A TERRORIST’S PROPHECY IS COMING TRUE
WASHINGTON — In his speech Wednesday announcing the United States’ retreat from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden noted that the 9/11 attacks “sparked an American promise that we would ‘never forget.’” Well, apparently Biden has forgotten the epic disaster he unleashed in 2011 when he was in charge of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq.
That catastrophic decision created a vacuum that allowed the Islamic State — which at the time, CIA Director John Brennan explained in 2015, had just
“700-or-so adherents left” — to regroup, reconstitute itself and build a caliphate the size of Britain. They unleashed a frenzy of terror — summary executions, women and children buried alive, people crucified, American journalists beheaded, and the enslavement and mass rape of Yazidi women. The rampage of violence was not contained to Iraq and Syria. We were forced to send American troops back to deal with the resurgent terrorist threat.
In a November 2019 Wall Street Journal interview, Biden admitted that the decision to withdraw all troops from Iraq “was a mistake” and claimed that as vice president he had tried to keep “a residual force” stationed there. This is revisionist nonsense. Biden was ebullient as he presided over the withdrawal of the last American troops, and even called President Barack Obama from Baghdad to thank him “for giving me the chance to end this g—d—- war.”
In that same interview, Biden went on to criticize Trump for his decision to withdraw the small contingent of U.S. forces in Syria and not leave a residual force there. “We don’t have to have 100,000 troops stationed anywhere,” Biden said, but “when we leave a vacuum, like he’s leaving it, it creates significant opportunities for difficulty, including what you see right now in the Middle East.”
So, Biden admits that the complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was a mistake, and chastised Trump for his withdrawal from Syria. Yet now he is withdrawing the “residual force” of U.S. troops in Afghanistan? And a residual force is exactly what it is. The U.S. deployment in Afghanistan is a mere 2,500 troops, fewer than are stationed in Spain (about 3,000), the United Kingdom (9,000), Italy (12,000), South Korea (28,000), Germany (35,000) or Japan (50,000).
The U.S. forces in Afghanistan are not nation-building, policing or even fighting a war. They are training, equipping and enabling Afghan forces who are fighting our enemies for us, while collecting intelligence and carrying out occasional strikes against terrorist targets.
The day before Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, his administration announced that it is increasing the number of troops in Germany — reversing Trump’s decision to withdraw some 12,000 forces from that country. So, Biden is withdrawing all U.S. forces from a country where there is an active terrorist threat, but surging forces into a country where our troops have been stationed since 1945 to prevent a Soviet tank invasion across the Fulda Gap?
Worse yet, nothing terrorists do will reverse our planned exit. U.S. officials say our Afghan withdrawal “is not conditions-based.” In other words, Biden has given the Taliban a green light to launch an assault on Kabul, install a radical Islamist emirate and invite al-Qaeda to restore its lost sanctuary.
Perhaps worst of all, Biden has tied the U.S. withdrawal to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — turning that solemn day of remembrance into a victory celebration for the terrorists. It is a victory the enemy predicted from the start. After he was captured, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogator something prophetic: While the United States may enjoy some fleeting battlefield successes, Mohammed declared, in the end “we will win because Americans don’t realize … we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.”
Two decades after 9/11, Joe Biden is making KSM’s prophecy come true.