Is The Honeymoon Over Yet?

Biden in Afghanistan

It is painful to put the matter in such blunt terms, but the United States has lost Afghanistan to the Taliban, and no amount of lipstick on the pig can change the nature of the loss.

Good, some may respond, 20 years rolling the rock up Noshaq, the second highest point in the whole of the Hindu Kush Ranges, elevation 24,580 feet, only to see it roll down again, is enough.  Prometheus’ shoulders are sore. He is bone weary.

In a White House statement on Afghanistan, President Joe Biden, attempting to plaster the pig with misleading rhetoric, put it this way: “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me. “

While Vice President in the Barack Obama administration, Biden had born patiently the “endless American presence” in Afghanistan. He and the Obama administration winked at the assassination of Libya’s intolerable dictator, the eccentric Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, hunted down by the hound dogs of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton chuckled.

Unlike the Taliban, Gaddafi appeared to have been cooperating with American demands before he … er… died. Considerable collateral damage followed. Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, was murdered in a subsequent assault on the American Embassy and compound in Benghazi, pretty much wiping the smile from Clinton’s face. Asserting at the time the attack was the result of a “spontaneous demonstration,” Clinton later shed a tear over the tortured corpse of Obama’s personal representative in Libya.

The U.S. military has been present in Korea since 1948 -- 73 years, without causing heartburn to Biden, though the 15 bases in South Korea must gall the present administration.

“When I came to office,” Biden wrote after his so called “exit plan” had flopped, “I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor [emphasis mine] — in which he [Trump] invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

The default excuse for any and every embarrassing mistake made by Biden during his protracted honeymoon with a largely uncritical American media is -- Trump made me do it.

Trump made Biden open American’s southern border to border jumpers; Trump made Biden lard his transportation initiative with millions in what used to be called, during the bad old days of Tammany Hall, “walking around money,” tax money used indirectly to purchase votes; Trump made Biden support a socialist inflation producing Bernie Sanders budget; Trump made Biden shut down a Canada-American pipe line that would assure environmentally safe passage into the United States of relatively low cost energy; Trump made Biden support an end to an electoral college that, since revolutionary times, had provided equitable representation in the halls of Congress for both large and small population centers; Trump  made Biden propose Supreme Court packing.

Every political reversal executed by Biden during his unending honeymoon with a media that has forgotten its mission has been heaped on the Trump scapegoat – including the dramatic failure of Biden’s Commander-in-Chief responsibilities that has led to an inescapable doom scenario in Afghanistan.

Concerning the putative “deal” struck between Trump and the Taliban, it should be noted that a preliminary agreement setting the terms of a final deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government is very different than a concluded peace arrangement.

“Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in,” The Associated Press reported recently. “It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.”

The “deal” was a fruitful negotiation the resolution of which remained unresolved after Trump had left office. The purpose of the condition-based negotiation was to pressure the government of Afghanistan into a power sharing arrangement with the Taliban. That negotiation, never completed, was inherited by the Biden administration as a condition based effort that could be repudiated or enhanced by the incoming Biden administration.

Some European leaders are cackling with laughter at the Biden fiasco in Afghanistan. Biden must be held responsible for the decisions Biden makes.

We know from countless examples furnished by history what happens when one party in a military struggle prematurely announces, incorrectly, that he has lost the struggle and proceeds to negotiate surrender terms with the victor.

All Biden's chess pieces, in the absence of a resumption of hostilities, have now been swept from the board.

Is Biden's long uninterrupted honeymoon over yet? And why on earth haven't Blumenthal or Murphy or the five other members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, all Democrats, been grilled, as they should be, by Connecticut's media?