The Patriot Post® · Rehabilitating Biden's Afghanistan Disaster

Joe Biden’s disastrous surrender and retreat from Afghanistan marked an early low point in his presidency. Solely to keep a foolish campaign promise, the commander-in-chief embarrassed and weakened America, which has had profound consequences worldwide.

And the “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” thinks everything went just dandy.

Politico’s Alexander Ward explains it in a new book coming out tomorrow — The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump.

The obtuse title should tell you a lot about the author’s skewed worldview. Donald Trump’s foreign policy record was laudable. He brokered peace deals in the Middle East, vaporized an Iranian terrorist leader, bolstered the strength of NATO, and countered Chinese ambitions, just to name a few things. The only thing to “restore” after that was the failures of the Barack Obama years.

And boy, did Joe Biden deliver.

“No one offered to resign” after the Afghanistan withdrawal, Ward writes, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.” The way Biden went about doing it, yes, it was. Of course, “messy” is a gross understatement.

Thirteen Americans were killed by jihadists during the chaotic evacuation in Kabul. In retaliation, Biden ordered a missile strike that killed a bunch of kids. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the U.S. abandoned “nearly $7.2 billion worth of aircraft, guns, vehicles, ammunition, and specialized equipment” to the Taliban.

That was just the beginning. Six months after Biden’s Saigon-like withdrawal, Vladimir Putin launched what Biden derided as a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. As you may have heard, that war is ongoing. Putin would not be in Ukraine if Trump was still president, and anyone who believes otherwise is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Then, in October 2023, Iran-backed Hamas terrorists brutally murdered 1,200 Israelis. That war is also ongoing, despite Team Biden’s efforts to hamstring our Israeli allies. Three more Americans were killed in related strikes by Iranian proxies just last month, and again, Biden lobbed a few missiles at targets anywhere but Iran.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is calculating his timing on crossing the Taiwan Strait to reclaim the free island nation the ChiComs insist belongs under their thumb.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban took control once again, immediately oppressing the people — especially women — and ruthlessly punishing Afghans who cooperated with America but whom Biden left behind along with hundreds of American citizens. “Human rights in Afghanistan are in a state of collapse [two years into the Taliban’s takeover], acutely affecting the lives of millions of women, men, girls and boys,” said Volker Turk, United Nations high commissioner for human rights, in September 2023. “The shocking level of oppression of Afghan women and girls is immeasurably cruel.”

The “good Catholic” Biden has been far tougher on pro-lifers in America than the Islamofascist thugs in Afghanistan.

In 2001, we went to Afghanistan to crush al-Qaida and the hosting Taliban. Yet al-Qaida is growing thanks to its Taliban hosts. That isn’t new news, but it’s worth remembering.

But sure, Biden handled the Afghanistan retreat so well that no one even considered resigning. “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up,” a White House official told Ward. The author added, “Biden told his top aides … that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”

In reality, White House players covered for Biden’s blundering and lies. For example, “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise,” one official told Ward of Biden’s promise to stay until every American was evacuated.

The entire book would be hilarious if it weren’t such a serious topic. At the time, Biden blamed all the withdrawal difficulties on the flaws in Trump’s evacuation plan that Biden was somehow forced to follow. He was able to undo everything else Trump did — why not that plan? Then again, anyone without Biden’s advanced dementia knows that such a disaster never would have happened under Trump, who would have altered the plan to deal with events.

Like every other Leftmedia hack, Ward may be attempting to rehabilitate Biden’s image by giving a gritty account of how the White House handled and viewed unfolding events. But the Afghanistan retreat remains one of his worst decisions with near-catastrophic results for the U.S. and the world. Going out on a limb, reminding voters of that during an election year might not actually help Joe Biden.