America's Suicide Attempt—The Sequel

The scale of failure in Afghanistan is hard to overstate. Our “intelligence” services (who deserve to be referred to in scare quotes until they display some actual intelligence some day) were incapable of picking up any signs that the Taliban were arming and organizing on a large scale for their swift takeover of the entire country, or if they did gather any on-the-ground signals, their interpretive process (a polite term for “groupthink”) prevented them from drawing accurate and meaningful conclusions. This is the opposite of intelligence: it is the product of an establishment that simply lacks the capacity to think at all.

Never mind the “finding” that the Taliban would take 90 days to reach Kabul. How about the reassurances that we had trained an Afghan army of 300,000 (and provided them with lots of materiel that is now in the hands of the Taliban)? Doesn’t inspire much confidence that our military knows how to train a foreign army at all. Perhaps our military should be excused to some extent, as the entire “training” program was politically driven by our genius foreign policy establishment, people like the Agency for International Development and similar goo-goo entities. Remember the huge federal budget last year that included $10 million in the State Department budget for “gender programs” in Pakistan? This is the kind of establishment that thinks what we need is a now-abandoned $700 million embassy in Kabul (and an even more expensive embassy in Baghdad), with a staff of 5,000.

Truly sad!