US officials could have many reasons for not disclosing the names of the “ISIS-K planner and facilitator” taken out in a drone strike Friday as a down-payment on retaliation for Thursday’s horrific Kabul airport attack, but the reticence is unusual enough to seed suspicion. After all, the enemy certainly knows who they lost.
“Normally if they get a high-profile guy they like to name him,” US Army Lt. Col (ret.) Brian Sullivan told The Post.
It’s conceivable (as Sullivan noted) that naming the dead would somehow reveal US intelligence secrets, putting at risk sources that (or who) are helping to track more, possibly higher-level ISIS-K operatives — perhaps even the ones killed in Saturday’s drone attack that the military says eliminated a new active threat to the airport.
But it’s also possible that all these targets, while entirely deserving of death, are relatively small beans. As Sullivan also said, “They keep talking BS about ‘eyes over the horizon’ but I think a lot of this is the administration blowing more smoke.”
More: “They’re throwing this up as if the US is reacting with strength and power. So that makes the score something like ISIS 200-US two. Who are they kidding?”
While the strike was painted as a direct response to the airport attack, with the implication that the “planner” bore some responsibility for that atrocity, military sources have adamantly refused to claim knowledge of any such connection. Again, they may be keeping mum for other reasons — but this may also suggest that Team Biden politicians, desperate to claim some success, are overpuffing the significance.
Feeding those suspicions are the ongoing efforts by the president, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others to throw some blame for the debacle of this pullout on the military.
Blinken on Sunday again fingered the Pentagon in the decision to abandon the US base at Bagram airport early in the pullout. But it’s clear that the White House was dictating the pace of the retreat, how many troops could stay for how long — a call that forced military planners’ hand.
And that’s true no matter how many times the Bidenites claim that the only alternative was to continue the forever war.
Indeed, such persistent double-talk can only add to Americans’ doubts that their president and his people are leveling with us all.