I’d like to tell you that what’s been happening recently equates to the Taliban quickly raising a fist in our direction and our military leaders bracing in fear, but what happened was actually worse than that. What really happened is that our leader told our troops to pick up their things and run as quickly as possible while leaving everything from tanks to personnel behind in their haste.
Now, we’re suffering from the results of an insanely mismanaged military by leaders whose approach to dealing with terrorists looks less like “please don’t hit me” and more like “harder, daddy.” It’s to the point where the Taliban are ordering the US around, and preemptively denying us what we want. We could have a President that laughs off the demands of a terrorist group, but we don’t. We have one that likes to pretend everything is fine as his underlings talk about what the terrorist group wants to look like to the international community.
As I’ve said before, they’ve already made that decision. The conclusion they came to was “terrorist.”
(READ: Jen Psaki Confirms That Democrats Don’t Understand Terrorism or What Classifies as a Terrorist)
We seem to be choosing to be bullied at this rate. Our military’s leadership seems to be more concerned about how it looks than how it operates. Injections of woke ideological nonsense and promotions of self-centered politics when attempting to recruit was our first warning that our military was about to go from being the biggest wolf with the sharpest teeth to the pomeranian with a cute cut and a bowtie in its hair.
As I wrote when those ads came out, the military is not a space for identity politics and leftist agenda pushing. It’s the thing that’s keeping you alive in a world where people with the means and the will would love nothing more than to subjugate you and eradicate your freedoms until they’re little more than fairy tales told to children in the dark.
As Kurt Schlichter wrote on the situation on the ground, the way this is being handled is so amateur that Americans look incompetent and soft to boot. We have so many tools and methods to deal the kind of death that would make the four horsemen blush, yet none of it is being utilized:
You look at the Kabul airport and you got the riflemen – great ones – but is there artillery (that’s a key killing system)? How are they doing air support since some genius gave away the local airfield that we could fly fighters out of? How are we doing intelligence with our intel guys gone? My guess – I don’t know – is that some guy from a three-letter agency rode outside with a duffel of cash, found whatever Taliban warlord controlled the area around the airport, and bought some time. Fair enough – cash can be a weapon system – but it would be nice to have a 155 mm howitzer and A-10-based Plan B in case he or a rival decides to renegotiate the deal.
What we saw on TV were 3K troops coming in, then 5K, then 6K. That’s a lot of troops, and a big logistics footprint for an airport. There seemed to be no plan, just reaction. One wonders if here’s any plan for getting them out – there should have been a plan before they got in; we can only hope that there’s a planning cell scribbling away on one right now. But I am not confident, not in the civilian leadership or that of the military.
America is flinching because the Biden administration made us a nation that flinches. He wanted it because he wanted to look like a mature, peace-oriented leader in contrast to his predecessor whom he thinks everyone hated just as much as he did. Biden wanted to slap his name on the end of the Afghanistan war but didn’t stop to consider what an immediate withdrawal might entail. His leaders were so hyper-focused on “reimagining” the military that many Afghans and Americans pressed against one another in their bid to fly to safety at the Kabul airport are imagining what it would be like if the American military actually showed up.
But here’s the chaser to the shot.
Our enemies are watching us, and I don’t just mean the Taliban. I mean our enemies in Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and wherever communism is sold. They can see us failing and continuing to fail. They watch as we scramble to recover where we should be bringing the fear of God (not the Allah one) on the heads of any who would even so much as sneer at an American. They’re watching us flinch, and I’m sure that any leader worth their salt is currently discussing how far they can push America now.
I’m sad to say that with our current leadership, my guess is pretty far.
