Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming had a perfect rejoinder for the misdirectional pettifoggery of national security adviser Jake Sullivan on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
Sullivan’s entire appearance consisted of weak excuse-making, but he inadvertently admitted that actual events in Afghanistan had proved that President Joe Biden’s claim of having prepared for “every contingency” was nonsense. Without directly acknowledging the obvious truth that of course the current horrors were not a contingency for which Biden had adequately prepared, Sullivan said that “no plan survives first contact with reality.”
Appearing on the same show in the next segment, Cheney made clear that Sullivan’s statement had identified the problem. The entire Biden approach, she said, was “fundamentally at odds with reality.” Sullivan was being more truthful than he realized when he said Biden was now having his “first contact” with reality, meaning he showed no understanding of it before.
The reality, Cheney correctly said, is that Biden has now created “an entire country that is a sanctuary” from which at least three international terrorist groups can plan and stage mayhem, especially against Americans. Cheney noted that even an ordinarily Biden-friendly media had reported widely that Biden ignored strong military advice to adopt a different plan of action. The same advice had come with significant weight back in February from the official, bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group, which recommended leaving a force of 5,000 Americans in that Asian nation because otherwise, the Taliban would, yes, rapidly retake control. Moreover — and this is the key — the study group reported that once the Taliban took over, it would be “likely” that terrorists harbored by the Taliban would be able to conduct more strikes on the U.S. homeland itself.
“The White House is denying what is happening on the ground,” Cheney said. “We have to, as a nation, recognize evil in the world.”
Having recognized the evil, Cheney pushed back against the notion promulgated by Sullivan that there were only two choices facing the United States in Afghanistan, namely whether or not to “remain in a civil war” there “with American men and women fighting and dying.” Well, for the past five years, there have been very few Americans actually fighting and dying. Instead, Americans provided logistical air and intelligence support while maintaining a relative stasis, all as we kept al Qaeda and the Islamic State from establishing strongholds and as we enjoyed the strategic advantages toward Russia and China of the superb Bagram Airfield.
Hence, Cheney’s rejoinder: “We’ve got to provide the support necessary to continue to have the Afghans bear the brunt of the fight. It means we’ve got to help build the institutions that can withstand, you know, the al Qaeda and the Taliban threat that continues. So, this isn’t about building a democracy that looks like the United States; it’s about what we can do to maintain stability so we don’t have further attacks on the United States from Afghan soil.”
The simple reality is that for much of the past decade, we had indeed maintained stability, and had done so relatively inexpensively, with a cost-benefit analysis quite arguably well in our favor.
Instead, every major news outlet was reporting this weekend that a major ISIS threat — not just the locally focused Taliban, but the international jihad of ISIS — is forcing the U.S. military to “establish alternate routes to Kabul airport.”
This is a contingency, this is a reality, about which Biden had every reason to know, if only he had accepted contact with it before withdrawing troops and abandoning valuable equipment and the Bagram air base to the terrorists’ evil benefit.
