President Joe Biden has been in government for nearly 50 years. On the campaign trail, he touted his foreign policy experience as a selling point. After he won election, he declared that “America is back” and would be respected again in the post-Trump era.
In less than seven months, the Taliban, an enemy defeated years ago, showed just how false all of those claims were.
There has been a significant fallout from Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal and the Taliban resurgence. With White House press secretary Jen Psaki “on vacation,” and Vice President Kamala Harris presumably being held in a safe bunker where she cannot say anything too ridiculous, Biden was finally forced to come out of hiding himself.
Remember, this was a president who campaigned on being honest and transparent. This was a president whose staff criticized his predecessors as being secretive and dishonest. So far, Biden has been worse than the people he criticized.
Biden’s statement that the chaotic, death-filled scene at Kabul Airport was “days ago“ evinced a total lack of empathy for the victims of his own disastrous bungling. He snapped at ABC’s George Stephanopoulos when faced with even minimally challenging questions. As a president who once promoted himself as compassionate and caring, he seems capable of empathy only when there are votes to be gained. He has none for the thousands of Afghans fleeing in terror from the Taliban.
The details that have emerged regarding U.S. intelligence experts’ preparedness might even be more concerning. Earlier this week, Gen. Mark Milley stated, “There was nothing that I, or anyone else, saw that indicated a collapse of [the Afghan] army and this government in 11 days.”
That is enough to indicate incompetence, but even more worrying is the internal State Department memo that warned about Afghanistan quickly falling to the Taliban after the U.S. troop withdrawal. That indicates mendacity on Biden’s part and Milley’s.
Either the Biden administration lied to the public, or it is so incompetent and inefficient that senior officials cannot accurately interpret intelligence reports. Neither of these scenarios is good.
