Biden - The "BUT" Starts Here!

 The View from the Middle 

“The Buck Stops Here”!!  If Harry Truman wasn’t the first person to utter that axiom, he certainly popularized it.  He famously had a plaque with that principle inscribed on it and placed on his desk in the oval office as a reminder that he needed to take responsibility for the decisions he made.  Not surprisingly, our “Plagiarist in Chief” has recently appropriated that phrase to describe his decision-making process in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, while it was obvious that President Biden understood how principled that maxim sounded, nobody bothered to explain what those words actually meant.  Every time he has invoked that truism, he has added a big “BUT”, and then he goes on to blame everybody but himself for the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The first person he blames after his “buck stops here” statement is Trump, which is ludicrous for three reasons.  First, Joe says he was locked into Trump’s agreement with the Taliban despite the fact that he has nixed virtually every other deal and program that Trump put in place despite the fact that they are working.  Second, Joe didn’t stick with Trump’s agreement which was conditions based and would have allowed him to move the May 31^st withdrawal to whatever date made sense for The United States.  Third, Trump’s deal was way better than the train wreck that Biden crafted.  Trump’s deal clearly pointed out that the US would NOT recognize the Taliban as a governing body in Afghanistan and required the Taliban to work with the current Afghan government to create a new intra-Afghan governing body.  Don’t take my word for it, or CNN’s or MSDNC, because they totally misrepresent it.  It is only three and a half pages long, and a link to it is provided below.  Read it for yourself.

 

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Signed-Agreement-02292020.pdf

 

Next, President Biden blames the Afghan military for the disastrous withdrawal.  They certainly aren’t the professional fighting force that the American military is, but the Afghan security forces have lost over 30,000 men in this war.  That’s over ten times the number of American losses.  The two things that the Afghan military needed from the Americans were leadership and air support, both of which were taken from them in the dead of the night.  As the President evacuated Bagram air base without notifying the Afghan President or their military leaders it sent a chilling message to the Afghan government.  After that move the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, and the incompetent and corrupt Afghan military leadership fled the country.  After being abandoned by the US military, the Afghan President and the Afghan military leadership, what did Joe Biden expect from the rank and file of the Afghan military.  This was as predictable as the sunrise in the morning.

Finally, the President tries to blame previous administrations for getting us into Afghanistan in the first place and keeping us there for 20 years.  This is disingenuous in at least a couple of ways.  First, the question is not how or why we went to Afghanistan, it is how we chose to get out.  Why did we withdraw in such a rushed and unorganized fashion after a 20-year presence in that country.  He also fails to remind the American people that the Obama-Biden administration was in charge for eight of those 20 years.

Unfortunately for Joe Biden, while he doesn’t understand the meaning of “The Buck Stops Here”, the American people do.  He can’t dodge his responsibility for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the impact it will have on our country and the world for years to come.  Here are just a few of the universally accepted mistakes that Joe made during the cataclysmic withdrawal:

1.      He decided to withdraw our troops before he evacuated American citizens from Afghanistan.

2.    He abandoned the highly fortified airbase at Bagram, just 30 miles from Kabul, with its two runways and easily defensed position.

3.    We left $85 billion in military equipment (trucks, planes, rifles, ammunition, etc.) for the Taliban to use and or sell to promote their terroristic ideology around the world.

4.    The Taliban actually offered to give us control of the entire city of Kabul during the evacuation, but we declined that offer and decided to just control the Kabul airport.

 

I believe that the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to America’s vulnerability to terrorism.  Joe Biden might think that the war on terror is over, but the Taliban, Isis, al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, Hamas, The Haqqani Network, Hezbollah and many other terrorist groups have not surrendered.  They still hate us and Israel and they now have an entire country to train their jihadists and to develop and launch their murderous plans.  The war is not over, it has just entered a new phase.  Hopefully, we can rise to this new challenge.  Yes, the buck does stop here, Joe, and America will not forget.