By Ben O'Rourke
October 1, 2021
The White House is under siege.
A two-pronged attack led by Republicans has forced Joe Biden into a corner of the Oval Office where he may be hoping a helicopter will land on the lawn, ready to extract him out of his stickiest situation to date as Commander in Chief. But there are no choppers coming for Joe.
Marine One is on standby after the President was forced to cancel a trip to Illinois to discuss vaccines for businesses. Instead, he needs to stay and rescue his ‘landmark’ budget, which desperately needs a shot in the arm.
On the other front, he is trying to save face after the U.S. military’s disastrous departure from Afghanistan. Joe, whose image is more pussycat than lion, might see it as his first military victory. But international media cameras captured a different story and broadcast it live to the world.
Under intense questioning from the Senate Armed Services Committee, some of Joe’s top military men admitted that his statements in public have not been entirely accurate.
“Would you use the term ‘extraordinary success’ for what took place in August in Afghanistan?” Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley at the hearing on Tuesday.
“It was a logistical success, but a strategic failure, and I think those are two different,” Milley replied.
That was just one of Sullivan’s beefs with the President’s version of events, which included him telling the public “al-Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan” in mid-August.
“True or not true?” Sullivan quizzed the generals.
“Al-Qaeda is still in Afghanistan,” replied Milley. “They were there in mid-August.”
CENTCOM Commander General Kenneth McKenzie backed him up: “Al-Qaeda was present in Afghanistan.”
Since the fall of Kabul, global media has been documenting the exploits of Taliban fighters, from riding bumper cars in a theme park to battling ISIS. The new government is signaling Afghanistan is back in business, as far as resources are concerned, with Beijing undoubtedly reaching for the phone at the first opportunity.
Sullivan reeled out a list of headlines slamming the foreign policy fiasco, including ‘China Sees America Humbled’. The Alaska senator is demanding accountability from the armed forces and ultimately Joe himself for complicity in the high-profile disaster.
“The problem here – these are not marginal misstatements by the President to the American people,” he told the hearing. “These are dramatic, obvious falsehoods that go to the very heart of the foreign policy fiasco we have all witnessed. These are life-and-death deceptions that the president of the United States told the American people.”
Sullivan and 22 other senators have introduced an act they contend will limit some of the damage caused by the Biden Administration and perhaps restore some of America’s standing. The Afghanistan Counterterrorism, Oversight, and Accountability Act addresses the issues related to the President’s “rushed and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
“The faith of our allies has weakened, our adversaries have been emboldened, hundreds of Americans and thousands of our Afghan allies were left at the mercy of a ruthless Taliban, and Afghanistan is once again a safe haven for global terrorism,” said Sullivan.
The Act includes slapping sanctions on the Taliban and ‘foreign governments’ that support them and calls for Washington to ignore any candidates for Afghan ambassador to the U.S. or United Nations, among other things. It also helps holders of SIVs (Afghan Special Immigrant Visas) get processed quicker if they are stuck in Afghanistan.
Reports military interpreters are being rounded up like French collaborators after the Second World War have unsettled those who say they played a vital role in the conflict. At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) asked how many American citizens are still there.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted there was no definite figure but suggested the State Department’s estimate might be accurate. That had been put at 10-15,000 in mid-August by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but Milley insisted about 6,000 had got out. By anybody’s calculation, that leaves anywhere from 4,000-9,000 people left behind – far above the White House claim of 100 in early September.
“The President has not been leveling with the American people at all, during this fiasco,” Sullivan told Fox News after the hearing. “We went through a number of things where I pressed the witnesses today on things that the President had said. You mentioned a number of them… The President said that his generals recommended that there should be no forces in Afghanistan. That was not true. This president said that al-Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan. That was not true. The President said that our military would stay until all Americans were out of the country. That was not true.”
Back at the White House, Joe is under lockdown while he tries to avoid a shutdown. The senate evacuation hearing has only compounded his problems. Now his domestic and foreign policies are inching towards the shredder.
Ben O’Rourke recently joined the Alaska Politics & Elections team. Ben has more than 25 years of media experience in radio, television, online, and newspapers working globally in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom. He accidentally landed into news journalism in 2003 and has been writing, reporting, and producing videos and nightly news programs for Hong Kong television and South China Morning Post ever since. He’s currently a freelance news editor at Fieldsports Britain, a popular hunting, shooting, and fishing channel on YouTube. Ben spent three weeks in Alaska filming a documentary and that time had a profound effect on him and it quickly became his favorite U.S. state.
