Biden Sends 3,000 Troops, Offers Taliban Bribes, As Afghanistan Disaster Looms
Biden Sends 3,000 Troops, Offers Taliban Bribes, As Afghanistan Disaster Looms
Biden tried to negotiate with Islamic terrorists. He’s shocked they didn’t keep their word.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Joe Biden claimed in July.
He denied an intelligence assessment that the Afghan government would fall in six months.
The current intelligence assessment is that the Taliban may take Afghanistan by September 11.
Biden has been reduced to bribing the Taliban with foreign aid in exchange for a promise not to attack the United States embassy in Kabul. The proposal to fund terrorists is criminally treasonous and since the ranks of the Taliban include any number of Jihadis, and their old Al Qaeda allies have a presence in Afghanistan, that’s setting up our diplomats to be killed.
Obama had his Benghazi, Biden is trying to have his own Saigon in dusty old Kabul.
After Biden announced the withdrawal, the Taliban swiftly began sweeping up territory, first the rural areas and then provincial capitals. There is no point in listing the numbers because by the time you read this the Taliban will hold more territory than they did when this was written.
When Biden announced with great fanfare that the United States was withdrawing, there were 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite falsely claiming that there was a complete withdrawal, he left behind 650 soldiers to provide security for American diplomats in Kabul.
Now 3,000 soldiers are heading back to Afghanistan to help evacuate Americans.
Another 3,500 soldiers will be on standby in case the situation continues to worsen.
Biden is sending more soldiers back to Afghanistan than he withdrew to begin with.
When are those soldiers going to leave? Good question. The Pentagon spokesman refused to to “speculate” whether the 3,000 soldiers sent to Afghanistan will leave in time for Biden’s original August 31 withdrawal deadline that the incompetent leader had reaffirmed last month.
“This is not a case where we have been caught flat-footed,” State Department spokesman Ned Price insisted.
When you claim that it’s “highly unlikely” that the Taliban will take over a country and announce you’re withdrawing 1,900 troops only to then send back 3,000, that’s the definition of being caught flat-footed. But Biden and his allies will never admit to having been completely wrong.
In July, military sources were telling the media that “the withdrawal is over, for all intents and purposes.”
By August, B-52 bombers and AC-130 Spectre gunships were rushed into action, operating out of Qatar to try and protect Kandahar and Herat. Despite those efforts, Herat and Kandahar have fallen to the Taliban. The odds that remote over-the-horizon airpower will be enough to protect Kabul from falling doesn’t look good. A Pentagon spokesman described a “rapidly deteriorating security situation in and around Kabul” which suggests that a collapse may be rapidly coming.
The only question is whether Americans can get out in time.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,.” Biden predicted, denying that Kabul would turn into another Saigon. If his track record is anything to go on, that means it’ll happen.
And indeed the military is mobilizing a significantly larger airlift to get Americans out of Kabul.
Meanwhile, Biden handed the keys to Kabul Airport over to Turkey’s Islamist government in exchange for concessions, financial, military, and diplomatic still to be negotiated. Turkey is an Islamic terrorist state, despite being a member of NATO, and is already blackmailing America.
Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist tyrant, has announced that he wants a meeting with the Taliban.
There are thousands of Americans in Kabul. Among them are 1,400 American diplomatic workers. The Pentagon wants them out while the State Department is dragging its heels.
The Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach efforts to the Taliban have consisted of trying to bribe them with promises of foreign aid if they leave the embassy alone. That’s a swift collapse in Biden’s negotiating position from trying to bribe the Taliban to join the Afghan government to bribing them not to kill Americans. And just like in Libya and Iran, bribing Jihadists doesn’t work.
“The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community,” Jen Psaki, Biden’s spokeswoman, pleaded.
The Taliban have made their assessment a long time ago. Their international community is the Ummah of the Jihad that unites Muslim terrorists across the world in building a Caliphate that will conquer the world. Urging the Taliban to follow international law in exchange for foreign aid will work no better for Joe Biden than it did for Bill Clinton. And if Biden leaves Americans behind in Kabul, their blood will be on his hands, the way the blood of the men who died in Benghazi was on Obama’s manicured palms.
Mark Frerichs, a Navy vet, who had been working in Afghanistan, is already being held hostage by the Haqqani Network: an Islamic terrorist group interlinked with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
If Americans are left behind to the mercy of the Taliban, he will become one of many hostages.
Biden already has Carter’s economy. Now he also has Carter’s foreign policy. Let’s hope that fewer American hostages are captured by Islamic terrorists on his watch than on Carter’s.
Biden continues dismissing the scope of the crisis. “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability,” he blathered at a press conference. The Taliban have taken more territory faster than the NVA.
They may not have the same military capabilities, but Biden clearly underestimated them.
Much as Obama underestimated ISIS by insisting that they were a jayvee team even as they were capturing cities. The Taliban are clearly not a jayvee team. The jayvee team is in the White House running our foreign policy and asking the Taliban if they’ll play nice in exchange for cash.
When asked if Afghanistan was about to fall to the Taliban, Kamala Harris said she needed to be briefed before she could answer the question. That’s the jayvee administration in a nutshell.
Faced with imminent disaster, the Biden administration has gone back to what it knows.
Blaming President Trump.
After initially doing a victory dance over the withdrawal, Biden’s people began disavowing the move and blaming it on the Trump administration. State Department spokesman Ned Price complained about, “the deal that we inherited.” As if any deal with terrorists actually mattered.
While the Biden administration tries to strike a deal with the Taliban, its withdrawal has collapsed. Sending thousands of troops back to Afghanistan was never part of the plan.
The Taliban now have captured American military equipment, including artillery. They’re closing in on the thousands of Americans and $9.5 billion in international reserves still in the country.
The United States should have left Afghanistan a long time ago, but not in this disastrous fashion. Instead of departing from a position of strength, we’re leaving in a rout.
The Biden administration bet everything on diplomatic outreach to the Taliban and continues to be surprised that Islamic terrorists don’t negotiate in good faith and don’t keep their word.
“What we’re seeing is levels of violence that are of grave concern. They’re certainly not within the spirit of the U.S.-Taliban agreement. But we know that diplomacy is the only way that we are ever going to achieve a durable solution,” State Department spokesman Ned Price whimpered.
Diplomacy with terrorists doesn’t work. The Taliban are not interested in joining Psaki’s international community. They will tell infidels any lie that they need to get rid of them.
A serious administration would never have negotiated with Islamic terrorists. It would have launched a straight military operation to leave Afghanistan while inflicting enough damage on the Taliban on our way out to warn them off from interfering with our withdrawal.
Civilians should have been evacuated first followed by the military. Instead, Biden evacuated the military first as a photo-op, and now has to send them back in to evacuate the civilians.
The Biden administration tried to lead with diplomacy and then had to pivot back to the military at the last minute anyway. What could have been a departure conducted with a show of strength has become another humiliating disaster in the legacy of appeasement disasters from Carter to Clinton to Obama and to Biden. The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.
Despite Biden’s denials, the Taliban are on track to take Afghanistan.
Biden’s efforts to negotiate with the Taliban have put American lives at risk. The administration and its media operatives will blame the Trump administration and the military for its failures.
Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously said that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
As a new decade gets underway, the ‘wrongest’ man in foreign policy is now in charge.
Last month, Biden claimed that a Taliban takeover was “highly unlikely.” Now it appears likely that the Taliban will commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 by taking over Afghanistan.
And Joe Biden may get his own Saigon.