As John noted earlier tonight, the Biden administration has told our allies that “America is back.” Does this mean that it was some imposter nation that destroyed the ISIS caliphate, took out the Iranian terrorist Soleimani, helped broker peace deals between Israel and important Arab states, and supplied Ukraine lethal aid with which to defend itself against Russia?
I suppose this is all ancient history now. But what’s happening in Afghanistan, now that “America is back,” is current history. And one thing happening there is that our allies have citizens trapped due to Biden’s pullout.
So is Biden’s allegedly resurgent America going to get them out? We should. After all, these allies all committed personnel to a perilous land to help America fight the forces that conspired to attack America. And they stood with us as our approach to the war zigged and zagged and the nature of the mission seemed to evolve.
Now, allied personnel are at the mercy of the Taliban because Joe Biden decided to pull U.S. troops out and badly miscalculated what the consequences of his pullout would be.
Yet, top U.S. officials are (in the words of the Washington Post) “evasive” on the question of what America will do to help evacuate allied personnel whom we promised to assist, but who are being stopped at Taliban checkpoints. The Pentagon says it’s committed to staying in Afghanistan as long as there are “American citizens left” there. However, according to the Post, it has not committed to evacuating all of our allies.
The Post reports that some former U.S. officials consider this unwillingness to commit to evacuate our allies “a moral failing.” Is that overstating things? I don’t think so.
In any case, that unwillingness, and indeed this entire Afghanistan fiasco, contradict Biden’s claim to our allies that America is back as a steady, reliable partner. The whole business smacks of “America first” in the worst sense — a fact that isn’t going unnoticed by our key allies.
Biden’s claim that America is back rings utterly false unless he means that we’re back to the harrowing Jimmy Carter years.
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