President Biden’s “The Buck Stops Here…But Let Me Blame Everyone Else First” speech on the fall of Afghanistan was a pack of lies. This was not an intelligence failure, nor was it a failure of our military leadership. Biden ignored warnings
Back in April, The NY Times reported the military asked Biden to keep some troops in Afghanistan and to set conditions for the withdrawal.
The current military leadership hoped it, too, could convince a new president to maintain at least a modest troop presence, trying to talk Mr. Biden into keeping a residual force and setting conditions on any withdrawal. But Mr. Biden refused to be persuaded.
The two Pentagon leaders stood before Mr. Biden near the same Resolute Desk where President George W. Bush reviewed plans in 2001 to send in elite Special Operations troops to hunt for Osama bin Laden only to see him melt over the border into Pakistan. It was the same desk where President Barack Obama decided on a surge of forces in 2009, followed by a rapid drawdown, only to discover that the Afghan military was not able to defend itself despite billions of dollars in training. It was there that President Donald J. Trump declared that all American troops were coming home — but never carried through a plan to do so.
There would be no conditions put on the withdrawal, Mr. Biden told the men, cutting off the last thread — one that had worked with Mr. Trump — and that Mr. Austin and General Milley hoped could stave off a full drawdown.
They were told, Zero meant zero.
On Aug. 17th, the Wall Street Journal added:
The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability.
The intelligence community also warned Biden that his Afghanistan withdrawal was going to be a disaster. But Joe wanted out of Afghanistan and didn’t care how it was done. According to a report from investigative reporter John Solomon on his site Just The News, the Afghan army couldn’t even handle refueling their machine.
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and a lifelong Democrat, explicitly warned that Afghans couldn’t even handle their own refueling operations, their soldiers were prone to defections and allegiances to tribes over command structure, and their fighter jets were far less ready than the American military commanders had portrayed.
“Five of the seven airframes experienced decreases in readiness in the last month of the quarter [June],” Sopko wrote in one warning report days after Biden and Milley made their assurances. “This coincided with the Taliban offensive and the withdrawal of U.S. and Coalition forces, including aircraft maintenance contractors. The combined effect of the two appeared to reduce aircraft readiness rates.”
Sopko’s report is embedded below.
The NY Times also reported on Biden’s intelligence warning.
The drumbeat of warnings over the summer raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.
One report in July — as dozens of Afghan districts were falling and Taliban fighters were laying siege to several major cities — laid out the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a person familiar with the intelligence.
Intelligence agencies predicted that should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart. It is unclear whether other reports during this period presented a more optimistic picture about the ability of the Afghan military and the government in Kabul to withstand the insurgents.
(…) But in recent months, assessments became ever more pessimistic as the Taliban made larger gains, according to current and former officials. The reports this summer questioned in stark terms the will of Afghan security forces to fight and the ability of the Kabul government to hold power. With each report of mass desertions, a former official said, the Afghan government looked less stable.
But despite warnings, the tone-deaf President pushed the rapid withdrawal of the American Military from Afghanistan ignoring the warnings he received from the Military and Intelligence.
In his Monday speech when he said “the buck stops here” and them blamed everyone else, Biden displayed he didn’t care about the warnings nor did he care about what the American people were thinking. He kept defending his pullout, but it was the execution of the pullout that American’s were worried about.
If one needs more evidence that the Biden administration is tone-deaf combined with the old saying “you can’t make it up” Kamala Harris is coming out of hiding and due to visit Vietnam as part of a trip to the region starting on Friday. It has not been announced whether she will visit Ho Che Ming City which used to be named Saigon. The evacuation of Kabul Afghanistan going on right now is reminiscent of our evacuation of Saigon.
Will Kamala Be Taking A Helicopter To Vietnam?
Biden ignored warnings
Intelligence Afghanistan by Jeffrey Dunetz on Scribd
Biden ignored warnings
Biden ignored warnings
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