We Will Never Win Another Foreign War Again, Because The Left Has Set Us Into Permanent War With Ourselves

Note that a ranking Taliban official was set free by Barack Obama in exchange for American Hero Bowe Bergdahl.

From the New York Post:

When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday's sacking of Kabul.

Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile.

...

Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden's envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

"I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement," Khairkhwa said at the summit.

...

The mastermind of the regime change is former detainee Khairkhwa, the Taliban mullah whom Obama released from Gitmo even though the Pentagon classified him as too dangerous to release.

Meanwhile, Noted Foreign Policy Expert Joe Biden, Who Will Restore Our Norms and Bring Respect Back to America, claims the Taliban is having an "existential crisis" about their burning desire for recognition by "the international community."

The left just keeps babbling about "soft power" as they sabotage our hard power:

For those claiming -- like Noted White Rage Theorist Mark Milley -- that there was "no indication" that the Afghan National Army would collapse in a puff of hashish, perhaps they should watch these short clips of US soldiers complaining that the ANA sits on its ass and smokes hash all day -- even when allegedly doing military exercises -- and is too stupid to understand basic commands.

One soldier says that the ANA "troops" he's supposedly working with are not allies, but just useless children he has to "babysit." An Afghan officer says the ANA isn't an army at all, but rather just idiots and "delinquents" who are only in the "army" because they were kicked out of their tribes for "misbehavior."

Here's a 12 second clip that explains it all: Even while the enemy is firing on them, Afghan "soldiers" have to be screamed at by Americans to start even pretending to fire on the enemy.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that top diplomats sent Biden a cable telling him that Afghanistan would collapse quickly, and Fox's Jacqui Heinrich confirms that report:

Jacqui Heinrich
@JacquiHeinrich

NEW, thread: my colleague @RichEdsonDC confirms WSJ reporting, that about two dozen State Dept officials in Kabul sent a memo to Blinken, other top officials July 13th, warning of potential Kabul collapse soon after withdrawal deadline, offering recs on mitigation & speedy evac

The confidential cable constitutes the clearest proof the Biden administration had been warned by its officials the Afghan military may not be able to hold off Taliban takeover - casting questions on POTUS claim

President Biden said to ABC in his ONLY q&a since the Taliban took the country, "The intelligence community did not say back in June or July that this is gonna collapse like it did."

"The source defends the secretary's actions saying it "was immediately brought to the Secretary's attention, and he personally approved the response. We appreciated the thoughts of the drafters, which reflected much of the thinking at the Department and throughout the inter-agency. For example, cable coincided with our launch of Operation Allies Refuge, effort to bring to SIV applicants to the US. We have consistently encouraged constructive use of the channel, which this was, and we conveyed that sentiment in our response."

@RichEdsonDC adds, "Fox has repeatedly reported that the intelligence regarding the situation in Afghanistan was troubling and deteriorating throughout the summer."

Coincidentally, the Special Inspector General examining the mistakes made in the Afghan war just released a report, long in the making, making it clear that the US could never win in Afghanistan, and that this was well known.

The latest report is a critique not so much of the military operations but rather of the premise underlying the war: that U.S. troops could someday leave Afghanistan in a good enough place to thrive as a functioning state.

It concludes that the U.S. presence improved Afghanistan's conditions in medical care, women's health, and the environment, but not so much in any other aspect of life--and that even in the few successful realms, the "prospects for sustaining the progress that was made are dubious."

The U.S. failed in every aspect of its strategy, and often for reasons that are endemic to the way that its bureaucracy functions or to the limits--social, political, and economic--of Afghanistan. The failures were so broad and deep that they raise "questions about the ability of U.S. government agencies to devise, implement, and evaluate reconstruction strategies" in any foreign country. "No single agency had the necessary mindset, expertise, and resources to develop and manage the strategy to rebuild Afghanistan," the report adds--nor were multiple agencies able to divide powers and responsibilities with one another.

In what may be the most damning section of the report, the authors note that rebuilding Afghanistan "required a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics" -- yet U.S. policymakers in Washington and field workers on the ground “were consistently operating in the dark.” As a result, they

clumsily forced Western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its decisions through informal means.... Without this background knowledge, U.S. officials often empowered powerbrokers who preyed on the population or diverted U.S. assistance away from its intended recipients to enrich and empower themselves and their allies... [Thus,] projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and even inadvertently funded insurgents.

If you want a flamethrower of a piece on this point, read Lee Smith's newest at Tablet.

There is no mystery about why the U.S. experience in Afghanistan ended in failure, embarrassment, and scandal. Nor is it a mystery why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. They were fighting for primacy. Their victory was foreordained.

The medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun explains the dynamic in his 14th-century masterwork, Al Muqaddima. History, he shows, is a repetition of the same pattern seen throughout the ages--a group of nomadic tribesmen overturn an existing sedentary culture, a civilization that has become weak and luxurious. What drives the success of the rising tribe is its group solidarity, or assabiya. Its awareness of itself as a coherent people with a drive for primacy is frequently augmented by religious ideology. The stronger the tribe's assabiya,, the stronger the group. Assimilating the conquered by imposing its will and worldview on them, the victor lays the foundations of a new civilization. But since, as Ibn Khaldun writes, "the goal of civilization is sedentary culture and luxury," all groups carry the seeds of their own demise.

And so the struggle begins anew.

...

Ibn Khaldun's most important contribution to political theory was to show that assabiya is the engine of history. With it, the most primitive tribe can overturn the mightiest of civilizations; without it, a people will wither in the desert.

That's just to set the table -- because Smith goes on to argue forcefully that the United States no longer has any assabiya due to the left's very successful campaign to set the US at war at itself for all eternity, just because they know they can win elections by constantly ginning up hatred among their constituents for the real Enemy: The White Middle Class.

For our elite, the fall began during the tail end of the Bill Clinton presidency when Democratic Party strategists augured that they'd soon have a permanent hold on power thanks to urban intellectuals, young single women, racial and ethnic majorities, and the LGBT community. What is described as a coalition is in fact a mélange of clients with varying and sometimes opposing interests that can only be held together by stoking a communal hatred of the national majority--the white middle class.

It was hardly a coincidence that this demographic was the source of the wealth that the establishment was busy transferring to themselves and abroad, through initiatives like the North American Free Trade Agreement. The elites rationalized their impoverishment of the white middle class by claiming that they were dying anyway. And when the American heartland didn’t die off quickly enough, the establishment credentialed themselves as progressives by calling the people who live there racists. Being racists, they deserved all the bad things the elite had decided for them. Thus, by betting on sectarianism as the path to permanent power, American elites polarized the United States.

The elite institutions that weren't already part of the left establishment, like entertainment, the academy, the media, and the foreign policy and national security bureaucracy, were co-opted through party initiatives--as, for instance, the Beltway think tank Center for a New American Security vetted the rising ranks of U.S. military officers.

By fomenting constant internal war, the Marxists have guaranteed that the US will no longer intervene against their foreign allies. They have insured that we can never win a war, and that we know that we can never win a foreign war.

America is depressed. Divided. Dispirited.

Another word for that -- demoralized.

Precisely what the Soviet Union and the KGB spent 85% of its "time, manpower, and effort" on.

Not intelligence. Not assassinations.

But simply subverting the United States and setting it at war with itself:

posted by Ace at 12:12 PM

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