Biden and Blinken Are Really Stupid or Liars
The Afghanistan Catastrophe
By Chuck Warren
The Biden people are on their way out, but not before they push through their last lies. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before Congress, saying, “no one anticipated the [Afghan] government and Afghan forces would collapse as quickly as they did.” Blinken is lucky that the administration’s plan for a ministry of disinformation was never realized because, if it had, he would have gone straight to jail!
Many people anticipated it. No, actually, most people did. Here are some examples.
The Afghan Study Group was a Congressionally mandated commission co-chaired by former senator (and now governor-elect of New Hampshire) Kelly Ayotte, Joseph Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Nancy Lindborg, who runs a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C. Here’s what their report said in February 2021, months before the collapse of the Afghan state:
The guiding logic of this pathway would be to withdraw troops … according to the Doha agreement’s timetable and to prepare for, or at least be willing to accept, an eventual Taliban ascendance. The expectation that the Taliban would return to power is based on the Taliban’s relative unity, their backing by Pakistan, and the fact that the already problematic centrifugal forces within elite government factions will be intensified if there is reduced funding for the Afghan state and, more importantly, a rapid and total U.S. withdrawal.
In March 2021, the U.S. government’s top Afghanistan War watchdog warned:
Eighty percent of Afghanistan’s budget is funded by the U.S. and the [other international] donors. If, for whatever reason, the donors keep drawing down funding ... that could bring the sudden demise of the Afghan government as we know it.
General Frank McKenzie, then Commander of Central Command, told Congress, “To be blunt, the government would probably face collapse.”
These are just U.S. government sources who went public. The CIA warned Biden that Afghanistan would fall to the hands of the Taliban, too. And it was not saving their bottoms after the fact. The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. intelligence community thought that Afghanistan would collapse within months after U.S. withdrawal.
Outside the government, Seth Jones, a defense expert warned that the Taliban might have been “negotiating simply to get U.S. troops to withdraw so that Taliban forces can overthrow the Afghan government.”
In April 2021, Fred Kagan, another expert, said, “I do not see how the U.S. can continue to support the Afghan military in any meaningful way, other than financial, once our forces departed the country.”
The Washington Post editorial board ran an editorial a month before the withdrawal was concluded, entitled, “Biden’s cold response to Afghanistan’s collapse will have far-reaching consequences.”
The Economist warned that “America leaves Afghanistan on the brink of collapse.”
There are way too many examples to cite them all, so I’m going to stop here, but you get the gist. It’s a blatant lie that no one predicted this. Not only was it predictable, it was actually predicted.
And you didn’t need to be an expert to see it coming. It was very simple. The Afghan state was reliant on U.S. support to remain in power. So for it not to collapse, there were only two ways: Either the U.S. support needed to continue, or we had to trust that the Taliban had become good guys and not interested in overthrowing the Afghan state. No sane person would have believed that the Taliban had suddenly become the good guys.
Biden and Blinken pulled all support. So they either are lying that they didn’t see it coming, or they are really, really, really stupid—even stupider than we had thought—for having believed that the Taliban had become good boys.
While they might not have seen it coming themselves because they are actually really stupid, they are definitely lying that nobody else predicted it either. And I’m going to go with that version: They are both liars and stupid. Good riddance on January 20th!
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
What the Biden clown show has down to our foreign policy has been a true disaster. Since these issues in the Middle East and Europe escalated, Biden has been a absolute no show. What really pisses me off was his disastrous exit from Afghanistan, our soldiers and the Afghan people deserved better than that.