My latest in PJ Media:
As American troops were preparing to leave Kabul for the last time, their commanders had their priorities straight: As we now know, they weren’t taking steps to ensure that all American citizens could safely leave the country. They also weren’t doing anything to get $85 billion worth of American weaponry into safe hands, which we know because the Taliban are now the proud owners of all that taxpayer-funded materiel. They weren’t even doing anything to make sure that it was the Afghans who actually helped us who got onto the planes out of Kabul. No, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan had a far more important priority on their minds: making sure that the Marines didn’t leave behind any messages that the Taliban or ISIS would find insulting.
Marines at Kabul’s airport had taken out their frustration over the catastrophically humiliating mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the failure of the twenty-year mission in general, by leaving some coarse messages on the airport’s walls: “F*** ISIS,” “F*** the Taliban,” that sort of thing. Not high-level diplomatic communications, to be sure, but the kind of thing that has happened in wartime since time immemorial.
Until now, that is. Not only did commanders demand that the troops scrub the walls clean and remove the graffiti; they also ordered them to clean the place up, so that the Taliban would have a spotless airport to showcase for all the international authorities who will soon be flying in to Kabul to deliver their billion-dollar aid packages. One Marine recounted: “My boys had to go…pick up every last piece of…trash for who? The Taliban? It was a slap in the face to us.”
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, “Marine spokesman First Lt. Jack Coppola said that the cleanup was enforced to prevent delaying any flights leaving the airport. But it is unclear why the graffiti was also removed.”
Maybe it was because Biden’s handlers didn’t want to anger a group that they don’t consider to be an enemy of the United States. A few weeks ago, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan: “What is the Taliban? Are they now our frenemy, are they our adversary, are they our enemy? Are they our — what are they?”
Sullivan refused to call the Taliban our enemy, saying: “Well, it’s hard to put a label on it, in part because we have yet to see what they are going to be now that they’re in control — physical control of Afghanistan.” Sullivan was just echoing a position his nominal boss took back in December 2011, when he declared: “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
gravenimage says
Before Marines Left Kabul, U.S. Commanders Made Them Remove Anti-Taliban and Anti-ISIS Graffiti
………….
Yes–now we are supposed to respect the bloody Taliban and ISIS. Moral insanity.
wpm says
The command of the Marines with limited personal and time still in Afghanistan made the choice of using those limited resources to remove anti–Taliban anti-ISIS graffiti? Could they have used those resources to remove more American citizens in the limited time they had there that could killed or held as future hostages by the Taliban ?Could they used that time to remove more Afghan that helped America that would be kill by the Taliban and or ISIS after they left with the limited time they had ?Could they use that limited time to remove or destroy weapons that were then left for the Taliban to use ?Would it have been better to destroy the buildings that Americans taxpayer money built so the Taliban could never use them never mind “the graffiti” in them that might offend the tender hearts of the Taliban? The woke leadership of the military service have lost their collective minds in my humble opinion.
Keith O says
Should have booby trapped anything that wasn’t nailed down. Starting with the goats!
revereridesagain says
+1 !!!
Bikinis not Burkas says
Not allowed to upset your bosses!
Bikinis not Burkas says
Australian SAS were also made to remove anything that could scare the enemy!
Walter Sieruk says
That’s an awful, terrible, order. The troops shouldn’t have to remove that graffiti