The two blasts at Hamid Karzai International Airport - one at the Abbey Gate and one at the Baron Hotel - have killed at least 13 people, including 4 US Marines. The US military is now in the final stages of its "retrograde" - that's bureaucrat-speak for turning tail and getting the hell out - from the airport.
Approximately 1,500 Americans are still in Afghanistan, with rapidly dwindling chances of getting out. That's at least as true for the thousands of Afghans (at least 250,000 at a minimum who are eligible for US visas) who helped the US in various capacities and now face dismal prospects. T.hose who are scrambling for the Pakistan border are encountering Taliban thuggery.
US Charge d'Affaires for Afghanistan Ross Wilson told CBS News's Norah O'Donnell this morning that his office had sent warnings starting in April, each one worded with more urgency, that they needed to get out, and that some seem to have chosen not to leave and that "that's their business."
Ambassador Wilson, how does that square with what Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to say on June 21, that "the embassy's staying, our partners are staying," and that he didn't think "significant deterioration in the security situation is something [that would] happen from a Friday to a Monday"?
Or with Joe Biden's assessment on July 8 that there would be "no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy"?
Speaking of Biden, what's up with the address the other day in which he didn't even mention Afghanistan, but rather exhorted the nation to get COVID vaccine booster shots, or the more recent presser in which he touted domestic-policy wins for his progressive agenda for seven-plus minutes before getting around to discussing Afghanistan?
Not that the previous administration was any better. As LITD mentioned the other day, Trump came damn close to hosting a Taliban delegation at Camp David in September 2019, until the plan was squelched by a Taliban-staged car bombing in Kabul. Still, he pressed ahead with his idiotic patty-cake agenda, having Mike Pompeo work out a "peace" deal that called for all US troops to be gone by May 2020.
Western civilization has no reliable guardian now. The institutional and cultural rot that has been underway for decades is now matched by a foreign-policy rudderlessness to which both parties have signed on.
Still, one side wants to talk about white-privilege indoctrination and forcing the populace to switch from cheap, dense and readily available forms of energy to play-like forms that would ultimately wind up depending on the continued existence of the normal-people forms, and the other side wants to indulge in rigged-election fantasies, flirtation with industrial policy, and paranoid notions that vaccines are some threat to personal liberty.
As I've said many times over the years, I keep hoping that someday the name of this blog could be rendered obsolete by a fundamental turn toward a rule bright future. Alas, the wait for that goes on.
UPDATE: The dead-Marines figure is now 12.
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