Beta Male Foreign Policy and the Fall of Afghanistan
By HanaLyn Colvin – August 20, 2021
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f—k things up,” former president Barack Obama reportedly warned. But who could have predicted that President Joe Biden could screw things up as catastrophically as he did this week with his reckless withdrawal of troops and the immediately subsequent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. As chaos consumes Afghanistan and the Taliban continue their door to door hunt for women, journalists, and American allies, our feckless president continues to lie and blame shift to avoid any responsibility for the humanitarian crisis he created.
This week the world witnessed horrifying scenes after the Taliban marched across the country in a lightning offensive, seizing control of one province after another, culminating in their successful invasion of Kabul and the overthrow of the Afghan government. In the bloody aftermath, seven people were killed in the chaotic rush at the Hamid Karzai airport as video showed Afghans desperately clinging to the wings of an American military plane before plummeting to their deaths as the plane reached altitude. The mangled body of a stowaway was discovered inside the wheel well of a C-17 transport plane. Daring military pilots completed evacuations with 500 people over capacity as refugees swarmed the planes begging to be transported to safety.
Two men with their faces tarred and their necks in nooses were paraded through the streets by the Taliban. Reports continually emerge of Taliban fighters going door to door targeting women, Christians, and anyone who worked with the American military. Bill Kristol tweeted that his sources in Kabul have relayed, “Terrorists are going door to door and killing pilots and SOFs [Afghan Special Operations Forces], raping their families, taking their houses.” Video emerges of the Taliban torturing Afghan translators in the street. The Taliban opened fire on a crowd that was carrying the Afghan flag, killing two people. There is a fear that the Taliban has control of the US military’s biometric database and is using it to compile a hit list of anyone who cooperated with the Americans.
The doors of prominent women, those who have worked in government or as journalists, are ominously marked in pink. Girls as young as twelve are targeted as child brides and sex slaves. Women are disappearing from the streets of Kabul literally and figuratively as terrified women hide in their homes and images of women on the sides of buildings and storefronts are painted over or ripped down. And a burgeoning refugee crisis looms as nearly 100,000 Afghans apply for special visas to flee the country. Terrified mothers are actually throwing their babies over the barbed wire fencing at the airport, pleading with American and British servicemen to save their children from the fate they know awaits them under the Taliban.
As many as fifteen thousand Americans remain stranded in the country and the Biden administration has said it cannot guarantee their safety or evacuation. U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan told Americans they should trust the Taliban to provide them “safe passage” to the airport because the U.S. military is incapable of providing it.
Meanwhile, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward, who has been menaced on the street by armed Taliban fighters who order her to cover her face, reports that people are being whipped and beaten amid continuous gunfire and chants of “Death to America” at the Taliban controlled perimeter of the airport. U.S. citizens have had their passports confiscated once they reach the Taliban checkpoints so that they cannot leave the country. And the U.S. embassy issued a security alert that additional space on evacuation transports would be provided on a first come, first served basis, belying Joe’s feeble promise that he would not leave any Americans or allies behind.
But perhaps, as Biden said, the Taliban are going through an “existential crisis,” eager to please on the world stage. Perhaps Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff Nick Carter is correct and “this Taliban is a different Taliban to the one people remember from the 1990s.” They did after all promise to form an “inclusive” government in which “women will be very active in society within the framework of Islam.” They promised this magnanimous inclusivity the same day they executed a woman on the street for not wearing a burqa. Expecting a kinder, gentler band of cave-dwelling barbarians seems a bit like Neville Chamberlain declaring the we have secured “peace for our time.”
Indeed, this debacle is just the latest example of the utter failure of beta male foreign policy and the danger that weak men pose to the safety of our societies.
We don’t even need to look as far back as the failure of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. We need only look to Obama and the rise of ISIS. Dogmatically determined to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, President Obama sabotaged negotiations with Iraq to extend the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and then claimed he had no choice but to withdraw because the SOFA had expired. Against the warnings of his military advisers, Obama withdrew all American troops and special forces. Nature abhors a vacuum but terrorists love one. Thus in the absence of American military presence, the tenuous peace between Shia and Sunni factions in the country rapidly deteriorated and disaffected Sunnis looked to ISIS militants for protection, allowing them to takeover enough territory to establish a caliphate. Obama derisively referred to ISIS as the “JV team,” but soon after was forced to send thousands of troops back to Iraq to clean up the mess his ill-timed exit had left. In Syria, Obama’s ignominious failure to follow through on the “red line” he established led to the world’s largest refugee crisis and created a hotbed for terrorist activity. Obama always spoke with eloquence and empathy, but his actions left a trail of human devastation. Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American doctor once critical of President Trump, captured the difference between feckless rhetoric and decisive action when he tweeted out after Trump’s airstrikes on Syria: “How come that @realDonaldTrump was moved into military action by the images of children in Syria, while @POTUS44 was so stone-hearted?!” After engaging in an unconstitutional war in Libya and toppling Gaddafi, Obama abruptly withdrew from the country, eschewing the type of long-term “nation-building” operation that he had just pulled us out of from Iraq. Libya quickly deteriorated into chaos and violence, replete with open air slave markets and rife with terror cells. Even Obama referred to it as the “worst mistake” of his presidency, and that’s saying something. Writing in the LA Times about Obama’s legacy, reporters Christi Parsons and W.J. Hennigan noted that “U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Yet the U.S. faces more threats in more places than at any time since the Cold War, according to U.S. intelligence.”Weak men are dangerous men.
Protecting America’s interests means being willing to use our military force when necessary and not abandoning our global commitments because we’ve grown weary of the political costs. Obama never respected how vital a strong U.S. military is to our security. He was content to use our troops as photo op backgrounds until each time he needed them to clean up the messes created by his feckless diplomacy. President Trump understood that when you make a threat, you must be prepared to back it up. If you draw a red line and your enemy crosses it, you can’t shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, we’ll give you that one. Let’s pretend no one was looking.” When you fail to follow through, you embolden your adversaries, who will not hesitate to follow through on their attacks when they sense weakness. Weakness invites violence. Strength commands stability. Trump took a strong stance against Iran, ending Obama’s failed appeasement policy and employing strategic military force to reestablish deterrence. And in so doing, he took out the head of Iran’s terror forces, increased the stability in the Middle East, and brokered historic peace treaties between Israel and other Arab nations that the Obama administration had declared impossible. Strength commands stability. Biden projects neither strength nor stability. And the results of his weak leadership are unfolding with catastrophic predictability. On April 14, 2021, Biden announced that he would withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by September 11, in order to capitalize on the optics of ending the war in Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. He touted his preference to employ diplomacy over military leverage, not understanding that diplomacy without leverage is as toothless as a newborn pit bull. The Taliban understand this. They know that in the absence of a military threat, Biden intends only to cajole and admonish them through strongly worded statements from Jen Psaki. The Taliban need to “assess their role in the community,” Psaki tut-tutted from the podium. Yes, that will really give the Taliban pause in between throwing acid in the faces of young girls and feeding women’s bodies to dogs. Fifteen thousand Americans remain at the mercy of cave-dwelling terrorists but Biden is pleading for the Taliban to do the right thing or else he’ll leave a negative review on their geopolitical Yelp page. For the past eight months of his presidency, the media has praised Biden’s “chocolate chip diplomacy.” This is all well and good if you’re negotiating with Cookie Monster, but there are real monsters out there. There are real enemies. And while Joe was busy passing out cookies and our military was putting on drag shows and lecturing soldiers about their “white fragility,” our enemies were sitting and watching with gleeful anticipation waiting for their chance to strike.Kabul airport now pic.twitter.com/743y2AULrh
— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) August 19, 2021
Despite repeated warnings from military generals and intelligence officials, the Biden White House claims to be taken by surprise by the rapid fury with which the Taliban swept across the country. And yet, as the Wall Street Journal reports, “The Taliban began this offensive on May 1, two weeks after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal[…].” They sensed weakness and they decided to strike.
Biden is now claiming that the chaos was inevitable, it would have happened no matter what. But just one month ago he swore there was “ZERO” chance of this happening. American lives hang in the balance, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, and Chocolate Chip Joe doesn’t have the decency to speak honestly to the American people.
Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicts that terror groups such as Al Qaeda will very soon reconstitute within Afghanistan. This completely obliterates the very objective we went into Afghanistan to accomplish, to prevent Al Qaeda from using the country as a base for terrorism. With this abject surrender, Biden just negated twenty years of service and sacrifice by American veterans.
China has seized on this opportunity to form an alliance with the Taliban and expand its influence peddling through its Belt and Road initiative. Whereas the Biden administration groveled before the Taliban, asking them to spare the U.S. embassy before frantically evacuating, the Chinese embassy is still open. The Taliban already signaled their willingness to partner with the Chinese. Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said in an interview a few weeks ago that “China is a friendly country and we welcome it for reconstruction and developing Afghanistan … if [the Chinese] have investments, of course we will ensure their safety.”
The Chinese Communist press agencies have been making hay out of America’s humiliating defeat and using the debacle as a way to threaten other countries. Xinhua News Agency, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, declared it the “death knell for declining U.S. hegemony” and rhapsodized that the “sound of roaring planes and the hastily retreating crowds mirrored the last twilight of the empire.” China’s Global Times menaced, “From what happened in Afghanistan, those in Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and U.S. military won’t come to help.”
Think of that ignoble message that Biden sent around the globe: When our allies are in danger, the Americans won’t come to help.