Despite that, President Biden plowed ahead with his withdrawal plans.
He was confident enough that, just last month, he rejected comparisons to Saigon because “the Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army.”
That might be fair. They proved far more capable.
Again, just last month, Biden said “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
One month later, the Taliban had done just that.
If today’s speech from Biden sounded familiar, it’s because it was largely lifted from his speech in April announcing the drawdown.
One line that didn’t make it in this time? The Afghan military will “continue to fight valiantly…at great cost.”
One of the most consistently wrong people is Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State.
He said of the withdrawal: “as the United States begins withdrawing our troops, we will use our civilian and economic assistance to advance a just and durable peace for Afghanistan.”
In April, while visiting Afghanistan, Blinken told Afghan President Ashraf Gandhi - who has since fled the country - that Blinken was there to “demonstrate literally, by our presence, that we have an enduring and ongoing commitment to Afghanistan.”
I’m…not sure that one came to pass.
But perhaps Blinken’s worst prediction was from June where he said the US withdrawal wouldn’t lead to “some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation” that could happen “from a Friday to a Monday.”
It took, what, a week and a half?
There were a lot of bad predictions about the Taliban.
In April, US Envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad told lawmakers that the new Taliban would behave better because “international recognition” would prove an incentive.
Doesn’t look like it.
The generals, as ever, were also wrong. Speaking to the Senate in June, SecDef Lloyd Austin and Gen Mark Milley said there was a “medium” risk that the Taliban would have the capability to retake Afghanistan and it would take two years.
It took them two weeks.
Milley at that same testimony said that “I don’t see Saigon 1975 in Afghanistan. The Taliban just aren’t the North Vietnamese Army. It’s not that kind of situation.”
It was, in fact, precisely that type of situation, just worse and faster.
Here we’ve got nameless “U.S. officials” endorsing the theory that the Taliban - yes, that Taliban - would be concerned about being an international pariah because their leaders “have a record of seeking international credibility.”
"...experts also believe that Taliban leaders have moderated in recent years, recognizing that Afghanistan’s cities have modernized, and note that the group’s peace negotiators have traveled internationally, seeing the outside world in a way its founders rarely...did." NYT, 4/23
Speaking of generals, here’s Joseph Dunford endorsing the international respect theory that this Afghanistan would “temper its violence” because…well, who knows.
Just amazing.
As has been the case for the last twenty years, our intel has simply been wrong.
We thought we had months, even worst-case scenario.
We really only had weeks.
I’ve said this on here repeatedly but I really don’t think that Biden will face serious political consequences from this devastating situation.
But every prediction and promise he and his team have made have been disastrously wrong on Afghanistan.
Folks sometimes ask how they can support the threads. I do them as a hobbyist so the short answer is that there isn’t a way.
Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.
Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?
Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”
The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine.
Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”
You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after
Good to see the NYT’s considerable resources being put to finding the truth in a debate between private citizens that led one of them to raise a flag upside down.
Real afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted stuff here.
It has only become “news” because of the pivot to left wing clickbait that Trump inspired among the press.
It’s politically inspired harassment and not only is it noxious it’s driving a deep animus among its target demo that is fraying what remains of the bounds of our body politic and society more broadly.
I’ve got an oldie-but-a-goodie for you from the archive of unhinged media coverage.
Do you remember how insane the coverage of Trump’s killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani was?
I bet it’s worse than you remember. Follow along ⤵️
It all started with what I’ve gotta say might be the coldest presidential use of social media in history.
After ordering the strike that killed Iranian General Qaseem Soleimani, Trump tweeted out simply a picture of an American flag.
Many in the media went berserk.
First, the issue was directly with what Trump had done. Outlets claimed that he was rushing America into a war. @washingtonpost tried to point out the hypocrisy of a president who had said he would prevent a war.