This is one of the greatest votes of no confidence in the 21st Century.
Against the destructive policies of President Joe Biden, a torrent of spending that has brought back memories of the 1970s — surging inflation as the middle class are taxed their savings at the grocery store and then scenes of American defeat overseas in Afghanistan that stranded hundreds of Americans and thousands of American allies, who now suffer under the tyranny of the Taliban.
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The U.S. announced it will provide an additional $144 million in aid to Afghanistan as part of efforts to help citizens in the country in a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday.
The assistance brings the total amount of aid to Afghanistan to $474 million in 2021, making the U.S. the top aid donor to the country out of any nation, the statement wrote.
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The U.S. State Department joined an initiative to welcome Afghan refugees into the country that is sponsored by organizations supporting groups with possible ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.
Welcome.US is part of the Office of American Possibilities initiative, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, according to its website. The initiative’s main co-chairs include former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, former President George W. Bush, former First Lady Laura Bush, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The initiative also formed a coalition composed of nonprofit leaders and organizations, former government officials, corporate leaders and public figures. Businesses, including Starbucks, Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart and Airbnb, also support the effort.
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U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict how quickly Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, would fall to the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Four agencies tracked the Taliban’s gains around Afghanistan starting in the spring of 2020 up until Taliban insurgents overthrew the U.S.-supported government in the capital city of Kabul, according to classified materials reviewed by the WSJ.
Around two dozen of the reports the WSJ reviewed predicted the Afghan government would collapse after U.S. forces withdrew, though none of them thought the government would fall as quickly as it did or with American troops still deployed in the region.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed Wednesday the State Department is conducting an internal review into the evacuation of Afghanistan.
“It’s absolutely critical that we capture and benefit from lessons learned,” Blinken said in a speech at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, attended by lawmakers, diplomats and others.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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Nearly 450 American citizens are estimated to remain in Afghanistan almost two months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country, according to the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken originally said the Biden administration believed there to be “under 200, and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave,” on Aug. 30, the day before the last Anerican troops left Afghanistan.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.
Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.
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On Feb. 29, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement, which set conditions for an American military withdrawal from Afghanistan. A few days later, then-President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. On that call, Trump explained to Baradar in no uncertain terms that, if he and his men didn’t fulfill the agreement, which included a pledge not to attack U.S. forces, the Taliban would suffer dearly. Not a single U.S. soldier was killed in combat in Afghanistan for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
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Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.
Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.
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A series of economic struggles that have grown increasingly worse this year will likely have a significant impact on the holiday season, many economic experts predict.
After President Joe Biden gave remarks from the White House this week, one reporter called out, “Will Christmas presents arrive on time, sir?” The president did not respond to that question or the flurry of others as he walked away from the podium.
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State Department evacuation flights out of Afghanistan will resume by the end of the year, a senior State Department official told The Wall Street Journal.
The operation to retrieve U.S. citizens and Afghan allies left behind will require coordination with the Taliban and other governments, the official told The Wall Street Journal. Kabul’s international airport remains closed to regular passenger travel since the U.S. ended its first evacuation attempt on Aug. 31.
U.S. citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents and immediate family members will receive priority treatment in securing seats on evacuation flights, the official said. The State Department is hoping to eventually have several aircraft leave the country each week.
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When 13 U.S. service members were killed by suicide bombers as American citizens were abandoned in Afghanistan last August—in perhaps the most ill planned military operation since our efforts in Somalia which resulted in naked U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—it should have given us a clue about the Biden Administration’s priorities. Much as the Somalian disaster led to a massive influx of Somali immigrants, which is changing the makeup of the Midwest, we can soon expect a surge in Afghan immigration.
In retaliation for the Kabul airport bombings, the United States conducted a drone strike on what the world was told were ISIS-K members. When confronted about the irregularities of the operation, General Mark Milley described the air attack as a “righteous strike.” We later learned this “righteous strike” killed an innocent aid worker and nine members of his family. No one has been held accountable for this tragic political slaughter.
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What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
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The U.S. will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but won’t recognize the Taliban as the country’s leaders, the Associated Press reported on Sunday.
U.S. and Taliban officials met for the first time since American forces left the county in August in Doha, Qatar, according to the Associated Press. U.S. officials said they would provide aid to Afghanistan, which faces an economic disaster, at the meeting’s conclusion.
U.S. officials said the leaders “discussed the United States’ provision of robust humanitarian assistance, directly to the Afghan people,” the AP reported. The aid was promised after officials agreed it didn’t mean the U.S. would officially recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government.
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An Afghan father and ally to American military operations in the country sued the U.S. in an effort to reunite with his two sons who are in hiding in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
Mohammad decided to request asylum in the U.S. after the Taliban sent a death threat to his home in Afghanistan where his wife and two sons were in 2019, according to the AP. He petitioned for visas for his wife and children before she died of a heart attack in 2020, forcing his sons to go into hiding with their grandmother and uncle.
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Almost two months after the Taliban seized control of the nation of Afghanistan, dozens of American students and their relatives remain stuck in the nation that is now controlled by enemy forces, and with no more American military forces remaining, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The majority of the students are from the Sacramento area of California. The Times’ Justin Ray says that his investigations have led him to believe that there are still “dozens” of families still trapped in Afghanistan, with 38 students among them. The students are all from the San Juan Unified School District.
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Former President Donald Trump says he’s not concerned by the prospect of his former advisers testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Lawmakers, Trump argued, should instead investigate the “insurrection” that changed last year’s election rules and committee chairman Bennie Thompson’s ties to a black separatist group whose members killed cops decades ago.
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Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI-06) signed a letter asking for the release of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was jailed after criticizing the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Grothman said, “Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller spoke truth to power. Now, he is unjustly sitting in pre-trial confinement.”
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The Marine officer who received viral attention in August for posting a video on social media blasting military leadership over the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, has been thrown in the brig, the United States Marine Corps has confirmed.
Lt. Col Stuart Scheller was taken to a military brig on Monday for violating a gag order, his father told the military blog Task & Purpose.
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Top American military leaders are set for another round of intense congressional grilling on Wednesday, following a day-long Tuesday session that at times featured blistering criticism of their part in the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
The Tuesday hearing placed on the griddle Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; U.S. Central Command Chief Gen. Frank McKenzie; and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
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As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.
The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.
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Mistakes like the ones that led to the deaths of 10 civilians by a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan will continue without a ground presence, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Now that we don’t have an on-the-ground presence, it’s going to be harder to target people and know they’re the right people,” Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for the Middle East and veteran of Afghanistan, told the DCNF.
Mulroy said the diminished U.S. human intelligence network in the country would severely impact the ability of the military to monitor terrorism. “We had an intelligence service. We had bases all over the country. We had the ability to move about, to meet with people. Now, we don’t have any of that,” he said.
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In a letter to the Biden Administration, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) demanded answers to the White House’s “miscommunication” regarding the vetting of Afghanistan refugees. The letter reads, “The Biden Administration’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about Afghan parolees and its vetting procedures, especially when coupled with OMB’s request for Congress to waive terrorist, national security, and all other grounds of inadmissibility, raises significant national security concerns about Operation Allies Welcome.”
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Twenty House Republicans signed a letter to President Joe Biden Thursday demanding a public account of the military equipment lost in Afghanistan and the risks that it poses to the U.S., its allies and its interests.
The letter, led by North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd and obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, also laments the lack of public reports detailing how tax dollars were spent in the country throughout the two-decade war. Other signees included Reps. Brian Mast of Florida, Jody Hice of Georgia and Michelle Steel and Young Kim of California.
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Two Afghan refugees staying at Fort McCoy have been charged in separate incidents involving sexual assault of a minor and abuse. A grand jury charged Afghan refugees Bahrullah Noori and Mohammad Haroon Imaad on Thursday. Noori, 20, was charged with three counts of sexual assault of a minor, with one count of use of force. According to the indictment, the girls he assaulted at Fort McCoy “had not attained the age of 16 years and were at least four years younger than the defendant.”
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President Biden’s job-approval rating has fallen six percentage points, to 43%, since August. The number is the lowest of his roughly eight-month presidency, and now for the first time, a majority, 53%, disapproves of his performance, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
The poll was conducted from Sept. 1 to 17, after the U.S. military left Afghanistan in late August. The military’s departure after 20 years in the country included the chaotic evacuation of 120,000 people that was overshadowed by a suicide bomber killing 13 U.S. service members.
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Wisconsin Representative Thomas Tiffany (R-WI-07) paid a follow up visit to Fort McCoy and discovered that over 600 immigrants are quarantined with measles, chicken pox, tuberculosis, and other diseases.
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The United States should be at its pinnacle of strength. It still produces more goods and services than any other nation—China included, which has a population over four times as large. Its fuel and food industries are globally preeminent, as are its graduate science, computer, engineering, medical, and technology university programs. Its constitution is the oldest of current free nations. And the U.S. military is by far the best funded in the world. And yet something has gone terribly wrong within America, from the southern border to Afghanistan.
The inexplicable in Afghanistan—surrendering Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban, and forsaking both trapped Americans and loyalist Afghans—has now become the new Biden model of inattention and incompetence.
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Wisconsin Representative Bryan Steil (R-WI-01) introduced several amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. According to a press release from Rep. Steil’s office, “Bryan Steil introduced several amendments to the nation’s annual defense funding bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to strengthen the legislation and hold our adversaries accountable.”
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Wisconsin Representative Tiffany shared concerns in a Fox News interview about Afghan refugees coming and going from Fort McCoy unsupervised. Tiffany visited Fort McCoy, a base hosting Afghan refugees, in late August.
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Twenty years after the U.S. government declared war on terrorism, it consummated its own defeat in Kabul and Washington, in a manner foreseeable, foreseen, and foreshadowed in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Fixation on itself and unseriousness about war are the twin habits of heart and mind that disposed the ruling class to defeat. The practical explanation for why and how it accepted defeat is found in the overriding interest each part of the ruling class has in doing what it wants to do.
On the night of September 11, 2001, Muslim governments strictly forbade public celebrations of the carnage. The Palestinian Authority, anticipating that outraged Americans would destroy them to avenge the day’s events, even called the attacks al nachba—“the disaster.” But as the U.S. ruling class made clear that it was accepting defeat, the Muslim world’s media and streets celebrated.
Two decades later, after that defeat’s logic had worked its way through and transformed American life, and as the government’s self-humiliating exit from Afghanistan consummated it, much of mankind followed Muslim crowds in celebrating—including prominent Americans.
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Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN-04) responded to the revelation that a Biden Administration air strike killed 10 Afghan citizens. McCollum said, “The killing of Mr. Ahmadi and his family members was not an accident, it was deadly military malpractice.”
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Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) and a Representative from Wisconsin, Gwen Moore (D-WI-04) are calling for an investigation into the Fort McCoy refugee conditions. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, they asked for an investigation into “possible mistreatment and/or neglect.” In a tweet, Rep. Omar said, “There are concerning reports of mistreatment faced by Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy. These families fled their homes and left everything behind. They should be treated with compassion and dignity.”
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U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) on Saturday faulted U.S. President Joe Biden for a lack of accountability on Afghanistan and for hurting America’s relationship with its political allies.
Hagerty made these remarks to anchorman Jon Scott on FOX News. “What we’ve seen in our allies is the Dutch Foreign Minister stepped down this week. The same for the British Foreign Minister, both have stepped down, they’ve stepped down over their role or their lack of accountability for Afghanistan. They’ve stepped up and taken responsibility,” Hagerty said.
Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore (D-WI-04) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) are calling for an investigation into the Fort McCoy refugee conditions. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, they asked for an investigation into “possible mistreatment and/or neglect.” Moore and Omar said that they were requesting that Austin and others take steps to “ensure the safe and respectful treatment” of the Afghan refugees. They said that the refugees have “suffered enough” with “having to leave their country because of threats to their safety and security.”
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Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) have signed on as cosponsors to bipartisan bill S.2756 which would award Congressional Gold Medals to the 13 American servicemembers who lost their lives during the terrorist attacks in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 26th.
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U.S. Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10) said members of the U.S. State Department fell short when the congressman and members of his staff urgently asked the agency to help remove Afghan allies who assisted the U.S. military. Hice said this in an emailed press release where he linked to a recent Breitbart article.
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When the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan last month, the group took possession of a U.S.-funded weapons stockpile worth tens of billions of dollars.
The U.S. invested nearly $83 billion in bolstering the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), more than $24 billion of which went to funding weapons, vehicles and other equipment, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report published in July. The amount of funding for weapons, vehicles and equipment is based on a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimate that roughly 70% of the investment went towards other budget items like training.
In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government last month, U.S. defense officials estimated that Taliban militants took dozens of aircraft including Blackhawk helicopters and thousands of vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Republican lawmakers demanded the Biden administration provide them with a full accounting of the equipment that was in the Taliban’s possession while GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill requiring the White House to share the information with Congress.
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed author and retired Marine, Lt. Colonel Jonathan Myers to the newsmakers line to discuss his efforts to rescue American citizens left behind in Afghanistan.
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North Korea was likely always going to restart its nuclear reactor regardless of which presidential administration was in office, an expert on the region told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in late August that North Korea had restarted a plutonium-producing 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon in July 2021, after previously shutting it down in 2018.
Bruce Klingner, the senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at The Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that while it’s unclear whether the timing of the restart was meant to send a message, North Korea probably was planning for the reactor to become operational again for a while.
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The last missile fired by the United States Military in the 20-year war in Afghanistan struck only an innocent Afghan man and his family in Kabul— not ISIS militants, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The blast killed ten members of the extended family of a civilian aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Mr. Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three of Romal’s children, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.
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If you watched HBO’s recent docudrama about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, you may have been struck by the historic connection to the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan. The epilogue posited the theory that the need for helicopters to mitigate the nuclear disaster caused the Russians to pull the attack helicopters from Afghanistan, making the already pointless war impossible to continue. So in 1988, the Soviets cut their losses and withdrew from Afghanistan.
The Afghan rebels did not seize control of Afghanistan until 1992. But the 1988 withdrawal also played a huge role in the loss of legitimacy for the Soviet system itself. The apparent juggernaut wielded terrifying power at its borders but remained frail and vulnerable to collapse from within. The very idea that the great Soviet evil empire could fail set off a series of dominoes that led to its collapse. The Afghan war, the struggling economy, and the Chernobyl disaster all combined to reveal the wise and powerful leaders in Moscow as incompetent despots.
More than 30 years later, American planners may have felt they had years or at least months during which residual civilians could make an orderly departure from Afghanistan as needed. The Soviet puppet government lasted almost four years (ironically, longer than the Soviet Union continued to exist), so why wouldn’t an American-sponsored government be able to hold on at least that long? The American planners probably believed that they were prolonging the longevity of the puppet regime by leaving nearly $80 billion in military equipment in the hands of the American-aligned Afghan government.
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The U.S. State Department will not give official approval to any private evacuation flight from Afghanistan seeking to land in third countries, leaked emails obtained by Fox News show.
“No independent charters are allowed to land at [Al Udeid Air Base], the military airbase you mentioned in your communication with Samantha Power,” a State Department official said in a Sept. 1 email to Eric Montalvo, who organized a number of charter flights out of Afghanistan, Fox News reported.
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Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07), a former combat veteran now serving in Congress, penned an opinion piece in The Daily Signal, hammering the Biden Administration for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
The member of the Foreign Affairs committee detailed that Biden’s decision “leaves America just as vulnerable as we were on 9/11.”
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A measles outbreak has occurred among Afghan refugees who recently arrived at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. McCoy is one of the military bases housing thousands of Afghan refugees after recent evacuation attempts because of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
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From the moment he was nominated until the last few weeks, the media carried a lot of water for Joe Biden. In spite of his apparent lack of energy or brains, we were regaled with tales of his experience, good judgment, and, above all, his empathy.
America was back. The adults were now in charge. No more “mean tweets.” Biden’s presidency would be a time of competence and compassion.
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Watching the Biden Administration bring into the country tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans, who are neither U.S. citizens nor native Afghans who assisted American troops, I am coming to wonder whether Biden was actually wrong to describe the withdrawal of American forces as an “immense success.” It was, in fact, exactly what Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other Democratic operatives said it was: a success that will move the Democrats toward their goal of creating a one-party state.
Like the illegal aliens streaming across our southern borders and the efforts to remove restrictions against voting fraud, the influx of Afghan refugees is intended to increase the number of votes that will likely go to the Democratic Party, no matter how badly they mismanage the country.
Looking at these coordinated steps, I am reminded of an idea put forth by Aristotle in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle famously insisted on a distinction between technical expertise (e.g., building a house) and deeper, more foundational forms of knowledge. The most primal wisdom is sophia, which deals with universal knowledge that underlies all other true modes of knowing. But Aristotle also raises the question of whether there are not forms of techne that are so well developed that they reflect sophia. The two examples that he cites are Phidias’s work as an architect and Polykleitos’s achievements as a sculptor. According to Aristotle, the excellence that characterizes their technical skills indicates their creators are truly wise.
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The State Department is endangering the lives of Americans and others still in Afghanistan, lawmakers and others allege, even as the State Department claims it has accomplished an unprecedented, global evacuation effort.
Military veteran Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) who has called on President Biden to resign over Afghanistan, is calling on Americans to demand that Secretary of State Antony Blinken get stranded Americans out of Afghanistan immediately.
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Impeach Biden, court martial the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Only one man lost his job over Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller challenged Biden’s incompetent and spineless Joint Chiefs of Staff to take responsibility for their dereliction of duty that led directly to the catastrophe in Afghanistan. Taking responsibility meant resigning. Biden’s military men immediately smeared him as mentally ill and forced him out of the Marines.
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