Biden remained at the wooded Camp David presidential retreat with members of his family over the weekend as chaotic images from Kabul emerged. He will return to Washington ahead of his address, which is scheduled for 3:45 p.m. ET.
Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden's national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country's defense forces, which they said lacked the will to defend their country against the Taliban.
Blame the Afghans. Have they gamed it out and decided it would be a mistake to blame Trump? Trump isn't even mention in the article. Perhaps they can see that to blame Trump is to open the path of blame back to Obama.
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senior members of Biden's national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country's defense forces
The buck stops over there, I guess?
WOW!! how many quarts of Adderall are they going to pump into him?
Are they going to pretend that it will be Live, or will they admit that they filmed in in takes?
(See how i didn't ask if there'd be unauthorized questions allowed? 'cause i'm not That stupid)
How many IV's and how many different chemicals is it going to take to pull this off, one wonders.....
Told ya. I just wrote that in the comments on an earlier post.
Blame the Afghans and 'previous administrations' to make sure others share in the blame for this mess.
No one ever stands up and says, 'we blew it'. We've Peter Principled the entire government. Is there no one with a position there who is not in way over his or her head? Anyone?
Think about what Trump accomplished with the entirety of the media, Big Tech, and our National Security apparatus, DoJ, and State Departments working against him 24/7 for 4 years. Now think about what Biden's group has done in 7 months.
Defund them all.
You can bet your ass they will blame SOMEONE! Cause they sure ain't gonna accept responsibility for this shit show.
My guess is that much like the Afghan army, Joe's supporters in the WH and the Dem party are starting to abandon him. He has to try and get in front of this.
It will fail.
It's a bold strategy...
The big problem is that guys like General Milley have recently assured us that the Afghan army was up to the task.
Will he be fired for incompetence? I'm not sure how our military is left unscathed by this. It seems that heads might actually roll if the administration is to deflect blame.
Sure that's the ticket, blame the citizens of the country we invaded. We came to help you, whether or not you wanted us to and you Afghans just weren't up to it.
I've seen this sort of thing elsewhere, it reminds me of the LBJ quote ("We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.") That was before escalation and this is well after it but it didn't work then and it doesn't work now. Of course Vietnam was never the "good war" that the Afghan invasion was supposed to be.
A mid-afternoon speech seems like an odd time. I wonder if he's avoiding prime time because he's not wanting it to seem like too big of a deal?
Jack Posbiec on Twitter has good WH sources. Supposedly Dr. Jill Biden overruled Chief of Staff Ron Klain and made Joe stay at Camp David.
Posbiec also reports much in-fighting between Harris and Biden camps.
My thought is that Kamela and Doug are building a 25th Amendment file on Joe right now. And they will use it to force Joe out. Secretary Pete is the new VP. Joe will be out by Christmas.
Re blame-shifting, Jake Tapper finally woke up and put Blinken through his paces yesterday. Blinken tried to blame Trump, who had aspired to be out by May 1, but Tapper blew him up. He said that May 1 was long gone but the troops were still there, and the withdrawal was obviously being mishandled by Biden and his team.
I think they have figured that blaming Trump won't fly, although they have been trying it since last week. No one in the US public knows anything about the Afghan Army, and Milley and the CIA told Biden that they ought to be able to hold out for 90 days, so they are the logical culprits. Message: it's not my fault.
But the withdrawal should have been first, the US nationals and friends; next, blow the facilities and equipment; then extract the troops. They didn't do it that way. Milley ought to be sacked along with the upper management of the CIA and half of the occupants of the Pentagon.
The "Blame Trump" trial balloon has been floated, but even Politico isn't buying it.
Might be past it's sell-by date.
His handlers must have concluded that his continued silence on the Afghan fiasco is worse than the risk of him wandering off the teleprompter and making a fool of himself. I for one will be popping corn and eagerly awaiting our leader's emergence from his bunker to reassure the nation that none of this was his fault.
There were 2,500 troops in Afghanistan when Biden said that we were leaving. Soon there will be 7,000 troops in Afghanistan as we depart. So, in order to leave we have to go back in???. What the fuck is going on here and who is making the decisions???
Now that it is all over Biden can return to public view and speak a fee apprpriate words over the smoking wreckage. I suggest "Did I do that?" for his catch phrase. Or perhaps "D'oh!"
"Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden's national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country's defense forces, which they said lacked the will to defend their country against the Taliban."
Gosh, and I wonder why people who've been told they've been left dangling in the wind have no incentive to fight?
I also why it took until now for teh "adults in charge" of the Biden Admin foreign policy only NOW figured out that that would be a problem? how are we supposed to trust the "experts" who couldn't figure out teh obvious flaws in their polices, until the falws destroyed their claimed policy?
Note: Reports are coming out that the reason the Afghan Air Force couldn’t operate is that the Biden Administration banned foreign maintenance contractors (i.e. the only people with the expertise) from entering Afghanistan.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/08/15/it-sure-looks-like-joe-biden-sabotaged-the-afghan-air-force-n426935
Since the Biden Admin not only "lacked the will to defend Afghanistan against the Taliban", but deliberately sabotaged any attempt to do so by the natives, them going on TV to blame others for their problems is as repellant as it is both shameful and predictable.
Of course, what's also shameful and predictable is that the left wing "American press" will do everything in their power to support this blame shifting.
"...Camp David presidential retreat..."
Presidential retreat? Sounds about right.
I'm hardly inclined to defend Biden but blame Afghans indeed. They get the blame for their shithole country - wanting it that way, keeping it that way. Blame Biden for not understanding that their "army" was a complete joke. Blame Biden for not intelligently (what else) planning the American withdrawal. But yeah, the Afghans get the blame for Afghanistan being Afghanistan and, reverting once again to Afghanistan.
The way things have gone this weekend, by 3:45 p.m. D.C. will have been taken over by the Taliban.
I wonder if this entire episode will result in "surprising" purchases of Hunter Biden's "art" by "anonymous" Afghanistan-based "art officionados"?..........
Potentially something new for Khristopher Wray's Korrupted Klowns to cover up.
Bill Clinton: I think that blonde is checking me out.....
George W Bush: Uh, its probably not a good time for me to say something publicly, is it? What if I promise to only criticize Trump while hugging the obama's and the biden's again? Wassat? Oh. No. Right. Sorry. I'll check back later........maybe I'll give Liz Cheney a call now that she has time available since she is no longer in leadership and never talks to anyone back in Wyoming and is basically just spending every day on MSNBC and CNN as a job interview. Yeah, that's the ticket. I'll call Liz. Dick won't take my call but Liz will. I mean, I think she will. Why wouldn't she? She will, right?
Please clap.
"Have they gamed it out and decided it would be a mistake to blame Trump?" Perhaps I lack imagination. How would they work that exactly?
"He refused to accept the outcome of the election, and incited an insurrection. This disheartened the Afghan army. We are submitting articles of impeachment for treason, causing our nation to lose the war."
Blaming Trump could be a tough sell, as most Americans want the US out of Afghanistan, and as it was Trump who struck the agreement with the Taliban to withdraw by May, a deadline Biden blew. Doesn’t mean Biden won’t try to make the sale, coherence not being his forte.
Camp David
Middle East Crisis and an Embassy Under Siege
Sudden Return to the White House
Inflation Rising
Civil Unrest and Racial Conflict
OPEC/Oil Issues
Is Jimmy Carter still President?
A minority that is ruthlessly terroristic can take over a society.
For example, the Taliban blows up bombs in crowded marketplaces.
The Nazis took over Germany. The Bolsheviks took over Russia.
In the Middle Ages, heretics were burned alive in public.
If you live in such a situation, it might be practically impossible for you to resist the terrorists in your midst.
Althouse writes, "Blame the Afghans."
Sky News reported that many Afghan soldiers have not been paid in months -- not years, months. Trying to feed a family with a salary you're not getting tends to sap the will to fight.
Apparently as soon as Trump's in-country people, the eyes and ears responsible for monitoring the distribution of taxpayer dollars to various Afghani agencies and bureaus of government, were replaced by Biden's representatives the grafters turned up the corruption level to 11. And why not? If Americans are comfortable with Hunter Biden and "the Big Guy" shaking down the Ukrainians, shouldn't we be comfortable with Afghan generals fleecing their grunts?
I hope he resigns and has all of the Joint Chiefs resign. The DoD head and all the leading IC heads should all resign as well. People must be punished! Defense and Intelligence should also have their funding cut.
Biden loses. He's going to be left holding the bag. I think people are tired of listening to Jill Biden or whoever is behind Joe.
Mika's comments on Morning Joe, and CNN's coverage right now is people inside the administration calling for Joe to accept responsibility.
"Joe will be out by Christmas"
Christmas is too late. If he survives that long he survives.
"A mid-afternoon speech seems like an odd time. I wonder if he's avoiding prime time because he's not wanting it to seem like too big of a deal?"
I bet he's not in sufficient mental shape by the evening.
"…first, the US nationals and friends; next, blow the facilities and equipment; then extract the troops."
This is so obvious I really can not understand what they were thinking. It's appalling.
The Biden puppet-masters didn't know what was going on in Afghanistan and I doubt they know what's going on in the US. I expect Biden to be coherent and clear and totally off-key just like the Obama birthday bash.
Trunalimunaprzure didn't work out as well as one would have hoped.
Plenty of blame to go around. Almost none of it belongs to Trump. As much as I would like to blame the Biden handlers for all of this, I cannot.
First, the Afghan government knew we were looking to pull out and that the American public was in favor of such a move. The fact that they failed epically to prepare themselves for this is entirely on them.
Second, the Army collapsed and had no will to fight. They were apparently not paid regularly(?) Anyway, they took money from the Taliban to abandon their post. This too is on the Afghan government.
Third, what were the forces that led to a supposedly corrupt government? Did we enable or at least fail to take stronger steps to prevent it? Do they have a complicit media that kept the people in the dark?
Fourth, the people, possibly. Did they not know what was going to happen and thus unable to prepare, or were they simply not motivated enough to demand it be fixed? Maybe all the people calling for it to be fixed were maligned as terrorists and marginalized as the bad people while the corrupt government fiddled around.
Fifth, our intelligence agencies. If we have not proven over the last decade how utterly corrupt and incompetent they are, we have now. No one will care. Maybe The media takes some culpability here for not doing their jobs.
Sixth. Here is our real shame. We know what kind of people the Taliban are. We got people to assist us in our effort to over-throw the Taliban. And then we abandon them. That is all on the Biden handlers. We should have known the risk we put on them and we should have granted them asylum and brought them here BEFORE we pulled out. If we can let millions across our southern border, we can bring in a few extra from Afghanistan.
Seventh, The failure to extract or disable our equipment is entirely on the US military. Did they at least leave the rainbow flax painted on the side?
This is just a predictable extension of Obot Middle East foreign policy. Iraq, ISIS, Libya, Syria, Iran, anti-Israel, oil dependence, etc.
Same decision makers. Same ignorance and poor judgment. Dead allies everywhere.
I guess the reason they didn't do an orderly withdrawal is they believed the intelligence that the Taliban wouldn't take over in the near term. I believe I read they intended to keep the US Embassy open. Massive intelligence failure. AGAIN.
Perhaps he'll come on and tell us a folksy story that has no relevance to anything. His fans seem to like that sort of thing.
"A mid-afternoon speech seems like an odd time. I wonder if he's avoiding prime time because he's not wanting it to seem like too big of a deal?"
A cynic would say that a mid-afternoon speech gives the tv news time to package coverage to make him look good.
Fortunately, I'm not a cynic.
This is the fucking we get for the… goddam it, it’s just the fucking we get.
"Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden's national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country's defense forces, which they said lacked the will to defend their country against the Taliban."
"Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden's national domestic team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Black community on the community's leaders, which they said lacked the will to defend their community against the gangs."
"If you live in such a situation, it might be practically impossible for you to resist the terrorists in your midst."
Live free or die tryin'.
It should be a short speech. I mean how long does it take to say "you f*cked up, you trusted us!"
"[Biden] will return to Washington ahead of his address, which is scheduled for 3:45 p.m. ET."
They promised him a bowl of ice cream.
".Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden's national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country's defense forces, which they said lacked the will to defend their country against the Taliban."
An explanation that WaPo served to them on a silver platter. First by reprinting this piece:
Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption
By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019
"...In one interview, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could “set up their own private checkpoints” and extort payments from travelers.
Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told government interviewers that the Afghan police were ineffective “not because they’re out-gunned or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level.”
"...The interviews were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, an agency created by Congress to uncover fraud and waste in the war zone. In 2014, SIGAR launched a special project titled “Lessons Learned” to examine policy failings from the war. It interviewed more than 600 people who played a direct role in the conflict, from military commanders to aid workers."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-army-police/?itid=hp_special-topic-chain1
Followed by today's piece by the same author:
Investigations
Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
'...Although U.S. intelligence officials had recently forecast the possible demise of the Afghan government over the next three to six months, the Biden administration was caught unprepared by the velocity of the Taliban takeover. Afghan forces “proved incapable of defending the country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”'
'...In September 2013, Mark A. Milley, then an Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, gave reporters another upbeat assessment. “I am much more optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what they’ve been doing,” he said.
“If they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on, then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan,” he added. Today, Milley is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and serves as the chief military adviser to President Biden.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/afghan-security-forces-capabilities/2021/08/15/052a45e2-fdc7-11eb-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.html
The efforts are to move the blame off the US intel/NatSec/Foreign Policy communities. The Bureaucrats, the Georgetown/Harvard alumni. If they try to blame Trump, the Communities' efforts to undermine Trump, to slow walk, ignore his orders gets a opened up.
US intel/NatSec/Foreign Policy communities failed in Vietnam, failed with the Soviet Union's collapse and now failed with Afghanistan.
According to the Beeb again, the US evacuation is complete. I really wonder about that.
This is eerily reminiscent of what happened in Norway in 1940. (N.B. The Talibs do not represent the kind of threat Nazi Germany did, it's just a rhyme.)
As soon as it became obvious that the (mostly) Brit forces that had landed in Norway to help them against the Germans were not up to the job, the order went out: "We're bugging out, but DON'T TELL THE NORWEGIANS." To their credit, a lot of British officers did tell the Norwegians anyway.
I'm also reminded of proverbs about pearls before swine, and making silk purses out of sow's ears.
Remember, this is the guy who is touted (and touts himself) as one of the greatest foreign policy experts of our time.
What the hell was he doing all those decades on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee?
Fire everyone above O-8, maybe O-7, including the General Staff, forget the Academies they're gone, promote from the ranks. My NCOs were always far more grounded than officers. Oh, also say goodbye to Saigon. The world is watching and taking notes. This will not end well.
Biden only wants 10% of the blame… he says his hands were tied, his back to the wall and no choice but to fuck up.
why blame trump?
Trump listened to his generals. Milley said no, so the afghan pullout didn't happen under trump's watch.
And the one time he contradicted his DOD secretary Mattis on the kurds and troop withdrawal in Syria back in 2018, nothing happened! The kurds are still alive! 😂
Obama overruled the generals on Iraq in 2011 and unilaterally pulled the troops out. Obama created ISIS and the destruction that followed.
Trump, even tho he wanted to bring the troops home from afghanistan, listened to the generals and was conditions based.
Biden just followed Obama's ISIS playbook.
It sounds to me like "The Plan" was to have the Afgan army fight and die for at least 90 days to cover our asses as we pulled out. There must be something I'm missing because that is absurd.
Someone should have told President Biden that the Taliban are White Supremacist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic sexists. Then he’d have been all in against them.
(No, seriously, bring an Afghani (Pathan?, Pashtun?) to the US, give him a job at UPS and Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi will prove that he has White Privilege.)
The public has a short attention span. If Biden & Co. can make it past next Sunday morning talk shows, he can get back to more important matters. Chasing down white supremacists and solving climate change.
That should give our returning soldiers something to do. Maybe Fauci can sic them on the folks who won't take the jab. The anti-vaxxers in da hood might shoot back, though. Our own version of the Taliban.
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