AMERICAN KNOW-HOW – OVERNIGHT:  The thing that seems to bother Americans most of all about the withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it was done so badly.  We have, as a people, taken a certain deserved pride in being the can-do nation.  Others concentrated on ideology and verbiage, but Americans got it done.  American know-how was never a myth.  Think of how quickly we pulled ourselves together to fight World War II, with one innovation after another.  We engulfed ourselves with quotes.  "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer."

"To do."  That is a good part of the American creed.  "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation..."  We are very good at bringing forth.  Or at least we were. 

Our teachers once taught us that the glory of American politics lay in its practicality, not its ideology.  Get it done.  "We will build good ships here," said a company in Virginia.  "At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships."  We didn't always live up to our own standards, but we strived.

Now something has gone wrong.  Accomplishment is being replaced by theory and disparagement.  Nothing displays it more than the term, "the flyover people," which the elites on our coasts use to describe the citizens who grow our food, build our planes, patrol our streets.

The dry rot has reached every level.  The great reporter, Salena Zito, examines Joe Biden in that context, and tells us what she finds.  You should read it.  From the Washington Examiner:

Last Thursday at 6:00 p.m. in Kabul, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest as American troops at Abbey Gate were processing entrants to Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nearly 200 people died at that horrific moment, including 13 U.S. service members.

It was a horrific massacre that didn’t need to happen.

There is only one person to blame, and that is Joe Biden — not for his decision to leave Afghanistan, but instead his stubborn insistence on leaving the country on a specific date. It is a stubbornness rooted in negligence, not incompetence, a word often thrown around as reasoning for his failure at this moment.

In the days since Kabul fell, we have learned through reporting that the U.S. has depended on the Taliban for security screening outside the airport since mid-August, purposely choosing to rely on foes that killed Americans for decades to screen jihadists determined to kill Americans.

We have also learned through reporting by Politico that U.S. officials gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies to grant entry into the outer perimeter of the Kabul airport — giving their information to the very entity that has viciously murdered any Afghan who has joined up with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the 20-year war.

And those hundreds of students, their relatives, and staff of the American University of Afghanistan who had boarded buses on Sunday to evacuate on U.S. military flights were told after seven hours of sitting on the bus that all evacuations were permanently called off; the New York Times reported that because of Biden’s mandatory deadline, the military will now only be bringing its own personnel home. But a list of their names and their passport information has been shared by the U.S. military with the Taliban fighters guarding the airport checkpoints.

Biden’s negligence on Afghanistan is not a singular event but a pattern of behavior. He has been negligent in his dismissal of the crisis at the border. The dramatic surge in illegal U.S. southern border crossings — last month alone there were nearly 200,000 — is a humanitarian crisis that has endangered lives and communities, increased human and drug trafficking 100-fold, and turned the lives of people who live along the border upside down.

Incompetence denotes that Biden has no idea what he is doing. And yes, he certainly seems unsteady in numerous settings. But he has shown stubborn purpose in making the withdrawal from Afghanistan, whatever the circumstances. He has been equally purposeful in showing no responsibility for conditions at the border. That is negligence.

Biden’s fragility as the leader of our country is illustrated by the frequency of his negligence and the ease with which he and his administration and military leaders have been dismissing it.
They have willfully overlooked his flaws, or they have pardoned him without criticism. That's why history will show that his negligence is their negligence as well. If the media do not hold him accountable, they also share that burden. 

COMMENT:  We have work to do.

August 31,  2021