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| Blumenthal Sworn In By Biden |
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, we learn from a piece in the Washington Examiner, is furious at his chief.
“Sen. Richard Blumenthal,” the paper reports, “took aim at
the White House and State Department on Monday, saying he is ‘furious’ over
struggles to secure planes to evacuate a group of Americans and Afghan allies
from Afghanistan.”
And here is the money quote, carefully authored, one can be
sure, by some member of his staff who has learned to be furious on cue: “’I
have been deeply frustrated, even furious, at our government’s delay and
inaction,’ Blumenthal, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said. ‘I expect the White House and State Department to do
everything in their power, absolutely everything, to make this happen. These
are American citizens and Afghans who risked everything for our country. We
cannot leave them behind.’”
In fact, we have left them behind and do not
know, at this point, their precise numbers, who they are, or how exactly the
Biden administration is prepared to get them out of a country now entirely
controlled by the Taliban, whose chief, a bit more persistent than Biden, is Sirajuddin
Haqqani, a leader of the Haqqani network and now the Taliban’s acting interior
minister. Haqqani was once a resident in an American holding pen for terrorists
in Cuba, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
Blumenthal’s frustration, it would appear, is just
beginning.
In addition to being frustrated and furious, Blumenthal
reminds us that he is also worried. And his worry accounts for his silence: “I haven’t yet spoken publicly about these efforts because we
worried that heightened attention would only escalate tensions and put these
people at even greater risk of being targeted.”
No intrepid Connecticut reporter has yet asked Blumenthal
whether his new found courage in speaking out now will put the sequestered
victims of the Taliban and the Haqqani network in further jeopardy. The
prisoners of the Taliban are, after all, still behind enemy lines, and there is
some indication in Blumenthal’s justifiable fury that he still considers brutes
like Haqquani and the Taliban to be enemies.
Unfortunately, there also is some indication that the Biden
administration, putting aside 20 years of frustrated opposition to the Taliban
by the U.S. government, seems now fully prepared to begin diplomatic relations
with the new Emirate of Afghanistan, which may demand some sort of tribute – a
payment Islam often demands of those they have conquered as a sign of
submission -- before the terrorists begin releasing their prisoners, thus
allaying Blumenthal’s fury and worry.
Among its traditional allies – France, Great Britain, Spain,
Canada, etc. – the United States has lost face. Trust has received a black eye,
and core Western countries also find it nearly impossible to extract its
citizens from Talibanland. China, on the other hand, has gained face – and, according
to recent accounts, Bagram
Air Force Base. And Afghanistan’s last Jew, Zebulon
Simentov, has left the country, Blumenthal, who is Jewish, may be
relieved to know.
The extraction problems have been with us for some time.
Last week, Texas Republican U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw disclosed that “after
securing a charter flight to evacuate a group, including American citizens,
lawful permanent residents, and Special Immigrant Visa holders, the State
Department pulled the clearance for the charter plane due to the ISIS-K bombing
that killed 13 service members at the Kabul airport. They also had trouble
getting the State Department to help coordinate overflight rights from Saudi
Arabia and coordination to land in Jordan.”
A frustrated Blumenthal, who also has been attempting to
wrest Americans and others from the jaws of the Taliban, commented, “There will
be plenty of time to seek accountability for the inexcusable bureaucratic red
tape that stranded so many of our Afghan allies. For now, my singular focus
remains getting these planes in the air and safely to our air base in Doha,
where they have already been cleared to land.”
Time, writes T.S.
Eliot in his poem, The
Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, “there will be time/ To prepare a
face to meet the faces that you meet;/ There will be time to murder and create,/And
time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your
plate…/ Time for you and time for me,/And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And
for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea/.
Time, which always erodes a lucid memory, is the best friend
of certain kinds of politicians. But one senses that time will run out on the
Afghanistan drama sooner rather than later – perhaps before the taking of a
toast and tea by incumbent politicians on election eve, many of whom will by
that time be haunted by indecisions, visions and revisions.
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