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| Twin Towers post 9/11 |
There are few things worse than generals pretending to be presidents. President Harry Truman fired one of these, General Douglas MacArthur, in 1951. Generals in the Pentagon have since taken the lesson and learned to defer. In the postmodern period, the danger comes from presidents pretending to be generals and generals conniving at the pretense.
That is what happened when President Joe Biden closed Bagram
Airfield, also known as Bagram Air Base, the largest U.S. military base in
Afghanistan, in order to meet a self-imposed withdrawal deadline of American
troops from Afghanistan by August 31. The depleted military, their attentions
diverted elsewhere, also left behind billions of dollars’ worth of
sophisticated hardware and, if one any longer is to believe figures issued by
the White House, 100-200 American citizens and thousands of Afghanis Biden
pledged not to leave behind in the grip of Taliban terrorists.
Some critics say the unnecessary deadline, red-penned by
Taliban terrorists, whose relations in the past with ISIS terrorists has been
cordial, should not have been announced until Biden had reinforced the military
with additional troops and used Bagram to ferry out of Afghanistan first
American citizens, second anyone in Afghanistan who had helped Americans to
keep the peace for more than twenty years, third the billions of dollars in
military equipment Biden was forced by thoughtless planning to deed to Taliban
terrorists, and lastly American military
troops.
Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted, and sweat beads are
beginning to form on the foreheads of national and state Democrats. Among the
Republicans loyal opposition, moderate Democrats and unaffiliateds, there is
some chatter that the Truman option should be deployed against any general in
the Pentagon who had advised Biden to do what he so obstinately did.
Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy, are less interested in affixing blame for Biden’s poorly executed
withdrawal from Afghanistan than in smoothing the rough edges of the messy mop-up
operation.
It seems that Taliban terrorists are expected to assist
Biden in rescuing former friends of Americans in Afghanistan from, well,
Taliban terrorists. Friendly eyes and ears on the ground in Afghanistan, post
pull-out, have been waylaid and incapacitated by the Taliban and Biden’s
subservient bows in their direction.
This is the second time Afghanis have witnessed a takeover
of Kabul by the Taliban. In the Pashto language, “Taliban” means “student”. In September 1996, the Taliban “killed the
country’s president,” according to The Counter Terrorism Guide, “and established the Islamic Emirate
of Afghanistan. The Taliban’s first move was to institute a strict
interpretation of Quranic instruction and jurisprudence. In practice, this
meant often merciless policies on the treatment of women, political opponents
of any type, and religious minorities.”
In the absence of reliable on the ground intelligence, neither
Biden nor Pentagon generals can know how many Americans have been left behind
the Taliban cordon at Kabul Airport, now in the hands of the terrorists, along
with much of Afghanistan. Of this number we cannot know how many hapless
Americans or American helpmates during the now concluded “war in Afghanistan”
have freely
chosen to remain in the country among terrorists, Islamic purists, and their ISIS
comrades who in the past have been very unfriendly and rude towards Americans
and their helpmates. One imagines Americans caught in the Taliban trap and
Afghans unfriendly to the Taliban, all of them on the ground students of recent
history, would not willingly or freely expose themselves to the
Pashto religious intolerance of the recently reinstated Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan.
The new Emirate of Afghanistan is the old Emirate of
Afghanistan, a pan-national Islamic gang that includes Pashtun Sunnis in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and other places in an area of the world where salafists,
deemed heroes and martyrs of the faith, suicide vests strapped to their chests,
blow up Parisian restaurants and heretical newspaper offices – not to mention the
Pentagon and the twin towers in New York City.
The United States has had an active presence in Afghanistan longer
than 20 years. US attention was first drawn to Afghanistan in 1980, more than
40 years ago, when Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, having failed to quell armed
dissent, invaded the country during the Carter administration. The Soviet
invasion lasted 10 years. An attempt to suppress armed dissent and to install a
communist puppet regime in the country finally failed when the US began arming
the Taliban opposition.
“In their wake,” according to a brief account of the US
entré into the Afghan maelstrom authored by the Department of State Office of the Historian,
“ the Soviets left a shattered country in which the Taliban, an Islamic
fundamentalist group, seized control, later providing Osama bin
Laden with a training base from which to launch terrorist operations
worldwide.”
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s answer to the Soviet’s Leonid
Brezhnev, is now having the last laugh on the United States, and he who laughs
last laughs best.
Biden’s faltering presidency returns the postmodern world
back to 1980, and there is no cleaning up his mess. The only question worth
asking now is – when will Islamic fundamentalist terror resume?
Sooner, Murphy and Blumenthal should assume, rather than
later.
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