Biden's British Afghanistan Adventure: Liar, Liar Pants on Fire
On August 31, Joe Biden emerged for his latest struggle with an apparently hostile teleprompter and scolded the nation. He angrily asserted that his withdrawal from Afghanistan was a smashing success and should not be criticized. Any fault rested with others. He implied, for example, that Americans left behind must have neglected the heroic social media outreach of his State Department. He didn't mention that getting out meant crossing checkpoints manned by the terrorist Taliban based on agreements his military made.
But the pictures of desperate people clinging to and then falling to their deaths from a C17 taking off in Kabul and the image of an American President glancing at his watch five times as the 13 coffins of the soldiers killed at Kabul Airport came off the plane at Dover, are searing and will not be washed away by the torrent of triumphalist lies now issuing from the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Nor will the fact that an effort funded by trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds and costing thousands of American and Afghani lives has ended in what appears to be a deliberate rout.
Moreover, a series of leaks from disgruntled Pentagon, CIA, and White House staff conclusively demonstrated over the week that Joe Biden lied outright and repeatedly to the American people about the situation in Afghanistan from at least July 8 forward. https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/6-lies-president-joe-biden-told-about-afghanistan/
Now, the neo-con Republicans, the TV generals (as Donald Trump calls them), and the war party Democrats, such as Leon Panetta, supplemented by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other neo-cons of the British establishment are milking Biden's lies and incompetence for all that it is worth. These are the very same people who joined then Senator and Vice-President Biden in creating and sustaining America's 20-year Afghanistan trap in the first place. The slobbering of Fox TV over such idiots as Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, and Mike Pompeo has little to do with the situation in Afghanistan and everything to do with 2024 presidential campaigns the Republican establishment wants to promote.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are struggling to form a government among their competing factions and their various foreign state sponsors. With most of the Afghans who fought with the United States—the people who were supposed to be evacuated—left behind, along with hundreds of Americans, the potential for mass casualty events and hostage taking loom large. On September 5, Texas Congressman Mike McCaul told Chris Wallace on his Sunday Fox show that six airplanes with American citizens and Afghan interpreters onboard had been held up at Maza r-i-Sharif airport in Northern Afghanistan for five days by the Taliban, a fact confirmed by State Department messages to Congress.
In addition, no one knows exactly who was evacuated. In Hollywood fashion, the White House proclaimed that it was conducting "the largest airlift in history." People were simply shoved onto planes with minimal vetting in what appears to be a numbers game to substantiate that headline. Thus, as September 11 approaches, two situations of Biden's creation—the open southern border and the unhinged Afghanistan evacuation—have produced a singular terrorist threat.
The CIA and, undoubtedly, the British have backed resisters in the Panjshir Valley where the Taliban is now claiming victory. That outcome is not entirely clear, and this is but one battle in what could be a long civil war. There are also multiple reports that American military and intelligence are on the ground in Pakistan despite denials by the Pakistanis.
Thus, the right decision, to get out of Afghanistan, has been so sullied by the execution that the decision itself is now imperiled. Some say that those opposing withdrawal from Afghanistan in the military and Intelligence Community deliberately botched the withdrawal in order to ensure that the United States could not, in the end, leave. It would have to return. They remind us that the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community invented the totally fake story that Russians were giving bounties to the Taliban to kill Americans to stymy Donald Trump's effort to withdraw. No doubt there is an element of truth in that.
I lean more, however, to situating these events in the context of Joe Biden's declared foreign policy, his own history, and the fact that he is still functioning on behalf of a globalist empire and not on behalf of a sovereign United States. He says that he is now creating a Bloc of Democracies to lead a new Cold War against "autocrats" in Russia, China, Iran, and other nations insisting on their sovereignty. That is the proclaimed new purpose of NATO. It emerged as consensus at the June G7 meeting. In that calculus, there is no room for "small wars" and expensive nation-building counterinsurgency.
Biden wants the money for his Green Great Reset globalist agenda while building a military capable of acting on behalf of the so-called block of democracies NATO now vows to build. Counterterrorism, in the form of the Obama/Biden policy of "leading from behind" destabilization and assassination, will continue, just without the expense and pretense of "nation building."
In 2009, when Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai pressed then Vice-President Biden to crack down on Pakistan's numerous safe havens for the Taliban, Biden rebuffed him by saying that Pakistan was 50 times more important for the United States than Afghanistan. This is completely consistent with how things have played out here. https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-withdrawal-afghanistan-pakistan-nuclear-lashkar-e-taiba-tehreek-e-taliban-islamist-11629402468
Our sources tell us that Americans work through the British in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the British have the major sway over Pakistan. Double dealing and geopolitical intrigue have dominated these relationships since Zbigniew Brzezinski's use of the Pakistani supported mujahedeen to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan in the 10-year war which started in 1979. In the current context, it is not improbable that Biden agreed to give Afghanistan to Pakistan as a way of keeping the Pakistani door open to the British and the U.S. while closing it to China.
Consistent with this supposition, Pakistan has gone on a summer shopping spree for new lobbyists in Washington, D.C. They include Grenier Consulting, a firm founded by the former CIA station chief in Pakistan in 2001–2002, and the Democratic progressive lobbying firm Fenton/Arlook. They have been messaging Washington repeatedly that Pakistan is not, necessarily, in "China's pocket."
The 2014 statement of Hamid Gul, a former head of ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, accurately paints the entire ugly picture now emerging. "When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America," Gull told a television audience. "Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America." https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-07-22/pakistans-pyrrhic-victory-afghanistan
It is well known among all of those now so feverishly opining on this situation, including Joe Biden and his Republican foes, that the U.S. funds the ISI, which controls the Taliban, to the tune of billions, while our servicemen fight the same Taliban in Afghanistan. While Joe Biden may imagine that he has shifted America toward his fever dream of great power competition, in reality he has only driven Russia and China closer together as both, for security reasons, must now act to ameliorate the terrorist threat on their borders.
This absurd situation cannot be explained without resort to explaining the immoral precepts upon which the British operate, and how our establishment has come to operate with them in the evil "special relationship" crafted in the aftermath of Franklin Roosevelt's death.
Twenty Years of Satanic Foreign Policy
In 1848, Britain's satanic Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, told the British parliament, "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies."
Authors Phil Miller and Mark Curtis just revisited this Palmerston statement in an article posted to Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/26/friends-enemies-four-failed-wars/ They found echoes of Palmerston in the statement of Britain's Defense Chief, General Sir Nick Carter, praising the Taliban. Carter said: "I think you have to be very careful using the word enemy. I think people need to understand who the Taliban actually are … and the plain fact is that they happen to live by a code of honour and a standard … [which] has honour at the heart of what they do." The Taliban are "country boys" who, despite killing 457 British troops, are "bound together by a common purpose which is they don't like corrupt governance, they don't like governance that is self-serving, and they want an Afghanistan that is inclusive for all."
This statement, of course, is being echoed by the Pentagon, the State Department, and Joe Biden's other flaks.
The War on Terror sallied forth in alleged response to the September 11, 2001, attack with the declared goal of overthrowing the governments which George Bush and Tony Blair said were "the axis of evil"—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—and replacing them with democracies. That war had a brief pitstop in Afghanistan in 2001–2002 when the Taliban were temporarily defeated.
The doctrine undergirding this War on Terror, a claim to the right to wage preemptive war anywhere in violation of international law, was then new and controversial as were the curbs on constitutional rights and civil liberties embodied in the Patriot Act.
Despite the war waged against these policies by Lyndon LaRouche and others, Americans for the most part went along, traumatized by the shock of the September 11 attacks, and disoriented by subsequent propaganda directed at them from the Bush Administration and a compliant Congress, including the loud-mouthed member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden. Despite lying about it repeatedly, Biden voted for and continued to advocate these wars. https://theintercept.com/2019/09/06/joe-biden-defends-record-iraq-including-plan-divide-along-sectarian-lines/
It turns out that the new military policy was largely written by Zalmay Khalilzad back in 1992, in a document called the "Draft Defense Planning Guidance" (DDPG). Khalilzad claims authorship of the document in his book "The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey." The DDPG said that the pre-eminent goal of U.S. foreign policy, following the Cold War, was to prevent the emergence of a new rival. Defense spending was to be increased to ensure the U.S. had lone-superpower status. Preventive and preemptive force was to be used to ensure that the U.S. was the sole hegemon and multilateralism was to be forsaken if it did not suit U.S. interests. https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/1992_draft_defense_planning_guidance/
If you hear Lord Palmerston speaking in this creed, you are hearing accurately. Khalilzad says Dick Cheney loved it, telling him, "You've found a new purpose for our role in the world."
Khalilzad, according to his biography, is a protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, the "Balance of Terror" monster of the University of Chicago and the Rand Corporation; Zbigniew Brzezinski, with whom he coordinated the mujahadeen terrorist war against the Russians in Afghanistan; and Dick Cheney. After service at the Bush National Security Council, as an Ambassador to Afghanistan in the initial Afghanistan war, followed by similar service in Iraq, and then as Bush's UN Ambassador, Khalilzad, like most, went into international consulting, maintaining his relationships to NATO's intelligence services, but at a much richer pay scale.
All these posts involved the use of British methods of counterinsurgency and nation building, the same stratagem which had failed so spectacularly in Viet Nam.
In Barack Obama's previous presidency, the one prior to the current Biden administration, a big fight developed in 2009 concerning escalating the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Biden advocated a counterterrorism strategy involving killing and decapitating terrorist leaders deemed hostile to the United States and destabilizing targeted nations economically and militarily by sponsoring insurgencies within them, without a nation building component. In fact, he advocated segregating the various ethnic groups in Iraq and balkanizing the nation into homogeneous ethnic enclaves.
General Stanley McChrystal and Defense Secretary Bob Gates advocated for a counterinsurgency surge putting 30,000 new troops on the ground. McChrystal called Biden's strategy "Chaos-istan" in a London speech, an incident recounted in the 2010 Rolling Stone article which resulted in McChrystal being fired by Obama. Nonetheless, the military won the argument and got its 30,000 troops.
The anger with which Biden scolds the American people now in his senile rants is the same anger he expressed to Barack Obama when he opposed the Afghan "surge." He yelled that he wouldn't send his son Beau there on behalf of women's studies. In his confused state he seems to believe he is waging and finally winning the very same argument now, in 2021.
Later, as the Obama/Biden Arab Spring set the entire Middle East on fire, counterinsurgency for the most part was dropped in favor of drone warfare decapitation of alleged terrorist cells, special forces assassination squads, and employment of terrorist mercenaries, including offshoots of Al-Qaeda, to wage regime change wars in Libya, Syria, and Egypt, among other locales. The idea is to destabilize target nations to such an extent that they can never assert a national interest or form a coherent political body. It is, in all respects, a repeat of British colonial policies, rebranded by Obama and Biden as "leading from behind."
In the regime change operation in Ukraine, run by Biden, the British, and Victoria Nuland, who is now the third highest ranking official in Biden's State Department, neo-Nazis were the preferred mercenary forces.
The constants in the 20-year war in Afghanistan are chiefly two: Zalmay Khalilzad and Joe Biden. Khalilzad was recruited back to the State Department by the ever-conniving Mike Pompeo in 2018 to engage in negotiations with the Taliban after President Trump ordered the war to end. Khalilzad and Pompeo drafted the Trump withdrawal agreement signed in February 2020. Based on what has been characterized as Khalilzad's "close" relationship to Joe Biden, Khalilzad has remained the key negotiator with the Taliban, with constant input from Pakistan. The elected Afghanistan government was excluded from the talks.
Khalilzad's testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee back in May is revealing. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4973782/user-clip-house-hearing-us-policy-afghanistan He said that the Taliban offensive would not result in an immediate collapse of the Afghan government because the Taliban knew that military victory rather than a negotiated settlement would result in a long war. This was presumably the calculated threat Khalilzad and Biden were conveying to the Taliban at the time. It would be most wise for the actually curious in Congress to focus on Khalilzad's communications with the Pakistanis, with the British, and with the U.S. national security apparatus since Pompeo brought him back. That would be the quickest way to figure out just what has taken place here.
Absent that, however, the outlines are clear enough. Back in July, the lights were flashing red about the success of the Taliban military offensive in intelligence reports, various media, and even and on the website of the Council of Foreign Relations. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-07-22/pakistans-pyrrhic-victory-afghanistannos.
On July 2, the U.S. abandoned its huge Bagram air base in the middle of the night without telling their Afghan counterparts. The base had been the center of NATO operations in Afghanistan and its airfield was fortified and defensible. The Afghans had been trained to fight with U.S. airpower as an essential component. Already at this time, all neighboring countries were building or had built border walls based on the inevitably of a Taliban victory and an influx of refugees. The United States was actually assisting this construction for Tajikistan while dismantling President Trump's wall on our southern border.
On July 8, however, Biden's scripters told the American people in an address about the pullout that there was no question that the Afghans would hold up against the Taliban and there would be no Saigon type exit by the United States.
But on July 23, based on a leaked transcript obtained by Reuters, Biden told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that the "perception" around the world was that things were not going well in the fight against the Taliban. https://www.reuters.com/world/excerpts-call-between-joe-biden-ashraf-ghani-july-23-2021-08-31/ Biden said, "There's a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture." He told Ghani to focus on defending the population centers if the U.S. was to give more help, suggesting that Ghani hold a press conference with all Afghan factions to announce a "new" strategy.
Ghani countered this invitation for a propaganda magic show with the actual reality. He told Biden, "We are facing a full-scale invasion, composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10-15 thousand international terrorists, primarily Pakistanis thrown into this, so that dimension needs to be taken account of." Ghani's claims have been substantiated by reports from media throughout the world. Ghani further said there were apparent agreements between the United States and the Taliban which the Afghan government was not aware of involving reluctance to use air support against the Taliban.
Ghani told Biden that some cities had withstood Taliban sieges of 55 days without surrendering but the government needed help, particularly air support to reverse the military situation. That request, of course, was never going to be answered. The Taliban offensive was allowed to proceed, unimpeded.
The Biden collective's stupendously stupid miscalculation seems to have been about the timing. They believed that Khalilzad, the British, and Pakistan could hold the resurgent Taliban off, at least until sometime long after September 11, so that the hologram President could say he extricated America from its endless wars on that horrible anniversary. Time would allow for a much more orderly evacuation. It should be clear that "endless war" as employed by the Biden collective means ending expensive counterinsurgency efforts in developing nations. It is not a repudiation of the monstrous imperial policy set forth in Khalilzad's 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance which was so brutally implemented by Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Betsie Bridge followed this page 2021-09-12 21:36:47 -0400