We didn’t want to talk about it on the day itself, but what a cloud President Joe Biden managed to cast over the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
He’d clearly intended his Afghan pullout to allow a triumphant speech on the 20th anniversary of the world’s deadliest terrorist strike. But he was so determined to make political hay from ending America’s longest war as the country commemorated the attack that sparked it that he instead wrought a national humiliation.
Notably, Biden extended the deadline for exiting — right into the combat season, allowing the Taliban to plan an offensive that made it look like they were driving America into retreat. Then, as the Afghan army collapsed, deprived of air support and its morale shredded by events like the middle-of-the-night US abandonment of Bagram Air Base, he stubbornly stuck to his self-imposed deadline even after it became clear it’d mean abandoning Americans and allies.
His debacle leaves the Taliban far stronger than they were on Sept. 11, 2001, and raises the risk of terrorism worldwide from al Qaeda and like-minded groups.
And to think he made his supposedly vaunted foreign-policy experience a centerpiece of his campaign.
The Taliban established their Islamic emirate in 1996 but never had complete control of the country: The US special forces that helped topple them relied on resistance fighters from the north. But this year’s resistance faced a force enriched by the vast state-of-the-art US arsenal abandoned in the Biden-ordered retreat: thousands of armored vehicles and dozens of aircraft seized from the Afghan army. The United States delivered seven new helicopters alone in July, just a month before the Taliban takeover.
In the rush to evacuate, America even left biometric data on millions of Afghans, making it all too easy for the Taliban to identify — and slaughter or torture — their enemies, those who risked their lives working alongside coalition forces over the 20-year war.
Team Biden keeps claiming the Taliban have reason to be better as they seek international legitimacy for their new government. Hah! The interim leaders are the same old monsters: As Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Thomas Joscelyn notes, “More than a dozen of them were first sanctioned by the UN Security Council in early 2001.”
And plenty have ties to al Qaeda. The new interior minister is Sirajuddin Haqqani, a member of the FBI’s most-wanted list with a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head as leader of the particularly brutal and al Qaeda-tied Haqqani network, which is known for its mass-beheading videos — as well as the 2011 siege of Kabul’s US embassy compound that resulted in 16 dead Afghans.
Biden declared al Qaeda all but dead — though the Treasury Department noted just before he took office that the terrorist group has been “gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” In June, the UN Security Council reported that al Qaeda is active in at least 15 of the country’s 34 provinces.
It’s not the only Islamic terrorist outfit the Taliban support either. Biden repeatedly mentions — for no apparent reason — that ISIS-K is the Taliban’s sworn enemy. But the truth about the group that killed 13 US service members and hundreds of Afghans last month is far more complicated. As security expert Sajjan M. Gohel wrote in Foreign Policy, “There has, in fact, been a tactical and strategic convergence between the Islamic State-Khorasan and the Haqqanis, if not the entirety of the Taliban.”
Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s MI5 intelligence agency, warns the Taliban victory might’ve “emboldened” terrorists to carry out future 9/11-type attacks.
Biden had to scrap his planned “I ended the war” speech for the 9/11 anniversary. Instead, he led into the solemn day with a different bid to claim leadership — on COVID. All early signs suggest that ploy won’t work out any better.
The nation needs its president to stop playing politics with vital decisions, and start actually leading.
