One week prior to the single deadliest day for the U.S. military in a decade, President Joe Biden knocked on wood in hopes the superstition might ward off attacks on our troops amid his administration’s failed and ever-worsening withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But we need more than politicians knocking on wood. Tragically, service members have since been tasked with knocking on the front doors of at least 13 families who lost loved ones in last week’s terrorist attacks.
Make no mistake: Kabul’s collapse and the horrific events of Aug. 26 are a direct result of a catastrophic failure of leadership by the Biden administration, which put our brave men and women in harm’s way to bail a presidency out of a crisis entirely of its own negligent creation — one that prioritized the political symbolism of a date on the calendar above the safety of our personnel. Moreover, at every turn, this administration has underestimated the significance of the terror threat and undermined the safety of our troops as they meet violence with valor.
For context, the administration’s decision-making process has been driven by a worldview drenched in naivety and fueled by fallacy after fallacy, including the belief that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” “there’s going to be no circumstance when you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” and a significant deterioration in security couldn’t possibly transpire “from Friday to a Monday” — which is, of course, precisely what happened.
And as Taliban fighters throw a parade with tens of billions of dollars worth of seized U.S. military equipment, try telling anyone on the other side of a door-to-door manhunt that the Taliban is in an “existential crisis” over its role on the international stage. Such fundamental misjudgments form the backdrop of the fatal missteps responsible for the avoidable wreckage thus far.
The severity and scope of this administration’s mounting list of tactical errors, including the recent report that U.S. officials in Kabul willingly furnished what has appropriately been dubbed a “kill list” comprising “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies” to the Taliban, ought to outrage every American.
As a former naval officer and Iraq veteran who helped detain and prosecute thousands of war criminals and terrorists, I am especially alarmed by the Biden administration’s fateful decision to close Bagram Airfield. Thousands of hardened prisoners, “including many senior al Qaeda operatives” and top Islamic State fighters, regained their freedom after being captured and removed off the battlefield. By shameful contrast, “at least 27 California school students remain stranded in Afghanistan — along with a 3-year-old boy whose family was badly beaten by the Taliban while trying to flee.”
The decision to desert Bagram, and consequently to depend on Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as the lone evacuation outlet for American citizens, may well amount to one of the biggest blunders in American military history — a blunder compounded by the conditions under which it took place: in the middle of the night “with no coordination with local officials” whatsoever. And as al Qaeda and ISIS prisoners bent on killing Americans now roam free, an unconscionable failure of this degree raises the question of whether their release was a result of incompetence or a craven political calculation that the ramifications of putting savage terrorists behind bars in Guantanamo Bay were too great for the far Left to bear.
Meanwhile, amid alarming reports that “as many as 100 Afghan evacuees flown out of war-torn Kabul are on intelligence agency watch lists” and that “one passenger flown out to Qatar has potential ties to ISIS,” it behooves the Biden administration to remain clear-eyed about the gravity of the threat. Though I personally worked with local nationals who were our allies in a general sense, many of them were still not trustworthy and did not possess a worldview that we would welcome in American communities.
The families of slain heroes, our fellow countrymen still stranded, and the scores of Afghanistan veterans who represent the best of the U.S. have waited long enough for accountability and for answers as to how the withdrawal was botched so badly. It’s time for investigations, resignations, and real change. It’s time to fire Democratic leadership in Congress so we can hold this administration accountable for its failure. The men and women of the U.S. military did their job by keeping Americans safe. They should be proud of their service. It is the politicians in Washington who have failed us.
Adam Laxalt served as Nevada’s 33rd attorney general from 2015-2019 and is campaigning for U.S. Senate.
