I ran Team Trump’s Afghan withdrawal
— Biden’s attempt to blame us is just sad
By Kash Patel
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19 August 2021 6:35pm Updated
President Joe Biden has sought to place blame for the shocking dénouement in Afghanistan on the situation he “inherited” from the Trump administration. What a sad-sack attempt at blame-shifting. Team Trump’s withdrawal plan was sound. What proved catastrophic were Biden’s changes to that plan.
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I’m intimately familiar with former President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan strategy. In November 2020, I was named chief of staff at the Pentagon, where one of my primary responsibilities was to wind down the forever war in Afghanistan.
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Trump instructed me to arrange a conditions-based, methodical exit plan that would preserve the national interest. The plan ended up being fairly simple: The Afghan government and the Taliban were both told they would face the full force of the US military if they caused any harm to Americans or American interests in Afghanistan.
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Next, both parties would negotiate to create an interim-joint government, and both sides had to repudiate al Qaeda. Lastly, a small special-operations force would be stationed in the country to take direct action against any terrorist threats that arose. When all those conditions were met — along with other cascading conditions — then a withdrawal could, and did, begin.
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We successfully executed this plan until Jan. 20, 2021. During this interval — when there were no US casualties in Afghanistan — President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban conducted multiple rounds of negotiations, and al Qaeda was sidelined. The result was a successful drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan to 2,500, the lowest count since the dawn of the War on Terror.
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We handed our entire plan to the incoming Biden administration during the lengthy transition. The new team simply wasn’t interested.
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Everything changed when the new commander in chief declared that US forces would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, pushing back the Trump administration’s timetable by four months. Crucially, he didn’t condition the withdrawal on continued adherence to the agreed-upon stipulations. It would be an unconditional pullout with an arbitrary date based on pure symbolism — and set in stone.
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At that point, the Taliban sat back and waited for the date to draw near, then launched a countrywide offensive, knowing they had no reason to fear any reprisals from this administration. The ongoing chaos — not least the stranding of US personnel and allies — was the natural result of the Biden administration’s decision to eschew a conditions-based plan.
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With an unmovable withdrawal date in place, Team Biden showed no appreciation for ground-level intelligence reporting, which was largely rendered irrelevant. Just this week, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, claimed the security situation in Afghanistan “unfolded at unexpected speed.”
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That is a shocking statement to hear from one of our nation’s most senior national-security officials. No one should have been the slightest bit surprised that when relieved of any conditions or obligations, the Taliban could and would overrun the whole country in the absence of US military power.
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Tragically, because of the Biden administration’s single-minded focus on the pullout date, hard-nosed intelligence was replaced with wishful thinking and false promises. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed, “We will withdraw our troops responsibly, deliberately, safely. . . . We’ll pursue a durable and just political settlement between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.”
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None of that happened. Last month Blinken assured us that Biden’s withdrawal plan wouldn’t endanger the US embassy in Kabul, which is now evacuated. And Biden himself declared last month that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would overrun Afghanistan, which they have now done with blinding speed.
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Amid this cheap political rhetoric, ignorance of the ground-level security situation and the lack of a conditions-based plan, Afghanistan has fallen. America and the world deserve much better from those privileged to serve in high office. We are witnessing the utter collapse of a government — and not just in Afghanistan.
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Kash Patel served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense and as deputy assistant to the president for counterterrorism in the Trump administration.
Born Kashyap Pramod Patel
Garden City, New York, U.S.
Education University of Richmond (BA)
Pace University (JD)
Kashyap Pramod Patel (born 1980/1981)[1] is an American attorney and former government official.
He served as chief of staff to the Acting United States Secretary of Defense under President Donald Trump.
>The Whole World Is Watching
Establishment of the U.S. Space Command!
4:40 PM · Aug 29, 2019·
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1167175093241438214
'' The Media Try to Inflate Biden’s Stock''
wsj.com/articles/the-media-try-to-inflate-bidens-stock-journalism-story-news-president-partisan-6526db38
August 28, 2023
Gerard Baker
‘High-definition video shows Biden’s eyes open, blinking during speech”
No, that is not a headline from the Babylon Bee, the right-leaning satirical site that once got banned by the pre-Elon Musk Twitter for breaching gender ideology. It is from the pages of USA Today last week.
The paper that used to be everybody’s favorite purveyor of pie charts and pop culture ran a fact-checking exercise about President Biden’s visit to Maui in the wake of the wildfires there.
Some critics had mischievously accused the president of falling asleep during a gathering with residents because, well, he’s 80 and tires easily, and his eyes were closed.
But the paper’s journalists left no stone unturned to find the truth. After rigorous scrutiny of the video, they determined that Mr. Biden had actually been awake.
You can picture the scene: a team of expensively educated reporters and editors closeted for hours in a video suite, endlessly replaying the images from Maui on the latest high-tech machines. Suddenly, a triumphant shout goes up: “There! I saw it. He blinked!”
A less partial observer might conclude that if we need high-definition video to be certain that the president’s eyes are “open, blinking” while he performs his duties, we have a problem more serious than mean-spirited conservatives making fun of him.
To be fair to the USA Today investigators, they were far from the only ones to rush to the president’s defense. At least 10 news outlets ran a similar fact-checking exercise. Many devoted more space to debunking the Sleepy Joe story than they did to recording the numerous verbal gaucheries Mr. Biden visited on the bereaved and homeless people of the island, such as likening the catastrophe to a fire at his house some years back in which he said he “almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat.”
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Thirty years ago, during the early phases of Japan’s financial collapse, the government in Tokyo resorted to extreme measures to uphold the collapsing stock prices. The scheme, which included the use of public funds to buy stocks, was dubbed a Price-Keeping Operation, or PKO, in punning homage to the various peace-keeping operations in which Japanese troops were starting to participate at the time.
The media and their many friends in the wider culture are now embarked on a Biden-Keeping Operation.
Media bias is nothing new, but this goes further. For almost four years there has been a concerted, sustained and so far successful effort by supposedly independent media organizations to elect, defend and preserve in office the nation’s leading Democrat. It is immanent throughout the coverage of this president and mostly takes the form of misrepresenting reality by willfully ignoring or suppressing anything that undermines him—what we might call journalism of omission.
The juxtaposition of the attention given to the Hawaiian fact-check with the effort to look past the many infelicities of the president’s island misadventure is a small example of the Biden-Keeping Operation. Press coverage of the handling of the aftermath of natural disasters can damage presidential reputations, as George W. Bush discovered with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But this BKO has involved much more substantive, sinister dishonesty.
It began with his presidential campaign, in which, under the excuse of Covid, he was left to run for the most important office in the world largely immune to the normal rules of campaign media scrutiny.
The omission shifted to outright suppression at the end of the campaign with the determined effort, fully prosecuted by most of the big news organizations to ignore, discredit and suppress the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. These efforts were abetted by the major technology platforms, which censored not only the story itself but the newspaper that broke it.
The campaign of omission continued into the presidency. Only occasionally have we been given glimpses of the president’s frailties, and I suspect this is mainly because other Democrats are voicing concerns about his re-election chances.
The most important work news organizations do is investigative—exposing nefarious or incompetent behavior by institutions and individuals.
It is almost impossible to envisage things that don’t happen because no one makes them happen. But in this case we have a very clear picture of what the consequences of this sustained journalism of omission would have been. Imagine if the Republicans hadn’t won control of the House last November and conducted their own investigations. It’s highly unlikely that any of the metastasizing story we are learning about Mr. Biden and his son’s business dealings would have come out—no whistleblowers, no questionable prosecutorial leniency, no (grudging) expansion of the probe.
The press would have left well alone.
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They are hiding J6 video, they are hiding Epstein clients, they are hiding Nashville shooter manifesto, they are hiding JFK investigation, they are hiding investigation into Hunter and Joe, they are hiding facts about Obama chef death, hiding Maui investigation ….
10:14 PM · Aug 28, 2023
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Atia of the Julii
1948
https://youtu.be/Ka90ERKLTJQ
(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend - Stan Jones and The Death Valley Rangers
Stanley Davis Jones (June 5, 1914 – December 13, 1963) was an American songwriter and actor, primarily writing Western music. He is best remembered for writing "Ghost Riders in the Sky". In 1997, he was posthumously inducted into the Western Music Association Hall of Fame. * *
>just like a woman shouldn't go toe to toe with a man.
>Enjoy the show.