Regarding Afghanistan
Why assign to incompetence what may more readily be explained as malevolence?
Bear in mind, the folks now in charge have long believed America needs knocking down a peg or two. From the Obama apology tour onward, the Democrat left has actively treated the employment of American power as the cause of problems on the foreign stage, rhetorically placing a black hat on our forces and white hats on the sworn enemies of humanity.
Which is more believable? That the United States military has grown as weak and helpless as kittens, or their political leaders (and politicized officers) have decided, embarrassing the United States is just what is needed to bring about "equity" among nations?
What if a few (or even a few hundred) military personnel lose their lives? They know what they signed up for.
What if American civilians are lost? Well, they likely all worked for some sort of defense contractor, and we all know those types are just mercenaries collecting blood money, right?
What about the soon-to-be tens of thousands of Afghans who will be put to death by the Taliban for the crime of consorting with Americans?
Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, can you?
This entire, sorry, tragic episode isn't incompetence. No one is that irretrievably stupid, much less the number of them who would have to have abandoned intelligence entirely to create such a dramatically humiliating scenario as is unfolding on television screens world-wide.
And there is the operative word... humiliating. Precisely what the left has long suggested as the just desserts of the hegemonic United States. Humiliation.
This is intentional and unforgivable.
In warfare, (or even simple deployments) long-standing rules apply to retreat, withdrawal, or redeployment. If it’s not possible to bring equipment with you, it is to be destroyed, rendered unusable by the enemy.
If the equipment is of technological or intelligence significance, the equipment will be destroyed, or those responsible for the equipment will die trying.
Some equipment left behind was intended for the use of the Afghan National Army, including an as-yet unknown number of aircraft. However, the ANA has fled its positions in the face of organized Taliban incursions, which brings up an additional “epic fail” on the part of this administration. More on that in a moment.
Some abandoned hardware may be reverse engineered by an enemy. Computer systems utilized for a panoply of functions – from fire-control systems to intelligence and communications, can be compromised and reconstituted by an enemy, enabling them to identify and exploit weaknesses in our technology.
There is absolutely no reason for a large-scale abandonment of everything as has occurred in Afghanistan. If troops on the ground lack capacity to destroy the materiel, air power can be employed to do so.
If the remaining equipment belongs to the ANA, as suggested by the White House, why has it not been deployed in defense of the provincial capitals that have been falling like dominoes before the onslaught of the Taliban? Moreover, why did the United States cease meaningful air support operations on behalf of the ANA well before the pullout?
In mid-July, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated we would provide “over-the-horizon” air support for the ANA, however the abandonment of airbases in country has ensured providing close air support on a fluid battlefield will be next to impossible, as aircraft will have to transit between ships in the Gulf and the mission site, a distance too great to be described as rapid reaction.
Consequently, the Afghan forces, trained to operate with close air support, soon found themselves in the equivalent of a brawl, unable to deter swelling Taliban forces from reinforcing the attacking vanguard. They faced a battle of attrition with no hope of resupply. Many surrendered or fled.
Equipment was left in country by choice, not by necessity.
Human assets are no different. I can recall no other instance when the United States evacuated military personnel before American civilians, until now. Again, a choice, not a necessity.
I mentioned the rapid advances of the Taliban earlier. Yet another clue to this debacle being the product of design, not incompetence, is the utter failure of the intelligence community to detect the war preparations of the Taliban.
Or, if they did detect it (which I suspect, given our technology, is a certainty) their alerts fell on deaf ears in the administration, which appears to have been pursuing an insane negotiation effort with the Taliban themselves.
The administration’s policy appears to have hinged on the Taliban keeping their word to not molest our personnel (civilian and military) during our pullout. I cannot honestly identify the worst aspect to this – that our leadership would trust serial beheaders and sex slavers to adhere to an agreement, or that they had no prepared contingency in the event they did not.
This is not a withdrawal, this is a reckoning, orchestrated by those America-hating elements pulling the strings of this puppet administration.
They're humiliating the nation they believe to have been "mis-founded." They believe they are teaching us a lesson about foreign adventurism, imperialism and “wars for oil,” as they describe ANY military interaction with a Muslim nation.
As a withdrawal, this is an unmitigated disaster. As a reckoning for America’s perceived past sins, it’s going swimmingly. That it occurs so close to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, is nothing short of an incomparable gift to those in this world who wish to see America driven to her knees.