Afghanistan

The West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the country’s subsequent fall to the Taliban, has brought the number of refugees the UK should take back to the forefront of the political conversation. It is eerily familiar: many of the same ideas were being advanced by many of the same people in 2015 at the height of the Syria crisis.

Earlier this year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali did an interview with UnHerd in which she predicted exactly this, and warned about not making the same mistakes again.

While Sleepy-Time Joe recuperates from the hard work of not getting lost on the White House lawn (Camp David is so peaceful this time of year), the vultures are circling.

The America which flexed its muscles under Reagan and Trump is now prostrate.

The Taliban, Mexican cartels, OPEC, city savages – the sky is full of carrion birds. Signs of weakness always bring them out. With Biden, America might as well be wearing a kick-me sign on its back.

Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan has been the worst managed event in American history.  With Saigon as an example, the administration knew exactly how bad it would be.  There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on now, but, at bottom, people are wondering if the unconditional Taliban takeover, including the trapped Americans, is a deliberate policy.  On Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday show, Lara Logan said, “Yes, it is.  This was what the government wanted.”

When the cash-strapped Soviet Union stopped providing military support to its client government in Afghanistan in February 1989, U.S. intelligence officials predicted immediate demise for the Russian-backed Afghan regime.

They were wrong.

“Weeks passed and then more weeks. [Soviet-backed leader Mohammad] Najibullah, his cabinet, and his army held firm. Amid heavy snows, the Afghan military pushed out a new defensive ring around the capital, holding the mujahedin farther at bay,” author Steve Coll wrote in “Ghost Wars,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning history on Afghanistan in the 1980s and ’90s. “As March approached, the Afghan regime showed no fissures.”

There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now: Failure must be punished.

The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon. Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out. Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.

It’s remarkable how quickly liberals abandoned the women of Afghanistan.

Back in April, The Nation magazine told readers that the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan would be “a welcome and long-overdue action.” The essay, by a scholar named Phyllis Bennis, sounded upbeat, even salubrious. It was the liberal case in full: We Americans were a wretched people to have gone there and a depraved people to have stayed for two decades. Some collateral damage upon our retreat was to be expected. We had spent too much time, she suggests, celebrating “the important but tiny gains in human rights won by the small sliver of women living in the cities, while the 75 percent of Afghan women who live in isolated villages and rural areas continue to face the highest level of infant mortality in the world.”

America and it’s allies forgot the lessons of WW II, whether the emperor worshipping Japanese or our modern day Islamists the only solution is to kill them all if need be. 

The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration’s catastrophic decision to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

One of the most notable achievements of the US-led coalition’s presence in Afghanistan during the past two decades has been its relentless campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Islamist terror groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation.

In the years immediately following the September 11th attacks in 2001, American and other intelligence agencies estimated that around 80 percent of Islamist-inspired terror plots against the West originated from Afghanistan or the lawless tribal territories on the Pakistani border.

Afghanistan was a sinkhole for blood and treasure, getting out was long overdue. But bombs and drones work, get serious about Islam and they’ll have a change of heart, screw the collateral damage, act up and every scrap of infrastructure is gone, mass death from above can change minds. Domestically – deport whole families of terrorists.