Kabul terror attack: Lazy Joe Biden’s gift to global jihadism
The Aghanistan disaster has left the US president grievously diminished, and the liberal media has finally woken up to his feckless incompetence.
This is the world that Joe Biden has wrought – the return of mass-casualty terrorism, multiple deaths of US soldiers in terror attacks, rejoicing and celebration by extremists around the world, confusion and demoralisation for America’s allies internationally, and death for many of its Afghan friends.
The two explosions near the Kabul airport were the most comprehensively forecast terror attacks in modern history. Yet the mighty American military, the most powerful and bravest force in the world, was depending on suicide terrorists and Islamist extremists – the Taliban, who had dedicated much of their lives to killing Americans – to provide their security.
The grievously diminished Biden had just reassured the world, in one of those surreal Biden-speak ellipses of reality when time and space cease to coincide, that the Taliban was providing security and allowing Afghans to travel peacefully to Kabul Airport.
ISIS-Khorasan Province, a breakaway from the original ISIS, did the bombings. The Taliban and ISIS-K are at odds, but this has not prevented occasional co-operation.
Taliban fighters were all around the airport. They had extorted money from people trying to get through. They had beaten some of them. They took names for future reference for people who tried but failed to get out. Yet somehow, although everyone knew that the terrorist bombings were coming, the Taliban missed the ISIS-K suicide bombers with their large explosive vests.
There is every reason to suspect Taliban complicity. The way the US withdrawal has gone – the chaotic, rushed evacuation at Kabul airport, conducted at the Taliban’s pleasure – has been the greatest possible boost to the Taliban, and to global jihadism.
US strategic credibility is not destroyed, but it is gravely damaged. Biden has advantaged every enemy of America on the planet. He has also revealed what a feckless president he is, and what a clumsy, incompetent and capricious administration he heads.
I have written in praise of the Biden administration’s words on China, and Asia generally, but the sheer incompetence of the Afghanistan withdrawal, suggests that talking is the only thing the Biden administration does well.
This criticism does not extend to US troops. The bravery of American personnel, and the Australians for that matter, at Kabul airport is magnificent.
In the long war on terror, there is no more courageous soldier than the American, and it’s typically an American who stands for lonely hours at a check point to vet folks who come along, for any one may spell his death.
The disaster in Afghanistan has serious implications for Australia, not only because it encourages and empowers terrorists, not least in Asia.
Not only because it emboldens America’s rivals, in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, to test American resolve.
Not only because it diminishes US influence.
But mainly for the huge question mark it puts over US policy competence. It also throws into stark question just what value Biden truly puts on America’s alliances. Here is a stark and shocking fact.
Since the fall of Kabul more than 10 days ago, Biden has not had a telephone conversation with Scott Morrison. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not spoken to Foreign Minister Marise Payne. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has not spoken to Defence Minister Peter Dutton.
No one could support the USalliance more than I do. It’s fundamental to Australian security. But this is grotesque. For most of the past 20 years, Australia has been the largest non-NATO contributor to Afghanistan. Some 39,000 uniformed Australians served there. More than 40 were killed. We spent billions of dollars on aid and military operations in Afghanistan. We were there with the Americans at the beginning. And we were there with them at the end.
Yet in this greatest strategic debacle for the West at least since 9/11, none of the American leadership thinks it’s worth talking to their Australian counterparts.
There is no criticism of the Morrison government here. At the cabinet’s first National Security Committee meetings after the fall of Kabul it was thought there might be 900 people needing evacuation – Australian citizens and Afghans who had worked closely with Australia. In the event we evacuated 4000 people, including 3200 with close Australian connections. No Australian was killed in the process. This was tough, professional and resolute. Everyone who went to Kabul airport put their life at risk.
So how come the Biden administration has nothing to say to us, or hear from us?
This is largely down to the irrefutable weirdness of Joe Biden. I thought Donald Trump was the weirdest American president I’d ever seen. But Biden has a weirdness all his own.
This calamitous chain of events in Afghanistan came about without serious or effective US planning. There was no detailed consultation with allies. Appalling mistakes abounded such as abandoning the defensible Bagram air base because Biden hadn’t left enough US troops to cover the withdrawal.
Biden was just going on holiday when it all turned to custard and, after an initial statement of bromides and platitudes, planned to resume his holiday.
It was obvious during the election that Biden was way past his prime intellectually, to put it kindly, but the hope was that, as when Woodrow Wilson was sick, or later when Dwight Eisenhower had a stroke, the US system around Biden would run well.
But Biden appointed mere talking heads to his cabinet, no one of the standing of George Shultz or Colin Powell or Robert Gates, or even Hillary Clinton, who was a big national figure when she became secretary of state under Obama and was effective in office. Instead, he appointed talking heads with no national profile and no ability to drive the vast complexities of the US inter-agency process.
Biden is a lazy president who exudes lassitude. This has infected his administration. Because the US media is still so relieved that Trump is gone, until the fall of Kabul they were giving Biden a very easy run, seldom showing his many gaffes and terrifying efforts to form coherent sentences when not reading from a teleprompter.
But there was one disturbingly illustrative incident on Fox TV when Chris Wallace interviewed Blinken. Wallace is the least partisan figure on Fox and if anything was anti-Trump at the election. His interview with Blinken was polite but devastating. Wallace played a series of Biden statements that were bizarre in their disconnection from reality.
Wallace played Biden saying: “We have no indication that they (Americans in Kabul and Afghans with American visas) can’t get through. We have an agreement with the Taliban to let them through.”
Biden said this after extensive reporting of Taliban brutality towards those seeking to leave. About five minutes after Biden’s statement, the US advised Americans not to go to Kabul airport.
Wallace played a clip of Biden fatuously declaring: “I have seen no questioning of our credibility from our allies.” He then played clips of the German successor to Angela Merkel calling Biden’s Afghan retreat NATO’s worst debacle, and the immensely respected Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the UK House of Commons foreign affairs committee, describing Biden’s words and actions as “shameful”.
Wallace showed Biden asking that with al-Qa’ida gone from Afghanistan, what interest does America have there? He then showed excerpts of a UN report, which no one challenges, showing al-Qa’ida has hundreds of fighters in Afghanistan, enjoying the active hospitality of the Taliban.
There was also Biden a couple of weeks previously saying there would be no chaos and Kabul would not fall to the Taliban, and then more recently saying it would not be possible to have had an American withdrawal without all the chaos.
Blinken listened courteously but made no defence of Biden, for there was no defence to be made. Donald Trump was half mad and gratuitously offensive, but internationally he was intermittently formidable and people were scared of him. Biden is half asleep and never offensive, but internationally he is never formidable and no one is scared of him.
So when Biden told the terrorists: “We will hunt you down and we will make you pay”, how much were the terrorists really scared? Does anyone believe anything he says?
Biden has suffered a huge setback politically. The mainstream media was devoted to him. Many conservative Americans had grown tired of the Trump drama and just wanted normality. Friends of America all over the world hoped for a return to normality and predictability in Washington.
But Biden emerges from Afghanistan as an almost uniquely weak president, surely already a lame duck as the idea of his running for re-election at 82 is beyond imagining. The Afghan withdrawal may be his equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s chaotically failed military effort to rescue American hostages from Tehran in 1979.
For the first time, more Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance as president, than approve. The latest USA Today poll puts his approval rating at 41 per cent, which is Trump territory. The famous question: is the country moving in the right direction or is it on the wrong track, is often seen as a barometer of presidential performance. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll, under Biden right track gets 30 per cent, while wrong direction gets 58 per cent.
Most Americans wanted to leave Afghanistan, but only a tiny minority approve of the way Biden did it. Most Americans rightly conclude that the threat from terrorism will now rise substantially.
Chinese academics and semi-official spokespeople warmly welcomed the Taliban to power, casting it in the light of anti-imperialism and resisting US hegemony. One senior Chinese academic said the Taliban demonstrated the spirit of the communist People’s Liberation Army in 1949.
The brilliant Sinologist, Geremie Barme, commented that there was a lot of truth in this – not just in its anti-Western sentiment, but in its fanaticism, violence, intolerance and extremism.
For the first time, the liberal media in the US has turned against Biden. His staggering incompetence was this week repeatedly flayed in The New York Times, The Washington Post and on CNN, which previously have treated Biden like an endangered species in a conservation park.
Biden’s administration, and some international interlocutors seeking reasonably to put the best face on a diabolical and humiliating defeat, argue that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is part of its rebalancing towards the overwhelmingly more pressing and important priority of the growing Chinese security challenge in the Indo-Pacific.
There are several intractable problems with this immensely appealing idea.
One, the US will struggle to focus more on the Indo-Pacific if its attention is once more diverted to countering a big wave of terrorism. The Taliban may have the sense to take time to consolidate, but this is a massive, motivating victory for international jihadists of every stripe. They all certainly think so because they celebrated with great enthusiasm.
Two, a superpower needs to be able to wield influence in many parts of the world, not, assuredly, to fight many simultaneous wars, but to shrewdly arrange the combination of its soft and hard power such that its vital interests – as in denying terrorists complete power over a sovereign nation – are protected. Biden has been a disaster in the broader Middle East, with a fatuous approach to Iran and an alarming loss of influence with the Gulf Arabs.
And three, if the US loses strategic credibility it will tempt China to overreach, and so Washington will need to do much more to establish its position in the Indo-Pacific.
Everyone hopes the Taliban has moderated. But there is not the slightest evidence for that wish. Last time they took power in Kabul, in 1996, just like now, they promised no revenge and to respect women’s rights. As they were making that vow they took the former head of government, Mohammad Najibulah, from the UN premises where he had sheltered, castrated him, killed him, dragged his body through the streets and hung him, and his brother, from a lamp post.
It’s what they do that counts, not what they say.
Same with Biden.
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