Wayne Dupree: Joe Biden’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy issue over the past 40 years, and Afghanistan proves it

Obama’s ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote a damning assessment of Biden in his memoirs in 2015. His scathing verdict has, sadly, been vindicated by the president’s awful decision to throw Afghans to the wolves.

Having held the post of defense secretary between 2006 and 2011, Gates once famously declared that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

This includes Biden's opposition to going after and killing Osama bin Laden in 2011 (one of Obama's greatest achievements), the premature withdrawal from Iraq, and now, to cap them all, his haphazard abandonment of Afghanistan. 

Thousands of Americans killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred for life since 2001; $2 trillion down the drain; a restoration of Al-Qaeda's sanctuary; and America's reputation sullied. Not bad for less than seven months’ work. But hey, at least those mean tweets from the White House have stopped!

The people of Afghanistan were doomed when Biden took over the White House, alongside the weak former general he appointed to run the Defense Department. What their decision will spawn for ordinary Afghans is not hard to predict – after all, we’ve seen it all before. Soon Facebook will allow the Taliban to broadcast their atrocities, including their infamous beheadings.

Biden’s decision to send in 5,000 more troops to help with the evacuation of American personnel has the smell of panic. Did his handlers have no idea based on input from our military on the ground there how fast the Taliban would retake the country? This is an intelligence failure of the highest order. 

Given Biden's apparent inability to comprehend and process simple questions, I am not surprised by what appears to be policy by committee. Shame on the DNC for the Biden administration.

Since the Taliban has now taken almost all of Kabul, it is too late to do anything but leave. Sorry, this means the Afghans are left to their own devices. Twenty years of training an army that collapsed in a week. Wow. The basic problem is that there were not enough Afghans willing to fight for a government that was corrupt, unloved, and out for itself. The troops we paid for and trained were simply people looking for a paycheck, not soldiers committed to their country's defense.

The Taliban are oppressors, rapists, and murderers of women and girls. Biden is an influence peddler vacationing while mayhem that he incited, and that only he could stem, soars. Please make no mistake: emboldened by this debacle, the devils around the world will come knocking on our door again soon.

At the very least, the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, and the generals overseeing the training of the Afghan army ought to resign or be fired. How could they not be aware that the Afghans were not going to fight after all the time and money we've spent there? How could they give information to a president who would then sound so foolish and out of touch a short time ago? They have wasted our money and failed at their basic mission. Who will be accountable? 

Most often, it is the politicians who lose the wars who face the consequences, and not the military. I am not trying to opine whether each general in charge of this effort has done a good or bad job, but it is mostly the politicians who define success or failure. When you tell our military that they are only allowed to shoot if shot at, that they are only allowed to focus on certain regions within the country, that they can only have a certain number of boots on the ground, and only a certain budget, we constrain them enough so that victory becomes impossible.

To take a peacetime analogy, it’s as if President Kennedy said we would send a man to the moon and bring him safely back to Earth, but we will only spend half the money that we need, we won’t use any rockets that are too loud, and we will only try to launch our vehicle from the middle of the Sahara Desert. That endeavor would also have failed.

The arc of history doesn't bend towards justice; it bends towards those with the biggest and best guns, ammo, and deeper desire to impose their will.

Biden's withdrawal execution strategy has been about as pathetic as anything one can imagine. He and his woke generals have created an absolute mess.

It didn’t have to be this way. An orderly withdrawal, including rescuing loyal Afghans who served the US cause, under the protection of NATO troops, was an available option. Instead, Biden and his political advisers saw some weird political advantage to executing a hasty plan with a profoundly dumb emphasis on 9/11 as the official end date.

So much for competence being one of the attributes of this administration.

Our news and information media, owned by a small group of men who put Biden into the White House to further their own financial prosperity, will circle the wagons around him and ignore his absence from Washington during this crisis (extended nap time, perhaps?). But a lot of Americans will notice. As will the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, and the Iranians.  A leaderless superpower – the true recipe for instability in the world. 

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