About 250 Americans left in Afghanistan: Report
Jennifer Griffin, Fox News national security correspondent, discusses the last 24 hours of the War in Afghanistan on 'Your World'
President Joe Biden's public bungling of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan represents the most profound embarrassment in the history of the United States.
Dozens of poor Afghans clinging desperately to the underbelly of an American C-17 taxiing for takeoff from Kabul International Airport, with some falling to their deaths, and one crushed in the aircraft wheel assembly, epitomizes all that is wrong with Joe Biden and his buffoonish withdrawal from Afghanistan.
While most Americans agree that U.S. ground troops should be withdrawn after 20 years, no one envisioned the execution of that withdrawal in such a cataclysmic, disastrous manner which cast unspeakable humiliation upon the United States.
It didn't have to happen this way.
BIDEN BREAKS PROMISE TO 'STAY' IN AFGHANISTAN UNTIL EVERY AMERICAN EVACUATED
Biden could have taken a common-sensical approach. One doesn’t need an advanced degree in Strategic Studies from the Naval War College to know that you never telegraph withdrawal deadlines to enemy forces.
Rather than announcing his August 31st deadline, come hell or high water, Biden could have (and should have) first quietly gotten all excess American military equipment and weaponry out of the country, and then quietly removed all Americans from the country. He then should have quietly removed all essential Afghan Personnel from the country who were instrumental in helping United States during the twenty years of the war effort.
Then, only after first executing the steps above, should Biden have ever announced a withdrawal deadline, if at all.
Instead, the Biden approach is a disaster on steroids, as if he never meant to protect America, but rather to embarrass and humiliate us, for all the world to see.
British and the French paratroopers, the week of August 23rd, entered Taliban-infested Kabul to rescue their people. But did Biden, with the world's most powerful military at his disposal take that step?
Of course not.
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Like a paralyzed deer frozen in the headlights, he sat back and did nothing, leaving Americans stranded on their own, making them fair game in open season for the Taliban.
Then, on August 26th, news came that 13 American GIs were killed in a bomb attack, including 12 Marines and a sailor, along with some ninety Afghans, their blood spilled by Biden’s unfathomable incompetence.
The cataclysmic international embarrassment brought not only universal international shame upon the United States, but—just as shameful—served as a desecrating disservice to the memories of those who lost their lives in the 20 year War on Terror.
What will the world remember now? Will it remember the great and heroic Americans who fought and died in Afghanistan? Or Biden's shameful and disgraceful public exit?
More likely the latter, unless we who love this country are vigilant to remember the fallen.
Ten years ago, on August 6, 2011, America suffered our single largest-loss-of-life in the Afghan war. Thirty U.S. service members, including 17 members of the elite Navy SEAL Team Six, were mysteriously shot out of the air on board an Army Chinook CH-47 helicopter, called "Extortion 17." The shoot down, which occurred just 96 days after Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Laden, occurred under questionable circumstances that make their sacrifice seem like a pre-planned set up.
Twenty days later, on August 26, 2011, thirteen of the brave men who died on board Extortion 17 were laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, together.
On August 2nd of this year, a docudrama movie was released about Extortion 17 called FALLEN ANGEL: Call Sign Extortion 17. The movie honors these men and exposes Obama's shameful Rules of Engagement.
Then, soon after the movie's release, came the Biden debacle in Afghanistan. More presidential incompetence to blur their memories.
But then, it got worse.
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On August 26th, 2021, the tenth anniversary of the burial of these thirteen men of Extortion 17 in Arlington Cemetery, thirteen more American Service members unnecessarily lost their lives, killed by the rank incompetence of both the indistinguishably feckless Obama and Biden Administrations.
This is the legacy of the horrid recent democrat stewardship over America's foreign affairs: disaster after disaster, fumbling every possession, unnecessary loss of American life.
More from Opinion
- Reps. Scalise, Mast: Biden's Afghanistan exit is a disgrace and just one of many avoidable disasters
- Medal of Honor Recipient Littrell: Afghanistan fiasco – don't punish service members for a leadership failure
- Rep. Mike Turner: Amidst Afghanistan horror show, Biden seems completely oblivious to his own failures
Extortion 17, Benghazi, Kabul. These are the images brought to our television screens under Democrat presidential rule, smoldering images of smoke-and-flame, from which charred American bodies were placed in flag-draped coffins.
But for the men of Extortion 17, for the men of Benghazi, for the 13 Americans unnecessarily killed in Kabul just last week, and for the thousands of other Americans who shed their lives in the War on Terror, we as a nation must work to ensure that the smoke of the Biden-Obama incompetence will not obfuscate the memory of their ultimate sacrifice.
Remember the fallen who served America. Remember those who voluntarily gave their lives for our nation.
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Remember them despite an incompetent commander-in-chief.
Time will not diminish the glory of their deeds.
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