"Not an Evacuation," Insists State Dept. as DoD Sends 3K Troops to Evacuate

[Eupher]

Granted, the word "diplomacy" is but a euphemism for "lying" and everybody knows it, but can't these spokesturds representing the official paid liars come up with something at least a LITTLE more original?

FML

I was on active duty in May 1975 when Saigon fell. Just a PV2 fresh out of cook school, there was no way my ass was going to Saigon to "help" them load helicopters touching down on the roof of the embassy. But you can't tell me this ain't the same thing, and I don't give a damn what the spokesturds' spin is. That said, it's time to bail out of that hellhole. No mission, no metrics, nothing more to do but spend money we don't have.

All I ask is a little honesty, and the ****ing State Dept. can't even deliver on that. 

Townhall

[Drafe Hoblin]

Thanks for your Service.

And this is the same thing as Saigon.  So far, even worse.  The entire World is watching Biden being inexcusably weak... 

Is his administration actually trying to bribe the Country who blew-us-up on 9/11, to not blow us up again..... ?  That's what the World is seeing... 

[DLR Pyro]

Thanks for your Service.

And this is the same thing as Saigon.  So far, even worse.  The entire World is watching Biden being inexcusably weak... 

don't worry.  xiden is on top of things...

Biden departs for vacation as multiple crises escalate
Deteriorating situation in Afghanistan leads the list of policy nightmares confronting a relaxing president

President Joe Biden departed the White House for a vacation in Wilmington, Delaware as multiple crises escalated Thursday, most notably the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan that has forced the Pentagon to send troops to the country in a desperate attempt to help Americans there escape.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-departs-for-vacation-as-multiple-crises-escalate

[Drafe Hoblin]

Wow, he won't be back in DC 'until Wednesday'... 

[Zathras]

Hopefully the roof of the US Embassy in Kabul has room to land helos as large as a CH-53 or V-22s. The way things are going downhill fast in Afghanistan it might be needed.

[DLR Pyro]

Wow, he won't be back in DC 'until Wednesday'...

Give grandpa a break.  He needs a nap

[dutch508]

Wow, he won't be back in DC 'until Wednesday'...

Well,... he's not really in charge, so...

[Ralph Wiggum]

Well,... he's not really in charge, so...

Which is the $1.98 beauty pageant question: Who is actually in charge at the White House?  My hunches are a horrid combination of Susan Rice/Barack H. O./Valerie Jarrett.

[DLR Pyro]

Which is the $1.98 beauty pageant question: Who is actually in charge at the White House?  My hunches are a horrid combination of Susan Rice/Barack H. O./Valerie Jarrett.

An unholy trinity

[Ferrance]

This whole mess in Afghanistan was entirely predictable. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knew the Taliban were just waiting for us to leave so they could take over again. Had Trump won and stuck to his May 15th deadine similar things would have happened. The elected Afghan government is corrupt and our training of the Afghan military doesn't matter a lick if they're not willing to fight. So, i say get all our people out and go from there.

[Drafe Hoblin]

The Marines won't let themselves become trapped or separated in an environment, unless they're under-orders to contact Washington for every tiny instruction or assessment.  That's what I'm worried about. 

Democrat Administrations are famous for that.

[Eupher]

This whole mess in Afghanistan was entirely predictable. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knew the Taliban were just waiting for us to leave so they could take over again. Had Trump won and stuck to his May 15th deadine similar things would have happened. The elected Afghan government is corrupt and our training of the Afghan military doesn't matter a lick if they're not willing to fight. So, i say get all our people out and go from there.

I don't believe it's the "getting out" of A-stan that is the issue. It's "how" the getting out is occurring. It's haphazard, sloppy, careless, and unorganized. Characteristic of Gropey Joe and his *dministration.

A 20-year war with no end in sight other than continuing to spend money and send troops - even if only a few - is not in our best interests.

Entirely concur with you about the Afghan government being corrupt. We encountered the same problem in South Vietnam.

[Drafe Hoblin]

France24 was reporting that NATO-brass put Turkey in-charge of security at the Kabul-airport. 

Then Al Arabiya was reporting that US Embassy-staff were now operating at the Kabul-airport.

Can Biden make us look any more humiliating? 

[enslaved1]

This whole mess in Afghanistan was entirely predictable. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knew the Taliban were just waiting for us to leave so they could take over again. Had Trump won and stuck to his May 15th deadine similar things would have happened. The elected Afghan government is corrupt and our training of the Afghan military doesn't matter a lick if they're not willing to fight. So, i say get all our people out and go from there.

I missed most of Trump's plan, but a commentator this morning was focusing on the idea that Trump's plan did have requirements of the Afghan government for the May 15th pullout.  If those requirements weren't met, our troops stayed. 

No doubt, Afghanistan has been an unholy cluster since day one, and there have now been 4 administrations who have had their hands on it for various amounts of time.  W had most of both his terms, O had two terms, Trump had one, Biden has had a few months, but if he was coherent, there should be some recall of his two terms as VP.   There was no good reason for us to be piddling around there for 20 years.  Install a solid new government and get out, make it an American colony/territory under US law, whatever, we should have dropped a deuce or gotten off the pot a long time ago. 

[Eupher]

Anyone surprised at this kind of corruption within the Afghan government? Or, should I say, previous Afghan government?

Hollie McKay, a foreign policy expert and war crimes investigator who covered war, terrorism, and crimes against humanity for Fox News Digital for more than a decade, is reporting today from Afghanistan that the Taliban is paying off military commanders to abandon their posts and surrender their cities.

McKay made the shocking claim during an Instagram interview with SmartHERNews host Jenna Lee Babin, which she posted to our sister site RedState on Sunday afternoon.

She described the conditions in Mazar, prior to its fall on Saturday: “Friday, things had shifted and you could just feel it. There was a sense of fear, people were like, ‘they’re coming, they’re coming.'” McKay at first thought they were exaggerating, as shops were still open and people were milling about in the streets. That quickly changed. “Saturday it was just a ghost town. People were lining up at banks to get their monies out.”

“And then it was gone, just like that” after the Taliban rode in on motorbikes, celebrating their victory. “They came in without any resistance. There was no fight to this. There was very little gunfire that we heard.”

Rest of the article at the link: Redstate

[Eupher]

Just when you thought Asterisk couldn't possibly have screwed the pooch more completely, there's this:

Army veteran Matt Zeller issued a strong rebuke Monday night on MSNBC to President Biden’s Afghanistan speech, saying he was “appalled” by the lies the commander in chief told the American people about having planed for every contingency. Zeller, a Biden supporter, said the administration completely ignored his organization’s actual plan for how to evacuate America’s Afghan allies safely. Even worse than that, however, it looks like the Biden administration still has no plan for how to evacuate American citizens safely.

Speaking to CNN, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby admitted he didn't even know the number of Americans currently trapped inside Afghanistan due to Taliban checkpoints—only giving his “best guess” of between 5,000 and 10,000 near Kabul. He then acknowledged there’s no plan for getting those Americans to the airport safely.

“What is the plan to get these people to the airport?” CNN’s John Berman asked.

"From a military perspective our focus is at the airport,” Kirby said. “Right now though I don’t want to set the expectation that we are equipped and able to go out into the countryside and physically move people into Kabul. Our focus right now, the troops that we have there, are at the airport. The idea is that we can get the air operations, not only have they resumed, but to keep them in place for as long as possible.”

Berman then pointed out the obvious: "If they can’t get to the airport what does it matter if you have the capabilities to get them out from the airport?”

Kirby had no answer for Berman—only acknowledging the security situation is “not ideal.”

We might recall that Bagram Air Base (a large US asset until given to the Afghanis) fell to the Taliban on 15 Aug 21 after Afghan forces "surrendered." Evacuation of US assets would require a secure airfield large enough to handle large transport aircraft, so rather than keep and hold Bagram, the morons in charge gave it away in favor of using Karzai International Airport. Karzai is within the Kabul city limits while Bagram is located about 25 miles north of Kabul.

This is Gropey Joe's legacy, along with his minions SecDef Lloyd and SecState Blinken. Incompetency personified.

Townhall

[ADsOutburst]

I heard there were Europeans who were surprised at Biden's ineptitude.  Just... how?!

[DefiantSix]

I heard there were Europeans who were surprised at Biden's ineptitude.  Just... how?!

Good point. #JoeThePretender has been utterly incompetent for the entirety of his tenure on the public stage. It's difficult to see how anybody who hasn't been living in a cave in Afghanistan for the last 50 years could be surprised by any of #JoeThePedophile's moronic decision making

[Eupher]

This keeps on getting richer and richer and richer.

We all knew that Asterisk is a dipshit of the worst order, but here's video evidence of just how much of a ****ing narcissist and liar that he is.

I wrote earlier about how the debacle in Afghanistan may have been intentional because Joe Biden previously said he thought we should just pull out and didn’t need to be concerned about the allies we left behind. “F*** that,” he reportedly said in 2010. “We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” So it appeared it was always his intent to just pull out, no matter the cost.

That was pretty horrible to read — that indeed he was looking at Vietnam actions as a model of what he could get away with.

But that isn’t all. He blamed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. But that wasn’t who was responsible. Guess who was involved in 1975, too? You guessed it — Joseph R. Biden and the Congressional Democrats.

From The Atlantic:

In the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese with connections to the U.S.—soldiers, officials, spies, interpreters, drivers, bar girls, cooks—begged their American friends and colleagues to help them find a way out. But the embassy in Saigon and the Ford administration in Washington were slow to face the gravity of the situation and reluctant to prepare an evacuation for fear of panicking the population into chaos. In mid-April, President Gerald Ford finally realized that the government of South Vietnam might fall, and he asked Congress for $300 million in emergency aid, including money to evacuate the remaining 2,500 Americans and their dependents along with up to 175,000 South Vietnamese.

But Congress, led by Senate Democrats, had no interest in throwing away more money on a lost war that Americans wanted to forget. The prospect of sending U.S. troops to help evacuate Vietnamese along with Americans was a nonstarter. Some of the most strenuous objections came from the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.

“I feel put upon in being presented an all-or-nothing number,” Biden said at a rare White House meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 14. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

Ford countered: “We opened our door to the Hungarians. I am not saying the situation is identical, but our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”

Biden and other Democrats were unmoved. In a Senate speech on April 23, Biden argued that the president lacked the authority to rescue any Vietnamese. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats of third countries, Biden said. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” The U.S. should leave the task of protecting them to “the organizations that are available” and “diplomatic channels,” he added. A week later, North Vietnamese tanks entered the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon just hours after the last helicopter carried the last Americans out of Vietnam.

Here he is at the funeral of Sen. George McGovern in 2012, saying that he was right about Vietnam.

The video is purely disgusting and it reveals the length to which Biden the Turd will go.

https://republicandaily.net/2021/08/youll-never-guess-who-was-also-involved-in-the-1975-debacle-in-saigon/

[Eupher]

It keeps getting worse.

Headline: Left Behind: Billions in U.S. Equipment for the Afghanistan Taliban to Use Against... Us

Well, I'll be damned! Twitter is useful for something besides otters! 

All joking aside, the Taliban proudly display the booty of war. Didja hear that, U.S. taxpayer? The ka-CHING?

PJ Media

[Eupher]

This is the pinnacle of stupidity.

We pay these ****sticks hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to come up with THIS:

Headline: Not a Joke: Biden Admin's Response to Taliban Violence Is a 'Strongly Worded' Letter

The Biden administration is dealing with its deeply serious disasters in a deeply unserious way. Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, appeared on CNN with Wolf Blitzer Tuesday and said that the United States and its remaining allies worked really, truly, very hard on a response to the Taliban as it tightened its grip on Afghanistan.

That response — this is not a joke — came in the form of a strongly worded letter. Watch.

The rest of this shitstorm is at the link -- if you can stand it.
PJ Media

[old dog 2]

Headline: Not a Joke: Biden Admin's Response to Taliban Violence Is a 'Strongly Worded' Letter

I'm sure this letter will occupy a temporary and appropriate use in a Taliban outhouse.

[DefiantSix]

Far be it for me to sound like I'm defending the utter incompetence of #JoeTheFraud, but I'm not sure anybody could have executed any kind of withdrawal plan and not come out covered in shit.

What I mean is that a stable, basically honest government where corruption of public officials is seen  by the governed to be stamped out vigoroisly would have been a prerequisite for this to have any kind of happy ending. And lo; what sort of Afghanis were the sort of people to be "Public Enemy No.1" to the Soviets, the Taliwhackers, the Opium cartels and just about any other faction in the region looking to enrich themselves? Exactly the sort of people with sufficient personal integrity to make that kind of good government stick. Our own 20 year occupation hasn't really done the region any favors in that regard either (that I'm aware of; if y'all are aware of efforts that I'm not, then PLEASE educate me).

That being the political calculus which obtains, it was almost inevitable that whenever we pulled out of Afghanistan, however we did it, this was going to be the outcome. The damn of it all is that the options available due to the Clinton Regime's corrupt mismanagement of the region and the Sept.11th attacks didn't allow for many alternatives to choose from at the time.

[Ptarmigan]

Biden admin moved to dismantle protections for citizens trapped overseas months before Kabul’s fall: memo
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-admin-dismantled-ccr-kabul

The Biden administration moved in June to dismantle a system designed to protect American citizens trapped abroad — just months before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, stranding thousands of Americans in the Central Asian country.

Fox News has obtained the June 11 memo sent around the State Department which gave the green light on the "discontinuation of the establishment, and the termination of, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR)."

The sensitive but unclassified memo was signed by Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, just a couple of months before the Biden administration’s botched troop withdrawal that saw Afghanistan fall under Taliban control.

Read it and weep.

[Ptarmigan]

Sen. Bill Hagerty: ‘I’ve Seen Reports Ranging from 10,000 to 20,000’ Americans Stranded in Afghanistan
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/08/17/sen-bill-hagerty-ive-seen-reports-ranging-from-10000-to-20000-americans-stranded-in-afghanistan/

Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said on Tuesday, “I’ve seen reports ranging from 10,000 to 20,000″ Americans are currently stranded in Afghanistan.”

Hagerty’s remarks came during an interview on the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy, broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.

“How many Americans are currently stranded in Afghanistan?” Leahy asked.

“It’s a hard number to put your hat on. I was again, as ambassador to Japan, we had plans to do what they call non-combatant evacuation operations, NEO. That’s what needs to be undertaken right now. They’ve got to assess how many Americans are there,” Hagerty responded:

I’ve seen reports ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 and many of these are people with dual citizenship. But what you find out in a NEO operation is that there are many more people that may not have been known to the embassy and that may be there for other reasons that will emerge.

So those may be conservative numbers. I saw counts yesterday of up to 10,000 German nationals and 4,000 British nationals. Again, these are our allies that we also have obligations to work together to get them out.

And then you’ve got local Afghans who have worked for the embassy, who have helped our military, and who served as translators. We’ve all heard about them as well. The numbers in total that that are being pushed around right now are in the range of 60 to 80,000 people that need to be evacuated. And again, I’ll come back and say that’s probably a conservative number.

There are tens of thousadns of Americans trapped.