Three years ago this week, everything President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the rest of the White House said couldn’t happen collided to place a deadly exclamation point on the administration’s failures during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the last three years, there’s been no accountability, no apology, no acknowledgment of wrongdoing from the Biden-Harris administration. To them, it was still a record-setting success. For those outside the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, however, this week did not mark another year since a stunning success took place. It was, instead, an anniversary of disgrace.
This week marked a disgrace of so-called “leadership.” A disgrace of alleged “planning.” A disgrace for America. As with many other Biden-Harris administration failures, there was no accountability, not that any Democrats in Congress or Biden White House stenographers in the mainstream media cared to point that out.
The Taliban won’t sweep through Afghanistan within weeks, Americans were told back in the summer of 2021. Kabul won’t fall to the Taliban over just a few days, senior officials insisted in early August. The Taliban is cooperating and providing security for U.S. forces, American citizens, and evacuating Afghans, the White House gushed. This won’t be another Vietnam, the president himself pledged to Americans.
None of that was true. The Taliban stormed across Afghanistan, toppling one province after another, breaking dangerous terrorists out of prisons along the way, before capturing Kabul and swiftly driving out the U.S.-backed government. Scenes of helicopters lifting off from the U.S. embassy made for near-carbon copies of scenes from Saigon in April 1975.
Worse than all that, three years ago this week saw 13 U.S. service members and scores of fleeing Afghans killed in an ISIS-K suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA). The same Taliban praised as “businesslike and professional” by Biden’s White House aides had not prevented the murderous terrorist from killing American troops. A disgraceful abdication of responsibility for the safety of our service members and Afghan allies.
In response, the Biden administration scrambled to respond, launching a drone attack — one called a “righteous strike” by Pentagon brass — that turned out to be the killing of an innocent aid worker and multiple children. Another disgrace made worse by the refusal to hold anyone accountable.
A short time later, President Biden couldn’t even bother to give the fallen heroes of Kabul the respect they deserve. He checked his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony after he left them in Kabul under the “security” supposedly provided by the Taliban. Disgrace on top of disgrace.
It doesn’t even end there. The Afghanistan withdrawal was also a key marker in the beginning of the end of U.S. strength around the globe. As Biden handed control of Afghanistan to the Taliban — along with a staggering $7 billion worth of U.S.-provided military assets — the rest of the world’s bad actors licked their proverbial chops. Our friends, on the other hand, took a cartoonish gulp and wiped sweat from their collective brow.
The cost of the disgrace of August 2021 expands beyond the incomprehensible loss of the 13 heroes of Kabul. The Biden-Harris administration’s weakness on full display for the world to see was a green light for an unholy alliance comprised of the world’s worst tyrants. Russia would take Biden’s weakness as a sure sign that he could invade Ukraine. Iran leapt at the opportunity to increase support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and its other terrorist proxies to launch a barbaric attack that saw the most Jews killed in any single day since the Holocaust. China read the writing on the wall and ramped up its harassment and drills simulating an invasion of Taiwan. These three despotic regimes would grow closer, wrapping in the likes of North Korea, to cooperate and aid each other more closely than they have in recent history.
Biden’s dereliction of duty, leadership, and responsibility continues to compound into one disgrace after another. Earlier this year, he denied in his fateful and career-ending debate against former President Donald Trump that any U.S. service members had died on his watch. He didn’t remember the 13 heroes of Kabul. He didn’t even remember the American troops killed in an Iran-backed attack on U.S. forces in northern Jordan this year.
President Biden is the disgrace, as is Vice President Kamala Harris, his loyal accomplice who frequently brags about her role as the “last person in the room” when the decision to launch the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was made without proper planning, foresight, or any real intention for success.
Harris, who has never broken from lockstep with Biden on his deadly withdrawal or any of its consequential disasters, owns the disgrace as much as he does. Even then-VP Biden notoriously opposed several of then-President Obama’s foreign policy and military operations. But Harris did not. She gleefully supported — and still does support — Biden’s disastrous withdrawal that allowed this week’s anniversary of disgrace.