JEN PSAKI WILL HAVE TO CIRCLE BACK ON WHEN BIDEN’S COMING BACK: Where’s Joe? Biden Hides at Camp David While Kabul Burns.

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN: The West Has No Grounds to Discuss Freedom of Speech When Facebook Censors People.

HOW CONVENIENT: Academic claims critical race theory allows her to make racist comments.

To be fair, such double standards are the raison d’etre of the Critical Race Theory scam.

BIDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY ACUMEN: Taliban Blocks Access to Kabul Airport, Taliban Cofounder Returns, Biden’s Chaos Reigns.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: The Real Lesson of Afghanistan: The ‘Journey of Jihad’ Marches On.

Fascinating piece, impossible for an excerpt to do it justice.

INTERVIEW: 5 Big Questions for Woody White, Trustee at UNC Wilmington.

IT’S GETTING CROWDED UP THERE: Chinese satellite got whacked by hunk of Russian rocket in March. “Thirty-seven debris objects spawned by the smashup have been detected to date, and there are likely others that remain untracked.”

MANY PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS SOLD THEIR SOULS TO GET RID OF TRUMP:

CRT BY ANY OTHER NAME: Is still Critical Race Theory (CRT) and The Federalist’s Julie Barrett has a useful tutorial on how to identify its use in your school district’s classrooms. Pro Tip: “Social-Emotional Learning” has nothing to do with learning, it’s just another deceptive label for a CRT-based curriculum.

MOSTLY OUR PRIDE AND PLACE IN THE WORLD: Here’s What Biden’s Shameless Afghanistan Speech Cost Taxpayers.

OUR MILITARY LEADERSHIP, TOO WOKE TO WIN: Exclusive: Space Force Officer, Punished After Denouncing Marxism, to Leave Military.

THE TALIBAN IS TREMBLING IN FEAR:

BIDEN’S MESS: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives.

“We are stuck here,” he says. “We don’t know what will happen.” When he learned the Taliban had arrived in the capital city on August 15 he immediately burned some of the documents that showed he had worked for the United States. Now, like so many Afghans, he is trying to find a way out.

Others who have worked with the US have kept documents but hidden them, knowing that such paperwork is vital to gain a visa and a potential route out of Afghanistan. But it remains a horrific quandary: Taliban militia are already reportedly going door-to-door to find those who have worked with foreign governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Muhibullah – who, for obvious reasons, WIRED is not naming fully – is one of millions of Afghans now tussling with an impossible choice: to what extent should they erase any evidence of their past lives now that the ultra-conservative Taliban are the new rulers of Afghanistan?

Read the whole thing.

PEOPLE ARE STARTING TO NOTICE THINGS: Dive: Biden’s approval hits lowest point yet, 2-1 ‘wrong direction.’

THOUGHTS ON AFGHANISTAN, from a senior military officer with whom I am acquainted:

I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.

The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.

General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.

Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.

Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists. The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs. Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war. Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds. Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

Concurrent with its review of purpose, the Army must reevaluate its size and how it is organized. The active component is much too large. That makes it too eager to get involved in irrelevant theaters where failure is likely or even preordained. It should be very difficult for an American president to deploy the Army without the National Guard performing most combat operations. You argue that that takes time? Yes, that’s the point: it should take time to make the case to the American people that war is worth it.

The Marine Corps must provide the nation’s rapid response forces. It is a self-contained deployable multi-domain force. Some would argue that the service has both insufficient combat power and staying power. However, that is a feature, and not a flaw, as it forces the nation to rely on its Army—and hence its reserve components—before engaging in heavy combat or lengthy operations. The current Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, already seems to recognize his service’s role—hence his decision to eliminate armor from the Corps.

Congress must reevaluate the authorities contained within Sections 12301 through 12304 of Title X. The president has too much latitude to, on his own authority, mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen and Reservists without congressional approval. It must be the policy of the United States that we do not place our service members in harm’s way without first making the case to the American people. This also means ending the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force as well as strengthening Congress’ role in the War Powers Act such that, absent an actual declaration of war, there can be no war.

Some would argue that such a constraint would limit the nation’s ability to respond to a Russian incursion in the Baltics or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. However, recent open-source studies conclude that the US military already is unable to defend against either attack. Pretending otherwise while not having the means to back up our assurances unnecessarily emboldens our partners and allies, making such an attack more likely. We lose nothing by making the law match the reality.

Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

“Failure must be punished.” An idea so crazy it just might work.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Shame We Can’t Use the 25th Amendment on All of Team Biden. “While I would never presume to understand what goes on in the minds of Democrats, at this point I would wager that most of Biden’s Cabinet members are opposed to the Cackle Queen stepping into Amtrak Joe’s loafers. I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she’s bringing up the 25th Amendment 40 or 50 times a day.”

HEY, SHE FAKED HER WAY INTO A PLUM JOB AND PAID NO PRICE WHEN CAUGHT: Elizabeth Warren Effect? Census Reveals Surge in People Identifying as White Native Americans.

MATT TAIBBI: Afghanistan: We Never Learn. “Every image coming out of Afghanistan this past weekend was an advertisement for the incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing nature of American foreign policy leaders. Scenes of military dogs being evacuated while our troops fire weapons in the air to disperse humans desperate for a seat out of the country will force every theoretical future ally to think twice about partnering with us.”

THEY’RE COMING FAST AND FURIOUS: OPEC Delivers Another Embarrassment for Joe Biden.

TO BE FAIR, WESTERN FEMINISTS ARE LAME POSERS:

MORE OF A REMINDER, REALLY: Afghanistan Catastrophe Exposes Democrats’ Elitism and Incompetence.

THE NEW COMPETENCE: This is What a Whole of Government Epistemic Failure Looks Like: The Afghan army and government the Soviet Union left behind lasted over 3-yrs. The Afghan army and government the USA left behind lasted barely 1 month.

There is your benchmark. The Soviets were 38-times more successful in Afghanistan than we were, and they did it in half the time.

Let that soak in. Let the humiliation flow over you like a healing balm. Fear and shame – regardless of what modern minds try to tell you otherwise – are great motivators. Let this motivate you.

Almost exactly two decades after the attacks of 11SEP01, as a nation we are covered in disgrace. A global humiliation on a national scale. Accept that. Hold it close to you. Feel it. Smell it. Know it, because it will be attached to us for at least the rest of the decade – most likely longer.

Good people can agree or disagree about staying or going from Afghanistan, but no one can defend how we did it.

Everyone here who [was] given responsibility by the American people failed.

The president failed. . . . All our intelligence agencies failed their government and the people.

Our think tanks, the legions of foreign policy and diplomacy PhDs from all the right schools who populate the National Security State who like to tell everyone how smart they are – they all failed.

They sure did. But so did State, Defense, and a host of other overpaid incompetents, whose track record even before this was pretty pathetic.

Plus, the big lesson:

We can do nothing about the past, it is done.

The present is already written.

What we can do is set the condition for the future. We can try to contain the compounding damage to our national credibility.

A first step is to tell our remaining friends that the United States knows failure and rot when it sees it, and is confident enough to excise it and move forward.

We need accountability. The honorable thing to do is to resign. If not, the proper thing is for the President to fire those who advised him so horribly. If not the President, then Congress should have hearings with a pair of pliers in one hand and a blow torch in another and humiliate people in to resigning.

If neither happens, then bad on the American people for allowing a political system to function in such a way that people such as these are the ones who rise to the top of both parties.

Indeed.

HE AND OBAMA DID THE SAME THING TO IRAQ IN 2011, AND HE LEARNED NOTHING: Biden Wanted to Leave Afghanistan. He Knew the Risks. Generals and diplomats warned about a pullout, but the president told his team the U.S. was simply providing life support for the Kabul government while neglecting more pressing issues.

In his Monday speech defending America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden said he would not shrink from his share of responsibility.

That would include his decision to bring home U.S. troops, which was made against the recommendations of his top military generals and many diplomats, who warned that a hasty withdrawal would undermine security in Afghanistan, several administration and defense officials said.

The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited, while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability.

In a series of meetings leading up to his decision, military and intelligence officials told Mr. Biden that security was deteriorating in Afghanistan, and they expressed concerns both about the capabilities of the Afghan military and the Taliban’s likely ability to take over major Afghan cities.

Other advisers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, raised the possibility of Taliban attacks on U.S. forces and diplomats as well as the Afghans who for two decades worked alongside them. Ultimately, neither disagreed with the president, knowing where he stood.

Mr. Biden, however, was committed to ending the U.S. military role in the country. The president told his policy advisers the U.S. was providing life support for the Afghan government, which, in his view, was corrupt and had squandered billions of dollars in American assistance, according to current and former administration officials. He wanted to reorient American foreign policy onto what he sees as more pressing international matters, including competition with China, and domestic issues including infrastructure and battling Covid. “I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision,” he said Monday.

The Taliban on Sunday rolled into Kabul having barely fired a shot. The onslaught triggered a chaotic evacuation of almost all U.S. diplomats, helped by thousands of American soldiers who were sent back to assist in the mission, sending shock waves around the world.

The swift takeover, punctuated by images of desperate Afghans gripping onto moving U.S. Air Force planes, raises the stakes of Mr. Biden’s decision and the way it was implemented, for him personally as well as for the administration’s foreign policy and for America’s standing in the world.

His team’s failure so far to mitigate the fallout of the withdrawal, including protecting thousands of pro-Western Afghans marooned in the capital, has some countries expressing concern about the U.S. as a partner, including on some of the very issues Mr. Biden wants to address.

America’s allies were beginning to warm to the Biden administration until this weekend, said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “I’m sure that those events are raising questions about our credibility and President Biden is absolutely going to have to deal with that,” he said.

How? Honorable suicide? Too Japanese. Another pudding cup? That sounds about right.

THAT’S NOT HOW THIS ADMINISTRATION WORKS: The fucking answer here should be “we’ll get every american out, no matter what it takes. full stop.” Pay attention.