Afghanistan

Escondido, California “I will fight till my last breath to get the truth,” said Coral Briseño, the mother of Humberto Sanchez, who was killed in Afghanistan during the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal. Her son told her that if he didn’t come back, he wanted her to tell his story.  Briseño and her fellow Gold Star family members had their first opportunity to address the nation in a hearing that was aired live on Fox News — but completely absent from CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS.  The field hearing marked the first time the group of parents addressed the public as one. The chaotic exit from Kabul, marred by suicide bombings and people falling off of planes, was praised by everyone from the president to his top military brass as historically successful.

The Biden administration is using every tool at its disposal to paint a rosy picture of Afghanistan as a terrorist-free state as the two-year anniversary of its disastrous withdrawal approaches. But a coalition of Afghan generals, diplomats and civil servants is writing to Congress to explain that in reality, “today’s Afghanistan under the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies, is again the greatest terrorist safe haven in the world.

I almost feel sorry for John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman tasked with tidying up after the icky messes deposited about the landscape by Joe Biden.  Let me emphasize the adverb “almost.” Kirby’s job is unenviable. Basically he has to lie and pretend that his boss and that excruciating, illiterate muppet of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, make sense. It’s always a horrible goulash that Kirby has to contend with. He has my sympathy for that.  But yesterday, when Kirby stood before the press to answer questions about the administration’s report on Ameirca’s humiliating flight from Afghanistan in August 2021, his performance was not just cringe-making. It was infuriating.

David Beasely, head of the UN’s World Food Program, has said that 350 million people are at risk of hunger and 50 million are “knocking at famine’s door.” Cockburn sees this as a serious humanitarian issue, which is why he is also concerned about the UN’s growing messaging problem. For years, the UN has raised the alarm about impending famines, but in most cases — either because of its efforts or other factors — such catastrophes have not yet come to pass. This is excellent news, and speaks to the skill and dedication of aid workers both in the UN and beyond — but it also risks creating the false impression of crying wolf. Since the US withdrew in 2021, Afghanistan has been in a dire state.

Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. So is Ukraine. And so are we. Imagine the good guys win tomorrow. What exactly will we have won? Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe even before the war. Afterward it will remain as dependent on American dollars as it is now — and on American arms. Russia will not have disappeared, after all. The last war-torn and impoverished country that required open-ended American support was Afghanistan. Yet all the weapons and funds we lavished on Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani failed to keep the Taliban at bay after we left. The money also didn’t help with Afghanistan’s corruption problem. Will it help with Ukraine’s? In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine second only to Russia as the most corrupt country in Europe.

By now, the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is etched into history as a failure — one that punctured the Biden administration’s self-professed persona as a collective of calm and cool national security veterans. The Taliban’s rapid capture of the entire country, coinciding with the meltdown of the US-funded Afghan security forces and the awful optics of desperate Afghans trying to get on a flight out of Kabul, will be examined by historians for decades. The history-writing is already well underway. On February 17, the GOP-held House of Representatives sent letters to several government departments demanding any and all records related to the withdrawal.

The GOP’s foreign policy doves and soft isolationists have grown stronger, with 40 percent of “Republican and Republican-leaning independents” saying the US is giving too much aid to Ukraine. Former president Donald Trump has now taken up the mantle of this movement, firmly anchoring himself to the anti-Ukraine aid faction of the party. Trump recently gave an interview to radio host Hugh Hewitt in which he made one thing clear: he’s no fan of aiding Ukraine. Asked about sending F-16s, Trump said, “I think the United States should negotiate peace between these two countries, and I don’t think they should be sending very much.” When Hewitt asked if the former president would cut aid to Kyiv, Trump responded, “we’ve got to make peace.

What is Joe Biden's foreign policy? It's a trick question, because he has no actual policy, no plan, no careful set of chess moves a step ahead of his adversary. America suffers for it. Biden's foreign policy initially began and ended in Afghanistan with the disastrous withdrawal that left refugees strewn across the globe. There were years, then months, then weeks, then days to plan the NEO — the noncombatant evacuation order — and plenty of planning books for one sitting on desks in places like Seoul.