President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley tour the African Americans in Service corridor that honors the contributions of African American service members, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
America’s life would not have been nearly as “secure, free or prosperous” without 20 years of U.S. troops being in Afghanistan, explains Andrew C. McCarthy in NRO. Troop deployments have enabled Americans to project force and to collect intelligence in parts of the world that would have been far more dangerous for America, as well as for everyone else.
Biden’s Dimwitted Claim
President Biden’s claim that we can do effective “over the horizon” counterterrorism in Afghanistan is untenable. His conviction that the catastrophe he has made of America’s retreat somehow proves he was right all along is yet another dimwitted demonstration of why his claim to fame is to have been wrong on just about every major issue in his improbable half-century climb to the pinnacle of our politics.
What he, like his predecessor, has deprived the nation of is an honest assessment of what the counterterrorism mission is in Afghanistan and what military resources would be necessary to execute it.
With the Taliban installed once again in Kabul, the jihadists back in business, and our government bereft of a plausible plan, we are back in a turn-of-the-century threat environment.
Thus are we left to hope, as if hope were a strategy, that this won’t have turn-of-the-century consequences.
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