Let me put it in greater perspective what happened here. The American State Department was advising individuals to leave Afghanistan and at the same time was sending out cables saying, “don't come to the airport. It's not safe, shelter in place.” In fact, for the last month has been doing that repeatedly, saying, “you need to get out. By the way, don't come to the airport or go anywhere, shelter in place. We'll come to get you.” And now they're saying they can't go get them. They are talking out of both sides of their mouth.

Also, had the Biden administration done a better job, it would have been preventable. That's the most important thing to note here, is that so much of this could have been prevented because all Joe Biden had to do was nothing. All he had to do was nothing. In fact, H.R. McMaster was on CNN earlier today. They were essentially asking him to call out Donald Trump and blame Donald Trump. And what H.R. McMaster said was, in fact, no one bound the Biden administration to this. No one required the Biden administration to maintain what Donald Trump did.

CNN:
As you know, it was President Trump who negotiated with the Taliban, frankly, but also agreed to a withdrawal date of May 1st this year. Were President Biden's hands tied by that agreement?

H.R. McMaster:
No.

CNN:
Or could he simply have reversed it?

H.R. McMaster:
Now, it goes back to that. I'm telling you, that was not the original sin. That was one of the many sins here, was the capitulation agreement of February 2020, negotiated by Zal Khalilzad, who was still representing the United States after all of these humiliations. How was that the case, Jim? Right? I mean, the Biden administration reversed a lot of Trump policies. They could have reversed this. I don't believe that the president's hands were tied. And you know what? They're not tied now. Why not withdraw Zal Khalilzad immediately? Why not make it clear to the Taliban that if there's another attack like this, or if you interrupt our evacuations efforts, that there will be severe costs and maybe you'd be willing to impose those costs? I mean, it's a question of will, Jim, really. And of course, as we go further down this path, your options get fewer and fewer. And especially, if the mission is just to get out, what do you really expect our military and our diplomats on the ground to do?

That's H.R. McMaster. He was the national security advisor to Donald Trump. And he points out that one of the sins here was Donald Trump wanting to get out by May 1st, but that Joe Biden was not bound by that. He decided to not only double down but also to leave the country at a time when all of his advisors said not to leave. This is the problem here. This is where we have this. This is the President of the United States, the logical consequence of his actions and the logical consequence of his actions. That's the unfortunate thing.

Multiple people are dead now at the airport in Kabul and the State Department says there are American casualties. The original report is that American military personnel were injured, not dead. Now the State Department is saying there are American and foreign casualties, military and civilian casualties. This all could have been prevented merely by the President of the United States doing nothing. That's the craziest thing, doing nothing.

The pictures that are coming out of Afghanistan, they're actually too awful to look at, parts of bodies all over the ground. This is where we are. This is our crisis. Joe Biden made it. Surely you can't think that this is a good thing. And the Democrats, they've hit on a strategy here. Essentially, the strategy is to say that the media is doing it. It's the media's fault. No one would be upset with this, except the way the media is covering it. It's simply not true. Here's CNN's own national security analyst.

CNN Anchor:
So Peter, given what we've already heard from U.S. officials about the threat from ISIS-K, and their desire to create mayhem in the airport, does a warning like this surprise you?

Security Analyst:
Not really. This is a hostage crisis of the Biden administration's own making, where on the one side, you have the date of the older study first, and now you have this credible threat of violence, which could be from ISIS-K. But we can't also discount Qaeda, which has a presence in 19 of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, according to the UN. The UN is also reporting that on several months, thousands of foreign fighters have poured in to support the Taliban or Al Qaeda. ISIS-K has the ability to strike at will and Kabul. It bombed a girl's school, dozens of kids died in May. So, unfortunately, it's not a surprise there are other groups that would love to carry out an attack that would embarrass the United States and also kill Americans.

Just to reiterate, ISIS has claimed responsibility for this attack. ISIS has claimed it, not Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, but ISIS. All of this is just sadly, preventable. It's only going to get worse before August 31st. The sad, logical conclusion of this, that even members of the press are pointing out is that this really does mean August 31st is it. Help will not be on the way to Americans left behind who sheltered in place because the American government told them to stay put. The State Department said “we will come get you” and they never did.