Miranda Devine: Parents of dead Marines berate US President Joe Biden

They lost their sons in Kabul and now have to put up with a disrespectful President, writes Miranda Devine

The USA left Afghanistan on Monday, not with a bang but a whimper. Tail between its legs, the world’s superpower withdrew its troops according to a deadline set by the Taliban.

Most Americans wanted the 20-year war to end but not like this, not leaving Americans stranded behind enemy lines, abandoning Afghans who had worked with the US and now are being hunted door-to-door by the Taliban.

Not leaving behind $85 billion of sophisticated weapons and equipment.

The botched withdrawal led inevitably to the suicide bombing outside Kabul airport last Thursday which killed 13 young members of the US armed forces and almost 200 Afghans.

The average age of the fallen military was 22.

Most were babies on September 11, 2001, when the Islamist attack on the US launched the war on terror.

On Sunday, President Biden attended Dover Air Force Base for the “dignified transfer” of the remains of these first US troops killed in Afghanistan in 18 months.

Thankfully there were no words.

We didn’t have to hear him say “the buck stops with me” and then blame everyone else for his mistakes or listen to the formulaic words of compassion which always end up being about him, as if losing a son to cancer, tragic as that was, gives him proprietorial empathy over the families of the fallen.

The words which cut through were not from the president but from the freshly minted gold star parents. Their grief was so raw that they gave in, at times, to the impolite rage which many Americans feel and the White House refuses to acknowledge.

Joe Biden's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has enabled the Taliban to conduct reprisal attacks against US citizens and the theft of billions of dollars worth of military hardware.

The anger is not about politics but about incompetence, lies and a refusal to take responsibility for bad decisions which began with the incomprehensible abandonment of Bagram Air Base in the dead of night last month, before all the civilians were evacuated.

A few of the gold star families reportedly accepted Biden’s hugs but others expressed disgust that he kept looking at his watch as the flag-draped coffins were removed from a military aircraft.

“I actually leaned into my son’s mother’s ear and said ‘I swear to God, if he checks his watch one more time...’ And that was only probably four times in”, said Mark Schmitz, father of fallen Marine Jared Schmitz, 20, in an interview with Fox News.

“I couldn’t look at him any more after that … I found it to be the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“That didn’t happen just once,” said Darin Hoover Snr, father of fallen Marine Darin Hoover Jr, 31. “That happened on every single [casket] that came out of that airplane. They would release the salute and he’d look down at his watch on every last one.”

US President Joe Biden appears to check his watch as as the remains of American soldiers are removed from a military aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. Picture: AFP

Shana Chappell, the grieving mother of Marine Kareem Nikoui, 20, described her interaction with the president that day on Facebook: “Remember I am the one who stood five inches from your face and was letting you know I would never get to hug my son again, hear his laugh and then you tried to interrupt me and give me your own sob story and I had to tell you ‘this is not about you so don’t make it about you’ … U then rolled your f..ing eyes in your head like you were annoyed with me… u turned to walk away and I let you know my son’s blood was on your hands and you threw your hand up behind you as you walked away from me like you were saying ‘ok whatever!!!’… What the f was so important that you kept looking at your watch???? You are nobody special Biden!!! America Hates you!!!!!!”

The mother of Marine Rylee McCollum, 20, called Biden “that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap who decided he wanted a photo-op on September 11”.

“This was an unnecessary debacle,” she told SiriusXM. “They had months and months to remove everyone from Afghanistan and they chose not to. And so they sent in freaking 6000 troops and my son, through the laws of statistics, my son was one of the ones who just got blown up by a freaking terrorist bomb.”

Kareem Nikoui’s dad Steve faulted the decision to have Taliban providing security for the airport. “I blame my own military leaders … Biden turned his back on him.”

Biden turning his back has been a theme of his presidency. It’s the lasting impression from press conferences where he reads from a list of journalists as “instructed”, then turns on his heel and shuffles out of the room, heedless of shouted questions.

So it was on the eve of the July 4th weekend, when he waved away questions about Afghanistan. “I want to talk about happy things, man.”

As he spoke, the electricity was being turned off at Bagram and the last troops were slinking away in the dead of night.

That was the original sin of the withdrawal and it has not been accounted for. It demoralised the Afghan Army and set in train its rapid collapse.

Everyone sees the idiocy of abandoning a strategic air base with two runways and, instead, taking over a civilian airport in Kabul, surrounded by hills, with one runway and Islamist terrorists outside vetting a vast crush of people.

The decision was as indefensible as the airport.

The president blamed his generals for the premature Bagram pullout. “I followed [their] recommendation.”

But that’s not the story the top brass tell. The president gave them an order: leave the country, secure the embassy, no extra troops. Closing Bagram, they felt, was the only choice.

But there was another option. The generals could have told the president how calamitous his order was and resigned if he did not listen.

“Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’?” asked a real leader, Marine Corps battalion commander Stuart Scheller, in a Facebook video which got him fired.

Nearly 90 retired generals and admirals echoed his demand for accountability on Monday, calling on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, and the Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, to resign: “If they did everything within their authority to stop the hasty withdrawal and the President did not accept their recommendations, then knowing the disastrous consequences looming, [they] should have resigned”.

But the White House has made clear no one, other than Schiller, will be held accountable and has been trying to spin the debacle as a triumph.

Instead of fronting up to the American people on Monday, Biden left it to his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, an urbane citizen of the world who had been holidaying in the Hamptons when Kabul fell.

In a surreal televised address, Blinken spoke about the Taliban earning “international legitimacy” and creating an “inclusive” government which respects women’s rights, and he said he expects it to uphold its promise not to provide safe haven to Islamist terrorist groups.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to him that the Taliban IS an Islamist terrorist group.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph