AUSTIN BAY IN THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS: After 9/11, America was on guard duty against terrorism. Then we bugged out.
Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks taught Americans that anarchy in even the world’s most remote and impoverished corners provided anti-American terror cults with a base for global operations. If you read “anti-American” as also meaning “anti-modern” and “anti-personal freedom,” we’re in complete agreement.
On 9/11′s 20th anniversary, I no longer see common national purpose. Mismanagement and strategies of calculated grievance divide America. The Biden administration’s Afghan bug out has sowed further discord. Americans know failing to extract all American citizens and the Afghan interpreters we promised to protect is a huge moral and historical stain that also seeds long-term national security risks.
Our immediate present and troubling future are this essay’s subjects, but to understand them we must critically assess decisions, actions and inactions that spawned our 2021 Afghanistan catastrophe. That means more than angry dispute and talking-head accusations. It means holding decision makers accountable for their incompetence, misjudgment and mismanagement in the planning and execution phases of the U.S. military withdrawal. The Biden administration bears most of the responsibility for the failure.
On August 31, Reuters published a partial transcript of a July 23 phone call between President Joe Biden and then-Afghan government President Ashraf Ghani.
BIDEN: “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Confident propagandists love to play “Nothing to see here, move along” and its variants that slickly ignore essential context or suppress key facts.
Instead of punishing the Taliban and aiding the Afghan government in order to secure the extraction of U.S. citizens and deserving Afghan nationals, Biden was concerned with political optics.
Flashback: A reprint of Austin’s 9/11/2001 DMN column: On Point: The World Trade Center Attack 21st Century Pearl Harbor.
The war against international terror is one of the toughest America has ever faced.
War against terror requires leadership that is consistent, resolute, tenacious, persevering, relentless and personally courageous. A counter-terror war, waged against calculating radicals like Osama bin Laden, requires forceful and steady diplomacy. Such a war will necessarily play out in the cruelest shadows and corners of the globe, where targets are poorly defined, immediate goals fuzzy and mistakes a near-certainty.
Waging this war requires a national consensus to bear the responsibility of common defense and a commitment to common purpose.
It is a war we must fight — and we will win.
As Mr. Obama famously said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
(Don’t underestimate how Mr. Obama also f***ed things up, as well.)